Children's Tracing Services: A Success Story (1946)

In May 1945, some 15 million people in Germany were missing; an estimated half-million children did not know where their parents were. This was the birth hour of numerous tracing services, which went on to register astounding successes. By 1950, only 2.5 million people were still reported missing in the Federal Republic. (Although even today the International Tracing Service in Bad Arolsen, run initially by UNRRA and the IRO, receives over 1,000 requests a month for information from its archive about the as yet not completely clarified fates of victims of the Nazis, including missing children from that time.) Thanks to the efforts of the children's tracing service of the Penguin newspaper and the Bavarian Red Cross, this mother found her child and collected her from an orphanage (1946). Photo by Hilmar Pabel.

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