[PW] Re: NSF (Displaced Persons question)

[Tsviya Polani]

Graeme,
I'm glad you made this point.  I spent the better part of yesterday trying 
to answer this question, so far with no success.  I don't think we are 
talking about an organization but rather an acronym for a form or a station 
or a type of service.  I'd like to ask John where he first encountered the 
abbreviation NSF.  It might give us a direction.  Meanwhile, here is a link 
I just found for a YIVO site on Holocaust survivor lists.  No agency listed 
here comes close to NSF. 
http://www.yivoinstitute.org/library/index.php?tid=46&aid=105

Their explanatory text reads (and I hope this copy paste won't cause the PW 
computer to reject this letter): "During the years immediately following the 
end of World War II, the statistical departments of the local committees of 
the World Jewish Congress and the Jewish Agency for Palestine, with the 
assistance of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, compiled 
lists of Holocaust survivors.
Most of the information in the lists was gathered by the local Jewish 
councils that were struggling to establish themselves in various places. 
When Jewish survivors returned to their home towns and visited these Jewish 
councils in search of information about missing relatives and friends, they 
voluntarily registered themselves. The data they provided was forwarded to 
the statistical departments and was compiled into card indexes. Additional 
lists were compiled at Displaced Persons camps and in other refugee centers.

The lists listed below represent photocopies of the original lists published 
by the World Jewish Congress and by other agencies. They are available for 
use in the Reading Room of the YIVO Library at the Center for Jewish 
History.

Please note: In the early years of the mass registration of Holocaust 
survivors, material was gathered unsystematically and not according to 
accepted statistical methods, leading to the likelihood of inaccuracies and 
omissions. As such, these lists cannot and do not include all the names of 
Jews who survived the Holocaust."

Tsviya Polani
Reference Librarian
Aranne Library
Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
Be'er Sheva, Israel
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Graeme Rymill" <grymill at library.uwa.edu.au>
To: <list at project-wombat.org>
Sent: Monday, June 05, 2006 4:49 AM
Subject: [PW] Re: NSF (Displaced Persons question)


> >Many thanks to Kevin W. Woodruff, who provided the answer to the NSF
>>question I was looking for
>
> I find this thread very confusing. Kevin W. Woodruff helpfully suggested
> that the acronym NSF stood for Nationalsozialistische Frauenschaft. But
> surely this was in response to the original question which suggested
> this organization's activities involved concentration camps.  Once John
> C. Sanders clarified that what was meant was Displaced Persons' camps
> this changed the question totally.
>
> My belief is that Displaced Persons (DPs) was a term used by the
> Occupying Powers (particularly the U.S. and the U.K.) and not by the
> Nazis. As the Nationalsozialistische Frauenschaft was a Nazi
> organization it seems impossible for it be involved in assisting DPs in
> postwar Germany when this phrase came into use.
>
> According to the one book the Nationalsozialistische Frauenschaft or
> National Socialist Women's organization "was founded in 1931. From 1936,
> exclusively responsible for training the female leaders of the German
> Women's organization. See also Deutsches Frauenwerk;
> Reichsfrauenfuhrerin."
>
> Source: Nazi-Deutsch = Nazi-German : an English lexicon of the language
> of the Third Reich / Robert Michael and Karin Doerr ; forewords by Paul
> Rose, Leslie Morris, Wolfgang Mieder  (Westport, Conn. : Greenwood
> Press, 2002)
>
> So any link between this organization and any camps of any kind seems
> unproven.
>
>
> Graeme Rymill
> University of Western Australia Library
>
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