Remembering the Kitchener Camp
AJR was delighted to unveil a blue plaque in Sandwich, Kent on Monday 2 September 2019, in commemoration of the 80th anniversary of the Kitchener Camp which gave refuge to 4,000 Jewish men following their rescue from Nazi-occupied Europe.
Guests at the ceremony included Kitchener Camp descendants and the Mayor of Sandwich. The plaque was unveiled by Robert May and Adrienne Harris, whose fathers were brothers and were both Directors at the camp, along with AJR Trustee, Frank Harding, who devised our commemorative plaque scheme.
The Kitchener Descendants Group, led by Clare Weissenberg, author Clare Ungerson, Stephen Nelken and Paul Secher, were instrumental in bringing the Kitchener Camp to the attention of the AJR.
Frank Harding said, “It is with great pleasure that we are recognising one of the lesser known acts of rescue of Britain’s Second World War history, the remarkable story of the Kitchener Camp through which 4,000 lives were saved. It is recognition too of all those who were involved in its conception and establishment and of those refugees who came here, many of whom went on to serve in the Pioneer Corps.
“This will be the 11th plaque in AJR’s scheme. We believe that these commemorative plaques will help form a tangible link between key locations where refugees from the Holocaust were welcomed and those who made an everlasting contribution and the local community as well as fascinating residents and visitors. As well as being instructive and informative, they bring the past into the present, and they perpetuate the memory of the person being honoured.”
The Kitchener Camp saved the life of approximately 4,000 refugees from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland. Many of these men had been arrested during November 1938 and incarcerated in Sachsenhausen, Dachau and Buchenwald. With the support of the Home Office, the Central British Fund for German Jewry (CBF) managed to organise transport and accommodation for the refugees and to support them financially.
The Kitchener Camp had been derelict since the First World War. It opened in January 1939 and between February and the outbreak of World War Two in September, just under four thousand Jewish refugees, all of them men, were put on trains from Berlin and Vienna. They travelled via Ostend and Dover to Sandwich in East Kent.
Kitchener had its own orchestra and football team and even a 1000-seater cinema built with money donated by the Odeon Cinema tycoon, Oscar Deutsch. During summer 1939, a few of the men managed to get their wives and children out of Greater Germany using the system of ‘domestic service visas’ for their wives and the Kindertransports for their children. However, most families were not able to get out of Germany in time.
The Kitchener Camp plaque will be added to the new interactive map on our website which shows the location of all ten blue plaques, with information and photographs about each one.
