Training Friends and Overseas Relief: The Friends Ambulance Unit and the Friends Relief Service, 1939 to 1948

Abstract

This transnational case study investigates the establishment and development of training programs by two British faith-based voluntary relief organizations, the Friends Ambulance Unit (FAU) and the Friends Relief Service (FRS), during the Second World War and explores the implementation of learned skills by members of those organizations working during the immediate postwar period in the British Occupation Zone in Germany. It contributes new perspectives to scholarship on humanitarianism as it highlights both the continuities and ruptures in the approaches to and practices of humanitarian aid. It identifies the Quaker traditions that shaped the work of the FAU and FRS—particularly the core principles of promoting self-help, impartiality, democratic structures, and internationalism—as they delivered relief and fostered the rebuilding of communities in war-torn northern Germany. It demonstrates how small voluntary organizations integrated their values into the new relief structures of planning-mindedness, professionalization and international collaboration that also characterized the larger relief organizations.