Aline Atherton-Smith

Atherton-Smith was born in 1875 in Ryde, Isle of Wight. A Quaker all her life.[5] She was a member of the Friends Council for International Service.[6]

During the First World War, she worked for the Bureau for Reconstruction and Re-education, American Red Cross in Paris.[7][8][9] However, at the outbreak of hostilities in 1914, then aged 38, she worked for the Red Cross in France, under the auspices of Robert Cecil, 1st Viscount Cecil of Chelwood, who went on to become one of the architects of the League of Nations. She also volunteered as an orderly in a newly built Parisian hotel which served as a military field hospital, where she assisted Flora Murray (chief physician) and Louisa Garrett Anderson (chief surgeon). Her duties involved collecting X-ray apparatus, catheters and other supplies from either British and French Army medical stores, or the train station, or travel by bike to the Scottish Women's Hospital at Royaumont.[10]

Atherton-Smith began working with victims of forced migration, particularly the Serbian refugees in Marseilles, with Florence Mary Barrow working with the French Red Cross. In 1918 she was commended for her war relief service, along with Dr. Hilda Clark.[11] She remained in continental Europe after a cessation of hostilities in 1918, continuing her humanitarian aid work.[12]

A year later, now as a senior refugee relief worker, she relocated to Austria to assist in dealing with the humanitarian catastrophe that was building up in Vienna, following Dr. Clark,[13] where she chose to remain for many years. In the early 1920s, she was appointed Head of the Department for Land Settlements at the Anglo-American Quaker mission in Vienna.[14][15]

Atherton-Smith soon became known within the relief agency community as the “foster mother” of the Wolfersberg settlement project in Penzing, the 14th district of Vienna.[16] Widely respected in the communities she helped; and overseas where the Society of Friends replicated her model, inspired by a reformist social movement. Her writings are held within a number of libraries around the world,[17] with her efforts at the time being also reported in The Times of London during 1924.[18] Her brother was also helping educate poor students in Vienna during this period.[19] She appears in the American Friends Service Committee Newsletter of 1926.[20]

In terms of legacy, her main life project was dedicated to the task of building a new housing estate on Wolfersberg mountain, a rural settlement overlooking Vienna. The settlements occupants included displaced persons from the former Austro-Hungarian Empire.[21] Known as a Quaker settlement, it consisted of roughly 60 homes; a cooperative building and a community garden for growing food plants.[22] Wolfersberg was officially run in the form of an association, under her directorship; and solely funded by the Quaker charitable donations since inception in 1922, until Anschluss during March 1938, when the settlement association was abruptly disbanded.[23]

A once time member of the Anglo-German Fellowship, Atherton-Smith left Vienna after annexation by the German Reich during March 1938 to France. How she departed Vienna is unknown, since the authorities in the city now classified Atherton-Smith as an enemy of the German Reich, due to her being an active pacifist and having left leaning views. During the spring of 1940, Atherton-Smith was placed on the special “wanted list GB”, compiled by the Reich Security Main Office, a directory of people to be particularly targeted in their anticipated invasion and occupation of the United Kingdom. This priority list by the Nazi regime identified who was to be immediately arrested by the Einsatzgruppen, and contained 2,820 names of people, including British nationals and European exiles.[4] Such was her notoriety, in terms of Communist and Marxist sympathies, that she was on a second special list.[24]

The Reich Security Main Office records Atherton-Smith as last seen in Chantrya at the age of 70.[25] It is not known where or what is Chantrya. Her fate during / or after World War II was unknown, and it was previously assumed that she was captured and killed in German-occupied Europe; possibly Yugoslavia. However researchers have recently identified correspondence with art historian, Mary Berenson who resided in Florence, suggesting that she likely exited the country after annexation, and made her way to Italy.[26] The fact that she made it into the Nazi most wanted list, the Black Book, suggests the Reich knew her whereabouts; that she now resided in England. Furthermore, an Aline S.A. Smith death registration, representative of her exact age, having taken place in 1956 within the district of Maidenhead, Berkshire.[27]

Documents from the British National Archives suggest that Atherton-Smith was in Paris during the Second World War. In 1945, the British Ministry of Internal Affairs, officially known as the “Home Office”, opened an investigation against Atherton-Smith, on suspicion of her having made anti-British statements during the German occupation of Paris,[28] thereby suggesting that in 1945 she was living in German-occupied Europe.

Her correspondence with Frances Hodgkins, a New Zealander artist, whilst living in Paris during World War I, has been preserved by the Frances Hodgkins Institute,[10] and various other libraries across the globe.[29]

• Atherton-Smith, A. S. - The Austrian Land Settlements: A Solution of the Housing Problem, 1926[30]

• The rural settlements in Vienna and the surrounding area: To solve the housing question, 1925
• Omerod Greenwood: Friends and Relief: A Study of Two Centuries of Quaker Activity in the Relief of Suffering Caused by War Or Natural Calamity, 1975