Œuvre de secours aux enfants (, Children's Aid Society), abbreviated OSE is a French Jewish humanitarian organization which was founded in Russia in 1912 to help Russian Jewish children. Later it moved to France. OSE's most important activities took place both before and during World War II. OSE assisted mainly Jewish refugee children, both from France and from other Western European countries. OSE rescued children from extermination by Nazi Germany. It also operated after World War II. During the most important period of its work, immediately after the German defeat of France in 1940, OSE operated mainly in unoccupied southern France, controlled by the pro-German Vichy France government. However, many children helped by OSE were from the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, and German-occupied northern France. These children had reached the Vichy zone, usually under very difficult travel conditions, and sometimes with the direct danger that they could be captured by the occupying Germans. OSE was founded in 1912 by doctors in Saint Petersburg, Russia, as Obshchetsvo Zdravookhraneniya Yevreyiev ("Organization for the health protection of Jews"; OZE), to help needy members of the Jewish population. Branches were established in other countries. In 1923 the organization relocated to Berlin, under the symbolic presidency of Albert Einstein. In 1933, fleeing Nazism, it relocated again, this time to France where it became the Œuvre de secours aux enfants ("Society for Rescuing Children"), retaining a similar acronym. In France, the OSE ran Children's Homes (often called "Châteaux," but actually large "mansions," and see listing below). These Homes were for Jewish children of various ages, including infants, whose parents were either in Nazi concentration camps or had been killed. In March 1939, several transports brought German Jewish children to France. Other children arrived either on their own or were brought by relatives. By May 1939, the OSE Children's Homes held more than 200 refugee children. The children were schooled and trained according to their age. To prepare children for possible future dangers, the OSE teachers paid special attention to physical education and survival skills. A 1999 documentary "The Children of Chabannes" by filmmakers Lisa Gossels and Dean Wetherell is about one such home, Château de Chabannes, in a small village of Chabannes, where 400 Jewish children were saved from the Holocaust. In June–September 1941, Andrée Salomon (importantly, see below) supervised three transports which brought about 350 children from the OSE homes through Marseille and to the United