Toni Sender, the daughter of Morris and Marie Dreyfuss Sender, was born in Biebrich, Germany on November 29, 1868. She received her public education in Germany and later did graduate work in economics at the University of Berlin, and after coming to the United States, at the New School for Social Research and the American University.
Up to 1933, Toni Sender played an influential role in socialist politics in Germany. Miss Sender, a member of the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, was a member of the Reichstag from 1920 to 1933, where she served on the Committees on Foreign Relations, Foreign Trade, and Economics. It was during this period that she met a number of Germany's leading Social Democrats, including Paul Löbe, president of the Reichstag from 1920 to 1932, Herta Gotthelf, Fritz Heine, and Wilhelm Sander Miss Sender was elected again to the Reichstag in March 1933, after the Nazis had assumed power, but was prevented from taking her seat. She immediately fled to Czechoslovakia and then to Belgium, where she worked as editor of foreign affairs for Volksgazet, a daily labor newspaper in Antwerp.
Toni Sender arrived in the United States in December 1935, and for the next two years worked for the American Labor Education Service in New York City. During this period she gave numerous speeches and wrote many articles warning the Americans of the threat posed by Nazi Germany. She also began work on her autobiography, which was published in 1939 as The Autobiography of a German Rebel.
Between 1938 and 1946, Miss Sender held two very important positions. She served as director of European labor research for the Office of Strategic Services from 1941 to 1944. After she left the O.S.S., she became senior economist with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, 1944-1946, and was in charge of planning relief efforts for Eastern Europe and displaced persons. During this time she also served as foreign correspondent for Le Populaire in Paris and Le Peuple in Brussels.
In 1946, the American Federation of Labor acquired status as a consultant to the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations. Miss Sender was named as one of the A.F. of L. representatives. When the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions was organized in 1949, it replaced the A.F. of L. on the Economic and Social Council. Miss Sender now found herself in the position of representing some fifty-one million union members in over sixty countries. An authority on forced labor, she fought this evil at the meetings of the Economic and Social Council with a great deal of documentation, which proved conclusively the existence and extent of forced or slave labor in the Communist countries.
Miss Sender fell at the United Nations building in January 1956 and after that was only moderately active at the United Nations as an observer. During the last few years of her life, she was confined to her home with Parkinson's disease. She died in New York City in July 1964.
