The Children The Nazis Stole In Poland: Forgotten Victims
'The children the Nazis stole in Poland: Forgotten victims,' DW, March 13, 2020.
During World War II, the Nazis kidnapped tens of thousands of children and forcibly "Germanized" them. Afterward, they were left to grapple with their trauma alone. Now, a book and a documentary reveal their cruel fates.
Alodia Witaszek's biological parents were still alive when she was kidnapped as a girl. In autumn of 1943, both she and her little sister were sent to a youth custody camp in Litzmannstadt, which is today Lodz, to become "Germanized." The sisters were no longer allowed to speak Polish in the camp.
- Organized identity falsification
Countless Polish children experienced the same fate: The organized child robbery was part of the Nazi racial policy to turn "racially valuable" children from the annexed parts of western Poland into Germans. The youth welfare offices reported the children whose appearance they considered "Aryan." Representatives of the health authorities conducted medical examinations of them, filtered out the children with "good blood," who were then sent to a children's home where they were forced to learn German and their names were Germanized.
Afterwards, the SS-initiated association Lebensborn took responsibility of them, handing over younger children to SS families for adoption, and sending older ones to "German home schools." Over time, the children became increasingly robbed of their memories and their identity as they became Germanized.
The child abduction program was part of the Nazi reorganization plans (often called 'New Order') for occupied Europe.
In June 1941, SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler declared that it was necessary to capture "particularly well-bred small children of Polish families." But it was not only in occupied Poland that children were violently torn from their families. Children were also abducted in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union, Belarus, Ukraine and Slovenia.
The children of forced laborers were taken away from their mothers, some were passed on to German families, others were tortured in homes. In the Reich School for Volksdeutsche in Achern and in the Lebensborn Home in Steinhöring, children were severely punished for speaking their native language rather than German: Starvation and confinement in a cellar were among the types of punishment.
Estimates vary as to the actual number of children stolen by the Nazis, but according to the German paper Handelsblatt in 2018, "it is usually stated that up to 400,000 'Aryan'-looking children were taken from their families in Eastern Europe and Nazi-occupied Norway. Half of all the abductions took place in Poland."
- Difficulty in emotionally processing experiences
Seventy-five years after the Second World War, the Nazi kidnapping of children has hardly been addressed in Germany. This is a "white spot in historiography," believes lawyer Artur Wroblewski, who writes for the Polish website "interia."...
More https://www.dw.com/en/the-children-the-nazis-stole-in-poland-forgotten-victims/a-52739589
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