Among the crimes committed against the Polish population under German occupation, one of the least documented and most disturbing was the systematic abduction of Polish children for Germanisation. Between 1939 and 1945, an estimated 50,000 to 200,000 Polish children were taken from their families and subjected to Germanisation programmes designed to erase their Polish identity and incorporate them into the German population. The children were assessed for racial characteristics, given German names, placed with German families, and raised as Germans. Most never returned to Poland.
The racial screening process
Children were selected through a racial screening process conducted by SS racial experts who assessed physical characteristics including hair colour, eye colour, skull measurements, and height, according to the pseudo-scientific criteria of Nazi racial ideology. Children deemed to be of sufficiently “Nordic” appearance were classified as racially valuable and therefore candidates for Germanisation. Children who did not pass the screening were deemed racially inferior and were either kept in occupied Poland as a subordinate labour population or sent to concentration camps.
Children were taken from multiple sources. Some were seized during the Zamość expulsions and other clearance operations. Some were orphans or children of parents who had been killed. Some were taken from Polish families in the annexed territories who were expelled while their children were retained. Some were taken from children’s homes. The Polish children taken from Lidice in Czechoslovakia , seized when the village was destroyed in reprisal for the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich , were subjected to the same programme.
Life in German families
Children placed with German families were typically given German names and told nothing about their origins. They were raised speaking German, attending German schools, and in many cases believing themselves to be German. Contact with their biological families was forbidden. Children who spoke Polish or showed signs of retaining their Polish identity were punished. The programme was designed to be irreversible: a generation of Polish children would grow up as Germans, unaware of their origins.
After the war
After the war, Polish authorities and the Red Cross undertook a major effort to identify and repatriate Germanised Polish children. The effort was complicated by the fact that many children had been registered under German names, that their biological families had been killed, dispersed, or were unable to identify them, and that some children had been successfully assimilated to the point where they identified as German. An estimated 15 to 20 percent of abducted children were eventually repatriated. The majority were never recovered.
See also
- Reinhard Heydrich
- Children in the Holocaust
- Polish Victims
- Auschwitz and the Polish Prisoners
- Generalplan Ost: The Plan to Erase Poland
- The Destruction of Warsaw 1944
Sources
- Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 2 vols, HarperCollins, 1997 and 2007
- Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, University of Nebraska Press and Yad Vashem, 2004
- Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, Oxford University Press, 2010
- Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936 to 1945: Nemesis, Allen Lane, 2000
- Trial transcripts and judgment, Trials of War Criminals before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals under Control Council Law No. 10, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1949 onwards