Cruel World (2 page)

The bureaucracies of all the nations involved in the events described in this book were extremely complex. In the approximately thirty-year span described, agencies proliferated, changed their names, and spawned subagencies. This was especially true of the Nazi agencies dealing with race and youth matters and, after the war, the Allied refugee organizations. Added to this complexity is the fact that translators are not consistent in their terminology and use “Service,” “Agency,” “Bureau,” and so on interchangeably to translate the same German word. I have therefore tried to minimize the use of specific agency names in favor of more generic terms. Those who wish to know the details of the permutations and relationships of the Nazi agencies should consult the specialized studies dedicated to them listed in the Bibliography.

Just before lunch on May 29, 1945, three weeks after the formal end of the Second World War in Europe, Sister Wörle, head nurse of the children’s wards at the Kaufbeuren-Irsee Mental Institution near Munich, approached the bed of four-year-old Richard Jenne and put him to death by lethal injection. She had plenty of experience, having, as she readily stated to her interrogators, previously so injected “at least 211 minors.” The time of death was 13:10. Richard, classified as a “feebleminded idiot,” had been taken to the hospital some months before and put on a diet carefully calculated to bring him to the brink of starvation. By May 29 he had reached the desired state of weakness and was ripe for Sister Wörle’s visit. The death certificate, intended for dispatch to Richard’s parents in the town of Ihringen in the German state of Baden, did not mention the injection, but listed the cause of death as typhus.

The American troops who had occupied the picturesque town of Kaufbeuren in the hilly, blossom-laden countryside of Swabia on April 26 were unaware of Richard’s demise, and indeed would not discover his body and those of a number of other victims of Sister Wörle and her colleagues for five more weeks. The Americans had arrested the Nazi director of the institution but, put off by a large sign warning of typhus in the hospital, had not ventured inside, where routine continued as usual. On July 2, two medical officers finally entered the premises. What met their eyes was beyond belief: some 1,500 disease-riddled patients confined in the most squalid conditions, among them a ten-year-old boy who weighed twenty-two pounds, and a stifling morgue filled with bodies that had not been buried and that could not be disposed of quickly, as the shiny new crematorium, finished in November 1944, had been closed down.
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Richard Jenne was probably the last person to be put to death by the Nazi extermination machine, which in performing this act had come full circle. For it was in this institution, and a network of similar ones, that basic training, using German nationals, had been provided for those who would run the death camps so recently liberated by the Allies. Richard was not alone in his death: millions of other children were deliberately murdered in the Nazi era. Tens of thousands would die of conflict-induced
starvation in Leningrad, Athens, the Netherlands, and other war zones. Others did not survive the unprecedented forced transfers of populations engendered by Nazi racial policy and carried out under the most primitive conditions. Thousands of teenaged Hitler Youth died in battle, and children of all involved nations were sterilized, perished during evacuations, died of war-borne diseases, or succumbed as forced laborers. They wasted away in concentration, refugee, and disciplinary camps, and died in the bombings of cities and in the Nazi revenge burnings of hundreds of doomed villages in the USSR, Greece, France, and Czechoslovakia, of which Distomo, Oradour-sur-Glane, and Lidice are merely the best known. A precise figure can never be compiled, but it is vast. The historian Alan Bullock estimates the total number of military and civilian deaths due to World War II in the European nations to be some forty million. Mortality of this magnitude defies comprehension and tends to destroy normal human reactions to the reality of the events, a phenomenon that was highly evident among both perpetrators and victims during the conflict itself. It is therefore necessary to remember, as Bullock puts it, that the statistics are important, “but because they can have the effect of numbing the imagination, which cannot conceive of human suffering on such a scale, it is equally important to underline that every single figure in these millions represents … an individual human being like ourselves—a man, a woman, a child, or even a baby.”
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The discoveries at Kaufbeuren, coming weeks after the more horrendous accounts of conditions in the death camps, and coinciding as they did with the formal entry of Western Allied forces into Berlin, received small mention in the international press. But the Army was sufficiently embarrassed to replace the detachment occupying the town with another. The incident was only a detail in the gigantic mosaic of efforts under way to cope with the tremendous human needs of liberated Europe. The London
Times
of July 6, 1945, reported that the Combined Civil Affairs Committee of the Anglo-American Allies had announced that they had found, thus far, 5.8 million displaced persons in Germany. Of these 3.3 million had already been repatriated, which left 2.5 million to be cared for in camps. Their optimistic assessment was that the problem might “resolve itself” by September 1 into “the care of the residue of stateless persons and those who cannot be sent home.” No figures were given for this group, whose fate would then be determined by the so far ineffectual Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees, set up in 1938, which would “have the task of finding places” for them.

The bland Civil Affairs announcement was fine as far as it went. But much is left out of its statistics. Other estimates put the number of the displaced at war’s end in Germany alone as high as 12.5 million. The announcement does not mention the 7.8 million expellees from Hungary, Poland, and Czechoslovakia who would arrive in Germany in 1946 or the hundreds of thousands who would continue to move westward from areas controlled by the Soviet Union. It does not include the malnourished populations of newly liberated countries from Greece to Norway, the bombed-out millions of Warsaw, Stalingrad, Berlin, and London, or the exiles and evacuees trying to get home from all over the globe, whose numbers would burgeon after the defeat of Japan. A large percentage of these had, or would, become the responsibility of the Allied armies and help organizations, who were soon faced with situations beyond their most extreme imagining or preparation and challenged in their charitable desires by political policies, racial attitudes, and nationalistic self-interests not in the least moderated by the events of the war.

For large numbers of the children of Europe who had escaped Richard Jenne’s fate, life was far removed from the norm. In every liberated nation wild, streetwise groups attached themselves to troop formations and scrounged for food. Parentless children waiting for transfer out of concentration camps played among stacks of corpses, or lay near death in makeshift hospitals. Others, taken to still inadequate refugee camps with their families, fared little better. Evacuated children nervously boarded ships and trains to reunions with parents they no longer knew, while others waited in vain for parents who would never return from concentration camps or battlefields.

Thousands more roamed the countryside alone, moving toward the last homes they had known, along with the masses jamming the roads and trains. Everywhere, children who had been hidden for years, sworn to silence and subterfuge, emerged to deal with a strange world. Many who had been sent from occupied countries at a very young age to foster families in the Reich for “Germanization” would stay hidden until ferreted out, and some would never find out who they really were.