Authors: Lynn H. Nicholas
Things were not ideal for either the children or the parents once adoption or placement in foster homes in Germany did take place. The changes of name, sometimes done more than once, and the spurious birth certificates provided by Lebensborn immediately caused concern and suspicion on the part of the new parents. Many of them nervously demanded official certificates of adoption from Lebensborn, which were duly fabricated and provided. The children were often clearly not the age indicated in their documents; the files are full of requests from foster parents for medical verification of a child’s age. Most of these involve small children who seemed several years younger than their official ages. SS health officers attributed this to the fact that “almost all children coming from the East are found backward in their development.” Elaborate X-rays and much mumbo-jumbo about average weights and heights were provided to the parents, but it is clear that the obliteration of the children’s origins, whose records started only “with the time of the seizure of those children by the German authorities,”
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had in many cases been all too successful.
German parents who grew to love their adopted children were often in for experiences just as devastating as those of the biological parents. Nazi race theory did not provide for love or permanent relationships. The children taken away by the state were farmed out to German families to be raised, but never belonged to them unequivocally, and were always subject to surveillance. A distressed SS
Untersturmführer
wrote to his superior to say that he had discovered that an already adopted child not only had a mother who was alive, but that the mother was an epileptic. The foster parents, with whom the six-year-old girl, Rosalia K., had been for “quite some time,” did not want to give her up. The officer now asked if it was “justifiable” to leave the child with her foster parents or whether she should be sent back to Poland. His superior had no qualms. The epileptic mother had been afflicted since the age of fourteen and not only had her
fits “increased considerably” in the last year, but she was “addicted to excessive use of alcohol.” The child, therefore, “undoubtedly was suffering from hereditary affliction,” although she had not shown any epileptic symptoms up to now, and would surely “act as a further hereditary transmitter of the disease.” Germanization or education or adoption by German families could, therefore, “not be justified.”
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Relations with older children, who had clear memories of home, were even more difficult for the adoptive families. Some, like eleven-year-old Jan Sulisz, tried to run away:
I was sent together with other children to F. where we were boarded among farmers in the neighborhood. The German woman U.… had all our documents and handed us over to the farmers. I was handed over to a German woman in R.… where I ran away after a week. She reported me to the police and I was caught and beaten. I stayed with the guardian up to 8 May 1945 and went to the German school all the time and worked on the farm.
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Far worse was the situation of Alina Antczak, also eleven when she was “handed over” to her foster family. Alina was not an orphan. She had been temporarily placed in a Polish children’s home when her parents fell on hard times. Efforts by her mother to get her back after the German invasion were unsuccessful. Alina later reported that her foster mother, who apparently had no illusions about the girl’s origins, “constantly shouted and beat me for slight mistakes and said very often ‘you Polish swine.’ ” In the summer of 1944 Alina was informed that her father was dead. When she secretly read the letter from Lebensborn containing this news, she found that the authorities had advised her foster family to tell her that “my mother was dead too so that I would not think of my parents any longer and it would be easier for me to get used to the foster parents.” Alina, with nowhere else to go, stayed put. She was not allowed to go to the Catholic church or to write to her family, whose true fate remained unknown to her until a neighbor, who went to Poland in 1944, smuggled a letter out for her and brought back news of her parents, who were both very much alive.
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Foster parents also sometimes inadvertently became involved in the worst horrors committed by their government. The revelations were gradual and presented impossible choices. A Frau Dr. Weiss in Baden, who wished to adopt a child through Lebensborn, was sent by an official of that agency to the Polish children’s home at Pushkau, where she picked out a boy of eight and a girl of about four. At the time she was told only that they
were not Polish, but were from Czechoslovakia. Sometime later, feeling some doubt about their “German” origins, she requested more information on their background. The official sent to investigate later testified that he had discovered that they were the children of a professor from Prague, who had been shot, but that the mother of the children, who had been incarcerated in a concentration camp, was still alive. This distressing information was revealed to Frau Dr. Weiss, who realized that she probably would not be able to keep the children, but who decided, in “agreement” with Lebensborn officials, that the children should remain with her until the end of the war, which, it being by now late 1944, was undeniably near.
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It is not clear if Frau Dr. Weiss was also told that she had become the guardian of two of the handful of children who survived the reprisal actions against hundreds of Czech families that followed the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, who, in addition to his SS duties, had been appointed Deputy Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, but she must have suspected the truth.
Vengeance for Heydrich’s death had reached its height on June 10, 1942, with the massacre at the village of Lidice and its subsequent obliteration. On that occasion, the Nazis had systematically murdered all the males over sixteen in the town. The women and children had been gathered beforehand in the town’s schoolhouse and then moved to a gymnasium in the nearby town of Kladno, so that they were not immediately aware of the slaughter. After a time, policemen came to the gymnasium and began calling out the names of individual children, who, in many cases, had to be forcibly taken from their mothers:
We had to walk upstairs to a room between two rows of [policemen], where some forms were made out. Then we were chased out into the courtyard where we had to board waiting trucks; our mothers and girls over sixteen remained in the building and we were told that the mothers would follow us. The smaller children cried and the older ones had to take care of them and quiet them. We were accompanied by several SS men and several young German women.
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The ninety or so children thus chosen were sent by train to Lodz and dumped into a bare room without even straw on the floor. Toilets were in a small hut across a courtyard. Food consisted of a breakfast and supper of black coffee and bread and a lunch of soup with potatoes and barley. After a time, a team of racial examiners chose seven children from this group for Germanization. The candidates were then processed through a series of
camps, where they remember a few kind nurses among the many strange people surrounding them, and were finally taken to the children’s home at Pushkau, where they were put in with Polish children. Here the routine consisted of school attendance in a nearby town in the mornings, all lessons being in German, and work in the kitchens of the home in the afternoons. They were frequently punished: one favorite penalty was to make a child stand barefoot in his nightshirt in a cold hallway until midnight. More serious failure to obey the rules could lead to solitary confinement in a windowless basement for a week.
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A few more Lidice children were later added to the group at Pushkau. The rest, clearly bad-blood children “not desired for Germanization,” were to be “further sent through the Polish camps,” and the SS was informed that “special care will not be imperative.”
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News of the massacre, which the Nazis had proudly announced on Radio Berlin in order to intimidate the Czechs, instantly became a worldwide cause célèbre. The timing was not auspicious: the broadcast came at the same time as publication of the agreement between Molotov and Roosevelt to create a second front in Europe, and certainly was instrumental in engendering enthusiasm for that policy. Secretary of State Cordell Hull condemned the action at Lidice as “unworthy even of savages,”
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and the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay composed a passionate, if somewhat melodramatic, narrative poem that was read on NBC and shortwaved to England, referring to Hitler as “the butcher of human-kind.”
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This furor caused the Lodz SS to hesitate briefly about precisely what to do with the “un-Germanizable children” of Lidice and other Czech hostage groups. Ten days after the slaughter, they were still urgently requesting orders from on high for the “further disposition of the children.” It is not clear what their ultimate fate was, but various documents indicate that more than 100 Czech children from this category perished in the maze of Nazi punishment and concentration camps.
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A few days after the Lidice children had been taken away, their mothers were condemned to life imprisonment in the women’s concentration camp at Ravensbrück. Those who were pregnant were allowed to give birth, after which the babies were taken from them and killed by strangulation or lethal injection, if they were lucky. For other babies death came more slowly: two mothers were taken to a hospital in Prague with their infants, but were not allowed to nurse them. Instead, under the supervision of a German nurse, they were forced to feed the newborns mush or badly cooked gruel. After six months they were taken for interrogation,
which they were told would take only an hour. Instead they went to Ravensbrück, and never saw their malnourished children again.
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As time went on and the needs of the Nazis for workers and soldiers became more urgent, “Germanization” became ever more flexible. Children of partisans and resisters from certain areas whose parents had been executed or sent to concentration camps became of greater and greater interest. Himmler suggested that although “bad” Czech children were to be taken to “certain children’s camps,” those of “good racial stock who, unless subjected to proper care and education, are of course likely to become the most dangerous avengers of their parents,” were to be sent “on probation” to Lebensborn homes.
Later in the war, all sweetness and light, he wrote of the children of Balkan partisans, “We are Germans and we cannot look on while innocent children of a people which in itself is decent and good become depraved and broken through the unpropitiousness of circumstances.” He ordered that “all orphaned youth in the whole Balkan area be gathered by our Division Commanders” and sent to special schools in the Reich on “scholarships.” Somewhat revealing his hand, he then noted that these children, “who can move in two directions, either to the communists, if we do not care for them, or to us, if we do something for them,” were to be returned home “as decent men and women … when order and stability are re-established.”
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No endeavor was seemingly too remote for the promotion of Germanization. In the summer of 1941 Himmler received letters indicating a need for female household help in Germany proper. He demanded that suitable workers be found. Choosing girls for this work was most difficult, not only because they would be living in close proximity to German children, but also because it was foreseen that their employers might invoke the
droit du seigneur
, or, as Himmler’s chief for such matters, Ulrich Greifelt, put it, “girls unsuitable for Germanization may not be employed for folkdom reasons.” Extremely meticulous racial analysis of the entire family of the domestic candidate was, therefore, essential. The result of these stringent rules had led to a shortfall of domestics, who up to the summer of 1941 were recruited only in the annexed areas. It was therefore decreed that racial analysts be dispatched to look for maids and nannies not only in the General Gouvernement dumping ground for Poles, but even in the sectors of the USSR that by then had been conquered by Hitler.
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Himmler himself justified the plan in a flowery ordinance issued from Hitler’s Eastern Front headquarters on October 1, 1941, one day after the Führer’s
final assault on Moscow had begun. As the German armies struggled forward in the autumn mud, Himmler wrote that “one of the greatest calamities is at present the shortage of female domestic help.” National biology “was dangerously at risk,” he continued, as the “doubtlessly existing desire of many women to have children, and many children at that—is frustrated by bitter reality.” This reality was not that several million of their husbands would soon die in the Russian winter, but the fact that there were not enough nannies. Therefore, more girls, aged sixteen to twenty, must be brought in, who
are unobjectionable with regard to race and whose assimilation with the German folkdom is desirable. Thus, simultaneously, blood of the same kind lost to an alien nation is won back and again added to the German nation.… For these future mothers of good blood it means, in addition, a social rise when they are given the chance of working in Germany as domestic help and of later marrying here. I therefore order that girls of Polish and Ukrainian descent who meet the requirements of the racial evaluation groups I and II shall be selected by the racial examiners. Assignments may only be made to households of families with many children who are firm in their ideology and fit for training such girls.
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By December only 521 girls had been allocated. An apologetic official noted that he was facing competition from many local labor offices and administrations that wanted the girls for “defense industries and agriculture.” But the real reason for the low number was that only 3 to 5 percent of those examined could be declared eligible for Germanization; most came from agricultural backgrounds and were unsuitable. Moreover, there had been problems with the girls who had already been sent. It was “hardly possible to prevent correspondence with their families,” the official wrote. Homesickness was a “big factor,” and “many of the allocated girl-servants have been obstinate and had to be punished. Several suicides occurred.”
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One such girl, Zofia Pieskarska, sixteen when she was sent to Germany, later revealed why: