Cruel World (84 page)

The international welfare community had responded quickly to the plight of the children found in the concentration camps. All were agreed that they should be taken elsewhere as soon as possible, for conditions in the camps were still grim, with reminders of atrocities everywhere, and the adults surrounding the children were “disturbed, depleted in energy, slow in responses and mentally unstable.” Within a month of the liberation of the major camps, the French government offered to take groups of “unaccompanied” Allied, stateless, or German Jewish children up to sixteen years of age for temporary stays. By June 5, some 540 Jewish children from Buchenwald and Belsen, now in quite good health, had been chosen and processed and were on their way to France. Switzerland, Denmark, and England would soon offer to take more, and Sweden sent a hospital ship that took a large number of ailing children from Belsen back for treatment. Choosing which children should go was not always easy. The upper age limit was frequently waived or deliberately disguised for humanitarian reasons. A seventeen-year-old boy who “headed a family of six brothers and sisters” was admitted with the rest. In many cases it was not known if the parents had survived, and Allied workers in Germany were reluctant to release children to anyone before every effort had been made to find their families, but the dire conditions in many of the camps, and in Germany itself, led them to make many exceptions to this policy.
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For those not sent abroad, UNRRA had, by early July, set up a special
camp for children of “all nations” aged from one week to eighteen years at Kloster-Indersdorf, near Munich, and there would soon be seventeen more.
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It was not easy to procure suitable premises for the children, because most buildings in good shape had already been taken over by the military. Nor was it easy to dislodge Nazis, especially if, as had been the case of the euthanasia operations in Kaufbeuren where Richard Jenne lay dying, the buildings were considered to be “hospitals.” UNRRA personnel trying to set up a children’s home at Aglasterhausen, twenty miles east of Heidelberg, had to fight for two months to dislodge such an institution from the buildings they wanted. This “hospital” had been used as a collecting point for mentally defective children, who were then sent on to a killing center. When the building was requisitioned, there were still thirty-seven employees and sixty-seven patients in residence. The Germans had been ordered to leave immediately and were told to arrange other accommodations for their patients. But when the UNRRA team arrived one evening, they found all the patients and most of the staff, who had hoped to sidetrack the requisition, still there. Taken by surprise, the Germans immediately began to remove all the furniture and fittings from the building, “looking like a stream of ants, carrying stoves and couches … etc. into the nearby village.” The UNRRA team soon put a stop to this, but were forced to share the premises with the Nazis for six more weeks while the latter petitioned Army authorities for permission to remain. During this time the German staff either denied knowledge of or deplored the euthanasia operations, though the head doctor, “a kindly looking” man who was an ordained minister of the Evangelical Church, at one point slipped up and proudly said that
he
had made the selections “because he was qualified to do so,” and another staff member joked “with a wink and a laugh” that the selected children had been taken to
“Ewigheim bei Brandenburg”
—“eternal home” in the killing center near Brandenburg. The Nazi staff had also failed to follow the Führer’s directives on burning the records of the institution; the files made quite clear that many of the children sent away had been the offspring of anti-Nazis or concentration camp inmates. The children themselves, though “forlorn and ragged,” did not seem unintelligent and were sent elsewhere for evaluation. The UNRRA team revealed all their findings to the Army War Crimes investigators, who did not immediately follow up on the information, as, at this early date, “crimes against the German population were not of concern.”
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In the reams of military working documents and reports in the archives resulting from the early processing of DPs, the statistical tables always
refer to nationalities and not to ethnicities or political groupings. After a time a new category enters the endless lists, that of “stateless persons.” Sometimes other euphemisms are used. But this category of problem nationals was not national at all; instead it referred to Jews, a designation that was at first unacceptable in U.S. Army parlance. Needless to say, these first victims of the Nazi racial laws were not eager to stay in Germany. Nor did Jews from the East, where anti-Semitism in certain places was as strong as ever, wish to return to regions that only held terrible memories, where their communities had been destroyed and they would have to continue to live in fear. It also soon became clear that they generally preferred to be housed together in all-Jewish DP camps. These gradually began to evolve as the non-Jews of the various nationalities were also separated into their own camps. Conditions in the Jewish camps were no better or worse than those of the others; but even more than their gentile counterparts, the Jewish DPs had a liberation complex that was not amenable to discipline or denial and in a number of cases would lead to confrontations with Germans and the Allied military.

On June 22, 1945, President Harry Truman, under pressure from numerous groups Jewish and otherwise, directed Earl G. Harrison, dean of the University of Pennsylvania law school, to investigate the situation of the Jews in the DP camps. Escorted by the European director of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and accompanied by representatives of the War Refugee Board and the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees, of which he was also a member, Harrison, like everyone who saw such a camp, was shocked at the conditions in which the DPs were living, and deplored the fact that they were in settlements surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by MPs, which he too thought were remarkably similar to the former concentration camps. He was also critical of the lack of food, heating, clothes, and rehabilitation programs. Harrison felt that the Jews, “the first and worst victims of Nazism,” should be given special status within the DP category as “persecutees,” and that help for them should be expedited. This was, of course, desirable; but with an extraordinary lack of recognition of the magnitude of the job of repatriation and feeding of millions that was taking place all over Europe, as well as of the round-the-clock efforts by hundreds of welfare workers that had gone on for months in the concentration camps themselves, Harrison declared that the Jews, “beyond knowing that they are no longer in danger of the gas chambers, torture and other forms of violent death … see, and
there is—little change.” The knowledge that they no longer faced extermination would in itself seem to have been quite a big change, but Harrison reiterated further on in his report that “aside from having brought relief from the fear of extermination, hospitalization for the serious starvation cases and some general improvement in conditions … relatively little beyond the planning stage has been done during the period of mass repatriation, to meet the special needs of the formerly persecuted groups.” He concluded with amazing unfairness, “We appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them, except that we do not exterminate them.”
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This accusation was disputed by Eisenhower in a letter to Truman,
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and by a civilian team dispatched to check on Harrison’s findings by Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy, who termed Harrison’s accusation “fantastic.” The team found none of the camps “scandalous or anywhere near so,” and reported “unexpectedly sound morale, adequately nourished appearance and low sick rate in spite of cold and lack of fuel with Trojan efforts to achieve cleanliness.”
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The issue was not, of course, the improvement of the bad living conditions, which had already been suggested in an earlier report covering all DPs by Sir George Reid, the former director of the welfare division of UNRRA. Harrison was principally interested in promoting the quick resettlement of Jews who, with good reason, did not wish to be repatriated to their countries of origin, and who now faced the exact same problems of refuge they had faced before the war, which neither the War Refugee Board nor the Intergovernmental Committee had been able to solve. For this longtime issue, Mr. Harrison, a former commissioner of the Immigration Service, now had a perfect solution that would enable almost everyone to keep their immigration walls intact: he suggested that 100,000 Jews be immediately evacuated from Germany and, as was clearly the preference of most, allowed to “find peace and quiet in Palestine.” He did recommend that the United States admit Jews who had relatives living there, but only “under existing immigration laws” and in “reasonable numbers.”
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Harrison’s suggestions were, of course, nothing new. Increased Jewish immigration to Palestine was a long-cherished objective of the Zionists. The immediate difference now was that the United States wished to be rid of the DP problem in Germany as soon as possible, and that the idea of “peace and quiet” and a safe haven in Palestine, which had sustained the Jews who had managed to survive, had, with the revelation of the Holocaust, reached a high level of intense emotion and become an unstoppable force. These factors, and various others, would result, after much maneuvering and conflict, in the founding of the state of Israel in 1948.
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The
more immediate results of Harrison’s report and its subsequent publicity were frequent inspection visits by high-ranking officers (including Eisenhower and General Walter Bedell Smith) to the Jewish camps, the appointment of Judge Simon Rifkind as special adviser on Jewish problems to Eisenhower’s staff, an increase of rations for Jews over those of other DPs, and the provision of other amenities. In September 1945, regulations restricting the activities of the remaining DPs were also eased, causing much trepidation to all involved in running the camps, who correctly feared an upsurge in illegal activity.

Those concerned with child welfare, especially for “unaccompanied children,” would soon have to deal in a serious way with the movement toward Palestine, but it was only one of many problems. The Allied social workers running children’s homes and camps did not at first have sufficient staff or facilities for the separation of their charges into national or ethnic groups, as well as gender and age cohorts. The situation was made even more challenging by the fact that Jewish children and Eastern children—who had undergone intensive Germanization and had been indoctrinated to hate Jews—often arrived at the same time. Before the Germanized children could be repatriated, their identities and nationalities had to be elucidated, which was especially difficult with smaller children who had no memory of home. Once identified, they had to be “de-Germanized,” often an agonizing process. They had all been deeply affected by their experiences in the Nazi world:

But before dealing with nationality problems, the welfare workers were more concerned with physical ones. Malnourishment was common. They saw rickets, boils, ringworm, tuberculosis, bad teeth, and many other ailments. There were children “with large heads and small bodies who appear at least five years younger than the average for their chronological
age.” Many cringed from any touch and had scars “which tell the story of cruel treatment,” while others were afflicted with tics, fainting spells, excessive sweating under stress, bed-wetting, and amnesia. Some could not give consistent accounts of their experiences. Little ones rocked back and forth continuously or suffered from chronic hunger that made them scream constantly for food. Almost all were completely indifferent to the dead and were particularly good at dissimulating, the talent by which they had survived. Ages were altered to fit whatever end they had in mind. The children lied, cheated, stole food and hid it in their clothing as they had done in the camps, and were suspicious of everything and everyone. When reprimanded for such acts, they sometimes went on hunger strikes or ran away. But at the same time they deeply craved affection and formed emotional relationships and group bonds that made them resistant to repatriation or individual placement in families. For most, food and humane treatment worked miracles on health and behavior within weeks.
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It was far more difficult to overcome indoctrination, and the process was not helped by pressure from the representatives of national groups for whom possession of the children soon became an obsessive battlefield. The UNRRA child welfare workers, who in the main dreamt of international harmony in their camps and homes, where the children would be prepared physically and mentally by teachers from the various countries for voluntary repatriation or congenial resettlement elsewhere, were constantly undermined in their efforts by powerful political and religious interests, which included Communists, royalists, the Catholic Church, and the Zionists. Moreover, the repatriation officers of each country had specific criteria for who would or would not be taken back or released for resettlement. The USSR wanted immediate and compulsory return of all children and refused to supply any teachers or social workers for the UNRRA camps. The borders of a number of countries had changed with the end of hostilities: parts of Poland and the Baltic countries were now de facto parts of the USSR, anathema to many children from those regions who remembered family deportations with horror or who had heard nothing but anti-Soviet propaganda for years. The Poles in Warsaw were determined to recover all the children kidnapped by the Nazis but were reluctant to accept Polish
Volksdeutsche
children trying to get back to their families. The émigré Poles, who had managed to return from Soviet exile and had fought alongside the Allies, were equally eager to recover Polish children for themselves, and to prevent their return to what was clearly becoming a Soviet-dominated area. Similarly, Yugoslav children were sought by both the exiled royalists and the new Communist regime
headed by Marshal Josip Broz Tito. The Norwegians and Belgians did not, at first, want their war babies back, whereas underpopulated France not only welcomed these, but often spirited children in its zone out of Germany without knowing exactly who they were or informing the military authorities or UNRRA, who were trying to reunite families.