Authors: Lynn H. Nicholas
All these indicators led the UNRRA workers to press for more resources to find children in the German communities. It was clear that a very systematic search was needed. In January 1946, German officials were once again ordered to report the names of all foreigners, and notices and advertisements were put in publications and on the radio. But the still unsettled condition of the entire population—millions of people trying to get home, and groups of children and their caretakers wandering from institution to institution in a desperate search for shelter—made anything systematic nearly impossible.
The terse information on a series of case history forms filled in for children found during 1946 shows just how difficult any sort of identification could be, especially when it came to babies. Two-month-old Stefan P. had been “found beside a dead woman who was killed by artillery fire” near Nuremberg in April 1945, and taken in by a German woman. The burgomaster’s office had collected documents indicating that the child was the son of a Yugoslav worker who was thought to be the dead woman. Doubts were cast upon this analysis by the fact that a package of documents referring to a French worker had been found in a suitcase of baby clothes lying next to the child. The Frenchwoman, who had allegedly also had a baby in Germany and shared a room with the Yugoslav, had been repatriated. When she was found in Paris she denied, unconvincingly, that she had ever had a child. The German woman wanted to keep the boy, and the Yugoslavs wanted him back. Gathering of statements from France and Yugoslavia took months; the case was still not resolved by January 1947. In Czechoslovakia, American soldiers found an infant lying between his parents, who had been shot, but the GIs did not bring in any identifying information with the baby. Two-year-olds Barbara and Klaus, origins totally unknown, had been found at the Ratibor railroad station on the Polish-Czech border, moved five times, and deposited at a children’s home in Germany, where workers said that little Klaus “did not call for his mother, neither did he cry.”
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It was thought that many of these babies were the illegitimate offspring of Eastern workers who had been forced to give them away and now no longer wanted them, either because they could not support them or because they were ashamed to take them home.
By the early spring of 1946, more information about Lebensborn’s relation to the Germanization program began to be known. A Frankfurt city
councillor said he had heard rumors that vital statistics had been falsified. The French National Tracing Bureau added numerous details, including the fact that children they were finding in their zone had been taken away from their parents and reported as orphans. The Polish Red Cross delegate for Austria found one of the Lebensborn Germanization schools. A secretary who had worked there said that children had been sent to foster homes from the institution; she even had a list of names with destinations, but it was so full of errors that the UNRRA workers felt sure they were not unintentional.
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They also found incriminating RKFDV documents, as did the officers sifting through the tons of records gathered for the Nuremberg trials, which had begun in November 1945. It appeared that the Nazi records destroyers had not been perfect. Polish investigators, who had begun making lists of their missing children in August 1945, found NSV file cards and dossiers on 8,500 children in Lodz and Katowice. Dr. Roman Hrabar, the Plenipotentiary for the Vindication of Polish Children, raised the estimate of the missing to 200,000. More documents were discovered in Czechoslovakia, including falsified birth certificates and evidence that three truckloads of children from Lidice had been sent from their transit camp in Lodz to the Chelmno extermination camp.
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As usual, the USSR did not provide any estimates of how many of the tens of thousands of its young people taken away by the Nazis had failed to return, but was always eager to have Soviet children repatriated. Even without the Soviet statistics, however, the abundance of evidence and the dogged persistence of the child welfare workers eventually persuaded upper echelons in both the British and American zones to authorize special Child Search teams to scour the German countryside.
The teams were far better at conducting searches than individuals were, especially in German institutions that did not want to release the children. By the time a single investigator had interviewed two or three children in such places, the rest would have been prepared by their peers or the staff to produce doctored stories aimed at preventing identification. A team, on the other hand, could do many simultaneous interviews in numerous languages. Operating as a team also provided “balance when missionary zeal went too far,” for, as time went on, the welfare workers had become more and more outraged at the Nazi methods and obsessed with saving every possible child. Their determination did not diminish when they were confronted with children who, under the baleful eye of German staff, blurted out obviously memorized answers, even before a question had been asked: “I am German, I am not Czech. I speak only German. My
parents spoke only German …”; after which they “ceased breathlessly, looking for reassurance at the nun nearby.” One sister was heard to tell a child to “remember what answers you are to give.”
The interviewers soon learned ways to get around these preparations. Smaller children would often sing along with a casually hummed song, or finish a prayer in their original language. Everything depended on how one asked a question. A sudden provocation might lead the child to cry out in his native tongue. Indirection also worked well. John Troniak, director of the first Child Search team in Germany, and himself a refugee, was a master of this technique:
We have to let the child forget about the drastic subject and let him tell what we want to know in another way. If necessary, we do not spare compliments.… “I like your German. I have never heard children who speak so nicely as you do.… How long … have you been speaking this language?” “Four years, since I came to the children’s home”—is the answer. “All right, but you are nine years old now, what language did you speak before?” A little hesitation, then: “Polish.” “Did you speak only Polish at home, or did you speak with your parents German too?” “No, never, I spoke Polish only.” “You say your parents spoke Polish. Were they Poles or Germans?” “They were Polish.” … “Are you sure?” “Yes, I am.” “If both your parents were Polish, do you think you are German?” “I don’t know. I have forgotten my Polish, but I think if I learn it again, I can become Polish too.”
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By the summer of 1946, Dr. Raphael Lemkin, an adviser to the Judge Advocate General’s Office of the U.S. War Department who had coined the term “genocide,” was interested enough in the issue of Germanization to request a report from UNRRA on its findings about children for use as evidence in the second round of war crimes trials, being prepared even as the trials of the major war criminals proceeded. The information would become part of the documentation used to qualify the Germanization programs as war crimes, which were prosecuted in Case VIII, the Greifelt or RuSHA Case, which would begin on October 10, 1947. The UNRRA data would be added to the vast amounts collected by Dr. Hrabar, in charge of the Polish search programs, and to the evidence found in other nations. Together, the fragments would give a devastating picture of this aspect of the Nazi racial programs. The War Crimes office also provided information, as it came in, to the Child Search workers, and was certainly instrumental in promoting continued funding for their efforts, which were
constantly threatened with cuts in budget and personnel by the Military Government.
The trial was a revelation to the Child Search workers and to many others. As the testimony unrolled, their suspicions and exhausting work seemed justified. Eileen Davidson, chief of the Child Search and Tracing Division of UNRRA, and her colleagues could not believe what they were hearing:
One German foster father on the stand said he still had in his home a German boy of 14 from Lebensborn. When the Defense finished and the Prosecution staff took over, the man was asked if he intended to adopt the child. He said no, they had taken an older child to help them really. (!) Had they sent him to school? No. Why not? Well, he could not speak German! What did he speak? Polish!!! What did they know of his parents? Nothing. Where did he come from? They did not know.
So finally the Prosecution said, “Looking back now, does it not seem to you a matter of the gravest injustice that a human being could be taken with so few particulars known about him and placed in your home to receive whatever care—good or bad—you happened to give him?” The foster father said, “Well, when I came to think about it, it does seem unfair.”!!!
There followed testimony about ten more “German” children, all of whom were listed in the Child Search tracing files and were being sought by relatives. Davidson wrote that they had “pieced together a fascinating but devilish story.” She had several times “longed to give … up and run away from all this sordidness forever, but, in my mind’s eye, I have a mental picture of a group of distraught women from whom SS Troops are wrenching their children … and now, I feel that we who were so long in coming to the rescue have a small, very, very small opportunity of undoing what was done.”
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On November 10, 1947, Dr. Klukowski (the observer and diarist from the Zamosc region), who was testifying at the trial, and Dr. Hrabar brought three repatriated children to Child Search headquarters. Four days before, the children themselves had stood before the court and charged five officials of Lebensborn and RuSHA, the SS racial agency, with crimes against humanity, crimes against children, and against their families. Dr. Hrabar noted that the children’s parents had been afraid to let them come back to Germany. Now, in person, Alina Antczak and the others told their stories. A Polish social worker from Lodz indicated that 15,000 to 20,000 children were missing from that city alone. So far, only
about 1,300 had been reunited with their families. She was sure more had been repatriated, but as their names had often been changed when they were very young, there was no way of knowing who they really were.
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The war crimes trials changed some minds: after hearing the cynical plans Lebensborn had made for its war babies, Norway reversed its former decision and asked that they be returned. The Child Search teams were now even more determined to continue their work, but their very existence was threatened: UNRRA would cease to exist in 1947. Its functions would be transferred first to the Preparatory Commission for the International Refugee Organization (PCIRO) and eventually, in 1948, to the International Refugee Organization (IRO) itself. This organization, based in Geneva, was not enthusiastic about Child Search, in large part because the countries that had lost the most children were all in Eastern Europe, and not members of the IRO. Their officials put forth the now familiar argument that it was wrong to “disrupt” the children who had been in German homes for several years “another time” and to “disturb the security the new family has given them.” But the Child Search workers had seen enough families up close to convince them that the security was often ephemeral:
We are finding many instances in which the family tosses over the child the moment life becomes complicated for them, older boys and girls used for farm and household labor who have never been sent to school in Germany, children who are reminded daily that they must never reveal their non-German origin, children keenly aware of the fact that they had other homes and other families.
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There were plenty of case histories to back up these remarks. The Child Search workers continued to find neglected babies left behind by Soviet forced laborers, and preteens who had been used as virtual household slaves. Some families were financially pressed by having to care for their foster children (though the German Youth Department, which had replaced its Nazi predecessors, did give them small subsidies) and wanted to be rid of them. It was clear that many Germans knew that these conditions needed remedying; the youth authorities were often the ones who reported the cases to the search teams. One farm wife wanted to send a thirteen-year-old Polish girl back to her mother, but was afraid to do so because her husband wanted the child to stay and work. A Norwegian toddler who was left alone for days on end with a “big dog” and the twelve-year-old daughter of the foster parents, who “often beat and teased him,”
was reported to UNRRA by German neighbors. A Polish couple who had been slave laborers and had been forced to leave their son with a mentally unbalanced German woman could not take him home because the woman “had absconded with him.” In this case too, the neighbors reported terrible conditions in the home: “child mostly all day with 4–8 dogs in a small room. This child is bitten often and sometimes cries over one hour … the neighbors cannot help because the woman locks the door when going out.” Then, there was nine-year-old Lucie, a Lebensborn child born in Poland,
reported to IRO by the German foster father. He obtained the girl through the Lebensborn. He stated that when he and his first wife divorced, the latter told the child that she was Polish and was not theirs. The second wife did not want to keep the child since they now have three children of their own. The foster father asked IRO to relieve him of the child. He said he had not been able to manage her since she learnt the truth about herself.
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Not all the situations were so nasty. There were numerous German families who came forward voluntarily and returned their well-cared-for charges, and there were places where the children were happy and deeply loved. But their future was not secure. German laws forbidding the adoption of foreign children, the lack of such documents as birth certificates, and other nationality questions made the rights of the foster children in Germany problematical. Nevertheless, some families went to great lengths to keep the children by hiding them from the Child Search teams or by simply refusing to hand them over.