Tag: defeat of Nazis

Forgotten Victims of World War II: Polish Children ‘Germanised’ and Kidnapped by Nazis

A book and documentary reveal the cruel fates and trauma the children had to grapple with. 


Alodia Witaszek’s biological parents were still alive when she was kidnapped as a girl. In autumn of 1943, both she and her little sister were sent to a youth custody camp in Litzmannstadt, which is today Lodz, to become “Germanised.” The sisters were no longer allowed to speak Polish in the camp.

Organized identity falsification

Countless Polish children experienced the same fate: The organised child robbery was part of the Nazi racial policy to turn “racially valuable” children from the annexed parts of western Poland into Germans. The youth welfare offices reported the children whose appearance they considered “Aryan.” Representatives of the health authorities conducted medical examinations of them, filter out the children with “good blood,” who were then sent to a children’s home where they were forced to learn German and their names were Germanised.

Afterward, the SS-initiated association Lebensborn took the responsibility of them, handing over younger children to SS families for adoption, and sending older ones to “German home schools.” Over time, the children became increasingly robbed of their memories and their identity as they became Germanised.

The child abduction program was part of the Nazi reorganisation plans (often called “New Order”) for occupied Europe.

Also read: ‘My SS Uniform Is Just My Heritage’

In June 1941, SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler declared that it was necessary to capture “particularly well-bred small children of Polish families.” But it was not only in occupied Poland that children were violently torn from their families. Children were also abducted in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union. The children of forced laborers were taken away from their mothers, some were passed on to German families, others were tortured in homes. In the Reich School for Volksdeutsche in Achern and in the Lebensborn Home in Steinhöring, children were severely punished for speaking their native language rather than German: Starvation and confinement in a cellar were among the types of punishment.

Estimates vary as to the actual number of children stolen by the Nazis, but according to the German paper Handelsblatt in 2018, “it is usually stated that up to 400,000 ‘Aryan’-looking children were taken from their families in Eastern Europe and Nazi-occupied Norway. Half of all the abductions took place in Poland.”

Difficulty in emotionally processing experiences

Seventy-five years after the Second World War, the Nazi kidnapping of children has hardly been addressed in Germany.  This is a “white spot in historiography,” believes lawyer Artur Wroblewski, who writes for the Polish website “interia.” He and six other journalists and historians working for the website are aiming to change that.

Their book about the Nazi kidnapping of children in Poland was published in Krakow in 2018. This past February, it was published in German by the Freiburg-based publisher Herder Verlag. The authors traced the fates of people like Alodia, who had to experience first-hand how the Nazis’ racist megalomania destroyed their childhood and often their whole lives.

Almost all of those who reveal their fates in the book Als wäre ich allein auf der Welt (As If I Were Alone in the World) say that the repeated searches for their biological families have been futile. They describe the often painful return to Poland after the war — and the further traumatisation caused by their non-recognition as victims.

Also read: Why We Should Read a Nazi Memoir

Tracing history

The journalist Monika Sieradzka, who works for Deutsche Welle and Polish media, and her colleague Elisabeth Lehmann, who works for German public broadcaster MDR, took a step further in their search for information. During years of research, they were able to track down victims who were willing to talk about their fragmented lives in front of the camera, resulting in the film Kinderraub der Nazis: Die vergessenen Opfer (Children Stolen by the Nazis: Forgotten Victims).

Hermann Lüdeking is one of the film’s protagonists who, in his persevering search, never managed to find his roots again. As a six-year-old boy, he was put into a home and later joined the SS family Lüdeking as “valuable material from a racial point of view.” The only thing he managed to unearth through his persistent combing through archives and documents was his original Polish name: Roman Roszatowski, but he was called “Romek.” Lüdeking, who grew up in southern Germany and continues to live there, has long since forgotten the Polish language.

Doubly traumatised

An association called “Stolen Children – Forgotten victims” helped him in his search for his roots. The documents of the SS association Lebensborn were destroyed after the war when the association was classified as a charitable organisation in the Nuremberg post-war trials. The local youth welfare offices also had no interest in revealing the identity of the stolen children. Hermann Lüdeking is the only one who is also fighting for moral recognition as a victim, but the struggle has been in vain until now. “The Germans don’t want to be made aware of this because it would cost money,” the now 84-year-old bitterly says. Monika Sieradzka adds: “To this day, Hermann alias Romek feels like a foreigner in ‘his’ country.”

The article was originally published on DW. You can read it here. 

Stalingrad at 75: A Battle That Marked the Defeat of More than Just the Nazis

On the 75th anniversary of Germany’s surrender at the iconic Soviet city, it is evident that Stalingrad was also a turning point in the larger practice of empire.

On the 75th anniversary of Germany’s surrender at the iconic Soviet city, it is evident that Stalingrad was also a turning point in the larger practice of empire.

A Soviet soldier unfurls the red flag near the centre of Stalingrad. Credit: Wikimedia

This year marks the 75th anniversary of the victory of Soviet forces over Nazi Germany and its allies at the city of Stalingrad on the banks of the Volga.

It was in the nature of those times of epic proportion that a confrontation involving millions of people, with hundreds of thousands of lives lost and bodies maimed, and entire armies destroyed, is remembered as a ‘battle’.  The Battle for Stalingrad, nevertheless, became a symbol for heroism, sacrifice, bloodletting, tenacity, ruthlessness and tragedy all in good measure.  For the communists it was a byword for hard-fought victory.  Its place in the annals of military history survived communism’s fall from grace, and J.V. Stalin’s tumble from the pedestal.  There is much in the story that continues to fascinate students of warfare: one of the largest tank battles ever fought, strategic blunders and masterstrokes, a personal duel between Hitler and Stalin, the brilliance of General Zhukhov, but above all, “a psychological turning point”  of the Second World War.

Map of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. After Moscow held out, the Germans advanced on Stalingrad.

After a series of spectacular successes against ill-prepared Soviet defenders, Nazi German forces attempted to take Moscow in November 1941.  Their progress ground down, however, and by December they were forced to abandon the attack.  In the meanwhile, things had gone well for them in the south, and having captured the main grain producing areas of the Ukraine and Russia, Hitler decided to make a lunge for Caspian Sea oil. Stalingrad was the gateway to Baku.  This decision more or less sealed the fate of the war in Russia. From the military point of view, there would be a turning point, if not in Stalingrad, then somewhere else along this route.  Stalin appears to have understood this, decided that the stand will be made at the city named after him, and gave General Zukhov the task of laying a trap and then closing it.

But how did Hitler’s forces allow themselves to get ‘trapped’ so deep into Russia, at the far end of Europe?  If the fate of Napoleon’s armies in the winter of 1812 at the hands of the Russian expanse and winter had preyed upon the minds of Hitler and his generals, why would they choose to extend their supply lines even further to the east?

To the extent that Hitler’s politics, as laid out by him in Mein Kampf, were in the driving seat, we have an answer.  Race was the predominant theme.  Two groups were singled out as inexorable enemies of the noble Aryan: the “cunning parasitic Jew” and the “subhuman Slav”.  A central tenet of foreign policy was to create living space or Lebensraum for Germans by annexing Poland, Ukraine and Russia for settler colonisation.  The inhabitants of these lands would either be deported or turned into slave labour for German settlers.  With expanded territory and resources, Germany could truly become a “World Power” so that the Aryan race could takes its rightful place as the builder of civilisation.

Some wartime commentators in the west argued that Hitler had abandoned his plans of Mein Kampf, which was published in 1925, in favour of a more ‘conventional’ aim of replacing the Bolshevik government with a collaborationist regime, like the Vichy in France.   The conduct of the war in the east formalised under new rules of engagement such as the notorious Commissar and Jurisdiction Orders, however, made it clear that Hitler saw this as a “war of annihilation”, not just of the “Jewish-Bolshevik” regime, but of the people of the occupied land.  What seems, with the benefit of hindsight, like an ill-thought and suicidal lunge to the east was no “mission creep”. It was a primary aim of Nazi Germany’s war.

In his book, Hitler set out his position in favour of Lebensraum compared with the policy of seeking colonies in Africa and Asia.  He argued against an overseas colonial policy, not because he thought it was outmoded and collapsing, but because he believed that it was firmly entrenched.  A racial empire was there to stay, it would be difficult for anyone, let alone the natives themselves, to dislodge England from its colonies:

“England will never lose India unless she admits racial disruption in the machinery of her administration (which at present is entirely out of the question in India) or unless she is overcome by the sword of some powerful enemy. But Indian risings will never bring this about. We Germans have had sufficient experience to know how hard it is to coerce England. And, apart from all this, I as a German would far rather see India under British domination than under that of any other nation.

“The hopes of an epic rising in Egypt were just as chimerical. The ‘Holy War’ may bring the pleasing illusion to our German nincompoops that others are now ready to shed their blood for them. Indeed, this cowardly speculation is almost always the father of such hopes. But in reality the illusion would soon be brought to an end under the fusillade from a few companies of British machine-guns and a hail of British bombs.”

The Soviet Union, however, was a different proposition altogether:

“This colossal Empire in the East is ripe for dissolution. And the end of the Jewish domination in Russia will also be the end of Russia as a State. We are chosen by Destiny to be the witnesses of a catastrophe which will afford the strongest confirmation of the nationalist theory of race.”

While Hitler admired England’s racially-ordered colonial system, it was the other contemporary landgrab which was seen as the more appropriate model for German expansionism.  America’s Manifest Destiny had come to final fruition in 1890 with the end of armed resistance by the native peoples at Wounded Knee.

The moral and strategic arguments for the landgrab to the east were one and the same. A superior race deserved resources it could fight to take.  Just as Indians and Egyptians could not overthrow the English, and the native peoples could not resist the United States, so the ‘Jewish-Bolshevik cabal’, by violently removing the German blood line of the Tsars, had left the lands of the Slavs ready for the picking.  While racial supremacy and territorial hunger were not the sole preserves of Nazi Germany, Hitler’s shrill and frantic articulation of these ideas had closed off the possibility of a more cold-headed assessment of ground realities.

Hitler’s forces were not just trapped by the Soviet strategy – or muddle – of retreating before the Nazi German advance, while keeping the bulk of their military strength in secret reserve.  They were also trapped on the wrong side of history.  The Battle of Stalingrad was a turning point in the practice of empire.  Racially-ordered settler colonialism, which was at its apogee when Hitler’s ideas were formed, and which had seemed feasible enough at the start of Nazi Germany’s war in the east, went into unstoppable retreat, with perhaps one or two notable exceptions remaining. The British Empire ended, India and Egypt became independent, and Germany emerged as a world power without any further need for Lebensraum.

It is in the nature of epics to leave behind as many lessons as there are lesson-seekers.  Stalingrad will be remembered this year by disparate groups – anti-fascists, Russian nationalists, Soviet nostalgists, communist holdouts as well as the many families and communities who lost or found something there. One of its many lessons is that history does not end, ideas and power centres that lose moral legitimacy will also lose ground, shrill rhetoric notwithstanding, and it is good to keep looking out and preparing for the turning points, because they will come.

Haris Gazdar is an economist who lives and works in Karachi. He tweets at @HarisGazdar