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Nazi crimes against children

Nazi crimes against children refer to various crimes against humanity and war crimes perpetrated by the Nazi Germany against children.

The Nazis advocated killing children of unwanted or "dangerous" people in accordance with their ideological views, either as part of the Nazi idea of the racial struggle or as a measure of preventive security. They particularly targeted Jewish children (see The Holocaust), but also targeted ethnically Polish children and Romani (also called Gypsy) children and children with mental or physical disabilities. The Nazis and their collaborators killed children for these ideological reasons and in retaliation for real or alleged partisan attacks.

It is estimated that during World War II Nazis killed an estimated 2 million of Polish and Polish Jewish children in occupied Polish territories. 1.5 million of Jewish children perished in the Holocaust; tens of thousands of Romani (Gypsy) children died in the Romani Holocaust, between 5,000 to 25,000 disabled children were killed as part of their children euthanasia program. 200,000 mostly ethnic Polish children were kidnapped for the purpose of forced Germanization. Others were subject to forced labor.

Euthanasia of children

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Main articles: Child euthanasia in Nazi Germany and Nazi birthing centres for foreign workers
 
Grave-site memorial from the Am Spiegelgrund clinic in Vienna, where 789 child "patients" were murdered by the Nazis as part of the children euthanasia program.[1]

Nazis established centers for children euthanasia (Kinderfachabteilung [de], lit. "pediatric specialty care units") in 1939 as part of their program to eliminate disabled people. Those centers were responsible for killings of thousands of children; others were sterilized.[2][3] The number of children with disabilities that were exterminated by the Nazis is estimated to be between 5,000 to 25,000.[4]: 15–16  Some of such children were subject to medical experiments before their death.[5][6]

Sally M. Rogow noted that "it is a myth that only children with severe disabilities were killed", noting that Nazi victims also included children with minor disabilities, and even non-conformist youth, citing the cases of Edelweiss Pirates and Swing Youth, whose members were often subject to forced institutionalization, including in concentration camps and psychiatric hospitals.[5]

In addition to the euthanasia for disabled children, Nazis also established, from 1942, "birthing centres" for "troublesome babies", based on Himmler's decree on foreign workers. Those centers, known in German as Ausländerkinder-Pflegestätte (literally "foreign children nurseries"), Ostarbeiterkinderpflegestätten ("eastern worker children nurseries"), or Säuglingsheim ("baby home"), were intended for abandoned infants, primarily the offspring born to foreign women and girls servicing the German war economy, including Polish and Eastern European female forced labour. The babies and children, most of them resulting from rape at the place of their forced labor (realistically, enslavement), were abducted from their mothers en masse between 1943 and 1945. At some locations, up to 90 percent of infants died a torturous death due to calculated neglect. [7][8]: 400  For example, at the Waltrop-Holthausen camp, 1,273 infants were purposely left to die in the so-called baby-hut and then simply checked off as stillborn.[9]

Murder of children as a form of collective punishment

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Poland

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After German invasion of Poland, Germans begun a campaign of mass repressions against the Poles. Already in fall of 1939, a number of massacres of Polish civilians were carried out, often in the form of collective punishment in retaliation for real or alleged acts of resistance. In a number of cases (ex. Tryszczyn massacre [pl],[10]: 158–159  Pomeranian massacre [pl] in Gdynia, Wawer massacre) victims included children (teenagers under 18, and sometimes children as young as 12).[11]: 17–18  Various similar incidents continued through the war (for example, in 1942 in the Stary Ciepielów and Rekówka massacre, Germans murdered over 30 people, half of them children, for the crime of hiding Jews; in 1943, Germans massacred many inhabitants of the Michniów village, including dozens of children; in 1944 Germans executed the Ulma family, including their seven young children, also for the crime of hiding Jews[12]).[11]: 190–191 

Kidnapping of children

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Main articles: Kidnapping of children by Nazi Germany and Lebensborn
 
Polish girls in Nazi-German labor camp in Dzierżązna near Zgierz. Among the child prisoners were children kidnaped and resettled as part of the Operation Zamość (1942-1943)

During World War II, around 200,000 ethnic Polish children as well as an unknown number of children of other ethnicities were abducted from their homes and forcibly transported to Nazi Germany for purposes of forced labour, medical experimentation, or Germanization.[13]: 100 [14]: 49 [15]: 93  Only a fifth of that number were recovered after the war.[16]

A significant aim of the project was to acquire and "Germanize" children believed to have Aryan/Nordic traits because Nazi officials believed that they were the descendants of German settlers who had emigrated to Poland. Those labelled "racially valuable" (gutrassig) were forcibly assimilated in centres and then forcibly adopted to German families and SS Home Schools.[17]

Children in the Holocaust

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Main article: Children in the Holocaust
 
Warsaw Ghetto boy, an iconic photograph representing children in the Holocaust

An estimated 1.5 million children, nearly all Jewish, were murdered during the Holocaust, either directly by or as a direct consequence of Nazi actions. This estimate includes children killed directly (for example, in executions) as well as victims of starvation and neglect in ghettos and concentration camps.[18] In the infamous Auschwitz concentration camp, of the approximately 230,000 children and young people deported to Auschwitz, more than 216,000 children, the majority, were of Jewish descent. No more than 650 of them survived until liberation.[19]

Likewise, tens of thousands of Romani (also called Gypsy) children perished in the Romani Holocaust.[20]

Children war casualties

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Poland

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Around 6 million Polish citizens perished during World War II.[21]: 305  Out of that, the total number of Polish children (including Polish Jewish child victims of The Holocaust) under the age of 16 who died in Poland is estimated at 1,800,000. Of these, historians believe 1,200,000 were Polish and 600,000 were Polish Jewish. Including children aged 16 to 18 raises the estimated losses to 2,025,000.[11]: 230 

Other crimes

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Nazi propaganda directed at the youth, promoting concepts such as antisemitism, has also been mentioned in the context of Nazi crimes against the children.[22][23]

See also

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References

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  1. ^ Weindling, Paul (2013). "From Scientific Object to Commemorated Victim: the Children of the "Spiegelgrund"". History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences. 35 (3): 415–430. ISSN 0391-9714. JSTOR 43862193. PMC 4365921. PMID 24779110.
  2. ^ Obladen, Michael (2016-05-01). "Despising the weak: long shadows of infant murder in Nazi Germany". Archives of Disease in Childhood - Fetal and Neonatal Edition. 101 (3): F190–F194. doi:10.1136/archdischild-2015-309257. ISSN 1359-2998. PMID 26920413.
  3. ^ Kaelber, Lutz (September 2012). "Child Murder in Nazi Germany: The Memory of Nazi Medical Crimes and Commemoration of "Children's Euthanasia" Victims at Two Facilities (Eichberg, Kalmenhof)". Societies. 2 (3): 157–194. doi:10.3390/soc2030157. ISSN 2075-4698.
  4. ^ Evans, Susanne E. (2023-12-21). Forgotten Crimes: The Holocaust and People with Disabilities. Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN 978-1-4930-8236-0.
  5. ^ a b Rogow, Sally M. (December 1999). "Child Victims in Nazi Germany". The Journal of Holocaust Education. 8 (3): 71–86. doi:10.1080/17504902.1999.11087097. ISSN 1359-1371.
  6. ^ Weindling, Paul (2022). "Painful and sometimes deadly experiments which Nazi doctors carried out on children". Acta Paediatrica. 111 (9): 1664–1669. doi:10.1111/apa.16310. ISSN 0803-5253. PMC 11497248. PMID 35202478.
  7. ^ Magdalena Sierocińska (2016). "Eksterminacja "niewartościowych rasowo" dzieci polskich robotnic przymusowych na terenie III Rzeszy w świetle postępowań prowadzonych przez Oddziałową Komisję Ścigania Zbrodni przeciwko Narodowi Polskiemu w Poznaniu" [Extermination of "racially worthless" children of enslaved Polish women in the territory of Nazi Germany from the IPN documents in Poznań]. Bibliography: R. Hrabar, N. Szuman; Cz. Łuczak; W. Rusiński. Warsaw, Poland: Institute of National Remembrance.
  8. ^ Nicholas, Lynn H. (9 May 2006). Cruel World: The Children of Europe in the Nazi Web. Knopf Doubleday Publishing. ISBN 0-679-77663-X.
  9. ^ Oliver Rathkolb. Revisiting the National Socialist Legacy: Coming to Terms With Forced Labor, Expropriation, Compensation, and Restitution. Transaction Publishers. p. 89. ISBN 141283323X.
  10. ^ Wardzyńska, Maria (2009). Był rok 1939: operacja niemieckiej policji bezpieczeństwa w Polsce "Intelligenzaktion". Monografie / Instytut Pamięci Narodowej - Komisja Ścigania Zbrodni przeciwko Narodowi Polskiemu. Warszawa: Instytut Pamięci Narodowej. ISBN 978-83-7629-063-8.
  11. ^ a b c Lukas, Richard C. (1994). Did the children cry? Hitler's war against Jewish and Polish children, 1939-1945. New York: Hippocrene Books. ISBN 978-0-7818-0242-0.
  12. ^ "Jozef and Wiktoria Ulma | Paying the Ultimate Price | Themes | A Tribute to the Righteous Among the Nations". www.YadVashem.org. Retrieved 2018-02-22.
  13. ^ Cherry, Robert D.; Orla-Bukowska, Annamaria, eds. (2007). Rethinking Poles and Jews: troubled past, brighter future. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Pub. ISBN 978-0-7425-4665-3. OCLC 85862099.
  14. ^ Czesław Madajczyk (1961). Generalna Gubernia w planach hitlerowskich. Studia (in Polish). Warsaw: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe.
  15. ^ Roman Z. Hrabar (1960). Hitlerowski rabunek dzieci polskich: Uprowadzanie i germanizowanie dzieci polskich w latach 1939–1945 (in Polish). Śląski Instytut Naukowy w Katowicach, Katowice: Wydawnictwo Śląsk.
  16. ^ Schleunes, Karl A. (1996). "Review of: Richard C. Lukas, Did the Children Cry? Hitler's War against Jewish and Polish Children, 1939-1945". The American Historical Review. 101 (2): 520. doi:10.2307/2170499. JSTOR 2170499.
  17. ^ A. Dirk Moses (2004). Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. p. 255. ISBN 978-1571814104. Retrieved 2008-09-16.
  18. ^ "CHILDREN DURING THE HOLOCAUST". United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. October 1, 2019. Retrieved March 30, 2021.
  19. ^ "To Forget about Them Would Be Unthinkable – The Youngest Victims of Auschwitz: A New Album Devoted to the Child Victims of the Auschwitz Camp". Latest News (1999–2008) (Press release). Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, Poland. June 6, 2003. Archived from the original (Web) on September 30, 2006. Retrieved 2008-08-29.
  20. ^ "Children during the Holocaust". encyclopedia.ushmm.org. Retrieved 2024-10-12.
  21. ^ Piotrowski, Tadeusz (1998). Poland's Holocaust: Ethnic Strife, Collaboration with Occupying Forces and Genocide in the Second Republic, 1918-1947. McFarland. ISBN 978-0-7864-0371-4.
  22. ^ Corelli, Marie (2002-05-01). "Poisoning young minds in Nazi Germany: children and propaganda in the Third Reich". Social Education. 66 (4): 228–231.
  23. ^ Wegner, Gregory Paul (June 2007). "'A Propagandist of Extermination:' Johann von Leers and the Anti-Semitic Formation of Children in Nazi Germany". Paedagogica Historica. 43 (3): 299–325. doi:10.1080/00309230701363625. ISSN 0030-9230.
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