Children during the Holocaust

by Heberer, Patricia;

  German Jews were finally forced to wear the Jewish badge on September 15, 1941,19 shortly before the first deportations of Jews from the Reich began in October 1941. The Police Decree Concerning the Designation of Jews (Polizeiverordnung über die Kennzeichnung der Juden) required all Jews over the age of six to attach to the left side of their outer garment a six-pointed yellow star, inscribed with the word Jude (Jew) in black lettering. The decree further applied to Jews in Austria and the Protectorate; it was also officially introduced at this time in German-annexed territories of Poland, although in many areas such policies had already been in place since the autumn of 1939.

  19. The decree appeared on September 1, 1941, and went into effect two weeks later.

  Legislation mandating the Jewish badge was soon adopted in western lands occupied by Germany and in German satellite states. Belgian and Dutch Jews, for example, began to wear the yellow star in the spring months of 1942. In occupied France, such an ordinance was issued on June 7, 1942, although bureaucratic resistance on the part of French officials meant that a similar measure was never applied in Vichy France, even when German forces occupied those regions of France in November 1942.20

  20. See Michael R. Marrus and Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews (New York: Basic Books, 1981), esp. 234ff.

  Document 2-5. A Jewish child in occupied France wears the yellow star, USHMMPA WS# 63042, courtesy of Michael O’Hara.

  Caught in the Crossfire: The War on Civilians

  The sustained bombing of London and other British cities between September 7, 1940, and May 10, 1941, known colloquially as the Blitz,21 figures as one of the most well-known events of World War II. At its height, German bombs rained down on London for fifty-seven consecutive nights, causing extensive damage and loss of life among the civilian population.

  21. This is a shortening of the German word Blitzkrieg (lightning war).

  What many historians call the Battle of Britain began in July 1940. Prior to the planned invasion of the British Isles (Operation Sea Lion), the German Luftwaffe (air force) began to bomb strategic targets such as military airfields and key manufacturing areas in an effort to achieve air superiority over the Royal Air Force and to facilitate a possible German invasion across the English Channel. The first deliberate air raids on civilian London began on September 7.22 In that initial attack, launched in late afternoon, the Luftwaffe struck the city’s port and Docklands, where bombs, falling in nearby residential districts, killed more than 430 Londoners. In the days that followed, some one to two hundred German aircraft bombarded the city nightly, dropping an estimated thirteen thousand tons of explosives on the British capital. Perhaps the most devastating raid came shortly after Christmas, on the evening of December 29, when Luftwaffe planes dropped incendiary and high-explosive bombs on the city center. The resulting firestorm destroyed the largest contiguous area of urban land witnessed in any German raid of its kind, rivaling the devastation of the Great Fire of London in 1666.23

  22. When an initial German foray over residential London prompted a retaliatory British raid upon Berlin, an enraged Hitler called for a “disruptive attack upon the population and air defenses of major British cities, including London, by day and night” (quoted in Klaus Maier et al., Germany and the Second World War: Germany’s Initial Conquests in Europe [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991], 387). Controversy has long existed over whether this earliest bombing of London’s East End on August 24, 1940, was accidental or German pilots were acting on a loosely worded order from Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring.

  23. See Peter Stansky, The First Day of the Blitz (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007); Richard Overy, The Battle of Britain: Myth and Reality (London: Penguin, 2000).

  London was not the only target of German bombing. From November 1940 through February 1941, the Luftwaffe attacked British port cities, such as Liverpool, Cardiff, Plymouth, and Southampton, as well as military and industrial centers, such as Manchester, Hull,24 Belfast, and Coventry. Although in the campaign’s later stages bombers increasingly concentrated on strategic, rather than civilian, targets, the principle objective of the Blitz remained the same: to shatter the morale of the British people. British citizens, however, responded to the destructive raids with great courage and determination. London’s civilian population contributed enormously to the defense of their city, volunteering with the Home Guard, as air raid wardens, and as the intrepid “Blitz scouts,” who aided local fire brigades in their rescue efforts. By night, thousands of Londoners descended into the safety of London’s Tube, or subway system, or crowded into public bunkers; others huddled with family members in so-called Anderson shelters, small self-constructed bomb shelters made of corrugated steel, sunk in the backyards and gardens of homes throughout the country. Youngsters endured long separations from their parents and family members, as British authorities evacuated nearly one hundred thousand children and adolescents from their homes in London and other urban areas to the safety of the countryside.25

  24. After London, Hull was the most severely bombed British city during World War II, with 95 percent of its housing damaged or destroyed.

  25. The bulk of these evacuations occurred in and after June 1940; many children returned over the course of 1941 as urban areas became safer. Another evacuation of women and children from London began in June 1944, when German forces deployed V-1 and V-2 rockets on British civilian targets. See Carleton Jackson, Who Will Take Our Children: The British Evacuation Program of World War II (Jefferson, NC: McFarland Press, 2008).

  The bravery and resilience of British citizens paid off. By May 1941, with no British surrender forthcoming, most Luftwaffe units had redeployed to the East for the coming invasion of the Soviet Union. Although the German air force would never again attack British targets with such intensity, smaller raids upon British cities would claim the lives of some eight thousand more civilians, while the infamous V-1 and V-226 flying bombs, early forms of cruise missiles, killed an almost equal number of Britons in the last stages of World War II. But the sustained bombing experienced throughout the Blitz was over. From early September 1940 until late May 1941, forty-three thousand British citizens had died in air raids, half of them in London, while 1 million housing units had been damaged or destroyed.

  26. In each case, the V stood for Vergeltungswaffe (revenge weapon).

  Olive McNeil was fourteen years old on “Black Saturday,” September 7, 1940, when German bombs pounded the residential neighborhoods bordering the Docklands on London’s East Side. The family had just installed a private shelter, and she, her mother, and her younger brothers had just enough time to reach the bunker before the first shells fell. Olive recollected that, on that first day of the Blitz, an air of unreality mingled with the terror of the moment.

  Document 2-6. Olive McNeil, London, England, undated testimony, quoted in Jane Waller and Michael Vaughan-Rees, Blitz: The Civilian War, 1940–1945 (London: McDonald Optima, 1990), 12–13.

  I was in the backyard watching my two little brothers play—although most of our yard was taken up by the Anderson [shelter] that the council workmen had put in—and I could hear this strange droning sound. Looking up I could see lots of planes very small and very high. I called the boys to look. We said how pretty they looked with the sun glinting on them, they looked like stars. But there were so many of them and they were coming over us in lines. Suddenly everything changed, the planes that were high up started to swoop down and down and the air was filled with screaming whistling sounds. The siren was blowing and Mum came running out and pushed us down the shelter. But the screaming whistlings didn’t stop, they got louder and louder[;] I could feel the thudding of the ground around me. Some of the screaming whistlings were making the earth floor in the shelter jump. I could feel the dirt and dust was coming through the cracks in the shelter. I could hardly see, it was covering my hair and was getting in our eyes
. Mum told us to lie down and she lay on top of us and she kept saying her prayers, and I said, “Please Jesus, don’t let the screaming whistlings come too close.” Mum told me to shut up and not frighten the boys. But the screaming whistlings went on and on, and one got so close that the shelter nearly got lifted out of the ground. We all screamed and we heard glass breaking and things flying around.

  Suddenly everything went quiet, and we clung together in the blessed silence until the all clear went and we thanked God we were all right. I was out first. By now it was getting dark. I remember standing by the shelter and looking around me, it was as though I was in a dream. The sky as far as I could see all around me was orange and pink. It glowed, making everything look like fairyland.

  World War II fits within the paradigm that defines an increasingly more common pattern in warfare: it claimed more civilian lives than military casualties. Noncombatants on both the Allied and Axis sides fell victim to strategic bombing and mining, war crimes, persecution, population transfers, famine, and disease. In many countries, hapless civilians were caught in the veritable crossfire of partisan warfare.

  Perhaps no region saw a more vicious partisan struggle than the former Yugoslavia, where resistance against the Axis occupiers combined with internecine warfare. On April 6, 1941, the Axis powers invaded the Kingdom of Yugoslavia from all sides. The country was quickly overrun by, and partitioned among, the aggressors: Germany, Italy, Hungary, and Bulgaria. German forces occupied northern Slovenia and the truncated Serbian state; in the regions representing the modern nations of Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, German authorities created the Independent State of Croatia (Nezavisna Drzava Hrvatska), a puppet state over which Germany exerted considerable influence. A strong Yugoslav resistance emerged, in two distinct manifestations. The Chetniks, a conservative royalist and nationalist force whose support came largely from the Serbian population, initially gained recognition from the Western Allies, but they compromised their position through increasing collaboration with Axis forces.27 In July 1941, the communist resistance formed the People’s Liberation Army and Partisan Detachments of Yugoslavia, known simply as the Partisans, led by future Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito (1892–1980). At the outset, Partisan forces were poorly armed and lacked an efficient infrastructure, but they possessed two important assets that they would use to advantage. First, their units formed around a small central cadre of men who had gained combat experience in the recent Spanish Civil War and could share with their comrades important strategies and tactics employed in modern guerrilla warfare. Second, the Partisan movement united under an antifascist ideology that embraced factions from the republican, socialist, and communist Left but transcended the boundaries of ethnicity in a multiethnic state. The Partisans fought an increasingly successful guerrilla campaign against the Axis occupiers and the fascist Croatian Ustaše regime. The occupying forces and their local collaborators administered the region with such brutality that the Partisans gained widespread support and assistance from the local populations. In the end, the government of the Independent State of Croatia found itself unable to control its territory, resulting in a number of anti-insurgency campaigns undertaken by the Germany army and the Ustaše militia.28

  27. After the Teheran Conference in late 1943, the Allies and the Yugoslavian government in exile recognized the Yugoslav Partisan Movement as the country’s legitimate liberation force.

  28. See John Lampe, Yugoslavia As History: Twice There Was a Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Sabrina Ramet, ed., The Independent State of Croatia (London: Routledge Press, 2007).

  The Partisans were ultimately successful in cooperating with Allied forces to liberate Yugoslavia, but the ensuing partisan warfare came at a tremendous cost. Throughout the period of insurgency, law and order effectively broke down in many regions, and guerrilla groups combed the countryside, terrorizing the populace. Both the Ustaše militias and the Chetniks committed wide-ranging atrocities against the local populations. The German occupiers carried out massive reprisals for guerrilla activity against German troops and murdered thousands of civilians in retaliation for resistance activity. The Yugoslav Partisans also engaged in reprisal actions, although the most egregious of these occurred in the immediate postwar period.

  In July 1942, Milovan Ðjilas, a guerrilla commander with the Yugoslav Partisans, wrote an entry in the diary of his closest associate, Vladimir Dedijer. Both men would play vital roles in the founding of the communist Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia in the immediate postwar.29 Visiting his comrade after a month’s absence, the battle-hardened Ðjilas described with horror the Ustaše massacre of women and children he had witnessed in Urije, in present-day Bosnia-Herzegovina. “When he had finished,” wrote Dedijer, “I gave him my diary and said, ‘Note for me all of this so nothing is lost.’”30

  29. Milovan Ðjilas (1911–1995) was groomed as Tito’s eventual successor until his calls for greater democratization in both party and state led to his downfall in 1954. Vladimir Dedijer was Tito’s official biographer but lost influence with Ðjilas’s fall from power. Thereafter, he devoted himself to writing and teaching history at a number of universities in the former Yugoslavia, Great Britain, and the United States. Among his well-known works is The Yugoslav Auschwitz and the Vatican: The Croatian Massacre of the Serbs during World War II, trans. Harvey Kendall (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1992).

  30. Vladimir Dedijer, The War Diaries of Vladimir Dedijer, Vol. 1: From April 6, 1941, to November 27, 1942 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990), 269.

  Document 2-7. Addendum of Milovan Ðjilas to the July 28, 1942, diary entry of Vladimir Dedijer, in Vladimir Dedijer, The War Diaries of Vladimir Dedijer, Vol. 1: From April 6, 1941, to November 27, 1942 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990), 269–70.

  I was following an ordinary village road, and it was an ordinary summer morning, rather clean because of the gentle rain which had fallen during the night. . . . I was so depressed I wanted to cry, because I could not drive from my mind the picture of those wonderful comrades who had died in yesterday’s skirmish with the Ustaše, there somewhere in front of me, in the lush meadows. But what I saw yesterday [. . .] so filled me with disgust that it totally erased all the pain I felt for my dear comrades. [. . .]

  We went on our way a little further, on both sides of the road, hazel hedges and ferns, and suddenly, in the middle of the road, I do not recall the exact number, ten or twelve corpses. I think there were two middle-aged men—the remainder were women, girls, children, babies. Three or four paces from this heap of blood and flesh—an empty cradle, without swaddling, without a child, with straw dampened by a child’s urine. This straw seemed as if it was still warm from the child’s body. The child was lying in the heap of corpses, but its head was completely smashed. [. . .]

  The remaining corpses too were disfigured. The face of a ten-year-old had knife wounds on its forehead and cheeks. Some boy, also with an empty skull, like that infant, lay twisted around the bush at the side of the road, his bare legs and thin arms bent. Because rigor mortis had set in, the skin was gathered and the sharp white bones peered out at the temple. If the boy had not been so disfigured, one would have thought he was sleeping in the shade, by the road, a little hidden so the farmers wouldn’t see him and scold him for sleeping, not keeping an eye on the livestock so they wouldn’t get into the farmer’s fields and meadows. [. . .]

  The road at this point is broad and there is a lot of room, as there should be on the outskirts of a town, where the peasants can sit in the evening, to rest and admire the town. But the corpses were all slaughtered on the edge of the road, up against the fence, as if a storm had swept them there.

  Among them were two mothers with their infants. If at the earlier group, one could not tell who the mothers of the children were, here it could easily be seen. One mother, young and dark, held her child in her arms. [. . .] The other m
other had not held her child so firmly. She lay on her back, and the child, abandoned by her side, lay in a heap, its blouse torn from its chest. The first mother, with dark eyebrows, gave the impression of those old-fashioned, false romantic pictures of murdered or drowned mothers with children, but this was nothing old-fashioned or false, or romantic, but an actual mother killed with her child, a mother whom death had frozen, holding her infant to her breast.

  Document 2-8. Body of a young boy killed in an antipartisan campaign on the slopes of Petrova Gora, a stronghold of communist resistance activity in Yugoslavia, 1942, USHMMPA WS# 01138, courtesy of Lydia Chagoll.

  As for most civilians in war-torn Europe, privation was the central experience of children’s wartime existence. For a significant number of Europe’s young population, it was neither exploding shells nor encroaching invaders but hunger that proved the greatest enemy. One scene of unparalleled deprivation in the midst of World War II was the Soviet city of Leningrad (today Saint Petersburg), the site of a devastating 872-day siege by German forces, which began on September 8, 1941, when an advance of German troops to the shores of Lake Lagoda on Leningrad’s eastern edge effectively completed the encirclement of the city. On September 19, Red Army soldiers and civilians from the town halted the Germans before hastily dug defense lines in a 10-kilometer (6.2-mile) perimeter about the city. While Adolf Hitler announced that his forces had no interest in saving the lives of the civilian population, German army units settled in for a protracted siege. Early in the conflict, German bombs had destroyed the city’s major supply depot, and with only a trickle of provisions reaching the metropolis, the city’s 3.5 million inhabitants—400,000 of them children—knew the most extreme deprivation.31 Without sufficient foodstuffs, water, or fuel, the death rate that winter soared. In January 1942, rations dropped to their lowest point: just 125 grams (4.4 ounces) of bread per person per day. City dwellers ate paper, wallpaper paste, their pets. Furniture, books, and floorboards were burned for warmth. In January and February 1942, amid the coldest winter in recent memory, some two hundred thousand Leningraders died from starvation, disease, and the incessant bombing and shelling by German forces.32 Despite the grim conditions, the city did not surrender. In January 1943, a Soviet offensive opened a narrow corridor near Lake Lagoda that would prove a vital artery for goods and supplies and an urgently needed evacuation route for the city’s thousands of starving inhabitants. On January 27, 1944, Soviet forces dislodged German troops from the city’s southern outskirts, breaking the nearly nine-hundred-day siege. Leningrad had survived one of the most devastating blockades in modern history, one that claimed the lives of at least eight hundred thousand of its citizens.33