December 12, 1944
Our child was born on this night. The surroundings were quite primitive with a stove which consumed our entire supply of heating oil, a clandestine gas jet,49 and a smoldering oil lamp. The sky was full of thundering aircraft. There was a dark and heavy atmosphere over the city, over the house, over the small room in which this new life gave its first cries. How fragile yet how resilient, this life which emerged in the midst of this reign of terror.
49. The German occupying force ordered a general blackout in the Netherlands after dark.
December 18, 1944
The famine is inevitable.
Tens of thousands make their way to the outlying areas, to Haarlemmermeer and Wieringermeer,50 to the east, and even to Friesland, in order to get whatever [food] there is still to be had. An unusually heavy rainfall has flooded the roads and open fields. The flooding51 has turned the fields into lakes. All this makes it even more difficult to reach the far-away sources of plenty.
50. Haarlemmermeer and Wieringermeer are both polders (low-lying land reclaimed from lakes) located in the province of North Holland to the west and north of Amsterdam, respectively.
51. These floods were caused in part by German forces sabotaging Dutch locks and dams.
Today the temperature hovered around the freezing point. One cannot bear the cold any longer. People collapse in the street. Empty houses are stripped bare in broad daylight, trees are chopped down, fences and poles uprooted. Bakers’ carts are overturned and plundered by packs of local women. A policeman standing guard near a bread cart is no longer a rare sight. Yesterday a crowd ransacked a grocery store in Zuid.52 Desperation breaks down the boundaries of bourgeois respectability.
52. This is the southern district of Amsterdam.
Under these circumstances our child was brought into the world. In this misery it must grow, must be fed, and kept as warm as a tender hothouse plant. Fortunately, our friends from the “Movement”53 generously support us. They have even provided a legal document with false names. Our little creature is already in hiding.
53. This refers to the Dutch underground resistance.
Document 2-12. Malnourished Dutch children in the German-occupied Netherlands, 1944, USHMMPA WS# 89175, courtesy of David Briggs.
The German conquest of Poland in September 1939 and the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 brought a massive influx of civilian laborers into Germany from the East, most forcibly deported from their homelands to augment the Reich’s critical labor shortage in agriculture, manufacturing, and the armaments industries. By 1944, 7.5 million foreign laborers, including prisoners of war, remained on German soil, among them 2.2 million Soviet and 1.65 million Polish civilians. Laboring and subsisting under deplorable conditions, these Eastern workers (Ostarbeiter) fell victim in large number to serious illnesses, injuries, or debilitating psychiatric disorders.
Before mid-1943, Eastern workers incapacitated by illness or injury for more than three weeks were simply returned to their countries of origin.54 Initially included among these Arbeitsunfähigen55 were pregnant foreign workers. In August 1941, the Reich Labor Ministry ordered that participating agencies and work installations immediately report female laborers for transfer as soon as the fact of their pregnancy became known in order to obviate unnecessary costs in medical care and maintenance to their employers or local labor offices.56
54. By mid-1943, this policy had begun to change. As the successful advance of the Soviet army and the pressing need for all available resources in support of retreating German lines made such repatriations impossible, mentally ill “Eastern workers” were assembled at specially designated mental health facilities throughout Germany and Austria; in the course of 1944 and 1945, many of these people fell victim to the Nazi “euthanasia” program (see chapter 6). Physically incapacitated Eastern workers were confined in so-called infirmary camps (Krankenlager), where thousands perished under deplorable conditions. For further reading, see Matthias Hamann, “Die Morde an polnischen und sowjetischen Zwangsarbeitern in deutschen Anstalten,” in Aussonderung und Tod: Die klinische Hinrichtung der Unbrauchbaren. Beiträge zur Nationalsozialistischen Gesundheits- und Sozialpolitik (Berlin: Rotbuch Verlag, 1985), 160–67; Holker Kaufmann and Klaus Schulmeyer, “Die polnischen und sowjetischen Zwangsarbeiter in Hadamar,” in Psychiatrie im Faschismus: Die Anstalt Hadamar, 1933–1945, ed. Dorothee Roer and Dieter Henkel (Bonn: Psychiatrie-Verlag, 1986), 256–82.
55. This was the Nazi German term for “individuals unable to work.”
56. Hamann, “Die Morde,” 122.
From the beginning, German authorities found themselves torn between two conflicting facets of National Socialist policy with regard to the problem of pregnant Eastern workers: aspects of race and ideology, of primary relevance to Himmler’s Reich Security Main Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt), and the economic aspects that underpinned the use of forced labor, a significant concern to Germany’s labor administration. Reaching a compromise in September 1942, Fritz Sauckel, the general plenipotentiary for labor allocation (Generalbevollmächtiger für den Arbeitseinsatz), made plans to retain “racially valuable” children of foreign laborers. From December 12 until March 31, 1943, German authorities excluded pregnant workers from transports returning ailing civilian forced laborers to their native lands. On March 20, 1943, this directive was extended until the end of the war, and on July 27, 1943, a further SS decree removed all exemptions for the repatriation of pregnant Eastern workers. By the spring of 1943, a string of ordinances had lifted existing abortion restrictions in Germany for all female Eastern workers, provided they were not expecting “racially valuable” children.57
57. Abortion was illegal for most “racially valuable” Germans.
At this time, German administrators opened the first so-called Säuglingslager (infant camps) and Ausländerkinderpflegestätten (so-called nursery care facilities) for foreign laborers. Although initial plans for such establishments did not clearly specify which groups of laborers such institutions were to serve, subsequent decrees from Sauckel’s office and from the Reichssicherheitshauptamt made it plain that these facilities were meant to house the offspring of female Eastern workers—primarily women from Poland and the Soviet Union, who made up the largest percentage within the female forced labor population. Such installations ostensibly provided a place where female workers could give birth and where they and their infants might receive postnatal care.
Viktor Klemperer, in his incisive work LTI—Lingua Tertian Imperii (The Language of the Third Reich),58 asserts that National Socialist authorities were skillful and consistent manipulators of the German language for purposes of public consumption. In precisely this vein, the notion that Germany’s Ausländerkinderpflegestätten were infant-care facilities was pure metaphor. These establishments existed purely to ensure that pregnant laborers returned to their work sites as quickly as possible, unencumbered by their newborns. Labor officials were completely disinterested in the fate of the children inhabiting these facilities. Local authorities often divided sharply over which agencies bore actual responsibility for managing and funding the makeshift institutions, with the result that foodstuffs and supplies were often in woefully short supply, and appalling conditions prevailed.59 Fellow female Eastern workers served as untrained nurses and caretakers for the mothers and their offspring. Under fortunate circumstances, German authorities might enlist Soviet medics from nearby prisoner of war camps to serve as physicians but even these functioned under the most primitive conditions, usually without appropriate medicine or equipment. Records pertaining to the Ausländerkinderpflegestätten are sparse and incomplete, and these institutions often provided fictive mortality statistics for official records, so we may never know definitively how many of these facilities existed in the last years of the war or how many lives they claimed. We do know concretely from postwar adjudication
of these crimes, in such proceedings as the Velpke and Rühen trials,60 that the death rates at most of these establishments were extremely high. In a work focusing on institutions for infants of Eastern workers in northern Germany, Raymond Raiter estimates that at “care centers” serving large-scale industrial or agricultural concerns, mortality among infants neared 90 percent.61
58. Viktor Klemperer, The Language of the Third Reich: LTI—Lingua Tertii Imperii: A Philologist’s Notebook, trans. Martin Brady (London: Continuum, 2002).
59. For a closer examination of Germany’s Ausländerkinderpflegestätten and their conditions, see Gisela Schwarze, Kinder, die nicht zählten: Ostarbeiterinnnen und ihre Kinder im Zweiten Weltkrieg (Essen: Klartext Verlag, 1997); Raymond Raiter, Tötungsstätten für Ausländische Kinder im Zweiten Weltkrieg (Hanover: Hansche Buchhandlung, 2003); Evelyn Zegenhagen, “Facilities for Pregnant Forced Laborers and Their Infants in Germany, 1943–1945,” in Children and the Holocaust: Symposium Presentations of the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies (Washington DC: U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2004), 65–76.
60. George Brand, ed., Trial of Heinrich Gerike, Gustav Claus, Georg Hessling, Richard Demmerlich, Werner Noth, Fritz Flint, Hermann Müller, Valentina Bilien (The Velpke Baby Home Trial) (London: W. Hodge, 1950); Rühen Baby Farm Case, British Public Record Office, WO 235/263–277 and WO 235/674, Judge Advocate General’s Office, War Crimes Case Files, Second World War.
61. Raiter, Tötungsstätten, 201.
In the following testimony, Ernst Wirtz,62 a defendant in the Nuremberg proceeding against German industrialist Alfried Krupp63 and his associates, describes the conditions of a “care facility” for the infants of forced laborers in Voerde, near Essen.
62. Ernst Wirtz supervised foreign forced laborers for the Krupp concern beginning in the autumn of 1942. A denazification tribunal in Kulmbach sentenced Wirtz to eight years in prison for his mistreatment of forced laborers in the areas of Essen, Kulmbach, and Mulhouse.
63. Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach (1907–1967) was a member of Krupp family of industrialists headquartered in Germany’s Ruhr Valley. Famous for its steel and armaments manufacture, Friedrich Krupp AG Hoesch-Krupp was Europe’s largest company in the early twentieth century. During World War II, the Krupp concern was an important supplier of arms to the Third Reich and utilized foreign forced laborers and concentration camp prisoners in various plants and factories. As head of the conglomerate from 1943, Krupp, together with eleven other associates, was tried by American military authorities in the tenth Subsequent Nuremberg Trial (known as the Krupp Trial); in 1948, Krupp was convicted and sentenced to twelve years in prison. He was released from Landsberg Prison in 1951.
Document 2-13. Testimony of Ernst Wirtz, 1948, United States of America v. Alfried Krupp, et al. (Case 10: “Krupp Case”), in Trials of War Criminals before the Nürnberg Military Tribunals under Control Council Law No. 10, 14 vols. (Buffalo, NY: William S. Hein & Co., 1997), 9:1113–17.
Q: Where were you in January 1945?
A: In January 1945, I was in Kulmbach in Oberfranken [Upper Franconia, Germany].
Q: What was the order that Director Hupe gave you in Kulmbach regarding the transport of eastern workers from Voerde?
A: In January 1945, I had to go to Essen—the beginning of January—and I had to pick up a consignment of eastern workers. In Essen I was told by Mr. Dollwein that I had to go to Voerde in order to set up the transport of eastern workers.
Q: What was in Voerde?
A: In Voerde we have a former camp of the Organisation Todt. [. . .]64
64. The Organisation Todt was a civil and military engineering group named for its founder, Fritz Todt, a German engineer and senior Nazi official. The organization was responsible for a large range of engineering projects both in Germany and in German-occupied territories, deploying hundreds of thousands of forced laborers.
Q: How many people were in this camp?
A: I assume about 4,000.
Q: Were these men and women?
A: Mixed, men, women, and children.
Q: From among these women and children, did you pick the people for Kulmbach?
A: Yes.
Q: What did you see in the barracks in which the children lived?
A: The children were undernourished. There was no child at all whose arms or hands were thicker than my thumb.
Q: How old were those children?
A: From babies up to the age of two years.
Q: Were these the children of eastern workers?
A: Yes, they had been born in the camp.
Q: How were these babies housed in the Voerde camp when you saw them?
A: In sort of prison bunks. They had paillasses [straw-filled mattresses] with rubber sheets, and the children were there quite naked.
Q: Could you see definite signs of undernourishment in these children?
A: Yes, many of them had swollen heads. [. . .]65
65. Presumably this was caused by edema, a sign of acute malnourishment.
Q: Mr. Witness, were you surprised about this pitiable state of the children?
A: Yes.
Q: What did you tell the camp leader?
A: I told the girls in charge of the children—I asked them how it came about that these children were so undernourished, and I was told that these children had very little to eat.
Q: Were these female eastern workers?
A: Yes.
Q: And they told you that these children didn’t get enough food?
A: Yes.
Q: Did these female eastern workers also tell you how many children died every day?
A: Yes. Fifty or sixty children died every day, and as many were born every day, because there was a constant influx of eastern female workers with children.
Q: You said fifty to sixty children died every day.
A: Yes.
Q: And there was a steady influx of new ones?
A: Yes.
Q: Were these eastern female workers who had children married for the greater part?
A: Yes.
Q: What happened to the children of the female eastern workers—did they tell you what happened with the children who died?
A: I asked the interpreter to ask them how it came about that so many children died, and if the children were buried; and the interpreter told me the children were cremated inside the camp. [. . .]
Q: Do you know how long—do you know during which time, how long a time it was during which Krupp administered the camp at Voerde?
A: I can’t tell you in detail, but I assume since 1943.
Q: Since 1943?
A: Yes.
Q: But if you say that the female workers told you fifty or sixty children died every day, you didn’t mean that this number of children died over the whole period?
A: No.
Q: This only referred to a short period?
A: Yes.
Q: Could you give us an estimate concerning which period approximately?
A: There was January 1945—it may have been for one year.
Q: At the most for one year?
A: Yes [. . .]
Q: [. . .] Witness, do you know what happened to the children of a female worker who worked for Krupp?
A: As soon as the eastern worker had given birth to the child, she was allowed six weeks; and after this six weeks, she went back to work; and the child was kept in the camp so that the female workers could go to work again. She saw that child only after work.
Q: Was this child separated from the mother?
A: Yes. [. . .]
Chapter 3
Lives in the Balance
Escape and Deportation
National Socialist
policies directed at “cleansing” those territories under their control of their Jewish populations hinged on the twin dynamic of emigration and deportation. In their early efforts to remove Jews from German economic, political, and cultural life, Nazi authorities promoted measures that encouraged a mass emigration of Jews from the Reich. Discriminatory laws and the hardships these engendered prompted thousands of German Jews to relocate abroad. The first part of this chapter examines the efforts of Jewish families to flee persecution and the impact these actions had upon affected children and adolescents. Both children and adults faced an uncertain future in a new land. While affording escape from Nazi persecution, emigration imposed financial and emotional hardships upon refugees. The need to adapt to a new language and culture added to the anxieties of would-be emigrants, as did the very real threat of detention by German authorities. The absence of friends and family members weighed heavily upon youngsters who emigrated, as did their anxiety for loved ones left behind. How did the loss of homeland and familiar surroundings impact the lives of such children? The documentation below explores the challenges these young refugees faced in adjusting to new environments and new circumstances.
The opposite extreme of emigration was deportation—and death. Those Jews who did not escape persecution by fleeing abroad Nazi authorities aimed to “cleanse” from their territories by murdering them in their own communities or deporting them from lands under German and Axis control to ghettos, concentration camps, and killing centers in the East. The mobile killing units of the Einsatzgruppen followed Wehrmacht forces deep into Soviet territory, murdering over 1 million Jews, as well as thousands of Roma, disabled patients, and Soviet political officials. Even children, not spared from these shooting actions, were murdered beside their family members on the killing fields of the Soviet Union. For Jews in other areas of Europe under Axis occupation, deportation was an integral mechanism in the implementation of the “Final Solution.” In this volume, deportation carries two meanings. First, it refers to the process of uprooting Jews from their home communities and transporting them to ghettos, camps, or extermination centers. Second, deportation was a method of transferring Jews from ghettoized communities, such as Warsaw or Łódź, to killing centers for “liquidation.” In most instances, Nazi policy dictated that whole families be deported together, although, as we shall see in the case of Felicitas Gumpel (Document 3-14), French officials initially opted to dispatch only adult Jews to the East, a decision that rent families apart and hampered deportation efforts. Germany’s Axis allies developed diverse strategies for ridding their territories of Jewish populations. Here, too, children’s voices documented the harrowing circumstances of their dislocation.
Children during the Holocaust Page 13