Children during the Holocaust

by Heberer, Patricia;

  59. For a discussion of the “Buchenwald Boys” in the postwar period, see chapter 10 of this volume.

  Document 5-12. Prisoner personal information card of Stefan Jerzy Zweig, Buchenwald, August 5, 1944, USHMMA ITS Digital Collection, Buchenwald—Individual Documents, Male Section, R. 1.1.5.3, 7503616 1.

  Concentration Camp: Buchenwald[handwritten:] Jew and Juvenile

  Prisoner Personal Information Card

  Family name: ZweigTransferredPersonal description:

  First name: Stefan Jerzy[blank]Height: 97 centimeters

  (3 ft., 1 in.)

  Born on: January 18, 1941, in KrakówFigure: slender

  Civil status: singleChildren? NoFace: oval

  Residence: Kraków, Burgstr. 4Eyes: brown

  Street:Nose: gen[eral]

  Religion: [Jewish]Citizenship: PoleMouth: gen[eral]

  Address of relatives: motherTeeth: complete

  Helena Z., Schönewald near LeipzigEars: ———

  Concentration camp, H. Schneider AG60Hair: blond

  60. This refers to Hugo Schneider, Aktiengesellschaft (HASAG).

  Admitted: August 5, 1944Language: Polish

  Through: RSHA61Distinguishing features: none

  61. The Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Reich Main Security Office).

  Admitted to: Buchenwald

  Grounds: Political Pole—Jew

  Document 5-13. Survivors of Buchenwald walk through the liberated camp with Stefan Jerzy Zweig, a four-year-old Jewish boy protected by the camp’s underground resistance, between April and June 1945, USHMMPA WS# 19041, courtesy of the Fédération Nationale des Déportés et Internés Résistants et Patriotes.

  Chapter 6

  Children in the Web of Racial Hygiene Policy

  A significant segment of Nazi persecutory policies stemmed from racial hygiene or eugenic theories prevalent among the international scientific community in the first decades of the twentieth century. The movement’s leading American advocate, Charles B. Davenport, described eugenics as the “science devoted to the improvement of the human race through better breeding.”1 Eugenicists believed that the ravaging social ills that attended modern society—mental illness, alcoholism, sexually transmitted diseases, tuberculosis, criminality, and even poverty—derived from hereditary factors. Eugenics proponents championed three primary objectives: to discover and enumerate “hereditary” characteristics that contributed to societal ills, to develop biological solutions for these dilemmas, and to campaign actively for public measures that might combat these dangers. Throughout western Europe and the United States, where the movement was eagerly embraced in the 1910s and 1920s, adherents lobbied for “positive” eugenic efforts: public policy that aimed to maintain physically, racially, and hereditarily “healthy” individuals through social welfare for “deserving” families, marriage counseling, and motherhood training. Through these efforts, proponents hoped to encourage “better” families to reproduce. Dovetailing with these endeavors to support the “productive,” however, followed negative eugenic measures: initiatives to exclude and hinder society’s “unproductive” elements and to redirect social and economic resources from these “less valuable” to the “worthy.” Many members of the eugenics community, in Germany as well as in the United States, promoted strategies that sought to marginalize segments of society with limited mental or social capacity—the “feebleminded,” the mentally ill, and persons with disabilities—and to limit their reproduction through voluntary or compulsory sterilization. Eugenicists targeted the mentally ill and cognitively impaired, arguing a direct link between diminished capacity and depravity, promiscuity, and criminality. They viewed as a menace the racially “inferior” and “shiftless poor” who transmitted their dependency on the public through the modus of heredity. Tainted through inherited deficiencies, these groups endangered the national hereditary community, eugenicists maintained, and placed a financial burden on the society that sustained them. More often than not, eugenicists’ “scientifically” drawn conclusions about disabled individuals or ethnic and racial minorities did little more than incorporate popular prejudice. Yet, by employing “research” and “theory” in their efforts, they could assert their own notions of human inferiority and superiority as scientific fact.2

  1. Charles Davenport, quoted in Henry Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 4.

  2. See Patricia Heberer, “Science,” in The Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies, ed. John Roth and Peter Hayes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 39–53.

  German eugenics pursued a terrible and separate course after 1933, but before 1914, the German racial hygiene movement did not differ appreciably from its British and American counterparts.3 A genuine radicalization of the German eugenics community began shortly after World War I. Here, the conflict’s unprecedented carnage, coupled with the economic dislocation of the interwar years, underscored in popular discourse the division between hereditarily “valuable” Germans who had died on the battlefield and the “unproductive” Germans institutionalized in prisons, hospitals, and welfare facilities, who had remained behind to reproduce and to draw their sustenance from the slender resources of the state. An allegory of the “stab-in-the-back” legend, such argumentation resurfaced consistently in the Weimar and early Nazi eras to justify eugenic sterilization and an abrogation of social services for the disabled and institutionalized. By 1933, the theories of racial hygiene had embedded themselves into professional and public conception and influenced the thinking of Adolf Hitler and many of his supporters and followers. Embracing an ideology that blended racial antisemitism with eugenic theory, the Hitler regime provided both the context and the latitude for the realization of eugenic measures in their most concrete and radical manifestations.

  3. See Sheila Faith Weiss, “Die rassenhygienische Bewegung in Deutschland, 1904–1933,” in Der Wert des Menschen: Medizin in Deutschland, 1918–1945, ed. Christian Pross and Götz Aly (Berlin: Edition Hentrich, 1989), 153–73.

  Children and adults of diverse backgrounds became victims of Nazi racial hygiene policy. This chapter discusses the compulsory sterilization of youngsters on the basis of presumed hereditary disorders, and—in the case of the so-called “Rhineland Bastards” (“Rheinland-Bastarde”) (see Document 6-2)—of “mixed” and “inferior” blood. It examines the much understudied German policy of Lebensborn (Fount of Life), an organization that in Germany worked to sustain unwed mothers and their children but in occupied countries, particularly in Poland, located and abducted “racially valuable” indigenous children for Germanization and adoption by German families. It explores the National Socialists’ only killing campaign that specifically targeted children: the child “euthanasia” program, which claimed the lives of five to seven thousand disabled German infants, toddlers, and juveniles. The following documentation also traces Nazi policies directed against European Roma and Sinti (Gypsies), targeting both settled and nomadic Romani populations for mass murder. Finally, it considers children as victims of medical “research,” deployed in agonizing and often lethal experimentation to further the careers of unethical researchers or to underpin the racialist and ideological tenets of the Nazi worldview.

  Compulsory Sterilization

  One of the first racial hygiene measures employed by the National Socialist government when it came to power in 1933 was compulsory sterilization—an effort that stood at the core of broad-based plans to forge a new and utopian population policy in Nazi Germany. Such a strategy proved a double-edged sword. In a positive vein, German authorities would soon implement several complementary pronatal strategies, such as marriage loans (Ehestandsdarlehen), expanded marital and prenatal counseling, and child-support allowances (Kindergeld), meant to reverse Germany’s dwindling birthrate4 and
to promote the increase of racially “valuable” children.

  4. The birthrate in Germany had been on the decline since 1870 but hit an all-time low in 1932. This was in part a consequence of the heavy losses among young men in World War I, but it also resulted from the demographic changes that came with urbanization in German lands and with women’s efforts at enfranchisement and emancipation.

  Compulsory sterilization was the other edge of the sword—an anti­natal measure aimed at proscribing the propagation of “hereditarily compromised” Germans. Nazi ideologues portrayed individuals with mental, physical, or social disabilities as a “fifth column” within their “racial community” (Volksgemeinschaft), corrupting Germany’s national gene pool and burdening its social welfare network.5

  5. See Gisela Bock, “Racism and Sexism in Nazi Germany: Motherhood, Compulsory Sterilization, and the State,” in When Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany, ed. Renate Bridenthal, Atina Grossmann, and Marion Kaplan (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1984), 271–96.

  Nazi authorities resolved to intervene in the reproductive capacities of such persons. On July 14, 1933, at the injunction of Germany’s leading eugenicists and racial theorists, the Hitler cabinet promulgated the Law for the Prevention of Progeny with Hereditary Diseases (Gesetz zur Verhütung erbkranken Nachwuchses). Also known as the Hereditary Health Law (Erbgesundheitsgesetz), the new legislation ordered the compulsory sterilization of persons suffering from specific diseases or impairments. Five of the disabilities designated in the ordinance represented psychiatric or neurological disorders, including schizophrenia, manic-depressive (bipolar) disorder, hereditary epilepsy, Huntington’s chorea,6 and “hereditary feeblemindedness.”7 Four physical conditions also warranted sterilization under the new law: hereditary deafness, hereditary blindness, serious hereditary physical deformity, and severe alcoholism, which many physicians and scientists believed to have a genetic component. Medical professionals, including doctors and midwives, were now obliged to report patients with these illnesses or disabilities in the exercise of their duties. Directors of hospitals, mental institutions, schools, prisons, workhouses, and concentration camps also proposed candidates for sterilization, as did teachers, social workers, and public welfare agencies. Denunciation by ordinary citizens—by employers, employees, neighbors, and even family members—was not uncommon.

  6. This incurable neurodegenerative disease causes a cumulative decline in mental and physical abilities, often leading to institutionalization. The disease results from a dominant mutation; any offspring of an affected parent incurs a 50 percent risk of inheriting the malady.

  7. This ambiguous diagnosis today might include a wide spectrum of disorders, ranging in scope from various learning disabilities to mild and severe forms of cognitive and developmental impairment.

  After a petition to sterilize an individual had been proposed and processed, the suit came before a special hereditary health court (Erbgesundheitsgericht), a Nazi legal innovation superimposed on the existing German juridical structure. By 1936, there were approximately 230 hereditary health tribunals throughout Germany, each constituting two physicians and one jurist. If a particular court ruled for sterilization, the individual in question had four weeks in which to appeal the verdict, for it was a legal process. In the absence of an appeal—or if a higher court turned down a standing appeal—the implementing decree for the 1933 law demanded execution of the sterilization procedure within two weeks’ time at the hospital or clinic designated in the verdict. Paragraph 12 of the legislation sanctioned the use of force on unwilling victims. Those attempting to circumvent the procedure might be escorted by police guard to the facility in question. Gisela Bock, whose work still represents the seminal study of the topic, suggests that from January 1, 1934, when the legislation took effect, until the end of World War II, some four hundred thousand Germans were forcibly sterilized under the auspices of the Hereditary Health Law.8

  8 . Gisela Bock, Zwangssterilisation im Nationalsozialismus: Studien zur Rassenpolitik und Frauenpolitik (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1986). See also Paul Weindling, “Compulsory Sterilization in National Socialist Germany,” German History 5 (1987): 10–24. This figure does not include individuals sterilized extralegally, either experimentally in the Nazi concentration camp system during the war or as a result of anti-Roma regulations surrounding the December 1942 Auschwitz Decree, by which German Roma and Sinti exempted from deportation to Auschwitz were subject to compulsory sterilization.

  The terms of the law allowed for sterilization of children as young as ten with parental consent and compulsory sterilization, mandated by hereditary health courts, for adolescents aged fourteen and older.9 One youngster subjected to the procedure was Gerda E.,10 a teenager from Freienwalde, a village 50 kilometers (31 miles) northeast of Berlin. Gerda was deaf and, like many hearing-impaired children at the time, had been institutionalized in order to receive a special education. In this period, school authorities made little effort to integrate blind or deaf pupils with their seeing and hearing classmates. Moreover, some medical professionals associated the inability (or unwillingness) to speak—then labeled “deaf-mutism”—with mental retardation, and many profoundly deaf children and adults who lacked oral development found themselves confined to a mental health facility or institution for the deaf.11 Gerda E. was sterilized in early August 1936. The following correspondence, written by the director of the State Institute for the Deaf and Mute to Gerda’s mother, speaks to the thoroughness of this process.

  9 . Martin Rudnick, Aussondern, Sterilisieren, Liquidieren: Die Verfolgung Behinderte im Nationalsozialismus (Berlin: Edition Marhold, 1990), 97.

  10. This individual’s surname has been abbreviated in order to protect her privacy and that of her family.

  11. For a discussion of the German deaf community in this period, see Donna F. Ryan and John S. Schuchman, eds., Deaf People in Hitler’s Europe (Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 2002); Horst Biesold, Crying Hands: Eugenics and Deaf People in Nazi Germany, trans. William Sayers (Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 1999).

  Document 6-1a. Letter of Dr. Gotthold Lehmann, director of the State Institute for the Deaf and Mute and Teaching Institute for Teachers of the Deaf and Mute, to Frau E., Freienwalde, c. July 1936, USHMMA, RG-10.320, Horst Biesold Collection (translated from the German).

  On the basis of the Law for the Prevention of Progeny with Hereditary Diseases, your child Gerda was required to be registered with the local district physician [Kreisarzt] because it is suspected that she suffers from hereditary deafness. As you are certainly aware, hereditarily ill persons must, according to law, be sterilized in order to hinder the further spread of hereditary diseases.

  I attach a leaflet containing instructions concerning the sterilization procedure for your information. You are asked to seek out your physician as soon as possible in order to discuss with him, in presentation of this letter, the case of your child and to ask him for oral clarification concerning the nature and consequences of sterilization. You will then ask him to confirm with his signature on the attached form that this instruction [concerning the sterilization procedure] has taken place.

  I encourage you yourself to put in an application for the sterilization of your child. A form for the same is attached. The application does not imply that your child will be sterilized. It should serve instead to lead to an accurate examination of the case before the Hereditary Health Court. Sterilization will only occur when the Hereditary Health Court reaches the conclusion that your child is hereditarily ill.

  You will lessen the work of the court appreciably and at the same time serve the interests of your child if you give accurate information concerning any cases of deafness or other illnesses among your family members. We attach a chart for a family tree, and ask you to fill in the details as fully as possible.

  Heil Hitler! />
  [signed Lehmann]

  Document 6-1b. Letter of Dr. Gotthold Lehmann, director of the State Institute for the Deaf and Mute and Teaching Institute for Teachers of the Deaf and Mute, to Frau E., Freienwalde, July 31, 1936, USHMMA, RG-10.320, Horst Biesold Collection (translated from the German).

  To Frau E., Freienwalde on the Oder

  [address obscured]

  By order of the Public Health Officer [Amtsarzt] of [Berlin-]Neukölln, your daughter Gerda, now resident at the State Women’s Clinic Neukölln, Mariendorfer Weg, must be transferred for sterilization. Because Gerda is over fourteen years of age, a special declaration of consent from you is not necessary. Any objection would not alter this course.

  Gerda will be transferred on Monday.

  Heil Hitler!

  [Signed Dr. Lehmann]

  The Law for the Prevention of Progeny with Hereditary Diseases targeted Germans who suffered from certain mental, physical, or social disabilities. Yet even as the measure represented an endeavor to purify the German racial community by curtailing the reproductive capacity of its “hereditarily compromised” members, racism ensured that persons whom Nazi authorities considered outsiders to that community were also incorporated in the measure. For the most part, German Jews sterilized legally under the Hereditary Health Law tended to be included under the legislation because of perceived biological deficiencies, not solely on the grounds of racial antisemitism. Sterilizations of Jewish citizens were most common in large Jewish communities like Berlin, particularly where there was a concentration of poorer, eastern European Jews. As with German working-class victims, the grounds for sterilization in these cases lay predominantly in socioeconomic factors rather than in overt racism.12 So-called Gypsies (Roma and Sinti), African Germans, and a segment of the Polish minority in Upper Silesia, however, figured as targets for sterilization on purely racial bases.13 This was especially true for the so-called “Rhineland Bastards,” the children of German women and French colonial troops who had occupied the left and right banks of the Rhine directly following World War I and again when Germany defaulted on its foreign loans in the 1920s.