Children during the Holocaust

by Heberer, Patricia;

  12. Bock, “Racism and Sexism,” 283. In the case of both Jews and “Aryans,” the sterilization law tended to affect the lower economic strata of society.

  13. Bock, “Racism and Sexism,” 283.

  By the early 1930s, there were approximately five hundred of these children between the ages of four and fifteen, many of them living in such Rhenish urban areas as Cologne, Koblenz, and Mainz. The Allied occupation of the German Rhineland was a source of national humiliation during the Weimar and Nazi periods, and these youngsters—some the offspring of consensual relations with occupying soldiers but also, in considerable numbers, the product of rape—had emerged as a living symbol of Germany’s disgrace. Many of the children bore the physical features of their French African14 and Indochinese fathers and were marginalized by the local populace. Police and medical officials had registered a large percentage of these “Rhineland Bastards” in the Weimar era, and several German public health administrators had urged their sterilization in the 1920s. By July 1933, with compulsory sterilization now a legally sanctioned measure, Nazi authorities refocused their attention on this tiny racial minority. On February 28, 1934, the Prussian Interior Ministry underscored the danger that these “mixed breeds” (Mischlinge) represented to the German population and recommended their sterilization. This 1934 memorandum warned officials in Germany’s Foreign Office of the difficulty of sterilizing the children under the terms of the current legislation, for, with few exceptions, they did not suffer from the mental or physical ailments mentioned in the regulation. Ultimately, because the 1933 Hereditary Health Law contained no provisions for implementation of the procedure on racial bases, Hitler authorized the Gestapo and certain hereditary health court officials to carry out sterilization of these juveniles in a secret action in 1937.15 This clandestine effort applied only in the Rhineland. Other African Germans, although marginalized as second-class citizens throughout the Nazi period, remained unaffected by the measure.16 The wider fate of the “Rhineland Bastards” remains largely unknown: scholars researching this particular topic were unable to locate more than a few members of this minority still alive in the last decades of the twentieth century.17

  14. The French Republic at the time had colonies in North Africa, including Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia; French Equatorial Africa, including Chad, Gabon, Middle Congo (now the Republic of the Congo), and Ubangi-Chari (now the Central African Republic); and French West Africa, including Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast), Dahomey (now Benin), French Guinea (now Guinea), French Sudan (now Mali), Mauritania, and Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso).

  15. See Reiner Pommerin, Sterilisierung der Rheinlandbastarde: Schicksal einer farbigen deutschen Minderheit (Düsseldorf: Droste Verlag, 1979).

  16. See, for example, Hans Massaquoi, Destined to Witness: Growing Up Black in Nazi Germany (New York: Harper Perennial, 2001).

  17. Christian Pross and Götz Aly, Der Wert des Menschen: Medizin in Deutschland, 1918–1945 (Berlin: Edition Hentrich, 1989), 196.

  Document 6-2. Memorandum of the Prussian Minister of the Interior to the German Foreign Office, March 28, 1934, Political Office of the German Foreign Office, R99166, Partei, 84/4 (translated from the German).

  Copy

  The Prussian Minister of the InteriorBerlin, February 28, 1934

  III a II 714/34

  As a result of the assertions repeatedly raised in the press, as well as in the petitions to the Minister President and the Ministry of the Interior, that a serious danger in the form of racial degeneration of the German population is to be expected from the mixed-breeds [Mischlinge] produced by colored18 occupying troops and German women and girls, I requested in April 1933 an inquiry and a report from the appropriate Regierungspräsidenten19 (Koblenz, Cologne, Aachen, Trier, Wiesbaden, Düsseldorf) concerning the resident mixed-breeds resident in their areas of jurisdiction. According to the information reported to me, a total of 145 authenticated cases of children produced by colored troops were discovered (administrative district of Koblenz: twenty-four; Cologne: six; Aachen: six; Trier: sixteen; Wiesbaden: eighty-nine; Düsseldorf: four). These were born in the years between 1919 and 1930, and are therefore today between the ages of four and fifteen. This figure may, however, be considerably lower than the actual number because, for obvious reasons, the mothers keep silent about their racially foreign [fremdrassig] offspring or deny that they are such, and therefore an exact figure remains elusive. Further, in my experience the mixed-breeds often appear to be of a pure European type, and therefore cannot be distinguished from the rest of the German population, even by racial experts. This is especially true for those mixed-breeds produced by white Frenchmen who themselves derive from African blood; these are represented even today in a significant number among the French people. If, therefore, all of the children produced by these soldiers could be surveyed, then even the figure of 500 to 600 estimated by experts in the field may not be too high.

  18. This term was used at the time to designate persons of color—above all, in this context, black Germans. The term is seen as pejorative today.

  19. These were the local chiefs of administration.

  In order to ascertain an unimpeachable judgment regarding the physical and mental state of the bastard children and concerning the racial significance of this intermingling of foreign blood in our western borderlands, I have, with the consent of the Director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics in Berlin-Dahlem, Eugen Fischer,20 tasked his assistant, Dr. Abel—a recognized expert in the field of racial studies—with a thorough investigation of an easily recognizable segment of the bastard children. Dr. Abel21 undertook this assignment in July 1933, and with the help of state and communal authorities, as well as schoolteachers, examined all known mixed-breeds in the cities of Wiesbaden and [Biberach], in total thirty-eight persons. These results, briefly summarized, are as follows:

  20. A prominent German anthropologist and physician, Eugen Fischer (1874–1967) made his name in 1913 with the publication of research concerning the so-called Rehoboth Bastards, the offspring of unions between Dutch colonizers and Hottentot tribeswomen in southwestern Africa. His contribution to the seminal two-volume work Grundriss der menschlichen Erblichkeitslehre und Rassenhygiene (The Foundations of the Study of Human Heredity and Racial Hygiene), coauthored with Fritz Lenz and Erwin Baur in 1921, established Fischer as a preeminent German eugenicist. Fischer directed the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics from 1927 to 1942. In this capacity, he strongly influenced Nazi racial and eugenic policies. Fischer retired from his academic appointments in 1942.

  21. Wolfgang Abel (1905–1997), an Austrian anthropologist and racial hygienist, served at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics, beginning in 1931. In 1942, Abel succeeded his mentor, Eugen Fischer, as chair of racial biology at the University of Berlin. In conjunction with Fischer, Abel was involved in efforts to Germanize, expel, and liquidate segments of the Soviet population in conjunction with the Generalplan Ost (General Plan East). Following the war, he lived as a private citizen in Austria until his death in 1997.

  The fathers of the thirty-eight children produced for inspection were twenty-six Moroccans, six Vietnamese,22 presumably two Turks, one Scot, and one Frenchman. A further father is a cross between an Englishman and an Indian; the latter, unknown, was in any case not of colored origin.

  22. The original German texts refers to “Annamites,” indicating a mountain chain in the former French region of Indochina, including areas of Laos, Vietnam, and Cambodia. Annam itself was a former kingdom and French protectorate in central Vietnam on the South China Sea.

  In outward appearance, the children of the Moroccans and the Vietnamese—the others are irrelevant to these comments—were mostly readily distinguishable as such. It must, however, be stated that t
he children produced by Moroccan fathers often display a completely European appearance: a fact which has the natural explanation that many Moroccans possess no negro blood, but on the contrary in a racial sense are fully comparable to certain members of the southern Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese populations.

  However, a large number of Moroccan mixed-breeds displayed a pronounced negroid appearance. The physical development of these mixed-breeds can in certain cases be designated as quite poor. Much more striking, however, was the inferior mental and emotional predisposition of these children, as was established through the examinations of Dr. Abel and through the questioning of teachers and social workers. With few exceptions, they show themselves to be possessed of an insolent temperament, exhibited through disobedience, slovenliness, a predilection for street life, and an inclination for pilfering. Great excitability, rising to the point of violence, makes education extremely difficult or fully impossible.

  The children of Vietnamese extraction are to be categorized very differently. Even when the Mongoloid traits are clearly in evidence, they showed very satisfactory physical development, were easy to rear, and learned well in school. [. . .]

  While the estimated number of 500 to 600 mixed-breeds within a population of 60,000 is not very large in itself, it must still be stated that these mixed-breeds now resident in the western borderlands, and the anticipated offspring, represent a racially foreign element among the local population. It must certainly be made clear from a social standpoint that the native population avoids contact with these mixed-breeds, that these individuals are held back from gainful employment, and that as a result, they will decline to a socially inferior segment of the population which feels no sense of belonging to the German people. In France there are already today half a million colored persons, and with the low birthrate among the French people, the mixed-breeds will make up half of the population within four to five generations. Therefore there is the obvious danger that, with the passage of time, the racial differences in the Franco-German border areas will increasingly be obscured through the propagation of the Moroccan descendants, and that the present racially predicated wall of protection will be leveled.

  Certainly this danger has an excellent chance of being counteracted with a systematic population policy. Such efforts, however, must also be carried out with all energy because at this time they appear to be the only measures which can be undertaken. Because voices from many sides suggest a sterilization of the upper-age cohorts of those mixed-breeds soon to reach reproductive age, it must be countered that, according to the provisions of the Law for the Prevention of Progeny with Hereditary Diseases, only those mixed-breeds can be sterilized who are hereditarily ill in the sense of the law. If one were to deviate from this standpoint or adopt a special law allowing the possibility of sterilizing all mixed-breeds, then there may be the danger of highly unwelcome international implications. The French would probably view such a measure as directed against their colored French citizens, as the Japanese would view the sterilization of the Vietnamese offspring as directed against the Mongol race. Furthermore, a special law would have to encompass all of the numerous progeny of Negroes, Chinese, and members of other races produced through legitimate marriages with German women, and who are not present in large numbers in Germany. Such a measure on the part of Germany could then provide a pretext for other peoples, for example, the Japanese, to sterilize half-Germans living among them through legal measures. One must also reflect upon the fact that over half of the women made pregnant by colored soldiers during the time of the occupation are today married to German men and through these marriages have legitimated their mixed-breed children. [. . .]

  Nevertheless, one must reason on the basis of the results of recent research that among the mixed-breeds of Moroccan origins there are certainly a large number who are of inferior material, to whom the Law of July 14, 1933,23 is applicable without further question. If the pertinent agencies were to be advised in the implementation of this law, to direct especial attention to these mixed-breeds, then it may be expected that a not inconsiderable number of these carriers of unwelcome hereditary traits [unerwünschte Keimträger] can be eliminated from the reproductive pool within the framework of the existing law. Perhaps at some later date the Reich government will approach the idea of a law forbidding marriage between Germans and those of foreign [artfremd] races, as the United States of America has already considered, so that further legal grounds are available to protect us from the indubitably degenerative impact of racially foreign blood.

  23. That is, the compulsory sterilization law.

  The Many Faces of Lebensborn

  Lebensborn (Fount of Life) was a Nazi organization established on December 10, 1935, in an effort to reverse Germany’s dwindling birthrate and to increase the number of racially valuable offspring according to National Socialist principles.24 Instigated by Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, Lebensborn represented an office of the Race and Settlement Main Office (RuSHA) until 1938, when it became part of the Main Office of the Personal Staff of the Reichsführer-SS.

  24. For a comprehensive discussion of the Lebensborn program in all its aspects, see Georg Lilienthal, Lebensborn, e. V.: Ein Instrument nationalsozialistischer Rassenpolitik: Forschungen zur neueren Medizin- und Biologiegeschichte (Stuttgart: Gustav Fischer Verlag, 1985); Dorothee Schmitz-Köster, Deutsche Mutter, bist du bereit? Alltag im Lebensborn (Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1997).

  In part, Lebensborn extended the 1932 Schutzstaffel (SS) Marriage Ordinance, through which the Reichsführer-SS granted SS members permission to marry based on the racial and hereditary health of potential couples. In September 1936 a further Lebensborn statute enjoined every SS man to produce at least four children, whether in or out of wedlock. Partly as a result of this injunction, Lebensborn gained notoriety in the postwar based on the false assumption that it represented a “breeding program” that forced unmarried German women into sexual unions with selected SS men. Lebensborn was nothing of the sort. The organization did function within the context of Nazi pronatal policy in that it carefully screened its participants according to strict racial and eugenic criteria and furnished advanced health care to the select mothers and children in its charge. In simple terms, the effort provided financial assistance and maternity care to the wives of SS men and also to unmarried mothers, a group that concerned Nazi racial hygienists and population planners. Illegitimacy still carried a strong social stigma in Nazi Germany, but to National Socialist ideologues, the reproduction of racially valuable children trumped traditional mores and religious values. Under the motto “Bear a Child for the Führer,” such policy makers hoped to encourage racially “pure” German women to reproduce regardless of their marital status and undertook serious efforts to make single motherhood appear more respectable. Furthermore, as the termination of pregnancies was generally prohibited for “Aryan” women,25 Lebensborn was seen as a measure to reduce the significant number of illegal abortions. Lebensborn homes, the first of which opened in 1935, provided a safe environment in which unwed mothers could spend the time of their confinement and delivery away from the prying eyes of neighbors and family members. Here they might receive excellent pre- and postnatal care and gain a chance to rebuild their lives after childbirth. The Lebensborn organization constructed a sophisticated support system, offering the mothers secrecy, aid in finding employment, and assistance in altering their civil status to that of divorcée or widow in public records if they wished to retain their child.26 Lebensborn administrators encouraged unwed mothers to give up their infants after birth, and the organization managed both orphanages and adoption services that placed Lebensborn children in “good German homes.” In the end, the organization established nine such homes on German soil and several more in German-occupied Europe. Many of the latter flourished in Norway, where local women who had conceived children with German occupying troops faced severe social ostracism. Georg Lilienthal, an authority on t
he Lebensborn effort, estimates that some seven thousand children were born in the organization’s homes in Germany between 1936 and 194527; 60 percent of these were the offspring of unwed mothers.

  25. A May 1933 German law prohibited the availability of abortion facilities and services and effected a stricter enforcement of existing antiabortion laws. Nazi anti-abortion policies forbade medical abortions even to women who had experienced two Caesarean sections, but they allowed eugenic abortions for women whom hereditary health courts had ruled must be sterilized and who were pregnant at the time of the decision. See Bock, “Racism and Sexism,” 277; Lothar Gruchmann, “Euthanasie und Justiz im Dritten Reich,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 20 (1972): 239.

  26. See Michelle Mouton, From Nurturing the Nation to Purifying the Volk: Women and Nazi Family Policy, 1918–1945 (Cambridge/Washington, DC: Cambridge University Press/German Historical Institute, 2007), 212–32.

  27. See Lilienthal, 242ff. This statistic revises an earlier figure of twelve thousand children, introduced at the 1947–1948 Nuremberg Greifelt (RuSHA) Trial, whose data have in the last two decades become a matter of dispute.