Children during the Holocaust

by Heberer, Patricia;

  Document 6-3. Letter of Frau A.28 to Lebensborn, e.V., October 7, 1938, Bundesarchiv Berlin, NS 19/1064 (translated from the German).

  28. This individual’s surname has been abbreviated to protect her identity.

  Copy

  October 7, 1938

  T.B. 58, Straubing

  Poste Restante

  I read your address in the newspaper and now turn to you in confidence in my great desperation. I am expecting a child from a man I cannot marry. Because I don’t know where I should go for the delivery—the matter must not be known either within my household nor here in Straubing (I am a social worker)—I would like to ask if you have a home where one can go long before the delivery date. The father of the child and I are both healthy “Aryan” individuals, and I would look forward to the birth of my child in a quiet place, away from the turmoil of my professional responsibilities. Do you guarantee secrecy? What are conditions like at your home; how high are the costs? I am a member of the Barmen private insurance benefits program: could this insurance company pay for my costs without all of this becoming known? Please send me your reply quickly. Because I do not know if I copied your address down correctly and the letter might come back as undeliverable, I’m asking that you send your response poste restante.29 I am now in my third month and would like to go into a home in December or January, because by that time my condition will be apparent.

  29. This refers to a postal service in which a piece of mail is held at a locality’s central post office until the recipient retrieves it; in the United States, the terms poste restante and general delivery are employed for international and domestic mail, respectively.

  Heil Hitler!

  P. S. Does your institution also help with the accommodation of a child after birth?

  The Lebensborn program represented a positive eugenic strategy, even as the measure confined itself to a small number of racially “valuable” mothers and their children and excluded those deemed unfit or undesirable. But the effort also had a much darker side. With the German invasion of Poland, Heinrich Himmler added to his already formidable number of domains the Reich Commissariat for the Strengthening of German Ethnicity (Reichskommissariat für die Festigung deutschen Volkstums, or RKFDV).30 The RKFDV had as its mission the Germanization of “racially desirable populations” in territories occupied by German forces. In part its task was to discover ethnic Germans (Volksdeutsche) among the indigenous Slavic populations and to relocate, or “repatriate,” them. Under the auspices of Germanization, administrators from the Race and Settlement Main Office also conducted broad-based racial screenings of children in Slavic territories, searching for “racially valuable” children from among the local populace.31 German authorities seized those youngsters whom they believed possessed sufficient Germanic background or “appropriate racial features” and passed them on to Lebensborn officials. These administrators in turn processed the children and placed them for adoption with German families. As seen in the case of the children of Lidice,32 those young persons rejected for Germanization were generally not returned to their homes and families but instead murdered or sent to labor or reeducation camps.

  30. See Robert L. Koehl, RKFDV: German Resettlement and Population Policy, 1939–1945: History of the Reich Commission for the Strengthening of Germandom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957).

  31. See Isabel Heinemann, “Rasse, Siedlung, deutsches Blut”: Die Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt der SS und die rassenpolitische Neuordnung Europas (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2003).

  32. For a discussion of the children of Lidice, see chapter 2.

  Document 6-4. German medical personnel examine Polish children at an internment camp set up by the Reich Commissariat for the Strengthening of German Ethnicity in Łód´z to select youngsters “acceptable” for Germanization and adoption by German families, 1941, USHMMPA WS# 90416, courtesy of the Instytut Pamieci Narodowej.

  Because of the destruction of Lebensborn records during the war years, it is difficult to establish where the responsibility of agencies like the RuSHA or RKFDV ended and where Lebensborn’s accountability began with regard to these crimes. In the eighth Subsequent Nuremberg Trial—the so-called RuSHA, or Greifelt, Case—Lebensborn officials succeeded in shifting culpability for the abduction of several thousand non-German children onto the various organs of the SS. Yet, as the following testimony from that trial makes clear, the collaboration of Lebensborn in the Germanization effort left a considerable number of victims: the children abducted from their homes, the bereft parents and relatives left behind, and, in many cases, the unsuspecting German families who adopted the youngsters.

  Document 6-5. Testimony of Otto Uebe, November 4, 1947, United States of America v. Ulrich Greifelt et al. (Subsequent Nuremberg Case No. 8, RuSHA Trial), 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), 4:1060–62.

  Q: When did you first think of adopting a child?

  A: In 1942, before my son was killed in combat, he requested that if he were to be killed in the war, I was to adopt a child and that I was to bring him up [in remembrance of] him and devote myself again to living with my wife.

  Q: When did you first apply to Lebensborn for an orphan child?

  A: As far as I know, early November 1943.

  Q: With whom—

  A: Just a minute, please. I must correct myself. It was 1942. [. . .]

  Q: Did you continue to correspond with Lebensborn after this?

  A: Yes, I repeatedly requested that a child be assigned to me. Later on I asked an acquaintance in Munich to personally speak to [the] Lebensborn [organization] and thereupon both he and Lebensborn informed me that I was again to go to Kohren-Sahlis,33 and there were two children available there, not two years of age yet, one a boy and one a girl. My wife and I, therefore, on the 7th of June [1942] went there because just on this day I was anxious to take over the child, this being my son’s birthday, and there together with my wife I took the boy.

  33. This was a Lebensborn home and adoption center in Saxony.

  Q: Witness, what were you told about those two children and about their parents and what nationality they were?

  A: I was told that those children came from South Carniola.34 I wasn’t interested any further in the girl, but I was told about the boy that his parents had probably been murdered by Serbian bands; that this was a full orphan.

  34. This is currently part of the country of Slovenia.

  Q: Witness, is the child sitting at the prosecution table the child you selected?

  A: Yes.

  Q: Witness, would you have taken this child if there would have been any doubt in your mind that the parents of this child were living?

  A: No, I desired to adopt the child and this could only be done if it was a full orphan.

  Q: Witness, did you ask Lebensborn to have the name of the child changed?

  A: Yes. I was asked whether I was anxious that the child bear my name immediately. This could be done, I was told, and then I replied in the affirmative, and in Kohren-Sahlis the child was signed out under the name of Wolfgang Uebe, and registered again in that name in Bayreuth.

  Q: Did you have any further correspondence with Lebensborn after that?

  A: All I did was to request Lebensborn to confirm for me that I was taking care of the child myself, so that I could get a tax deduction and furthermore that I would get a child’s allowance from the place where I worked.35 I received another letter thereupon in which it was confirmed that the child Mathias Potucnik, now called Wolfgang Uebe, had been taken into my family and that I alone was responsible for the welfare of the child, as there were no other people alive responsible for taking care of it.

  35. During the Nazi era, individuals received a financi
al lump sum annually for each child (Kindergeld) and a possible percentage reduction of any existing marriage loans (Ehestandsdarlehen) contracted by the parents; the former practice continues to the present day in the Federal Republic of Germany.

  Q: After that did Lebensborn ever let you know that anyone else or the parents of this child were living?

  A: Yes. At the end of 1944, I was notified that the father had been found and wanted the child returned to him. I was informed about it, and asked if and when I was willing to turn over the child to him. On that point I replied that I loved the child, that it was in our family and had become used to us, and would they kindly give me the address of the father so that I could contact him personally. In answer to this, I received a letter that I was to do nothing whatsoever; the matter would be submitted to The Reich Leader SS [Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler] personally for his decision. Thereupon I heard nothing further from Lebensborn on the subject.

  Q: Witness, after the war did you register this child as a foreign child adopted by you?

  A: Yes. When the order was issued that children were to be registered, I made the notification that I had such a child which was actually not adopted; it is a foster child still in the care of my family, but the adoption had not formally taken place.

  Q: Did you later hear from Mr. Mathias Potucnik?

  A: Yes, I was told by the municipal administration at Oberhausen, where I live, that UNRRA36 by order of Mr. Potucnik at Klagenfurt, St. Veiterstrasse 77, was inquiring as to the welfare of the child, and thereupon knowing that Potucnik was the father, I wrote to him; months passed before a Mr. Fahrenberger notified me that Mr. Potucnik was the father and he demanded that the child should be returned to him; as a matter of fact the letter was very nice. The father himself did not know German well and therefore the gentleman, an uncle and relative, was taking up negotiations with me; [the child’s] father and mother had been in a concentration camp and the mother had died there, while the father had come back and now wished to have the child.

  36. This acronym stands for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency.

  Q: Witness, where are you taking the child from here?

  A: I am going to take the child to the German-Austrian frontier and there I will hand it over to Mr. Fahrenberger, who will turn it over to the father.

  “Euthanasia”

  The “euthanasia” program was one of many radical racial hygiene measures that aimed to restore the racial “integrity” of the German nation. The effort was National Socialist Germany’s first program of mass murder predating the “Final Solution,” or the genocide of European Jewry, by approximately two years. It endeavored to eliminate what Nazi authorities considered “life unworthy of life”—those individuals who, because of their severe psychiatric, neurological, or physical disabilities, were seen to represent both a genetic and a financial burden upon German society and the state. Hitler’s authorization of the policy, signed on his personal stationery in the autumn of 1939, decreed that those judged incurably ill by medical science “could be granted a mercy death.”37 But “euthanasia” was a euphemism. The program systematically targeted disabled children as well as disabled adults living in institutions in Germany and in German-annexed territories. Historians estimate that two hundred thousand patients, some 60 percent of Germany’s institutionalized population, perished as a result of the “euthanasia” program.38

  37. This was Hitler’s authorization for the “euthanasia” program; reprinted in Ernst Klee, Dokumente zur Euthanasie (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1985), 85.

  38. Hans-Ludwig Siemen, Menschen blieben auf der Strecke: Psychiatrie zwischen Reform und Nationalsozialismus (Gütersloh: Jan van Hoddis Verlag, 1987), 214. For a detailed discussion of the “euthanasia” (T4) program, see H. Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide; Michael Burleigh, Death and Deliverance: Euthanasia in Germany, 1900–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Winfried Suess, Der Volkskörper im Krieg: Gesundheitspolitik, Gesundheitsverhältnisse und Krankenmord im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland, 1939–1945 (Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 2003); Ernst Klee, “Euthanasie” im NS-Staat: Die “Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens” (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1985.

  In the spring and summer months of 1939, a number of planners, led by Philipp Bouhler,39 director of the Führer Chancellery,40 and Karl Brandt, Hitler’s attending physician, began to organize a secret killing operation targeting disabled children. Bouhler’s trusted subordinates Viktor Brack41 and Hans Hefelmann42 joined them in this endeavor, as did Dr. Herbert Linden43 from the Reich Interior Ministry’s Department IV, which enforced public health policy. The group enlisted the aid of four physicians: Hellmuth Unger,44 Ernst Wentzler, Hans Heinze, and Werner Catel. The latter three men were pediatricians with excellent credentials; Heinze had established a practice at Brandenburg-Görden, a pediatric clinic renowned for its modern facilities and advanced therapies, while Wentzler was the inventor of an incubator for premature infants ubiquitously known as the Wentzler Warmer. A fundamental concern of the planners was to develop a mechanism by which disabled youngsters—who often were not institutionalized until they reached school age—might come to the attention of public health authorities. On the basis of their recommendations, the Reich Ministry of the Interior on August 18, 1939, circulated a decree compelling all physicians and midwives to report newborn infants and children under the age of three who showed signs of severe mental or physical disability. Under the auspices of a front organization, the Reich Committee for the Scientific Registration of Severe Hereditary and Congenital Disorders (Reichsausschuss zur wissenschaftlichen Erfassung von erb- und anlagebedingten schweren Leiden), “euthanasia” operatives convinced or cajoled parents to surrender their severely disabled youngsters to one of the committee’s many “special pediatric units” (Kinderfachabteilungen) throughout Germany and Austria. The clinics were in reality children’s killing wards where specially recruited medical staff murdered their young charges by administering lethal overdoses of medication or by starving them.

  39. Philipp Bouhler (1899–1945), the director of the Führer Chancellery, was one of the earliest members of the Nazi Party: he held NSDAP membership number twelve and participated in the Beer Hall Putsch. With Karl Brandt, he was a leading planner of the “euthanasia,” or T4, program. Bouhler and his wife committed suicide on May 19, 1945, shortly after their capture by American authorities.

  40. This was Hitler’s private chancellery, a small office that managed his private affairs as head of state and responded to correspondence and petitions directed to the Führer personally.

  41. Viktor Brack (1904–1948) ran the Führer Chancellery’s Main Office II and, in this capacity, became involved in the clandestine “euthanasia” program. Until 1942, when he transferred to the front with his Waffen-SS unit, Brack served as T4’s chief administrator, managing its daily organizational operations. Convicted by an American military commission in August 1947 as a defendant in the Nuremberg Medical Trial, Brack was executed at Landsberg Prison on June 2, 1948.

  42. Hans Hefelmann (1906–1986) was the administrative director of the child “euthanasia” program. Although he was originally included in the indictment of several major T4 perpetrators in February 1964, the Limburg court ruled that Hefelmann was physically unable to stand trial and closed proceedings against him definitively in 1972; he died in 1986.

  43. Herbert Linden (1899–1945) directed the Reich Interior Ministry’s section responsible for state sanatoria and nursing homes and, as such, played an essential planning role in the “euthanasia” program. Linden committed suicide on April 27, 1945.

  44. An ophthalmologist by profession, Hellmuth Unger (1891–1953) penned the novel Sendung und Gewissen (Mission and Conscience), which, adapted as a feature film, appeared as the 1941 “euthanas
ia” propaganda vehicle Ich klage an (I Accuse).

  At first, medical professionals and clinic administrators incorporated only infants and toddlers in the operation, but as the scope of the measure widened, they included juveniles up to seventeen years of age. Conservative estimates suggest that at least five to seven thousand physically and mentally disabled German children perished as a result of the child “euthanasia” program during the war years.

  Document 6-6. Circular decree of the Reich Minister of the Interior, re obligatory registration for “Deformed, etc., Newborns,” etc., August 18, 1939 (Bundesarchiv Berlin, R 1501/5586, Reichsinnenministerium) (translated from the German).

  The Reich Minister of the InteriorBerlin, August 18, 1939

  IV b 3088/39NW, 40 Königsplatz 6.

  1079 MiTelephone: Depts.

  Z, I, II, V, III12 00 34

  III, IV, VI (Unter den

  Linden 72) 12 00 34

  Top Secret

  Re: Obligatory Registration for Deformed etc., Newborns

  1. For the clarification of scientific questions in the area of hereditary deformity and of mental underdevelopment, a registration of relevant cases is necessary at the earliest possible instance.

  2. I therefore order that the midwife who has rendered assistance in the birth of a child—even in the case in which a physician is present at the delivery—must submit a registration to the public health office within whose jurisdiction the birthplace of the child lies, upon the attached form, available at the individual public health offices, if it is suspected that the newborn child is afflicted with the following serious hereditary ailments:

  1) Idiocy, as well as Mongoloidism45 (especially in cases combined with blindness or deafness);