Kidnapping of Eastern European Children By Nazi Germany - Conditions of Transfer

Conditions of Transfer

See also: Expulsion of Poles by Nazi Germany See also: Untermensch

Many children were kidnapped during expulsions of Poles made by Germans. For example in Zamość County, Germans expelled 30,000 children, out of which 4,445 were chosen for Germanisation and sent to the German Reich. Over 10,000 children died in camps at Zwierzyniec, Zamość, Auschwitz, Majdanek or during transport in cattle wagons used normally to move livestock. Thousands of them were sent by railway to Garwolin, Mrozów, Sobolew, Łosice, Chełm and other cities. As one witness reported: "I saw children being taken from their mothers, some were even torn from the breast. It was a terrible sight: the agony of the mothers and fathers, the beating by the Germans, and the crying of the children."

The conditions of transfer were very harsh, as the children did not receive food or water for many days. Many children died as a result of suffocation in the summer and cold in the winter. Polish railway workers, often risking their lives, tried to feed the imprisoned children or to give them warm clothes. Sometimes the German guards could be bribed by jewelry or gold to allow the supplies to go through, in other cases they sold some of the children to Poles. In Bydgoszcz and Gdynia, Poles bought children for 40 Reichsmarks. In some places the German price for a Polish child was 25 zlotys.

The children were kidnapped by force, often after their parents had been murdered in concentration camps or shot as "partisans", including a handful of the children of Lidice. These children would not be permitted to remain even with other living relatives. Some were purportedly from German soldiers and foreign mothers, and others were declared "German orphans" who had been raised by non-German families. Indeed, orphanages and children's homes, along with children living with foster parents, were among the first groups targeted, in the belief that Poles deliberately and systemically Polonized ethnically German children. German foster parents were later told that children had received false Polish birth certificates to rob them of their German heritage.

Later the children were sent to special centers and institutions or to, as Germans called them, "children education camps" (Kindererziehungslager), which, in reality, were selection camps where their "racial values" were tested, their original metrics of birth destroyed, and their Polish names changed to German names, as part of Germanisation. Those children who were classified as "of little value" were sent to Auschwitz or to Treblinka.