Kidnapping Of Eastern European Children By Nazi Germany
Kidnapping of non-Germanic European children by Nazi Germany (Polish: Rabunek dzieci), part of the Generalplan Ost (GPO), involved taking children from the rest of Europe and moving them to Nazi Germany for the purpose of Germanization, or indoctrination into becoming culturally German.
Occupied Poland had the largest proportion of children taken, but a total of several hundred thousand children were abducted throughout Europe.
The aim of the project was to acquire and "Germanize" children with purportedly Aryan traits who were considered by Nazi officials to be descendants of German settlers who had emigrated to Poland. Those labeled "racially valuable" were forcibly Germanized in special centers and then sent to German families and SS Home Schools. In the case of older children used as forced labor in Germany those determined to be racially un-"German" were sent to extermination camps and concentration camps, where they were either to be murdered or forced to serve as living test subjects in German medical experiments and thus often tortured or killed in the process.
Read more about Kidnapping Of Eastern European Children By Nazi Germany: Historical Contexts, Conditions of Transfer, Selection, Germanization, Murder of Zamość Children in Auschwitz, German Medical Experiments On Kidnapped Children, Heu-Aktion, Post-war
Famous quotes containing the words nazi germany, eastern, european, children, nazi and/or germany:
“Humor is not a mood but a way of looking at the world. So if it is correct to say that humor was stamped out in Nazi Germany, that does not mean that people were not in good spirits, or anything of that sort, but something much deeper and more important.”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)
“All the morning we had heard the sea roar on the eastern shore, which was several miles distant.... It was a very inspiriting sound to walk by, filling the whole air, that of the sea dashing against the land, heard several miles inland. Instead of having a dog to growl before your door, to have an Atlantic Ocean to growl for a whole Cape!”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Being human signifies, for each one of us, belonging to a class, a society, a country, a continent and a civilization; and for us European earth-dwellers, the adventure played out in the heart of the New World signifies in the first place that it was not our world and that we bear responsibility for the crime of its destruction.”
—Claude Lévi-Strauss (b. 1908)
“We also have to make sure our children know the history of women. Tell them the rotten truth: It wasn’t always possible for women to become doctors or managers or insurance people. Let them be armed with a true picture of the way we want it to be.”
—Anne Roiphe (20th century)
“Now comes this Russian diversion. If it is more than just that it will mean the liberation of Europe from Nazi domination—and at the same time I do not think we need to worry about the possibility of any Russian domination.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)
“The tears I have cried over Germany have dried. I have washed my face.”
—Marlene Dietrich (1904–1992)