Cruel World (44 page)

Equally stringent measures were applied to children of families that, in the opinion of the racial agencies, were ethnically valuable, but who wished to remain Polish. These families were given several chances to convert; when they did not, they and their children were taken away. The Youth Department in Lodz was informed two days before Christmas that

Their two younger children, aged twelve and nine, were, over the objection of at least one German social worker, taken from their grandmother’s care and put in a children’s home.
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In another case, thirteen of the forty-four families in the village of Orlowo, near Mielec, who had “pure” Polish names were sent away without further ado as the town was being evacuated for incoming ethnic Germans. Frightened by this, many of the rest, whose names were Germanic, quickly registered as ethnic Germans. Those who refused the offer to register were given three months to reconsider. When they still refused, their property was confiscated and their children taken from them. The day the race officials arrived in the village to carry out their orders, Josef Schwakopf, who despite his name had refused to register as an ethnic German (which made one liable to be drafted into the Wehrmacht), jumped out of the back window of his house, taking his two-year-old son with him. He went to hide with friends:

In a particularly cruel action, some of the children were given to local ethnic German families, known to the parents, who shuttled them about the occupied East before fleeing with them to Germany as the tide of war turned.
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The Orlowo case was not racially complicated. But sometimes the race officials had a terrible time deciding what to do, especially when faced with more upscale victims. In February 1943, a confused SS officer sent his superior, General Odilo Globocnik, the notorious SS police leader in the Lublin district of Poland, a memo on five different cases. All these individuals, though proven to have at least 50 percent German blood, had
refused ethnic German status. All were well educated, middle- or upper-class, married to Poles, and very defiant. Johanna A., 50 percent German, was a doctor who refused to learn German. Maria L., 100 percent German, married to a Polish prisoner of war, was not only hostile herself. Her teenaged sons were too, and the eldest had declared that “he would feel like a deserter” if he committed himself to Germandom. Stanislas K., a gentleman farmer, 75 percent German, married to a Pole (which made the whole family 62.5 percent German), “had caused considerable trouble to the registration clerk,” and his daughters had also refused registration. The exasperated official was particularly irritated by the attitudes of two sisters, Brunhilde and Ingeborg von W., daughters of a Baron who held full German citizenship. Both ladies had married Poles. Brunhilde, whose husband had been killed in action, he described as “a renegade of the worst type” who “gives a very bad example to the population owing to her position and mental capacities”; and he noted that she only admitted to being of German blood “after having been reminded by her father.” Ingeborg, also interviewed in the presence of her father, “showed such an obduracy that it is not possible to recognize her as a German woman.”

The cases were apparently so difficult that, classified as Secret, they went to Himmler himself. The SS chief suggested that Johanna A. be sent to a non-German area of Poland and that Maria L. go to the concentration camp at Ravensbrück, while her sons, “who were of very good race,” should “with the assistance of the police” be separated, sent to “two specially well-managed boarding schools,” and forbidden to correspond with their mother until “the mother has become conscious of the treason committed.” Stanislas K. and his family were to be separated and sent via concentration camp to “armaments camps,” that is, forced labor. Brunhilde and Ingeborg were to go to concentration camps too, and their children handled like the others. Himmler closed his letter with a request for a complete dossier on each case, noting that he himself would make the final decisions. The investigations went on for more than a year. By then Maria L. had given in and accepted her German status, and her sons, by now too old for boarding school, had become good draft material. Stanislas K., it was felt, had considerable useful expertise, and should be sent to Germany to farm. Things were not so good for Brunhilde and Ingeborg. It seemed that their father, the Baron, who had had to “remind” them of their German blood, was, in fact, of Jewish origin. On the memorandum containing these findings Himmler personally indicated his judgments. Maria and Stanislas were not to be taken into “protective custody,” as their “reclamation for Germandom was of interest.” Brunhilde and Ingeborg
were to be arrested. Next to the investigating officer’s comment that he “would be grateful for a further decision as to what is to happen” to the small children of the two sisters, “who cannot be admitted to a German Folk School as they are of Jewish origin,” Himmler wrote: “sterilization … somewhere as foster children,”
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an astonishingly lenient decision for such children in 1944.

Once the young children who were orphans or who had been taken from their families had been gathered up, they were sent to an institution in Lodz for a full-fledged racial examination. Those who were accepted by the SS went on to special children’s homes still in Poland, at Brockau, Kalisch, and Pushkau, for further observation and preliminary indoctrination. In these homes they were given German language instruction. Discipline was strict and physical punishment frequent, and the children were frequently returned to Lodz for more blood tests and physical examinations.
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After a few months of careful observation, race officials decided which children were suitable for further Germanization, and responsibility for them was transferred to the Lebensborn organization, which took them to Germany. Children from two to six were taken to Lebensborn nursery schools and many of the older ones, from six to twelve, went to boarding schools.

Himmler took a personal interest in these “Germanizable” children. One girl long remembered being carefully scrutinized by the Reichsführer SS when he visited her children’s home. The quest was not limited to Poland. Himmler and his top aides spotted Nordic-looking children in all sorts of holding camps in Czechoslovakia, Romania, Yugoslavia, and numerous other places, and had them checked out by Lebensborn physicians. Despite their dedication to scientifically determined pure race, those who worked with the children had few illusions in this regard. A woman who worked in the legal department of Lebensborn testified later:

At the boarding schools in Germany, the children’s Polishness was supposed to disappear. Guidelines for the handling of the Polish children noted that “special attention is to be given that the expression ‘Polish children
suitable for Germanization’ may not reach the public to the detriment of the children. The children are rather to be designated as German orphans from the regained Eastern Territories.”
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At one of the boy’s schools, the new arrivals, dressed in spiffy dark blue suits piped in light blue, were mixed in with their German peers and referred to only as
Ostlandkinder
, or Eastern children, never as Poles. Along the way their Polish names were changed to German ones with similar initials or sounds. Alina Antczak, for example, would become Hilga Antzinger, and Josef Milozarek became Josef Mueller. Despite the prohibition on their native language and the severe punishments incurred for using it, the Polish children spoke it whenever they were together, a fact that could not be concealed, so that it soon was common knowledge in the local villages that there were Polish children in the schools.

Far worse for the children was the prohibition on contact with parents and relatives. At one point the Minister of the Interior noted that “it has been shown in the course of time that it must be expected that … Polish relatives and friends will attempt to find the location of the children.” This could easily be done by making inquiries at local police registries, where all residents were required to be listed. To prevent this, special registries were created for the children so that their names did not appear in the public record.
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Outgoing communications from the homes and boarding schools were also strictly forbidden. One girl reported later that “we were punished for every postcard we wrote to our parents. Letters addressed to us were torn and burnt. I know that from the girl who cleaned the room of the headmistress.”
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Despite such draconian orders from on high, some staff members at the schools, moved by the terrible homesickness of the Polish children and by their concern for the well-being of their families, ignored the considerable secret postal activity. Older children easily found Polish forced laborers or sympathetic townspeople who sent their letters on. One teacher even claimed to have helped his charges write letters home in German so that they would get past the censors. And despite all, some parents did manage to make their way to the schools and demand the return of their children, at what risk and hardship it is hard to imagine. Sometimes they were successful. One teacher agreed with a parent to certify his son as a chronic bed wetter, sufficient grounds for the child’s expulsion from the school and return to Poland.
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According to another Lebensborn employee, a number of children whose relatives managed to find them were returned to them, even if the children had already been placed with German foster parents. In these cases the German foster parents, much as
one would replace a defective piece of merchandise, “received Norwegian children as substitutes from the Lebensborn society.”
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After a time, either Dr. Gregor Ebner, chief of Lebensborn, or one of his assistants personally evaluated the children in the boarding schools for adoption by German families. Even after having been through many previous analyses, not all of them made the cut. Children who remained too “fully aware of their Polish race” or who could not or would not learn German were sent back to youth camps in Poland.
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Some who reached the age of fourteen, the age limit for education of the less worthy, were sent as apprentices to industries such as Siemens-Schukert in Berlin. Others went to work on farms, where little parental affection could be expected.

Dr. Ebner did not limit his evaluations to the Polish boarding school children. In August 1941 he voyaged to a resettlement camp at Schloss Langenzell, near Heidelberg, to inspect a group of twenty-five ethnic German orphans from the Banat region of Romania. It is clear that the visit was inspired by the fact that a high Nazi official had seen two of the children, a sister and brother, on a previous visit to the camp and wished to adopt them. Dr. Ebner did not think much of the group of children, noting in his long report on the visit that “only a few children can be designated as a gain to our folkdom.” The young people, ranging from three and a half to twenty-one, were divided into three groups: group I was “very good and useful for our folkdom,” II “average,” and III “inadequate.” The small sister and brother desired by the Nazi official were the only ones designated as group I, despite the facts that the boy, six and a half, was hospitalized with diphtheria and their mother (neé Aron, which Ebner hastened to add was a common Romanian surname and not Jewish) had died of tuberculosis. It helped that they were “fair and blue-eyed … good-natured, well-behaved” and that three-and-a-half-year-old “Little Maria” was the “favorite of the whole camp.” Ebner strongly recommended that they be kept together in their adoptive family. Eighteen children were put in group II. Considered “too old” for full adoption, they were to be sent to work or put in foster homes—even though three of them were only seven years old. The standards were tough indeed. Two brothers, aged seven and ten, were described as follows:

In general Dr. Ebner was quite benign in his judgments of the mark II group. He was not so kind about the five “mark III” children, all of whom, having defects such as TB, “degenerate formation of the skull,” or “Gypsy characteristics,” were destined for sterilization or worse. But the trip was not a total waste: at the end of his report Ebner added that he had seen “six other good-looking and well built young men 17–19 years old … whom I consider fit for the Waffen-SS.”
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