Why did the Nazis kidnap two hundred thousand Polish children?

Blue eyes. Blond hair. Age up to 10 years. The fulfillment of these three conditions was enough to turn a Polish child into a new Aryan.

The 4-year-old Basia from Łódź became interested in German doctors during a routine check-up. The grandmothers said additional research was needed. She never saw her granddaughter again. During his mother's absence, 18-month-old Krzys was kidnapped by two Gestapo men. His grandfather who was taking care of him and two sisters with more Semitic features were brutally beaten.

6-year-old Zosia from the orphanage in Poznań, along with several friends, was quickly selected by a commission of racial experts. This is how the ordeal that was to take the identity of thousands of Polish children began. And ruin their lives.

Lebensborn - More Than Just A Help For Pregnant

Renewal of German blood and breeding of the Nordic race of superhumans - these were the tasks of the institution called Lebensborn founded by Heinrich Himmler in 1936 ( Source of Life ). Its goal was to achieve, among others, by supporting racially valuable women during pregnancy and childbirth of illegitimate children. She also acted to reduce the number of abortions.

Creator of the Lebensborn Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler (source:public domain).

In practice, Lebensborn has often served as a place to combine business with pleasure . This is what a neighbor of one of the centers recalls in an interview with Anna Malinowska, the author of "Brown Lullaby":

There was a glade behind this center. In the evenings, they set a table there. And they feasted. Good-looking SS men and good-looking women:blondes, blue-eyed, busty, Polish, Jewish women, all the same. If only they looked good. Then, when it got dark, they split up in pairs and went into the forest. And the women were pregnant. They were born, they happened again and so on several times. The children were taken to Germany. And a woman used up after a few such births to gas.

However, the institution was also supposed to "support" the adoption processes. Polish children were kept in Lebensborn facilities, often in tragic conditions. They were waiting for adoption by a new German family.

Good blood must either be destroyed or… acquired

Naturalistic racial politics was the apple of Himmler's apple. He instructed his SS men:

Any good blood, wherever you find it in the east, you can either get it or kill it (...) It is clear that in this mixture of nations there will always be some very good types racially. Our task is to take their children to us (…).

No wonder that already in November 1939, the National Racial and National Socialist Party Office prepared the first guidelines for the colonization of Polish lands. They were simple: eliminate whoever you can, and use the rest for slave labor for the Third Reich . With time, after winning the war with the Bolsheviks, it was planned to resettle Poles and other Slavs far into Asia. However, the Nazis made an exception for racially valuable children. Instead of murdering them, they wanted to take them over, strip them of their identity and raise them into ideal Germans.

The Luisenbad cure house in Bad Polzin (Połczyn-Zdrój) was changed into the Lebensborn Pommern center. Illustration and caption from the book "Brown Lullaby" (Agora 2017).

Children won't remember anything

The experts in Germanization wanted the brainwashed children to remember as little as possible, and preferably not anything, of their true identity. That is why people were only interested in those who were not more than eight, or even ten years old. The necessary condition was, of course, breaking any ties with the current family.

Lebensborn officials took special care to cover their tracks, breaking with the German obsession that papers must be in order. Each child was given a new name and surname, which in the root had to be clearly Germanic.

They rarely showed any particular inventiveness here, which is emphasized by Anna Malinowska in "The Brown Lullaby". Witaszek was changed to Witschke, and Ogrodowczyk became Gaertner (gardener). When the surname was hopelessly Slavic sounded like Cieślak - it was replaced by the common Schueller. Sometimes, especially in the case of quite large children, care was taken to ensure that the first few letters of a new surname sound identical to Polish ones. All this for the young mind to fuse them into one over time.

Polish children in Hitlerjugend uniforms

New citizens of the Thousand-Year Reich were won not only by kidnappings. For example, children of parents of German or mixed origin were naturalized. Young Aryans were also searched for among children staying in care institutions and foster families, children of murdered, deported or displaced parents, and even among the children of Polish forced laborers in Germany.

Barbara Paciorkiewicz was one of tens of thousands of Polish children kidnapped by the Nazis (source:Barbara Paciorkiewicz's home archive).

The intercepted racially promising individuals were placed in Lebensborn centers until they were adopted by a German family. The conditions were very difficult there. Only young Germans could count on better conditions and food. Poles were threatened with severe physical punishment just for speaking their native language . They were subjected to absolute Germanization.

When ten-year-old Johann Buchner, formerly Janusz Bukorzycki, ended up in an orphanage in Austria, he was immediately dressed in the Hitler Youth uniform. Despite this, Polish children tried to stay together. The older ones made the kids realize that they are and must remain Polish.

I want an SS man dad!

Nazi efforts to make good Germans out of young Poles were sometimes successful. Alfred Hartmann (Alojzy Twardecki) ended up in a German orphanage as a five-year-old and grew up with Wehrmacht songs and Deutschland, Deutschland über alles. Like most children, he looked for aunts and uncles every Sunday, hoping someone would pick him up. And he dreamed of being adopted by an imperious man in impeccable uniform and polished riding boots.

In Austria, Janusz Bukorzycki was dressed in the Hitler Youth uniform (photo:WerWil; license CC BY-SA 2.5).

When a gentleman in a civilian suit, a reserve officer, finally showed up, Alfred's first reflex was inconsolable. But then he decided that such a dad was better than none. And when the new parent asked him if he remembered his parents, he replied immediately: My dad was killed by Polish bandits!

A new and better family?

The stories of transporting Polish children to Germany did not always end badly. Many German families welcomed them with real joy. Sometimes young people felt better with their new parents than if they stayed with their own relatives ... This was the case with Alodia Witaszek, daughter of Franciszek and Halina Witaszek, members of the Polish resistance movement.

After her parents were arrested (dad was murdered by the Gestapo, mum was sent to Auschwitz), the girl and one of her sisters ended up in a German orphanage. The other three children managed to hide, and Alodia was soon adopted by a German family, where she was treated like a princess. Meanwhile, her siblings found their way to relatives in Poland, who were hostile towards the children from the beginning, and finally ... decided to get rid of them.

I ended up with the Germans and was loved and pampered. My sister stayed in Poland with her family ... Isn't it ironic? - asked Alodia Anna Malinowska. It is worth adding that the girl's foster family did not know that the child was taken out of Poland. I would never adopt a kidnapped child from living parents Alodia later assured her Mutti .

Polish children, victims of the Cold War

After the war, thousands of Polish parents desperately tried to learn anything about the fate of their children. A mother will find it easier to get over the news of her child's death than to come to terms with the thought that it lives somewhere among strangers, unaware of its origin - wrote lawyer Roman Hrabar, Plenipotentiary of the Polish (Lublin) Government for the recovery of Polish children, who devoted his whole life to recovering kidnapped children.

Whether it would be possible to recover the missing son or daughter was up to the post-war German authorities and the Western Allies. Their posture was very shaky. It happened that whole transports of children taken from German foster families were sent to Poland. Nobody was particularly worried that in Poland they would end up in orphanages ... As the Cold War intensified, the borders were gradually closed. The authorities even refused to return children of documented origin for which Polish parents fought with all their might.

Tedious searching…

Even without administrative difficulties, the process of reuniting families separated during the war was difficult. Finding the parents of the kidnapped children, if they were alive at all, was in most cases virtually impossible. Says his name is Stronk, he is 6 years old. Father was tall. He lived on a street with a tram ride - often only such indications in the files were met by Hrabar.

Passport photo of Roman Hrabar, it was he who was looking for Polish children kidnapped by the Nazis (source:IPN - reproduction Grzegorz Celejewski / Agencja Gazeta).

The Polish lawyer categorically claimed that all kidnapped Polish children must return to their homeland. He established cooperation with Polish newspapers, in which he published announcements similar to this one:

Krystyna Mrozik was born on November 29, 1935 in Murcky. The child says that his mother's name was Paulina, and his father's name was Karol. Father was probably a miner. She herself is now with the German Lattner in Schönau. Lattner claims that Krystyna Mrozikówna has no parents. The child only speaks German today. He does not want to come back to Poland. Karolu and Paulino Mrozek, if you are alive, contact me!

… and hard comebacks

When the parents were found after all, there were sometimes Dante scenes. The children were distracted from the German guardians whom they considered their parents. They were taken to a country they knew nothing about and placed in the care of people who were strangers to them. Just as earlier in the Reich they were punished for using the Polish language, now their German accent was mocked - if they spoke Polish at all.

The meeting with the biological mother and siblings often followed a similar pattern. In the first hours there was great emotion, but with time the feeling of alienation and even hostility grew. Apart from the blood ties of "recovered" families, nothing was connected anymore ... This is how Anna Malinowska summarizes their stories:

Detachment from loving people burned holes in these children's hearts. During these conversations, the question was asked:did we have to be picked up again - this time from German families? Especially when the child received love and care in them, and in Poland only hell of orphanages awaited them? Or wandering for distant - not always kind - relatives? Was the Polish family always better than the German one?

Memorial plaque. "In this house, in the years 1943–1945, children were taken away from Polish families for Germanization" (photo:Cezary Aszkiełowicz / Agencja Gazeta).

Every fortieth child!

Hrabar's estimates show that the Nazis kidnapped and deported over 200,000 Polish children to Germany, out of approximately 8 million children born between 1930 and 1939. Figuratively speaking:from each school class, one child was kidnapped to the Third Reich and forcibly Germanized!

After the war, only 30,000 of them returned to Poland - they were mentally crippled forever. The others lived or are still alive in ignorance of their true identity.

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