Foster home for foreign children

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Bronze plaque at the place of the children's graves of the foreign children care facility in Velpke: If the echo of their voices fades - we will perish (text)
Bronze plaque on the Gantenwald memorial

A foster home for foreign children was an institution of the National Socialist German Reich that withdrew their children from Eastern European female forced laborers .

Lots of names

Originally there was talk of children's collection centers . After Himmler had suggested that a grandiose name should be found for the childcare facilities of the simplest kind , the foreigner childcare facility was officially used in the decrees.

Individual places were called infant homes or maternity homes. Other names: Alien children's home , children's camp , breeding room for bastards .

history

Its establishment was ordered in 1943 by a decree of the Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler . Many female forced laborers were also forced to have abortions . The mortality of the children was between 80 and 90 percent, especially in the larger care facilities. Selected babies and older children were adopted by “ Aryan ” families.

It is estimated that between 100,000 and 200,000 children died in these facilities. The War Against Children database contains information on more than 400 places where children of forced laborers were born, housed or died - including numerous foster homes for foreign children.

Foreign children

Towards the end of the Second World War , more and more female forced laborers were abducted from Poland and Russia to force arms production and had to work in the German economy under unbelievably harsh living and working conditions; Despite these circumstances, female forced laborers became pregnant and gave birth to children. In the Nazi ideas, foreign mothers should not raise their own children (in Nazi terminology: racially inferior offspring). They should be reintegrated into the work process as quickly as possible. The babies should by no means be raised by German women, but exclusively by foreign female forced laborers. The Nazis took away the babies and children from their mothers and took them to foster homes for foreign children. Himmler's instruction to separate the children from their mothers as few days after birth as possible and to place them in foster homes for foreigners was a murder recommendation. The term foster home is cynical: They were not foster homes, but killing centers.

The children were housed in barracks and stables. The hygienic conditions were catastrophic, the cleaning of the diapers and children was neglected, there was no or hardly any medical care, there were no or seldom weight checks of the babies. They were malnourished with a maximum of ½ liter of milk a day. Under these conditions, the neglected infants suffered slow and agonizing deaths. The result was death from malnutrition, dysentery and diarrhea - clearly a consequence of living conditions. The physical weakness that resulted in death was not a result of the birth, but was brought about deliberately.

Competence and responsibility

The home organization was in the hands of the NSDAP. Those responsible on site decided on the degree of neglect. Not only National Socialist agencies, but also local authorities, companies, health insurance companies, doctors and employment offices were involved in the organization of the infant camps. In the Velpke care facility for foreign children, for example, the NSDAP arranged for the barracks to be rented, and the rent payments ceased after a few months. She organized the interior of the barracks through the National Socialist People's Welfare Association (NSV), she paid the salary instructions to the nursing home manager and the supplier invoices she presented.

The "foster homes" for the children of the forced laborers were set up in Germany without those responsible in the party committees of the NSDAP having clearly clarified whether they wanted the children to survive. It was not clearly established which standards homes had to meet for the accommodation and meals of the children. It was unclear who was actually responsible for the operation and financing of this facility. The only well-known fact was that it was an institution of the NSDAP.

The irritations caused by the non-decisions and non-action of those responsible meant that everyone was waiting for decisions from other departments or postponing them. A situation arose in which everyone defined their own area of ​​responsibility, and so these "sites" were in administrative no man's land, each department as well as each person could transfer their responsibility to the next and reject their own responsibility. The NSDAP thus provided the prerequisites for the appearance of actual infant nursing homes to emerge and, on the other hand, for the unspoken purpose of allowing the unwanted children to die quickly was fulfilled.

All officials and officials knew about the death of the children, but they could always say that they did not know how to behave and that they were not responsible for the death of the children. The foster homes for foreign children were neither infant homes nor a killing center for the accused.

population

The foreign children foster homes were facilities of the NSDAP. They did not exist in empty rooms and the homes were dependent on local support to operate. The existence of these sites and the deaths of the children were well known and obvious because it could not be hidden from the population. Church councils, pastors and communal bodies had to deal with the question of where the children should be buried. The fact that such institutions could be set up was due, on the one hand, to the passive attitude of the population and, on the other hand, to the ability of the National Socialists to immediately suppress any form of sympathy. There were certainly also sections of the population who tried to find out more about the circumstances of these homes. It was mostly women who were threatened and intimidated by the officials and the NSDAP.

Selected foster homes and cemeteries for foreign children

In the area of ​​today's Germany

Bietigheim transit camp
connected to this is the Großsachsenheim sick camp with 51 and 27 reported dead small children
Braunschweig
Maternity home for Eastern workers, over 360 babies buried
Dresden
Kiesgrube camp , Dr.-Todt-Strasse; Associated grave in the St. Pauli cemetery
Foster home for foreign children in Gantenwald
(near Bühlerzell , Schwäbisch Hall district): Foster home for foreign children, 19 graves preserved
Foster home for foreign children in Großburgwedel
Foreign children care facility in Burgwedel (Großburgwedel) run by the district farmers, 24 deceased small children known by name, 28 stumbling blocks laid
Mölln
Maternity hospital of the Army Munitionsanstalt , 27 graves (not preserved) and memorial in the old cemetery
Otterndorf
Memorial stone in the cemetery for 14 babies
Foster home for foreign children in Rüben
Commemorative plaque on the Rüsten cemetery for over 100 children. In a war crimes trial in Helmstedt, the responsible doctor, Hans Körbel , works doctor at the nearby Volkswagen plant , was sentenced to death in 1946 and executed on March 7, 1947 in the Hameln penitentiary .
Foster home for foreign children in Velpke
Memorial at the burial site of 91 children in Velpke cemetery . In 1946, two death sentences and two prison terms of 15 and 10 years in prison were handed down in a case before a British military tribunal for this foster home.
Voerde
Buschmannshof children's barracks for babies and children of forced laborers from the Krupp company. Charge in the Nuremberg Krupp trial .

In the area of ​​today's Austria

Etzelsdorf Castle , Pichl near Wels

See also

literature

  • Children and the Holocaust. Symposium Presentations. Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington DC 2004, (PDF; 0.7 MB).
  • Christian Eggers, Dirk Riesener : A good stone can be found here. On the history of stone carving in Velpke. Published by the Velpke community with the kind support of the Helmstedt district. Velpke municipality, Velpke 1996.
  • Martin Kranzl-Greinecker: The children of Etzelsdorf. Notes about a “foreign children's home”. Denkmayr, Linz 2005, ISBN 3-902488-44-1 .
  • Raimond Reiter: Killing sites for foreign children in World War II. On the tension between military labor and National Socialist racial policy in Lower Saxony (= Publications of the Historical Commission for Lower Saxony and Bremen. Vol. 39 = Lower Saxony 1933–1945. Vol. 3). Hahn, Hanover 1993, ISBN 3-7752-5875-2 (At the same time: Hanover, University, dissertation, 1991: “Foreigner care facilities” in Lower Saxony (today's area) 1942–1945. ).
  • Cordula Wächtler, Irmtraud Heike, Janet Anschütz , Stephanus Fischer: Graves without names. The dead children of forced laborers in Hanover. VSA-Verlag, Hamburg 2006, ISBN 3-89965-207-X .
  • Irmtraud Heike, Jürgen Zimmer: The dead children of the "foreign children care facility" in Großburgwedel, in: Robbed lives. Searching for traces : Burgwedel during the Nazi era , pp. 66-133. VSA-Verlag, Hamburg 2019, ISBN 978-3-96488-038-3 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ NSDAP Gauleitung Baden, quoted from B. Vögel, p. 32.
  2. ^ War Against Children: Separation Decrees
  3. ↑ Forced to have an abortion ( memento of July 23, 2010 in the Internet Archive ), exhibition: Von Gebärhaus und Testortenbaby - 175 years of Erlangen Women's Clinic.
  4. ↑ Raimond Reiter, Killing sites for foreign children in World War II: On the tension between the war effort and National Socialist racial policy in Lower Saxony, in: Publications of the Historical Commission for Lower Saxony and Bremen 34, Lower Saxony 1933-1945, Hanover: 1993, quoted. n. Holocaust Memorial Museum, p. 78 (see literature).
  5. ↑ Eggers / Riesener: Geschichte des Steinhauens, p. 77f (see literature)
  6. ↑ Engravings of the war - dunning depots in Dresden. Location 62: Dr.-Todt-Straße 120 (Radeburger Straße 12a) ( Memento from November 21, 2012 in the Internet Archive )
  7. ↑ Entry in the Frauenwiki Dresden
  8. ↑ Irmtraud Heike, Jürgen Zimmer: The dead children of the "foreign children care facility" in Großburgwedel, in: Robbed lives. Searching for traces: Burgwedel during the Nazi era . VSA-Verlag, Hamburg 2019, ISBN 978-3-96488-038-3 , pp. 66-133 .
  9. ^ See Christian Lopau / Benjamin Polzin: Memorial for the Children of Eastern European Forced Laborers in Mölln , in: Informations zur Schleswig-Holsteinische Zeitgeschichte 36 (1999), pp. 91–93 (full text) .
  10. ↑ In the years 1944 and 1945 14 babies were "killed" in Otterndorf. The 14 children of Eastern European forced laborers were "killed" in a shed at the Otterndorf district hospital. “The 'killing in a roundabout way' was based on targeted malnutrition, neglected hygiene, neglected medical care.” The chairman of the association “Future through Remembrance”, Reinhard Krause, states that this was a dark chapter that nobody wanted to hear. “The graves of the 14 children in the Otterndorfer Friedhof were closed in 1968 and leveled. ... It was only 35 years later that Otterndorf made an attempt to publicly revive memory. On Memorial Day 2003, after a long political struggle, a memorial stone was inaugurated in the cemetery with the inscription 'In memory of all children who lost their lives through war and violence'. ”The 14 children remained unnamed. A brass memorial with the names of the dead forced laborers was inaugurated on May 8, 2009: a sculpture by the artist Rachel Kohn - a dark cloud over a child's bed and below the plate with the 14 names. "With the memory of the fate of the 14 children we can hopefully awaken the critical spirit in the children and young people of today." (Sources: Nordsee-Zeitung, November 17, 2014, p. 18, Nieder-Elbezeitung, December 29, 2014 and Shocked at the atrocities . Report on the commemoration of the association “Future through Remembrance” ).
  11. ↑ The Velpke method (Engl.)
  12. ↑ Kim Christian Priemel: Tradition and Emergency. Lines of interpretation and confrontation in the Krupp case. In: NMT - The Nuremberg Military Tribunals between History, Justice and Righteousness. Ed .: Priemel and Stiller, Hamburger Edition 2013, ISBN 978-3-86854-577-7 , p. 449.