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Another little known tragedy of WWII I'm reading the memoir of Gitta Sereny who served as an UNRAA official in southern Germany after the war. One of the issues UNRRA had to deal with were the who had been kidnapped by the Nazis and turned over to German families to raise. This was part of Himmler's racial purification program. Most of the were from Poland., and there were about 200.000. Not all of these were adopted by Germans. The older ones, for example, who didn't pass the racial tests were sent to Germany to work. in orphanages and foster care were initially taken. Later they were taken from schools, grabbed on the street, and even taken from homes. They were sent to centres where their racial purity was evaluated. Some were sent to German families who were told that these were German orphans from the occupied territories. Post-war, UNRRA tried to find these and restore them to their real families. The younger of these knew no other life, spoke only German, and didn't want to leave the only parents they knew. Having been torn from one set of parents, they were now torn from another. I wonder how these turned out. |
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8/6/2016 6:06 am |
Yup, part of the same system, run entirely by the SS.
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8/5/2016 6:57 am |
Hi Rent: Wow I didn't know about that. The havoc the Germans caused is unbelievable. I have read so many books about WW2 and one was about all the homes and possessions in Paris that were seized by the Germans when their Jewish owners were shipped off to concentration camps. After the war ended the Germans were taking complaints from survivors about stolen homes and possessions, but there hardly were any survivors. A survivor had to somehow come up with ownership papers or prove what possessions were in the home, so hardly anyone actually got any money and a lot of Jewish homes and possessions were very expensive. The houses that were seized had been sold by the Germans years before to new owners and all the possessions had gone missing.
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8/5/2016 3:54 am |
She writes that 40,000 of the missing 200,000 were returned to Poland. That means a lot of them grew up in Germany as Germans, not knowing their origins. They were probably better off that way given what happened to Poland after the war.
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