Imagine being taken from your town by soldiers, having no idea what your fate was. Going through your mind is the horror stories you have been told about the concentration camps, relocating, and the random murders. Germany seized many children during the war. The Nazis hoped that by relocating these kids to Germany and making them German that they would replace all the German blood lost throughout the war. This was all part of Hitlers plan to achieve the perfect race of people. This paper will be mostly focusing on 3 main points. First of all it will be talking about the actual Germanizing of these kids, how they were brainwashed and why. Then it will move on to the selection process. There is a lot of Information available about this topic because it was so widely used. If you look online you can still see some of the charts and objects used to measure the characteristics of a person. Lastly will be the victims of all of this. Including statistics, the victims life after the war, and their experiences. The Nazis were obsessed with creating the ideal race of people. The children selected had to be of Aryan characteristics.When the children were first selected they were picked out of large groups. They looked with children who had blond hair and light colored eyes. According to the research the characteristics that were needed to be chosen were much more extensive than that though. They really cared about every last detail. They concerned themselves with things like the distance between the back of the head and the forehead. These insignificant measurements determined if the child would live or not. They used a way of measuring commonly called as the arier tables.The selection process was something tha... ... middle of paper ... ...'s falling population. These children were taken from their homes and taken to new places. This project had many names but the most commonly known one is the Lebensborn project. This was all about repopulating Germany with the most aryan young people they could find. This report talked about the Selection of the kids, the Germization process, and the victims. It's very hard to know how many victims in total there were but it is known that less than 1/5th of them ever were retrieved. A lot of the time the children had been brainwashed so much that they themselves believed that the Nazis were doing the right thing and could never go back to having the values they did before. It's very important that we study things like this so that we can take the proper steps to making sure that they never happen again.
Heck’s admissions of his experience with the Hitler Youth lend the autobiography a unique perspective. A Child of Hitler blatantly points toward how the Nazi regime victimized not only jewish men and women, homosexual, or asexual citizens, but also how it devastated and destroyed a whole generation of children. Childhood was revoked an the burdens of war were placed directly on the shoulders of boys and girls just like Heck. This develops a new understanding of World War II that is not often disclosed. By addressing Nazi Germany from an insider’s view, Heck develops an argument against propagandizing children.
In the years between 1933 and 1945, Germany was engulfed by the rise of a powerful new regime and the eventual spoils of war. During this period, Hitler's quest for racial purification turned Germany not only at odds with itself, but with the rest of the world. Photography as an art and as a business became a regulated and potent force in the fight for Aryan domination, Nazi influence, and anti-Semitism. Whether such images were used to promote Nazi ideology, document the Holocaust, or scare Germany's citizens into accepting their own changing country, the effect of this photography provides enormous insight into the true stories and lives of the people most affected by Hitler's racism. In fact, this photography has become so widespread in our understanding and teaching of the Holocaust that often other factors involved in the Nazi's racial policy have been undervalued in our history textbooks-especially the attempt by Nazi Germany to establish the Nordic Aryans as a master race through the Lebensborn experiment, a breeding and adoption program designed to eliminate racial imperfections.
Murders inflicted upon the Jewish population during the Holocaust are often considered the largest mass murders of innocent people, that some have yet to accept as true. The mentality of the Jewish prisoners as well as the officers during the early 1940’s transformed from an ordinary way of thinking to an abnormal twisted headache. In the books Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi and Ordinary men by Christopher R. Browning we will examine the alterations that the Jewish prisoners as well as the police officers behaviors and qualities changed.
"There can be no keener revelation of a society's soul than the way in which it treats its children" (Nelson Mandela). If this statement is considered true, then it's fair to say that during times of the Holocaust, the German society was at an all time low. Children during the Holocaust did not have a carefree childhood, like they should have, but instead were placed under strenuous conditions. They had to go through being separated from all family and friends, being chosen the first to go to, and in most cases a permanent loss of family members. The Holocaust was undoubtedly a horrific experience for everyone involved but for children it must have been traumatizing.
The boys and girls that were German citizens and healthy at the age of 10 - 18 years were required to join the Hitler Youth program. The boys from the age of 10 - 13 were put in the German Young people and then once they were 14 they would be in the Hitler Youth until 18. They both did a wide range of physical activities from biking, swimming, to even doing religious practice. The boys were to trained to become the best soldiers they can be for Germany, and also taught business skills. The were also taught how to shoot, boxing, and fighting. The boys could 60 meters in twelve seconds. Also the boys were required to enlist in the armed forces once they come of age. When the time came for the Youth to fight, the kids were fearless and did not fear death and people on the opposing team did not want to kill the kids. The girls of Germany where to be the mothers of Germany. They were supposed to provide a lot of “perfect Aryan” kids for Germany and they were also taught good homemaking skills. They also did camping and other physical activities. Some girls were “accidently” put in the boys cabin, and some of the girls came back pregnant as that type of stuff was actually
...ny brought in Africans to help fight the war and some of these Africans married German women and had children. These children were labeled as ‘Rhineland Bastards.’ ‘Hitler said he would eliminate all the children born of African-German descent because he considered them an “insult” to the German nation’ (Non-Jewish Victims). The Nazi Party set up another secret group to ‘sterilize’ the children in hospitals. They would pull kids out of school and sometimes, without their parents’ knowledge. In all, there were only about 400 children ‘sterilized’ throughout the holocaust.
Regine Donner, a famous Holocaust survivor, once said, “I had to keep my Jewishness hidden, secret, and never to be revealed on penalty of death. I missed out on my childhood and the best of my adolescent years. I was robbed of my name, my religion, and my Zionist idealism” (“Hidden Children”). Jewish children went through a lot throughout the Holocaust- physically, mentally, and emotionally. Life was frightening and difficult for children who were in hiding during the rule of Adolf Hitler.
Only 7,000 emaciated survivors of a Nazi extermination process that killed an estimated six million Jews were found at Auschwitz” (Rice, Earle). Most of these deaths occurred towards the end of the war; however, there were still a lot of lives that had been miraculously spared. “According to SS reports, there were more than 700,000 prisoners left in the camps in January 1945. It has been estimated that nearly half of the total number of concentration camp deaths between 1933 and 1945 occurred during the last year of the war” (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum). The Holocaust was one of the most tragic events in the world’s history.
...he human depravity one can imagine. Even though Genocide did not begin with the Holocaust, Germany and Adolf Hitlers’ heartless desire for “Aryanization” came at the high cost of human violence, suffering and humiliation towards the Jewish race. These warning signs during the Holocaust, such as Anti-Semitism, Hitler Youth, Racial profiling, the Ghettos, Lodz, Crystal Night, Pogroms, and Deportation unraveled too late for the world to figure out what was going on and help prevent the horrors that came to pass. The lessons learned from all of this provide a better understanding of all the scars genocide leaves behind past and present. In spite the ongoing research in all of these areas today, we continue to learn new details and accounts. By exploring the various warning signs that pointed toward genocide, valuable knowledge was gained on how not to let it happen again.
“One of the most extraordinary aspects of Nazi genocide was the cold deliberate intention to kill children in numbers so great that there is no historical precedent for it.” (Lukas, 13 Kindle) About 1.5 million children were murdered by the Nazis during the Holocaust—one million being killed because they were Jews (ushmm.org) The Germans had a clearly defined goal of killing the Jewish children so that there would be no remnants of their race to reproduce, resulting in extinction. Not only were the children that were victimized in the Holocaust persecuted and murdered, but they were all stripped of their childhood. Children were not allowed to be children—they had to, for their own survival, be adults. The oppression of children because of race was a direct result of Hitler’s cruel policies and beliefs. In order to stifle the Jewish race from growing, the children were the first to be slaughtered at extermination camps (ushmm.org).
When the infamous Hitler began his reign in Germany in 1933, 530,000 Jews were settled in his land. In a matter of years the amount of Jews greatly decreased. After World War II, only 15,000 Jews remained. This small population of Jews was a result of inhumane killings and also the fleeing of Jews to surrounding nations for refuge. After the war, emaciated concentration camp inmates and slave laborers turned up in their previous homes.1 Those who had survived had escaped death from epidemics, starvation, sadistic camp guards, and mass murder plants. Others withstood racial persecution while hiding underground or living illegally under assumed identities and were now free to come forth. Among all the survivors, most wished not to return to Germany because the memories were too strong. Also, some become loyal to the new country they had entered. Others feared the Nazis would rise again to power, or that they would not be treated as an equal in their own land. There were a few, though, who felt a duty to return to their home land, Germany, to find closure and to face the reality of the recent years. 2 They felt they could not run anymore. Those survivors wanted to rejoin their national community, and show others who had persecuted them that they could succeed.
Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah. Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. New York: Vintage, 1997. Print.
Those with negative, undesirable, or inferior traits may be discouraged from having offspring. They may be sterilized, or undergo dangerous medical procedures or operations with high mortality rates. I chose this topic because it appealed to me and seemed interesting. In the following paragraphs, the tactics, methods, and propaganda the Nazi’s used will be exposed. Adolf Hitler (the Führer or leader of the Nazi party) “believed that a person's characteristics, attitudes, abilities, and behavior were determined by his or her so-called racial make-up.”
The treatment of Jews and other minority groups by the Nazi’s can be described as actions that could only be done by a totalitarian state. Hitler believed in eugenics, the idea of improving a race by selective breeding. Nazi ideology of the Jewish race was severe anti-Semitism and pure hatred. The Nazi policy towards the Jews has been said to be the most brutal and horrific example of anti-Semitism in history.
Ghettos start to take shape throughout German captive territories. Mass killings are perfectly and vividly described in the letters and communications within the Third Reich through communication and the war diaries of men like Lt. Col. Helmuth Groscurth about the massacres of polish citizens in October of 1939; “The woman had to climb into this grave and took her youngest child in her arms…” A culture of inhumanity was being created as certain groups were being targeted and annihilated from institutions for the handicapped and mentally disabled by the spring of 1940. Based on the calculations offered by the Germans the average daily cost for an institutionalized person in 1940 was RM 0.56. The Germans presented the information to the Aryan population as a positive money saving endeavor and affirmative reasoning to justify and execute the handicapped or disabled population institutionalized as wards of the state.