September 1939: Nazi Germany invaded Poland, and for more than five years brought terror to much of Europe, with its ideology of a master race. A central figure in that campaign was Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler. The leading Nazi was obsessed with racial purity and came up with a plan to bolster the so-called Aryan race.
Between 1941 and 1945, children were kidnapped from all over Eastern Europe and forcibly Germanized. Historians estimate that 20-thousand of those children came from Poland alone. In Nazi-run children's homes they learned to speak German. Their identities were falsified.
Before, I was named Alodia Witaszek, from that moment on I was Alice Wittke. Those children are now over 80 years old — and many of them still know nothing about their roots. This unease I felt, this kind of back-and- forth, also affected my relationships. Much of what happened to them is still a mystery. Jozef Sowa travels as often as he can to the place where his parents are buried.
It lies outside Częstochowa in southern Poland.He was just nine years old when they died. I feel I’m missing the warmth of being raised by a father and mother. We were brought up by strangers who were something like a family. But all my life I’ve been missing that warmth, that embrace. His father Jozef was 41, his mother Franciszka 36,when they were murdered by the Nazis on this spot.
Their son Józef is now 86 years old. But he has never forgotten his childhood home.Over there was a village house with two rooms. It was made of wood and bricks. Let me show you where the stables were, and father’s workshop and the bunker. During World War II, Sowa’s family hid Jews and partisans in the bunker. Seven people lived under the ground here for two years.
Above this bunker was a pipe where the air came in and out. And the Jews and the Polish partisans got their air through this pipe. Of course, my parents also gave them food.And the whole tragedy, the beating and torture, took place here.The Germans came in two cars soldiers and military police.They knocked on the door and asked if the Sowas lived here.
They started smashing the windows with their rifles. All the panes were broken.My mother was crying, and took us children out to the yard. We children ran behind our Mama and Papa.We were all practically naked in undershirts it was five o’clock in the morning. It was September so it was chilly.And the Germans said: Where are the Jews, where are the partisans? They went into the barn.
They had a pointy metal stick and they stuck it into the straw, to see if they would hit a person who would scream.But there was nothing. They got angry.The Germans hit them with anything they could get their hands on. With hoes, and pitchforks.My mother was stabbed in the stomach three times with the pitchfork.She was pregnant, in her sixth or seventh month.
Mama didn’t make any more sounds. She was bleeding. My father had his head bashed in. He’d been hit with a rifle.The whole courtyard was full of blood. They dragged my mother here, my father there, us kids there...But they still found nothing.
They set up grenades between the workshop, the stables and our house.Maybe four or six hand grenades fell in the middle of the courtyard. And at that moment the first Jewish women came out of the bunker they pulled them by their hair and beat them. And then they set the other side of the house on fire.After that the soldiers shot Jozef’s parents dead, and threw them into a pit at the spot where their grave is now.
The children survived after witnessing the events. Then they were taken to Germany, like thousands of other children from 1941 onwards, who were deemed to be worthy of being Germanized. Jozef’s sister Janina still lives in Germany. She's German Germanized. She corresponds to the pure Nordic race, with blond hair and light-colored eyes.That was what the Germans wanted. Our sister was lost to us forever. I don’t mean as a Pole, but as a sister. The best one of us is in Germany.
Hermann Lüdeking has lived in Bad Dürrheim in southwestern Germany since he retired.Where he originally came from, he doesn’t know.Everyone feels this curiosity to know what their parents looked like. I don’t know if I had brothers or sisters, or nieces or aunts. I just don’t know.I’ve tried everything. I’ve been to 20 archives, but I found nothing. Nothing at all.
For decades Hermann has been trying to find out who his parents were and where he was born.He always has the support of his partner Hannelore. Even as a child he felt that there was some mystery.He was six years old when he was placed with Maria and Hermann Lüdeking, but he sensed that they were keeping something from him.This pile was hidden in my foster-father’s closet. And as a curious 13 or 14 year old, I looked to see what was in it.
Yes I was always curious. And when I saw this, I realized more or less what it was about.I already knew that they weren’t my real parents, but I didn’t know how it all hung together.And then I read this document that said father dead, mother dead.Hermann Lüdeking’s birth certificate - issued by Nazi officials. There are dashes where the names of his father and mother should be.His place of birth is listed as Bruckau in Warthegau - the site of one of the Nazi-run orphanages where the identities of the abducted children were covered up.
Bruckau was the first place I went looking and I spoke to the caretaker there — he was still alive.I asked him if any births took place here in Bruckau, like it said in the document, and he said, no, no births ever took place here.Since then, Hermann has discovered that he was probably called Roman Roszatowski, before he was placed with his foster parents.Was he really born on January 20th 1936? He has his doubts.I might be a year older or younger. Maybe I’m just 36 years old.
The birthday in the documents from Lodz was January 21st.The central Polish city of Lodz was probably the first station in his life.Hermann still doesn't know who gave him up to this orphanage.But he does know that the Nazis took him from here to Germany.
Alodia Witaszek’s story also has ties to Lodz. She was five years old when she was brought to the youth detention camp in Litzmannstadt, as Lodz was called during the Nazi ccupation.Today she’s meeting up with her friend Barbara Paciorkiewicz. The two women have a lot in common. Their paths in life have been very similar.They've come to a school located on the site of the camp. The school director is showing them a roomthat commemorates the thousands of children who were interned here.
Like Alodia, who was brought here in 1943.Oh you have a great map. We need to find Emilia Plater Street.It’s over here. We should turn the map around like this.That means my house must have been here. How well you remember everything.Of course. Have you ever heard of the children from Dr. Witaszek’s group? I'm a Witaszek.Alodia’s father was a resistance fighter executed by the Nazis. Her mother was deported to Auschwitz for her husband’s actions,and Alodia ended up in the machinery of the German occupiers.
And how long were you in the camp?I was probably here for around eight weeks. Before that, in the Race Office in Poznan,they had determined that I corresponded to the so called 'Aryan race'.And the Germans wanted to Germanize children of the Aryan race.Three people... three life stories ...with this in common: All three are victims of Heinrich Himmler’s racist mania.The Reichsführer-SS visited occupied Poland in 1941, and traveled through the Warthegau district.In 1939 Poland had been carved up between the Soviets and the Germans.Sections of the western part of the country, including the so-called Reichsgau Wartheland, were incorporated into the German Reich.Other regions were placed under German civil administration. Himmler’s vision was to make Germany the mightiest nation in the worldby bolstering the population with new progeny from abroad — mainly from Eastern Europe.
In the Bundesarchiv in Berlin are hundreds of documents that show the gradual development of Himmler's strategy for the organized abduction of children.After his trip through Warthegau, Himmler wrote to the Gauleiter Arthur Greiser:I believe it is right that small children of especially good race from Polish families be collected and brought up by us in special,not too large children’s nurseries and orphanages... I would advise starting with two or three such institutionsso as to gather experience.
Isabel Heinemann is a professor of contemporary history at the University of Münster.She has studied the subject of the stolen children for a number of years.She's set up a Europe-wide research project, and with colleagues has analyzed 17,000 files of foreign children found by the in Germany Allies after the war.The historians want to reconstruct the routes taken by the stolen children.But the fact that the Nazis deliberately concealed their identities makes that a formidable task.
With the calculations I’ve done, based on the reports of how many children were transported and how many were found after the war,I would estimate the number to be around 20 thousand Polish children. Behind each one of those numbers is an individual story of a life thrown into turmoil, and set on a completely different course.There are many myths about the forced Germanization of foreign children. One account is that they were ethnic Germans that is children of German ancestry who lived outside the German Reich. And that only very few such children were brought to Germany at all.
But Himmler’s plan did have a system. As the Reich Commissioner for the Consolidation of German Nationhood, he helped to issue Directive 67/1... It stated: First, all children in formerly Polish orphanages are to be taken and placed in accommodations.After that operation is concluded, children living with Polish foster parents will be examined.
The directive was signed by Ulrich Greifelt, Himmler’s direct subordinate.Later at the Nuremberg Trials he claimed that there had never been a concrete plan.Directive 67/1 went to all high-ranking leaders of the SS and the police and the corresponding SS leaders concerned with race and settlement policy,so that the SS apparatus would be aware of how it worked. It was a part of a supposedly rational occupation and Germanization policy that was imposed mainly on occupied Poland, but also on other occupied and annexed regions of Europe.
Today, experts believe that around 50 thousand children were abducted from across Europe.Cases are known from today's Ukraine, the Czech Republic and Slovenia.But the largest group was from Poland because the machinery of the abduction started in the Warthegau district.
First, orphanages were searched. Then child welfare officials summoned all children living with foster parents for inspection. There were precise guidelines on how a ‘racially suitable‘ child was supposed to look. Twenty-one characteristics were examined, including growth patterns, the back of the head, the bridge of the nose, and body hair.
The officials were looking for so-called Aryan types classified as ‘pure Nordic’, ‘pure Phalian’ or ‘Nordic-Phalian’. What the Nazis couldn’t use were ‘unbalanced hybrid types’. And finally children were also taken away from their biological parents, like Alodia Witaszek. She was taken for racial examination after her mother was deported. Then, in the autumn of 1943, she was brought to the youth detention camp in Litzmannstadt to be Germanized.
This memorial recalls the thousands of children who lived here and were forced to do hard labor. Memories come flooding back when Alodia stands here. She was brought to the camp together with her little sister Daria. Straight away we weren’t allowed to speak Polish. We’d whisper to each other in Polish, but of course we couldn’t make it obvious that we were speaking it. We were punished for every infraction. Each Kapo had a club, and they shouted at us very loudly.
We were scared of the yelling and of course the severe beatings. At six a.m. they woke us up for roll call. They’d count us off in German, which was hard for us. We didn’t know the numbers. That's why the roll call used to take a very long time. But it had to keep going until our supervisor had counted the entire group of children. And often, when they went through the barracks where we slept, they would find dead children in the beds there.
Lodz then called Litzmannstadt was the first place where Alodia was sent. More followed: Kalisch, Bruckau . . . Bad Polzin. Thousands of children were funneled through these Nazi-run homes. Each station represented a further step to conceal the child’s real identity. Dates of birth were changed, names made more German-sounding. Alodia Witaszek became Alice Wittke. Her friend Barbara became Bärbel.They were forced to forget their origins. Finally both were placed in German families, where paradoxically they experienced the happiest years of their childhood.
Jozef Sowa lives in the center of Częstochowa.Even now he can’t accept that his sister Janina loves the nation that caused his family so much suffering.These are the letters from Germany, from my sister. She did not want to appear in person in this film,or engage with the family's history. That's apparent in her letters. Jozulein, when you come to see us please don't talk about politics or the war.
Love and kisses Jasia, Anita.All her letters are signed with her Polish and her German name. She's been so germanized that she even writes in her letters that I shouldn’t talk about politics or our history, because she’s embarrassed. It’s too bad: she doesn’t want to know anything about Poland, or the memory of her family.
She lives her life there in Germany. After the murder of their parents, the five Sowa children were brought to Grottkau ? now Grodkow ? in Silesia. Janina was taken from there by a woman from Hanover, who adopted her. Her name was changed to Anita.No official records about this were preserved, which is why Janina was not found after the war.But her siblings never stopped looking. It was 20 years before Józef saw her again. Since then they’ve met up regularly.
Hello, good day my dear sister. Are you at home or out for a walk? You’ve had lunch, and you’re probably tired. I’m looking forward so much to seeing you soon. I’ll be leaving Częstochowa tomorrow at 12. At noon.Okay. Goodbye my dear sister.Kiss, kiss. Thanks!So now you’ve heard her voice.
Jozef’s sister was carried off to Germany shortly before the end of the war. She didn't undergo a ‘racial examination’; the longer the war went on, the less attention the German officials paid to rules and guidelines. Janina’s abduction was an act of pure despotism. In the southwestern German city of Freiburg, Hermann Lüdeking is paying a visit to Christoph Schwarz. Schwarz is a teacher, but for years he has been helping Hermann. The two want the German government to recognize the kidnapped children as victims of the Nazi regime so that they can receive compensation.
Schwarz founded an association representing the children's interests, and he and Hermann have filed lawsuits together. So far with no success. As a last resort they've approached Germany's highest court the Constitutional Court. This is the letter I received. They're processing it. And now I have to wait for a date. Yes, Hermann, I’d suggest that we write another letter to the Constitutional Court saying they should speed things up a little, in consideration of your age.
I think it’s great that at his age he's still prepared to fight for justice. Even though it’s only about the symbolic sum of 2500 euros. Really, it’s a joke. According to Germany's ‘Act Regulating Compensation for National Socialist Injustice,’ that is the sum to which non-Jewish victims are entitled. Hermann Lüdeking considers himself a part of that group.
For me it’s not about the money but about the recognition that this was a crime. That's what gets me mad. Their strategy is to wait until nature takes care of it and then it’s over. The German government argues that the kidnappings can be seen as general collateral damage of war. And that therefore there can be no claim to compensation. And it’s often argued that the kidnapped children were well-treated in contrast to other victims. That was true in Hermann’s case. His German foster parents were wealthy.
His mother was a teacher and head of the regional Association of German Girls. The father was a high-ranking teacher. Both were Nazi Party members. Hermann graduated from school, studied at university, and became a mechanical engineer. But the parents never spoke to him about his background.
Back in Częstochowa, Jozef Sowa is on duty. For the past 30 years he’s been working for an organization for the victims of Nazi persecution. He campaigns for them to receive compensation. Poland has a number of funds from which the germanized children, or the children of mothers who were forced laborers receive small payments.
Like this woman. From now on she will get 50 euros a month.My dear lady, this is excellent. This letter says you will at least get 212 Zloty.So we’ve been able to help you. Yes, of course. In the early 1990s Germany paid 500 million Deutschmarks to Poland as a humanitarian gesture, as it was called back then. Jozef wanted to apply for money for his siblings, but they needed Janina’s consent.
My sister answered no, no, no I will not steal money from the German people, because I am German.Barbara has invited Alodia to her home. They want to talk about the stories of their lives, that wound up taking such a similar course. We are kind of like sisters. For a long time we didn’t know if we were German or Polish.
But I feel as though we were both very lucky. We ended up in families that treated us like their own children.Barbara was three when the Nazis examined her and approved her for Germanization.In 1942 she was placed with a German foster family and grew up as Bärbel in Lemgo.Like Alodia she had to return to Poland after the war. She was 10 at the time.
I always say that my war started after I went back. Yes, I say the same.My parents were no longer alive. There was nothing left. I was an unwanted child who was shunted around here, then there.You couldn’t speak Polish anymore. Right, I couldn’t speak the language anymore. I was this 'Hitler girl'.Right, 'German swine.' For us children our return was disastrous.But it was understandable that Poland wanted its children back.After the war, you mean... -Yes. Thats what she said.
It's extremely complicated. The western allied powers made the child’s well-being the benchmark on the one hand. On the other hand there was the justifiable demand of the Polish state that said give our children back. The authorities found themselves in a complicated legal middle in terms of international law. Alodia is back home again. She lives in Bydgoszcz, that’s 170 kilometers northwest of Lodz.
For years she has been giving public lectures as a witness of history. In a few days she will be travelling again to Germany to tell the story of her life. Here in the album is the photograph taken when my new German Mutti picked me up. Mrs. Luise Dahl. She didn’t have any children of her own. Luise Dahl took the six year old to her home in Stendal in Saxony-Anhalt. The little girl started going to school there, and led a comfortable life as a much-loved only child. Four years later came the shock. Luise and her husband Wilhelm Dahl received a letter from the Polish Red Cross which tore the family apart. Luise Dahl wrote this in response:
if the mother of the child is alive, we are prepared, in view of the mother’s terrible suffering and uncertainty during the years of separation, to return the child safe and sound to her.Of course, the biological mother has the first right, and with a heavy heart I will give up the child whom we have come to love and cherish.Alodia’s Polish mother Halina Witaszek had survived Auschwitz, and with this photograph searched the world for her two daughters — and found them. When the news came that I was a stolen Polish child, and had to go back to my home country, my Mutti began to tell me about my siblings who I had forgotten in the course of the four years.
So for that reason I was not so reluctant to return to Poland. I wasn’t afraid. But going back was hard. Alodia had forgotten her native Polish, but she could communicate with her mother Halina, who spoke excellent German. Alodia was lucky that she maintained contact to her German Mutti.
And the two women also became friends — Alodia was now daughter to both of them. I had two mamas, and these two mamas loved each other very much. They understood each other. Halina Witaszek believed the Dahls when they said they had not known who Alice really was. Luise Dahl wrote to the Polish Red Cross: Alice was born in Poznan, and after she became ill in a children's home in Kalisch, was then brought to Bad Polzin. That is where I picked up little Alice on April 25, 1944, mediated by the former Lebensborn association. The child was placed with me as a pure German child, with a German name,
as an eastern German orphan up for adoption.
Hermann Lüdeking’s foster-mother must have known that he was not a German child. She got him in December 1942 from ‘Sonnenwiese’, a Lebensborn home in Kohren-Sahlis, a village near Leipzig.
His name then was Roman Roszatowski. Lebensborn was a pet project of Heinrich Himmler. It provided a place for unmarried women to have their babies, and leave them to be raised. The goal was to boost the Aryan population. Sonnenwiese also served as an institution for children like Hermann who were abducted from Poland, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union to be taken to Germany. Hermann was one of the first children here to be given away to families loyal to the Nazi regime.
He remembers how it came about. I used to always play with my friend Roland, and we’d eat together. Then a nurse came and said, ‘you two have to come along to the head nurse.’ So we went up there and the head nurse was sitting there, and an elegant lady was standing there. Later I knew it was my foster mother. She wore a hat with a veil. And the head nurse said 'Alright Frau Lüdeking. You can pick one of the two children.' And she said right away 'I’ll take little Hermann. He’s so pale, I’ll fatten him up.'
And the head nurse said 'So just sign here and then you can take the child with you.' That was all. She took my hand and we went out, and took the train to Lemgo in Ostwestfalen Lippe. That’s how it went. Like at a chicken farm: 'I want that chicken, that one doesn’t look so good. But I like that one.' And that’s how they did it with the children, too. At the time Hermann was just happy that he had someone to take care of him. And he got along well with Maria Lüdeking. But once he started to try and find out about his background she broke away from him.
When she died in the late 1980s, he did not attend her funeral. At the Nuremberg Trials, American prosecutors tried to press charges for the ‘Kidnapping of alien children for purposes of Germanization’. But the Tribunal contested the charges, acquitting the defendants of that crime - and describing the Lebensborn organization as a welfare institution. In this respect the Nuremberg Trials can be seen to have made a tragic legal mistake. To classify Lebensborn, which ran these children’s homes, as a purely charitable organization and acquit those involved of the charges from today’s point of view that was a blatant judicial error.
Alodia Witaszek is on her way to the city of Freiburg. She k nows Germany well. She often visited her foster parents here. Today she's giving a talk to students at the Catholic University of Applied Sciences as a living witness. As always she tells her life story in German. And that is why they gave us new first and last names. Until then I had been Alodia Witaszek, and now I was Alice Wittke. Alodia says her lectures have also been a form of therapy for her. A way of coming to terms with her own past.
You said that your time in Germany shaped you. And yet you still consider yourself Polish. Would you say that Germany is also your homeland in a way? Yes, I think that’s true it is that for me. I love to come back here. And I always say: Every country has very good people and very bad people.
Alodia Witaszek’s story is also a positive one with lots of understanding on both sides.And she hopes to keep telling it for as long as she can.Today Jozef Sowa is setting off to the family get-together with his sister Janina. I’m nervous about the journey. I didn’t sleep well last night.The family history is likely to be a topic at the gathering.
Jozef can’t forgive Janina for denying that she is Polish but he says she is and will always be his sister. Everyone in the family loves her. She's warm and empathetic.We call her ‘the Princess‘, because she's so sensitive, so nice and warm-hearted. Hermann Lüdeking has received a letter from the German Constitutional Court. Another defeat. He has lost his fight for compensation.
But he will continue to search for his roots — for the parts of his life that the Nazis hid from him.I don't think I'll find out anything. But I'll keep looking. Who knows? Maybe I'll find a nugget somewhere. Even in his mid 80s, not knowing who his parents were is a source of unease that, Hermann says, will never leave him.
The kidnapping campaign of Nazi Germany .
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https://youtu.be/2GLsM169izM
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