CHILDREN DURING THE
HOLOCAUST ERA

The actual number of children who died during the Holocaust will never accurately be known. Estimates range as high as 1.5 million, including more than 1.2 million Jewish children. In addition, tens of thousands of Gypsy children and thousands of handicapped German, Polish French, and Eastern European children were also murdered while under Nazi rule.

Children were seldom the targets of Nazi violence simply because they were children but were usually persecuted along with their entire families for racial, religious, or political reasons. Chances of survival were somewhat higher for older children, since they could potentially be assigned to forced labor in concentration camps and ghettos. It is therefore important to separate children into three different age groups: (1) infants and toddlers up to age 6; (2) young children ages 7 to 12; and (3) adolescents from 13 to 18 years old. Their respective chances for survival and their ability to perform physical labor varied enormously by age.

Jews were a special target of Nazi ideology and policies, which ultimately resulted in the official German policy known as the "Final Solution." From the very beginning, Jews and their children suffered at the hands of the Nazis, and the rights of Jewish children were restricted almost immediately after the Nazis came to power in January 1933.

After 1935, German Jewish children were trapped in an increasingly hostile atmosphere, close friends suddenly avoided their company, often becoming openly agressive, unfriendly, and even spiteful. Letters written by German children to the editors of the Nazi tabloid Der Stürmer reveal a shameful outpouring of stupidity and fanaticism against their Jewish classmates. A multitude of humiliations confronted Jewish and Gypsy children in German classrooms. The teaching of Social Darwinism and the oppressive and humiliating tenets of so-called racial biology humiliated them and designated them as racially inferior. As a result, education as a form of resistance developed in many German Jewish schools after 1933 and provided both background and experience for the clandestine schools that were later created in the ghettos and concentration camps.

One of the first laws that affected Jewish students was the "Law against Overcrowding in German schools and universities" passed on 25 April 1933. This oppressive law restricted the number of Jewish children in schools to no more than 1.5 percent of the total number of students. Initially, the children of Jewish war veterans and those with a non-Jewish parent were exempted. Many schools sent Jewish students on vacation in April 1933, while awaiting further legislative developments. Nazis decrees escalated in intensity after the November 1938 pogrom known as Kristallnacht (the Night of Glass). After 1938, Gypsy children and their schooling was no longer a serious concern to Nazi authorities.

On November 15, 1938, Jewish and Gypsies children were prohibited from attending German schools. This same measure also excluded children from German schools. Segregated Jewish schools survived under steadily deteriorating conditions and increasing Nazi pressure until they were finally closed on July 7, 1942, after the first wave of mass deportations of German Jews to the East was completed.

First in Germany and later in occupied Europe, the persecution and pauperization of the Jewish community deeply affected their children. The world of childhood and adolescence, usually a time of joy and happiness, testing and experimentation, became instead a world of fear, insecurity, isolation, shrinking horizons and vulnerability. German Jewish children were systematically driven from ordinary German life. They could no longer belong to the same clubs and social organizations as Aryan children, and were banned from using most public playgrounds and recreational facilities. Several thousand German and Austrian Jewish children were able to escape the increasing Nazi persecution, by traveling abroad to the Netherlands, Great Britain, Palestine, and the United States before 1939.

Shortly after Germany invaded Poland, Jewish children trapped in German-occupied cities were confined with their families in ghettos and transit camps, and were constantly exposed to malnutrition, disease, overcrowding, exposure, and death.

Gypsy and handicapped children were similarly categorized in Nazi Germany and occupied Europe by race and biology. The Nazi quest for a biologically homogeneous society already in July 1933 included the Law to Prevent Offspring with Hereditary Defects. In ever escalating legislation, mentally and physically handicapped children were vulnerable to sterilization prior to 1939 and to murder in the so-called euthanasia program after 1939. Eugenic and racial measures also extended to the small number (ca. 600) of German mulatto children (the offspring of German women and African French colonial troops occupying the Rhineland in the 1920s). These Afro-German children were registered by the Gestapo and Interior Ministry in 1937 and they were all brutally sterilized in German university hospitals that same year.

The methods of children's euthanasia were developed between February and May 1939. First, the physicians and Nazi officials registered their potential victims. Thus, registration forms, called Meldebogen, collected data from midwifes and physicians reporting all infants born with specific medical conditions. The first killings of children in special wards by overdoses of poison and medicaments already occurred in October 1939. Recalcitrant parents who attempted to remove their children from the killing wards were rarely able to succeed. With fathers already absent as soldiers, mothers who disagreed were often assigned to contractual labor, thereby necessitating the commitment of handicapped children in state institutions. The killing of disabled children marked the beginning of the euthanasia program and continued throughout the war. Children's euthanasia was central, because children represented posterity and the Nazi physicians considered the elimination of those they considered diseased and deformed as essential to their aim of racial purification. Although it is impossible to calculate the number of children killed in these special children's wards during World War II, the best estimate is that at least 5,000 German and Austrian children were killed in these programs.

Nazi persecution, arrests, and deportations were directed against all members of Jewish families, as well as many Gypsy families, without concern for age. Inevitably the children were among the prisoners at highest risk. Homeless, often orphaned, they had frequently witnessed the murder of parents, siblings, and relatives. They faced starvation, illness, brutal labor, and other indignities until they were consigned to the gas chambers. In relationship to adult prisoners, their chances for survival were usually smaller although their flexibility and adaptability to radically changed circumstances could sometimes increase the odds in their favor. That these Jewish children survived at all and also created diaries, poems, and drawings in virtually all ghettos and concentration camps is truly remarkable.

After 1939, there are four basic patterns that can describe the fate of both Jewish and non-Jewish children in occupied Europe: (1) those killed immediately on arrival in concentration camps and killing centers; (2) those killed shortly after birth (for example, the 870 infants born in the Ravensbrück concentration camp, largely to Jewish and Gypsy women, between 1943 and 1945;) (3) those few born in ghettos and camps and surviving, such as the three year old Stefan Georg Zweig born in the Cracow ghetto and carried in a specially prepared rucksack through the concentration camp at Plaszow to Buchenwald in 1944, where he was hidden and protected by German communist prisoners; and (4) those children, usually above the age of 10, utilized as prisoners, laborers, and subjects for Nazi medical experiments. Thus, of the 15,000 children imprisoned in the Theresienstadt ghetto, only about 1,100 survived.

A few Jewish children survived by hiding and participating in the underground partisan resistance, as runners, messengers, and smugglers, but since there exists no comprehensive study concerning the fate children as a whole, their story has only been told in episodic fashion as part of the fate of Jews in each of the occupied countries.

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