WITNESSES OF WAR: Children’s Lives under the Nazis
by Nicholas StargardtCape £20 pp530
The second world war killed children on an unprecedented scale. They were massacred, together with their families, when the German army invaded Poland and the Soviet Union. They perished in the death camps and the transports. They were incinerated in allied bombing raids on German cities. They froze in the mass flight from the advancing Russians in 1945. Yet nobody has tried to write their history until now. That is understandable, for most of them vanished without trace, and of those who survived many could not bring themselves to recall what they had been through. In later life, however, some broke their silence. Among the memoirs that Nicholas Stargardt draws on in this dark and harrowing book, one is by a former member of the Hitler Youth who, as a 15-year old, assisted at the execution of 200 Jewish women on a beach in East Prussia in 1945. Another is by a Czech boy who worked alongside the penal battalion at Auschwitz that drove prisoners into the gas chambers.
In Germany, the systematic killing of children began just before the war, and its aim was the perfection of German youth. Doctors were ordered to report all newborn infants suffering from idiocy, Down’s syndrome and other defects, and the registration forms went before a panel of experts who decided which children should die. The success of this pilot scheme led to the opening of some 30 children’s units in asylums across the Reich for the extermination of defective children. Moral as well as physical health mattered greatly to the Nazis. To save them from growing up in corrupting conditions, children of “biologically inferior” parents were taken into care, and a system of youth courts and youth prisons dealt with those arrested for petty crime, playing truant or prostitution. Many children died in reformatories, mainly from starvation, since officials found that the surest way to curb their energies.
But Stargardt is not concerned just with children as victims. It is their superior adaptability that he stresses. Being less experienced than adults, the young have a hazier idea of normality, so they can accept the abnormal as normal more easily. When parents collapsed in despair, it was often children, he finds, who became the principal breadwinners for their families. They worked as beggars or food smugglers, climbing in and out of the ghettoes, and dodging round the legs of policemen, with potatoes and onions sewn into their clothes. They quickly got used to the presence of the dead and dying. An eye-witness recalls three Polish boys stumbling over the body of a famished child while playing in the street, and continuing as if nothing had happened.
Children assimilated the horrors around them into their games to a degree that can seem shocking to adults. Polish boys acted out Gestapo interrogations and executions, with the bigger ones playing the Nazi roles. In the camps they played at being Kapos and guards, beating the smaller children who pretended to be prisoners fainting during roll call. Girls used their dolls to make themselves feel braver. “Don’t cry, my little doll,” whispered a five-year-old in the Lodz ghetto. “When the Germans come to grab you I won’t leave you.” There was even a gas-chamber game in which children threw stones into a hole in the ground and mimicked the cries of the people inside. Adults tried to ignore the proximity of death, but children made fun of it. They dared each other to touch the electric fence, and when they saw white smoke billowing out of the crematorium chimney they joked that “This time it’s fat people.” In the war ’s last days, German children adopted similar survival tactics. Crouching in the cellars of Berlin, they played at being Russian soldiers with pretend machine guns.
The same adaptability made it easier for children to become Nazis. With no memory of pre-Nazi normality, they were less likely to question the new order, and they proved more adept at hunting down and denouncing Jews than their parents, who were restrained by past ties with Jewish families. Nazi values might almost have been designed, Stargardt feels, with adolescents in mind. The summer camps and cycle tours made them feel independent, and the ideals of purity and dedication were irresistible to high-minded teenagers. Young volunteers from organisations such as the League of German Girls eagerly assisted in the expulsion of Poles and Jews from the occupied territories. Watching the SS herd Polish villagers into a shed during one clearance, a German student recorded her feelings: “Sympathy with such creatures? No, at most I feel quietly appalled that such people exist.”
The young kept the Nazi flame alive when many adults had become defeatist. To offset the huge losses suffered by the Wehrmacht in the summer of 1944, thousands of boys were recruited into special Volkssturm units. They were supposed to be at least 16, but many 14- and 15-year olds joined up, ardent for self-sacrifice. Armed with first-world-war rifles, and clad in a ragbag of old uniforms, they faced Russian tanks, ignoring the advice of veterans to throw away their weapons and go home; 27,000 died in the last months of the war.
Juvenile crime figures soared after the war. This was partly because there were 13m abandoned or orphaned children in Europe. But it was also because the young had lost respect for the law, their elders and their communities. A Polish government survey in 1945 found that they felt indifferent to all ideals. A common factor in their disillusionment was memory of near-starvation. They had seen grown-ups fighting and prostituting themselves for scraps of food, and had frequently done the same.
They had learnt that hunger is stronger than love, kinship and civilisation. Fantasies about food, and furious family rows over minuscule inequalities in the division of rations, recur in their wartime letters and diaries. For those of us who have never felt real hunger, this simple unknown puts their experience beyond imagination.
Stargardt names about 150 children in his book, and reconstructs around them the fates of countless others. Inevitably, the more he does justice to his subject, the less bearable it is to read. Even the stories with comparatively happy endings are nightmarish. In November 1941, a boy called Lem, living in the small Belorussian town of Mir, hid in a barn and watched while the local police shot his parents and siblings in the Jewish cemetery. He also saw his sister’s small children picked up by the legs and battered to death against the tombstones. When his hiding place was discovered he was lined up with other Jews by a mass grave and machine-gunned. He came to, surrounded by still-warm bodies, clambered out, and was hidden by a forester. Later he joined the partisans, and in 1995 he testified before a War Crimes unit. The 21st century promises to be as full of wars as the 20th, which is why we need books like Stargardt’s that remind us and our leaders what war really means.
WAR CHILD
One boy caught up in the Nazi war machine was Pope Benedict XVI who, as Joseph Ratzinger, was forced to join the Hitler Youth in 1941. He quickly won dispensation, but was then enrolled as an anti-aircraft gunner. He deserted in 1944, claiming never to have fired his gun.
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websites:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitler_Youth
Encyclopaedia piece on Hitler Youth
