Cruel World (71 page)

The Nazi policy of promoting abortion for those of “bad” blood in Poland was soon extended to the USSR, where Himmler not only encouraged but ordered abortions for “non-German” women impregnated by members of the police or SS, “unless that woman is of good stock.” But even in this world of
Untermenschen
, abortion was not something that could be openly acknowledged as policy. The order was to be kept secret from Russian doctors, who were to be told that the procedures were being done randomly, “for reasons of social distress.”
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Introduction of abortion, illegal in Germany, into the Reich itself was much trickier. It was one thing to perform the procedure on criminals and mental incompetents, but quite another to do so on perfectly normal young forced laborers who often worked side by side with Germans. In addition, the race authorities, terrified of losing any drops of German blood, were now faced with a whole new set of duties: each case would have to be investigated to determine the racial worth of the unborn child.
Nevertheless, a decree announcing that “in the case of Eastern female workers, pregnancy may be interrupted if the pregnant woman so desires” was issued by the Reich Health Leader on March 11, 1943, and sent to all race and police agencies in June. The decree, which was “not suitable for passing on to the district and local police authorities,” suspended “criminal prosecution of abortion” for these cases. There were caveats: the “interruption” could only take place after an expert opinion was given by the “locally competent medical office,” and if it was determined by SS investigators that the probable father was not a “German or a member of an ethnically related (Germanic) race.”
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A bit later, another directive, which certainly might encourage “volunteering” for abortion, was issued, confirming the policy that pregnant female workers were not to be sent home anymore. Orders for their treatment and that of their offspring were appended. They were not kind. Women would go back to work as soon as possible. Births would take place in camp infirmaries and not in a German hospital, unless the woman was useful as “examination material for the training of students or midwives,” and then only when “separation from pregnant Germans could be guaranteed.” Once born, the babies would be taken from their mothers and put into “special” nurseries “of the simplest kind”
(Auslaender-Kinder Pflegestaetten)
. Exceptions to this rule were “children of foreigners who partly are of a similar race and bearers of German blood,” that is, Danes, Norwegians, and other “Nordic” peoples, who would still be taken from their mothers, but were to be raised as German children. Determining who belonged in which category of course meant more racial examining, for which another lengthy set of rules was enclosed. A few special mothers would be granted entrance to a Lebensborn home. But most of the babies lucky enough to be chosen would be taken by the Nazi Welfare Agency to “special children’s homes for foreigners’ children of good racial stock”
(Kinderheim für Auslaenderkinder)
or sent to private families.
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The subtle difference in the titles of the two children’s institutions was undoubtedly no more accidental than the monumental difference in the treatment of the tiny children. Conditions in one home for “bad” children in Austria horrified even an SS inspector, Major General Hilgenfeldt, who wrote to Himmler that he had found “all of the babies … undernourished,” and noted that if they continued to receive the officially mandated rations, they would “perish … in a few months.” The general reported that he had ordered the rations increased until Himmler’s opinion on the matter had been obtained. His own feelings, expressed in the careful language
required to dispel any impression of disagreement with Nazi leaders, are clear:

The General was not the only one who was disturbed. Health officials in the south of Germany reported that “a minority of reactionary Catholic physicians” and “even physicians whose political orientation is positive” had objected to the abortion policy for
Ostarbeiter
and Polish women. Indeed, one of the “politically sound” doctors had said that “in accord with medical and especially with German ethics … a pregnant woman is inviolable.” Nurses in the Seekreis, the district around Lake Constance, who “belong to religious societies” had “sternly” refused to collaborate. Many other health professionals had “argued that the abortion decree was not in accordance with the moral obligation of a physician to preserve life” and that “a discriminatory evaluation of fellow nationals and of foreign nationals should not be permitted … in the field of medicine.” Some doctors, clearly aware that the war was not going so well, said that they would not obey the decree for fear that they later would be “executed” for performing abortions. There were also fears that “encouragement would be given to the prevailing tendency to approve of abortions”; this would have “a damaging effect upon the morals of German women and girls, which through the exigencies of war have to a great extent become unstable.”
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Hard-core Nazis were disgusted with such “ridiculous prejudices originating in the time of liberalism,” and determined to continue their battle to protect the Volk from contamination. To get around the German doctors, orders were issued that abortions for
Ostarbeiter
and Poles were to be carried out if possible “by Russian doctors in the huts of the Eastern
workers” right at the factories.
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To improve efficiency further, nurseries were also set up by industrial firms to care for the babies delivered “in the huts.” From reports on the conditions in one such nursery run by the Krupp firm at Voerde, near Essen, it is clear that Himmler had not decided in favor of making much of an effort to nurture Eastern babies.

A Krupp employee testified after the war that the children in the nursery were “undernourished. There was no child at all whose arms or hands were thicker than my thumb.” The babies, up to two years old, lay naked on straw mattresses covered with rubber sheets.
Ostarbeiter
nurses caring for the children told him that they had very little to eat and that “fifty or sixty died every day, and as many were born every day, because there was a constant influx of eastern female workers with children.”
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This was probably an exaggeration, and was vehemently denied by other Krupp workers, though one of them, Hans Kupke, did admit that the deaths were due to “a measure of mal-administration” for which, of course, he personally could not accept any responsibility, blaming these events on the chief camp physician.
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Moreover, the camp was swept at one point by a diphtheria epidemic, which may have produced a temporary increase in mortality. But Krupp’s own records showed that 88 children died in the 120-bed nursery between August 1944 and March 1945, some 23 of them from malnutrition and many others of “general weakness”—a staggering death rate for any institution theoretically dedicated to child care.
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The abortion and child care policies were much harder to enforce out in the countryside, where tens of thousands of
Ostarbeiter
were at work and where an estimated 80 percent of the illegitimate births were occurring. For the Slavic workers there could, technically, be no legitimate births, as they were not allowed to marry one another, much less a German. The racial authorities were appalled to find that German farm wives were taking care of alien babies along with their own while the mothers worked in the fields. This was very bad, as “even the German farm wife and the members of her family and the farm easily fall into a relationship of psychological attachment with the infant of alien blood.” In Hannover, where some 1,500 “children of alien stock” were born in 1943, it was observed that a “very perilous infiltration problem” had developed, as “the bigger children played on the farms with the German children and the latter began already to include words in the foreign language in their speech.”

In such remote areas it was difficult to set up special nurseries for the alien children, but the racial authorities insisted that the effort be made.
In the community of Echemin, in Hannover, all that could be managed was a day-care center set up in a “shed used before as a garage for farm machinery and fertilizer,” measuring twenty by five meters. This edifice was fixed up in no time with the support of many Nazi agencies and local citizens. It boasted a kitchen, a dayroom, two dormitories, and a bedroom “for the alien nurse.” No mention is made of bathrooms, perhaps an oversight in the report, or perhaps not. A bombed-out German family was brought in to supervise, “living near the care center.” The parents were permitted to visit “twice a month for two fixed hours on Sundays.”
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Faced with an ever-increasing number of babies, some fanatic racial operatives lobbied for extreme prevention tactics even as the war was drawing to a close. It is clear that opinion was not unanimous. In May 1944, a long, vividly written memo lambasted weak-willed officials who advised letting alien children stay with their mothers until they were five years old and required farmers to sign a document saying that they would care for babies born to their workers. Instead the memo advocated “ruthless but skillful propaganda” about alien children who were “produced on the soil of the German people” that would inform the parents that they should expect “immediate separation between parents and children, eventually complete estrangement.… It must be constantly on the mind of the female farm worker of alien blood that to give birth to a child in Germany would mean to lose it at the same time.” In order to “round out the propaganda in a practical way, contraceptives should be quietly distributed (with the Reich bearing the cost),” as “there is no harm in leaving a valve open to the natural desires of the persons of alien blood.”

For the babies that arrived despite all these dire precautions, due to the “primitive sensuality and fertility of the farm workers of alien race,” a chain of rural homes like that in Echemin was to be established. Expenses for child care in these homes would be deducted in advance from the workers’ pathetic wages. After the war, children and parents, not necessarily together, should be returned to their “countries of origin,” a job that would soon fall not to the Nazis, but to the Allies.
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On February 18, 1943, Joseph Goebbels, speaking to some 14,000 top Nazi Party members assembled in the vast Sportpalast in Berlin, announced a new policy of “total war” for the German people. Despite the fact that virtually all of Europe was now enmeshed in the Nazi web, he did not have much choice. The preceding months had marked a distinct decline in German fortunes. In January alone the siege of Leningrad had been broken; Stalingrad had fallen; the British had brazenly bombed Berlin in broad daylight during the annual celebrations of Hitler’s accession to power; and Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto, led by a twenty-four-year-old commander, had dropped their passive stance and killed Nazi officers attempting to deport the remaining inhabitants, an act of resistance that would soon burgeon into the first major overt armed challenge to Nazi power by civilians in the occupied nations.

Goebbels’s speech was supposed to rally the German people’s fighting spirit by generating fear that the Russians and the Allies would exterminate them if the Reich was defeated. This was facilitated by the Allies, who, at the Casablanca Conference in mid-January, had demanded unconditional surrender by Germany and ordered a huge combined bombing offensive to encourage the Nazis to comply. Goebbels also wished to unite public opinion behind new economic policies that would put all industry on a war footing and would require, among other things, obligatory registration for labor by all German women between the ages of seventeen and fifty, a measure unthinkable a year before. Also among the other things, undoubtedly inspired by the combined bombing offensive, was an order that antiaircraft batteries would now be manned by Hitler Youth and Bund Deutscher Mädel girls aged fifteen and sixteen, an order that included its auxiliaries, such as the Flieger HJ, whose members were as young as thirteen. Another as yet unpublished directive, on February 16, had initiated negotiations between the Reich Youth Directorate and the Waffen-SS with the aim of forming an entire combat division of boys aged seventeen and eighteen. It was no coincidence that 1943, following the HJ tradition of naming years after the most important goal to be achieved, was dubbed “The Year of War Service of German Youth.”
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