The most terrible crime against humanity was committed during the Second World War. In Europe and the countries of the former Soviet Union, there are practically no families that would not have been hurt by the Nazis. Someone lost their fathers, sons, brothers in the war, someone lost relatives during the bombing, but the worst thing is the Holocaust of children forcibly taken from their parents. In the period 1933-1945, millions of innocent children of different nationalities and religions suffered. Few of them managed to survive, the fate of thousands of children in the post-war period was occupied by humanitarian organizations.
Selective extermination of children
Hitler was obsessed with the purity of the
Aryan race, so he organized a special program to fight for its purification. The children of Jews and Gypsies were destroyed in the first place, since they were considered dangerous for Germany. Physically and mentally disabled children from the occupied territories of the USSR, Poland and Germany itself were also exterminated. Many families affected the Holocaust of children; both orphans and children who were forcibly taken from their parents fell into concentration camps. All victims can be divided into several groups:
- children from 12 years old were used as labor and for medical experiments;
- destroyed newborns;
- children killed immediately upon arrival at concentration camps;
- born in death camps and ghettos who managed to escape thanks to people who sheltered them from the Nazis.
Nazi attitude towards children
In the ghetto, the unfortunate most often died of disease and hunger.
This did n’t bother the
Nazis , because the kids didn’t have much value for them, in most cases they were destroyed together with the disabled and the elderly in the first place. Holocaust children over 12 years old were used as labor, but the conditions were such that they could not stand it for a long time. The weak Nazis were sent to gas chambers, shot or simply left to die in agony. The Holocaust of children has become a shame for the entire nation, the Germans still can not cleanse themselves before the public for those terrible deeds. The fate of the kids, as a rule, was controlled by the Judenrat, and by his order, the children were deported to
death camps.Surviving children
The fair-haired, blue-eyed guys with fair skin were more fortunate, they were taken away from their parents, but not killed, and sent to foster “racially full” German families, because such an appearance was “Aryan”. The Holocaust of children did not affect the thousands of little Jews who were deported from Germany and the Nazi-occupied countries by the Kindertransport program. There were brave people who agreed to hide the unfortunate under their shelter. Many children found shelter in Belgium, Italy; in France, nuns, Catholic priests, and Protestant families hid them.
The Holocaust Monument will always remind people of the unprecedented cruelty and atrocities of certain historical figures and warn against the recurrence of such horrors. No one has the right to control the life of another person, to make a slave out of him or to kill on his own whim.