children

children were the victims of the Second World War to an extent quite unknown in previous conflicts. In Germany and occupied Europe many were victims of the Nazi Lebensborn and euthanasia programmes, and it has been estimated that 1.2 million Jewish children died in the Final Solution. (Only 11% of Jewish children living in Europe in 1939 survived the war.) But before it started the Refugee Children's Movement set up what became known as the Kindertransporte. It arranged for German and Austrian children—whose lives were at risk, whose parents were willing to part with them, and whose expenses could be guaranteed—to travel to the UK; and from November 1938 to September 1939 nearly 10,000 children, 9,000 of them Jews, were transported by train to safety.

Children were also victims of Soviet policies. According to Irene Wasilewska (Suffer Little Children, London, 1946) the Polish authorities calculated that about 140,000 children were deported to the USSR after Poland was divided between Germany and the Soviet Union in October 1939, of whom about 40,000 subsequently died and 85,000 never saw their homeland again. Many of those children in occupied Europe who did survive faced a bleak future: in 1945 there were 13 million abandoned children; Poland had one million orphans, Czechoslovakia 50,000, France 250,000, and Hungary 200,000; in Greece one child in eight was an orphan.

The number of children who were involved in the actual fighting was not insignificant, especially when their country was in extremis. In Moscow in July 1941 the war photographer Margaret Bourke-White recorded that ‘children patrolled the streets at twilight to warn householders who allowed threads of light to leak through their blackout curtains. It was the special function of children to help keep sandbags and water pails constantly filled in case of incendiary raids’ (Shooting the Russian War, New York, 1942, p.62). In the occupied parts of the USSR children reconnoitred German positions and worked with the partisans. They were such efficient scouts that Field Marshal Kluge ordered that ‘special vigilance should be exercised with regard to little boys, members of the Soviet Children's organization, the “Pioneers”, who snoop around everywhere. Anyone of them caught on the railway line is to be shot on the spot.’ A British war correspondent, Alaric Jacob, related in his book (A Window in Moscow, London, 1946) that he met boys aged 13 and 14, who had worked with partisan units and killed with them, and several had been awarded decorations. Resistance movements in other parts of occupied Europe also used children: boys, some as young as ten, fought with Tito and the partisans in Yugoslavia; others were used as couriers; in Belgium young children helped resistance workers by noting down the movement of German vehicles. In April– May 1945 Japanese schoolchildren, sometimes armed only with swords, fought on Okinawa at the same time as 5,000 Hitler Youth, some only 12, were opposing the Red Army during the fall of Berlin, an experience only about 10% of them survived.

For every child who was killed or wounded in combat many more died, or were maimed, by bombing. The Allied raids on Hamburg in July 1943 killed 5,586 children, and several thousand—it is not possible to be more exact—were the victims of the atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. Of those who survived the blasts, many subsequently suffered long-term effects from radiation. Horrific damage was also done to unborn children; of 169 exposed in utero in Hiroshima, there were 33 cases of microcephaly.

To avoid the bombing both sides evacuated children from cities. In Germany a programme called Kinderlandverschickung (sending children into rural areas) set up about 9,000 camps for children in the country. In July 1941 80,000 women and children were ordered out of Moscow, but in Shooting the Russian War Margaret Bourke-White wrote that this was never officially announced as evacuation. Instead 20,000 schoolchildren were said to have gone to the Arctic regions for scientific research and another 50,000 had gone on an expedition to central Asia to undertake geographical surveys. Such was the confusion that some children never saw their families again. In Japan, 15,000 children were evacuated from Hiroshima before the atomic bomb destroyed it, and at the start of the Finnish–Soviet war in 1939, 9,000 Finnish children, followed by 55,000 more during the next years, were sent to safety in Sweden.

But it was the British who evacuated the largest numbers. Under a government scheme, about 4 million adults and children were moved from the bigger cities, and another 2 million were evacuated privately. The first evacuees left on 1 September 1939 and during the next days 827,000 unaccompanied children and 524,000 mothers with pre-school children left the cities. But the phoney war followed this exodus and by early 1940, 80% had returned to their homes. A further evacuation did not take place until the Blitz began that September, and this was followed by another from London in mid-1944 when the V-weapons became operational. British children were also sent to Canada and the USA by their parents. In London, the American committee for the Evacuation of Children, formed by American businessmen, had the names of 35,000 children whose parents had requested their evacuation. But transatlantic travel was hazardous—77 children died when the liner Arandora Star, en route for Canada, was torpedoed in 1940—and adequate convoy facilities were rarely available; only 2,000 eventually found American foster homes.

Though the bombing of civilian targets killed many children, and evacuation often inflicted considerable distress on those who survived, the young of unoccupied countries suffered less than those who were forced to live under Nazi rule. In western Europe Jewish children were usually deported with their parents to the concentration camps. Many were hidden or adopted into other families to avoid this fate, though some families went into hiding together (see Frank, Anne). Non-Jewish children were also regularly deported for committing minor offences and many suffered internment with their parents.

It was in eastern Europe that children, especially Jews, felt the full force of Nazi rule. They suffered a massive disruption of family life, for even if parents survived the fighting, bombing, starvation, or reprisal executions, they were divided, often for ever, from their children by forced labour and the concentration camps. Nazi ideology corrupted childhood, and often brought it to an abrupt end because, to survive, a Jewish child had to act and work like an adult. ‘Children of tender years were invariably exterminated,’ the commandant of Auschwitz testified after the war, ‘since by reason of their youth they were unable to work…’

Though the teaching they received was often distorted, non-Jewish children in occupied western Europe were allowed to continue their secondary education. But in those eastern territories absorbed into the Greater Germany the school system was replaced with institutions which only taught, in German, the most basic curriculum, and in the Polish General government (see Poland, 2(b)), and in the occupied parts of the USSR, all schools above the primary level were closed and their equipment destroyed. ‘For the non-German population of the East,’ Himmler stated in May 1940, school should consist ‘in teaching simple arithmetic up to 500, the writing of one's name, and that God has ordered obedience to the Germans, honesty, diligence, and politeness. I do not consider an ability to read as necessary.’ This policy led (as it did with Jewish pupils who were often banned from school altogether) to clandestine classes being held. In Warsaw alone, 8,000 matriculation certificates were secretly issued during the war years. Play, too, was restricted. Jewish children were forbidden bicycles, the use of local parks, or visits to the theatre or cinema. The laws became draconian and a child of 14 could be given the same punishment as an adult. In some parts of Poland children as young as 12 were eligible for forced labour: in Greece the age was 16, in Yugoslavia 17, and in France it was 18 for boys and 21 for girls.

German children were also the victims of Nazi ideology. Compulsory enrolment in the Hitler Youth and its offshoots encompassed about 80% of those eligible, and its regimentation inculcated a fanaticism among its members to which even the most ardent adult Nazi found it difficult to aspire. However, a significant percentage of those who were not members of the Hitler Youth rebelled against the regime and were persecuted for doing so. There were two main groups. Neither could be classed as mere hooligans; nor did they represent an organized resistance against the regime. The Edelweisspiraten (Edelweiss Pirates) were mostly working-class city youths aged between 14 and 18 in non-skilled jobs, though their leaders were sometimes older. They beat up Hitler Youth patrols, wrote anti-Hitler graffiti, and sang anti-Nazi songs. In Cologne-Ehrenfeld they helped deserters, raided military depots, and assaulted Nazi Party members, and in November 1944 twelve of them were publicly hanged. The second group, the Swing-Jugend (swing youth), were mostly middle-class youngsters who listened and danced to jazz, condemned as decadent by the Nazis. They wore English clothes, spoke English, aped English mannerisms, and liked singing English songs such as ‘We're gonna hang out the washing on the Siegfried Line’. Some of their leaders were sent to concentration camps but, as with the Edelweiss Pirates, the Gestapo never managed to eradicate them entirely.

Juvenile delinquency rose nearly everywhere during the war years. In Belgium, France, and the Netherlands the number of cases brought to trial almost tripled, while in Norway they increased six times, from 5,016 in 1939 to 30,152 in 1944. In unoccupied countries such as the UK and the USA the figures were not so dramatic. Nevertheless, figures for the UK show an increase from 55,511 cases in 1936 to 73,620 in 1945. In the USA, where wartime conditions bred v-girls and the zoot-suit riots, and where new words such as ‘teenager’ and ‘bobby-soxer’ described the young, the statistics varied. Delinquency rose in the large cities, but fell in rural areas. It affected secondary education which in any case suffered a sharp decline, as American youngsters preferred work to study. Between 1941 and 1945 there was a decline of about 17% in enrolments, while the numbers of those aged from 14 to 17 who had a job rose from just over a million in 1940 to two million, or 29.6% of that age group, in 1944.

Bibliography

Dwork, D. , Children with a Star (New Haven, Conn., 1991).
Halls, W. , Youth of Vichy France (Oxford, 1981).
Johnson, B. (ed.), The Evacuees (London, 1968).
Macardle, D. , Children of Europe (London, 1949).
Sosnowski, K. , The Tragedy of Children under Nazi Rule (Poznań, 1962).
Turner, B. , And the Policeman Smiled (London, 1990).