In January 1945, Nazi officials gave Frau W. just twelve hours to evacuate her home in the Warthegau (now Poland). She left with her two younger daughters (ages ten and seven) and her friend's daughter (age seven), who was staying with them. Her two elder daughters had already been evacuated from their boarding school and could not be contacted. Initially, Frau W. and the three young girls rode on a wagon, but after the Soviets stole their belongings and horses, they walked westward across the wintery landscape. When they reached the Oder River, Soviet soldiers forced them back east so that civilians would not impede the ongoing fighting. Frau W. and the trio of children then trekked eastward for several days until they found a place of relative safety, where they subsisted on berries, plants, and food they received from the Soviets. In June, the Poles arrived and expelled Frau W. and her children. The group resumed their trek westward and finally reached Berlin by foot at the end of July. Frau W. turned over her friend's daughter to Red Cross authorities at a refugee camp and initiated a search to find her elder daughters. After ten days, Frau W. learned that the older girls were in a refugee camp outside Leipzig. They were reunited a short time later.Footnote 1
Hans B. was born in 1936 and lived in Königsberg with his mother during World War II. His father, a Wehrmacht soldier stationed in Denmark, routinely sent them food. Assured by local Nazi leaders that the Soviets would never take Königsberg, Hans's mother remained at home until it was too late to flee. Hans experienced firsthand the brutal conquest of Königsberg in 1945. In the first four months of Soviet occupation, his mother died as a result of the cruelty of Soviet soldiers and a lack of food and heat. Hans was left alone. For two and a half years, he lived in Soviet orphanages. Not until October 1947 did the Soviets and the Red Cross succeed in organizing a large transport of German children back to Germany. These children, including Hans, were put in quarantine and treated by German doctors in a camp in Mecklenburg. The children were then photographed by the Kindersuchdienst (Child Search Service) before being placed in orphanages. Hans slept in a bed and ate three meals a day for the first time in three years. It was at the orphanage that his father found him in January 1948.Footnote 2
These stories reveal two different scenarios in which German children became separated from their families as a result of World War II. Some separations occurred early in the war, as fathers were drafted or sent to serve the Nazi regime in the farthest corners of the Reich. As the war continued, state programs evacuated German children from cities that were threatened by Allied air raids and placed them in rural locations. Later, when it became obligatory for women to work in the war industry, mothers were sent to sites across the country far away from their children. The primary cause of wartime child endangerment, however, was the Nazi leadership's calculated delay in allowing the civilian population in the East to evacuate to the West. With no advanced planning on how evacuations should take place, panicked civilians fled westward as best they could in trains, in cars, in horse-drawn carts, and on foot. This frantic migration wreaked havoc on the youngest victims of the war: thousands froze, died of hunger, or perished in strafing air attacks. Some children lost their families when the Soviets or the Poles conscripted their mothers to serve as forced labor in the East. The postwar expulsion of Germans from Eastern European countries further increased the number of missing, displaced, and lost German children.
In the final days of the war, the dire needs of children found among the ruins in German cities, trekking westward on crowded roads or housed in refugee camps, became abundantly clear. The problem was compounded by thousands of non-German children who were living in Germany without their parents—a consequence of Nazi forced labor and “germanization” programs. Months after the war had ended, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) estimated that eight million children were still homeless in Germany; many of these children were on their own.Footnote 3 As early as 1943, the Allies realized that displaced people would pose a formidable problem when the war ended; in an effort to mitigate a crisis, they created the United Nations Rehabilitation and Relief Administration (UNRRA) to care for and repatriate those who had been displaced. Although lost children were not UNRRA's primary focus early on, postwar realities forced the agency—and its successor, the International Refugee Organization (IRO)—to address the situation. As one IRO officer put it, “The lost identity of individual children is the Social Problem of the day on the continent of Europe.”Footnote 4
In spite of the chaos that characterized postwar Germany, many children eventually found their way home without institutional support. Most fortunate were those whose parents received notification from the directors of children's homes and camps to pick up their children before the camps were dissolved.Footnote 5 Some camps and children's homes organized transportation to bring children home, while other youngsters arrived on refugee transports from the East and were reunited with their families in the refugee camps.Footnote 6 Still other children rode trains, hitched rides with soldiers or other passersby, or simply walked home—sometimes covering hundreds of miles on foot. They commonly traveled alone or with their siblings, but, in the end, defying great odds and largely without institutional support, they found their families. Charlotte W., who was evacuated from Bremen to Saxony with her brother in 1943, remembered Hitler Youth leaders telling them in 1944, “You must leave, children; the Russians are coming.”Footnote 7 Only twelve years old at the time, Charlotte took to the road with her ten-year-old brother, their suitcases in a cart. With no institutional guidance, they managed to make their way north to reunite with their mother. Another girl, Bärbel, was just eight years old when she traveled hundreds of miles with her fifteen-year-old sister from southern Germany to Hamburg. The siblings managed to hitch occasional rides with German, American, and British soldiers, but ended up walking most of the way. As they traveled through small towns, they registered with communal authorities to be assigned a place to sleep each night. “Our wish to be with our mother was far stronger than our fear,” Bärbel remembered. “It pulled us with all its strength to her.”Footnote 8
More than a million children returned to their homes or went to the locations their families had designated as postwar meeting places—usually a relative's home. These children were more fortunate than the hundreds of thousands of other German children who were unable to make their way home. Some were too young, others too ill. Some were too far away from home or unable to travel because of the war or the winter weather. Still others were in far-off camps or children's homes, or had been taken into families that were loath to give them up. These children—the ones who could not return home on their own, a significant minority among the millions of children displaced at the end of World War II—are the focus of this article.
When the armistice was signed and the fighting finally ended, Germany was a war-ravaged country, divided and occupied by its victorious enemies. The National Socialist regime had been discredited; its loyal followers had fled, were imprisoned, or were struggling to establish new identities. In the process, the institutional basis of the German welfare apparatus largely disappeared, and with it, help for the needy displaced children of Germany. From the outset, UNRRA explicitly excluded members of the “enemy nations” from its aid, effectively leaving German children outside its purview. Dealing with the problem of unaccompanied and unsupervised German children fell instead to the Allied military governments and to the Germans themselves. The Allies all struggled to feed and house the children in their occupation zones, to offer them basic health care, and to provide some sort of temporary order in their lives. To reunite lost and displaced children with their families and communities, the Germans founded the Kindersuchdienst des Deutschen Roten Kreuzes (Red Cross Child Search Service ) and the Suchdienst für vermisste Deutsche in der sowjetischen Besatzungszone Deutschlands (Search Service for Missing Germans in the Soviet Occupation Zone; hereafter Suchdienst). The Allies—together with German state officials, church authorities, and German citizens themselves—all understood the importance of helping these unaccompanied children; but putting together an effective system to locate, support, and aid them foundered upon both predictable and unforeseen hurdles.
This article uses sources found in the Red Cross Archive in Munich, the International Tracing Archive in Bad Arolsen, as well as in German state and church archives, to illuminate how decisions were made to locate, identify, care for, and place missing, lost, and displaced German children after 1945. The information in these archival sources are augmented by memoirs and by children's experiences as recalled in personal interviews conducted by the author with Germans from the East and the West who lived through the era as children.Footnote 9 Like the writers of memoirs, the interviewees are a self-selected group willing to relive their distressing memories as they retold them: “An interview,” after all, “reveals itself as a process of the conscious and unconscious (re)construction of a story in the remembering of a historical event.”Footnote 10 Memory is shaped not only by what happened, but also by what one wishes had happened. In addition, the passage of time, as well as the collective memory of the end of the Nazi regime and the expulsion from Eastern Europe, have all influenced how Germans recall personal events from this era.
These interviews provide new insight into how postwar children remember their childhood during a time of political, economic, and social turmoil. By focusing on policies designed to help children, the local implementation of those policies, and children's memories of their experiences, this article provides added depth to the political narrative of the era. In particular, it connects children's needs and experiences with official endeavors to meet those needs, and it highlights the ideological context of the story as it unfolded. This article reveals that displaced German children were first placed in harm's way by the failure of the Nazis to plan for and protect them at the end of the war. Although more than a million children were able to overcome the many postwar challenges and find their way home, hundreds of thousands remained lost and homeless. Their postwar fate lay in the hands of institutions and individuals torn by competing humanitarian concerns, by the demands of denazification, and, increasingly, by the growing ideological divisions of the Cold War. And yet, despite the numerous political, logistical, and economic hurdles, and despite the large number of unresolved cases, a great many displaced German children were eventually reunited with their families.
As we shall see, competing political, social, and humanitarian priorities influenced the various efforts made in Eastern and Western Germany on behalf of German children from the beginning of the postwar era. Throughout Germany in the first few months after the war had ended, the Allies struggled to balance various challenges: the need to feed and house the local population, punish those implicated in the crimes of the Nazi regime, and prevent a complete breakdown of society.Footnote 11 The necessity of providing for their own occupation forces, especially in the East, also placed limits on the resources available to help children.Footnote 12 In Eastern Germany, the focus on building a socialist system modeled on the Stalinist Soviet Union prompted a reorganization of all state offices, the elimination of the Red Cross, and a defunding of church organizations—three traditional providers of youth aid.Footnote 13 With a far more limited economic base, Soviet and East German authorities stressed the value of cooperative living and ideologically based education and training in their approach to working with needy children. The importance of those values in the East often took precedence over searching for individual children's biological families. In contrast, the central goal in Western Germany was the rebuilding of the family in its traditional form; a premium was thus placed on finding the families of all missing, lost, and displaced children.Footnote 14 The effort to help children in the West was carried out by state-run youth departments, church organizations, and the Red Cross, all of which underwent less substantial restructuring than their counterparts in the East and thus continued to function (or resumed function) with minimal disruption.Footnote 15 The Red Cross's Kindersuchdienst led the search for missing family members and later received financial support from the federal government for carrying out this work. When biological families could not be reunited, the next best solution for children—it was believed—was the creation of new traditional families.
Despite the clear delineation of Eastern and Western ideas about what constituted children's “best interests,” the practice was far less straightforward. Many families could not be reestablished because fathers had died in war, were missing, or were prisoners of war (POWs).Footnote 16 Mothers often had to “stand alone” as single heads of the household.Footnote 17 In other cases, mothers had died in Allied bombings, starved, or simply disappeared into the East as forced labor—leaving their children orphaned. The postwar shift in Germany's borders also left some children in orphanages or children's homes in Eastern Europe. Even when missing children could be located, disagreement frequently ensued about what lay in their best interests. Some children who had been placed in foster or adoptive families during the war had adapted so well to their new circumstances that they resisted any further change. For those whose families had perished in the war, surrogate families in the form of orphanages, “children's villages” (such as the Kinderdorf Pestalozzi in Trogen, Switzerland), and adoptive families had to be created. British and American policy makers and social workers tended to argue that a family, even if not the biological one, was best for a child's development. But Eastern Europeans, especially in Poland, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, and the Soviet Union, placed more confidence in collective types of living that reinforced national, ethnic, and political identities. In addition, they called in all cases for the return of children to their birth nations. Jewish leaders, for their part, believed that whether or not their biological parents had survived the war, and whether or not their wartime foster families wanted to keep them, all Jewish children should belong to a Jewish community in Europe or in Palestine. As Ernst Papanek, an Austrian-born psychologist who worked with Jewish children after the war, argued, “Because the children had earlier experienced the tragic inability of families to protect them, they would find a life in a collectivity more secure and reassuring.”Footnote 18
These various voices and circumstances complicated the context within which decisions about children's futures were made. There was agreement on general guidelines in the end, but a comprehensive view of what constituted a child's “best interests” remained elusive. The passage of time and the rise of Cold War political ideologies also influenced international interpretations of what “best interest” implied and directly affected the experiences of displaced German children. The process of placing them raised a host of thorny questions in postwar Germany. Was returning children to their biological parents always in their best interest, or did certain cases exist in which this might only add to their suffering? How long should the search for biological families continue before children could be adopted? How were parents and children separated by the Iron Curtain to find one another? To what degree should children's own wishes be taken into consideration? How did the deterioration of East/West relations affect the care of and search for German children?
This article responds to these questions by building on and adding to the rich literature that already exists on children in Germany during and after World War II. The earliest postwar studies of children, which began to appear in the 1950s, tended to focus on humanitarian organizations such as the IRO and the Red Cross.Footnote 19 In the 1990s, a new wave of research explored the experiences of specific groups of children in Germany, including Jewish children, the children of occupation soldiers, so-called Wolfskinder, and Lebensborn children.Footnote 20 Not until 1998 did the first detailed local study of war orphans appear, a case study of Mecklenburg submitted as a doctoral thesis.Footnote 21 More recently, a more nuanced narrative has appeared as Germans have come to be seen not only as perpetrators of the war, but also as its victims.Footnote 22 These studies have illuminated the plight of German children during the flight from Eastern and Central Europe, but they say little about how children who had become separated from their families fared once they reached Germany.Footnote 23 The shift in public awareness, together with the aging of those involved, have also yielded a burgeoning collection of autobiographical accounts that describe childhood experiences of flight from the East, life in bomb shelters and refugee camps, as well as the fears and uncertainties that surrounded missing family members.Footnote 24 Several recent studies have further shaped our understanding of how World War II affected an entire generation of children. Nicholas Stargardt's work, for example, examines how children across Europe—and of varying “racial worthiness”—remembered and described the war, but it does not extend to the postwar era.Footnote 25 Tara Zahra's invaluable study of “allied children” reveals that the war's psychological impact on children was both complemented and complicated by rising nationalist sentiment and demographic fears in Eastern Europe, as well as by Western humanitarian views of child welfare; German children are not her focus, however.Footnote 26 Heide Fehrenbach has argued that, for families, the violent nature of fascism ushered in an era that was not just postwar, but also “postfascist.” As a result, “After 1945, family reconstitution was rent by competing claims, emotions, and ambitions, yet remained a seductive social and psychological goal.”Footnote 27 But like Zahra, Fehrenbach does not specifically address the experiences of German children. Each of these studies has contributed to our understanding of children's experiences in the postwar era, but no prior study has examined the efforts to find and aid German children on both sides of the East/West divide on the eve of the Cold War. That is the goal of this article, which shows that family reconstitution was able to move beyond a mere “seductive social and psychological goal”—thanks to the efforts of workers at many levels in Eastern and Western Germany who spent the postwar years aiding displaced German children.
By viewing “history from the inside out,” this study reveals how the effort to care for German children and reunite them with their families and communities after World War II involved not just humanitarian concerns and herculean dedication, but also diplomatic negotiation, political maneuvering, and economic struggle.Footnote 28 Neither policies nor circumstances allowed for an absolute focus on German children's “best interests,” even if a deeply held concern for the lost children was at the center of efforts to locate and care for them after 1945. UNRRA's denial of aid to “enemy nations,” postwar political realities, local and international economic pressures, individual personalities, as well as the circumstances of the Cold War itself—all of this worsened the situation for German children. At the same time, their experiences varied both individually and by group. This article focuses on policy toward and on the experiences of the majority of German children, which means that those of several groups of children who were present in Germany when the war ended fall outside the scope of the following discussion. This includes Jewish children who survived the concentration camps, came out of hiding, and fled from Eastern Europe; so-called “Allied children,” who had been kidnapped from Eastern Europe and brought to Germany to be “germanized” or to work for the Nazis; and the children of occupation soldiers, who were the result of both consensual relationships and rape. These children were also displaced in postwar Germany, but their experiences differed dramatically from those of most German children.Footnote 29
After looking at the effort to create a unified search service in occupied Germany, the following discussion examines important aspects of the western Kindersuchdienst, especially its troubled early foundation, and the problems it encountered as lengthy searches for missing family members competed with more immediate solutions for placing found children. The article then turns to the Soviet Zone, where denazification and the establishment of socialism altered understandings of the search process, foster care, and adoption as alternatives to family reunification. It then documents the special problem posed by German children who remained in Eastern Europe after 1945 before concluding with some general thoughts about the plight of German children displaced first by Nazi policy and war, and then battered by postwar political exigencies.
Initial Efforts to Create a Unified Search Service in Germany
As thousands of children arrived in Germany on trains, on buses, on ships, and by foot in 1945, the extent of the displaced child problem came into sharper focus and a debate quickly arose about how best to help them. The Allies made clear that although UNRRA took a keen interest in non-German children, it would not search for “enemy children” or reunify German families.Footnote 30 Responsibility for finding German children fell, then, to the Germans themselves. A general consensus existed among German authorities, church leaders, youth workers, and individual Germans that reuniting German children with their families should be a high priority, but denazification and tension between the East and West complicated the search for individual children from the outset. Both the Protestant and Catholic churches tried to help in this endeavor, but many held out hope that the German Red Cross (DRK) would provide a more extensive search service. Even before the war ended, new leaders in the organization stepped forward to oversee “the immediate cleansing of the Red Cross from Hitlerism” and establish a search service.Footnote 31 In July 1945, just months after the armistice, Rudolf Nadolny, the former German ambassador to Moscow, became president of the DRK and worked to denazify it. In the months that followed, the links between the DRK and the Nazi regime nevertheless continued to dog the organization. With the Soviets pushing to fold the DRK into the nascent state health program, supporters of an independent DRK tried once more to save the organization by removing Nadolny from power. But by September 1945, the Soviets had concluded that “there is not enough time for a far-reaching transformation based on antifascist fundamentals, particularly since the DRK has traditionally been a stronghold of reactionary voices and always a well-disguised shelter for accomplices preparing new wars.”Footnote 32 The Soviet Military Administration of Germany (SMAD) confiscated the central DRK building in Berlin and dissolved the organization, thus eliminating the one entity that might have been able to run a comprehensive, countrywide search service. In its place, the Soviets established the Suchdienst to coordinate the search process in the East through an office located on Kanonier Street in East Berlin.Footnote 33
The Western Allies also had serious misgivings about the DRK. Fearing that “the Red Cross could serve the [National Socialist] movement as a basis for a secret restrengthening,” the U.S. military not only closed the central office and the twenty-one state offices in the American Zone, but also dismissed its leadership.Footnote 34 Unlike the Soviet military authority, however, American officials made an exception for local and lower regional offices if they were approved by the military authorities. The reestablishment of the Red Cross office in Munich was approved by the United States in July 1945; shortly thereafter, the British approved an office in Hamburg. These two offices functioned as the centers for the search for missing Germans and later housed the Kindersuchdienst. French military authorities recognized the problem of displaced German children more slowly and, as a result, denied the need for a search service in their zone. Berlin itself, a city divided among the four Allies and overflowing with refugees and missing persons, posed a special problem. German Red Cross leaders made several attempts to create a unified Deutscher Zentraler Suchdienst (Central German Search Service) in Berlin, but failed to gain the mandatory unanimous support from the four occupying powers. In March 1946, the Americans granted permission to local German authorities to found a search service in the U.S. zone in the Dahlem district, which eventually grew to serve all of West Berlin. At the same time, the Eastern Suchdienst conducted searches in East Berlin. The lack of a unified search service would continue to impede the search for German children.Footnote 35
The Race to Reunite German Children with Their Families in the West
The search process in the West centered on the Kindersuchdienst, whose earliest precursor had been established in northern Germany as refugees from the East arrived. As early as April 1945, a group of five German men—including two Wehrmacht lieutenants, one naval officer, and two men who had hands-on experience with the German refugee problem—met in Flensburg, a town in Schleswig-Holstein overrun with refugees. They saw how “the rootless people, thousands, tens of thousands of people who had fled from the East, trekked through the streets . . . from early until late searching for housing—and for relatives from whom they had been separated on the trip.”Footnote 36 The group was adamant about centralizing the search service in Germany, even if the occupying forces did not support them. They founded the Deutsches Rotes Kreuz Flüchtlingswerk, Ermittlungsdienst, and Zentral-Suchkarte (German Red Cross Refugee Help Service, Inquiry Service, and Central Search Index), and began to register the refugees from East Prussia as they poured into Flensburg and other towns in Schleswig-Holstein.Footnote 37
Among the refugees who fled to the West were more than a million children, many of whom were either orphans or traveling without an adult. There were 1.17 million unaccompanied children in the Soviet zone alone.Footnote 38 As the DRK-Flüchtlingswerk began registering children, they were flooded with questions about how best to help them. For children born between 1928 and 1939, the service filled out search cards similar to those completed for returning prisoners of war. But among children born between 1940 and 1945—a cohort that, by some estimates, represented half of the unaccompanied children—many did not know their own names, were too young to talk, and carried no identification papers. The special problems raised by these nameless infants and toddlers prompted the formation in December 1945 of a subgroup within the DRK-Flüchtlingswerk called the Arbeitsgruppe elternlose Kinder (Working Group for Parentless Children), which later became the Kindersuchdienst. Hans Szperlinski, the founder and head of the Kindersuchdienst, came up with a way to identify such children: he created a small biography for each child that included a physical description, a record of birthmarks and other distinctive features, the location where the child was found, toys that had accompanied them, and, for children who were at all verbal, what they could remember about their lives (e.g., details about siblings, home, illnesses). Since unaccompanied children were placed under the guardianship of local youth departments, the Kindersuchdienst also contacted such departments, as well as children's homes, to obtain lists of parentless children born between 1928 and 1945. Word spread through the refugee camps and community centers that parents, grandparents, and siblings who had lost family on the flight westward should fill out search cards, which Kindersuchdienst authorities then cross-referenced with the cards they had created. Searches were initiated primarily by mothers and grandparents, who visited one of the many Kindersuchdienst offices located throughout the country. During the first three postwar years, at a time when one in four Germans was searching for loved ones, these offices remained open twenty-four hours a day.Footnote 39 By the end of 1969 the Kindersuchdienst had succeeded in finding 217,676 lost children, the majority of whom were located before 1957.Footnote 40
In order to appreciate better the obstacles faced by the Kindersuchdienst, it is important to understand how these children first became displaced. About two-thirds of the total number of displaced children had lost their parents before actual fighting reached them. Many were separated from their parents as a result of Nazi work decrees, for example. Able-bodied men were drafted into the war beginning in 1939. On January 23, 1943, as the tide of World War II turned against the Nazis, women between the ages of sixteen and forty-five were also ordered to register to work; the National Socialist People's Welfare Organization (Nationalsozialistische Volkswolhlfahrt, NSV) provided homes for children as needed. Children were supposed to be placed in housing that was close enough for their mothers to visit them daily, but this requirement was eliminated in October 1944; mothers were now sent wherever workers were needed, without regard to the location of their children. The 1943 work decree not only separated mothers from their children, but also siblings from one another.Footnote 41 Other children were evacuated from cities threatened by air raids and sent to relocation camps (Erweiterte Kinderlandverschickung, EKLV), commonly located in eastern Germany and the occupied lands, which had been deemed safer.Footnote 42 Later, as the Soviets advanced, these camps had to be evacuated. Children went westward with their caretakers, youth group leaders, teachers, or peers, joining millions of other Germans fleeing on the roads and rails.
Failure on the part of the Nazi leadership to plan a timely evacuation from the occupied lands in the East posed the largest single risk to children. Civilians and children were forced to flee—with no advanced planning and no central authority to guide them. They fled by train, on bicycle, on horse-drawn cart, and by foot. In East Prussia, many also tried to flee across the Baltic Sea by ship, but severe overloading compromised their safety.Footnote 43 When the sea was frozen and refugees decided to trek across the ice, they became easy targets for strafing air attacks. Bitter winter weather, a lack of food, and the constant danger of encounters with soldiers on land or from the air made the westward flight even more treacherous. Wounded and ill children were often left behind in hospitals as their families fled to the West, and when hospitals were later evacuated without warning, the children often disappeared from official notice. Others became lost when the Soviets or Poles conscripted their mothers for forced labor. The journey itself ultimately left many children orphaned and many parents childless. Some children whose parents had died continued traveling with neighbors, friends, or strangers; others attempted the trek alone. After often harrowing journeys, children arrived in Flensburg, Schleswig, Berlin, Leipzig, and other towns and cities the Allies deemed suitable for accepting refugees. It was then that the Kindersuchdienst authorities began the arduous process of identifying them.
That process involved a whole new set of difficulties. Children often arrived unidentifiable even when they had come from NSV homes. Although some had nametags around their necks or names sewed into their clothing, most did not. Those accompanying them could sometimes relay their stories, but often nothing was known beyond the point of origin of their train, bus, or boat.Footnote 44 To make matters worse, even seemingly accurate information could not always be trusted. As Szperlinski wrote at the time, “From experience we have learned that children from these transports are often labeled with the wrong names.” And the fact that “the child's name is inscribed in her dress is absolutely not definitive [about her real identity] since in many cases it has become clear that children—especially ones sent on by the NSV—are very often wearing other children's clothing.”Footnote 45
Insufficient information or the presumed death of a parent posed special problems in the case of nonverbal children. As one mother wrote to her pastor in December 1945, “Oh, please, please help me find my little child. . . . She is so hard to find because she can't say when she was born or even what her name is.”Footnote 46 In other instances, infants languished in children's homes because no one claimed them: in August 1945, for example, a baby girl several weeks old was found wrapped in newspaper in the Fichtebunker, an air raid shelter in Berlin. There was no indication to whom she belonged or from where she had come, and she had no distinctive features or birthmarks that might have helped to identify her. She was given the name Brigitte Fichter and taken to a children's home in Berlin. In addition to combing its own files for a mother who had lost her child in the Fichtebunker, the Kindersuchdienst passed her information on to the International Tracing Service (ITS) as a possible non-German.Footnote 47 ITS kept Brigitte's file open until 1949, when they concluded that “there is so little information about the child's identity that we do not see any reason to keep open the case any further.”Footnote 48 Not all cases were this tragic: some children who had been found alone and hungry, with few clues about their identification, were eventually reunited with their relations. Frau Anni, for example, told the Kindersuchdienst that she had lost her children (Brigitte and Horst, born in 1942 and 1943) at a train station in Berlin on September 21, 1945. Searching their files, the Kindersuchdienst discovered that an unidentified and unclaimed Brigitte, born approximately in 1942, had been brought to a refugee camp in Berlin. They obtained a photograph from the refugee camp and sent it to Frau Anni, who immediately identified her daughter. The two were reunited, but her son was never found. Such cases of relatively easy identification were especially common in the first two postwar years.Footnote 49
The utilization of broadcast and print media, which began in earnest in 1946, boosted the Kindersuchdienst's success in identifying displaced children. Lists of missing children's names, along with their ages, nationalities, birthdates, and their last known residences, were broadcast on the radio in Frankfurt, Munich, and Stuttgart between 1:30 and 2:00 p.m. and 11:30 p.m. and midnight.Footnote 50 Initial efforts lacked organization: children's names were not grouped geographically, which meant that listeners had to pay attention to each name read from the list. This led to many false identifications, as overanxious parents heard names that seemed familiar, but then missed other essential identifying information.Footnote 51 It was not until 1950 that the files were reorganized according to the geographical location of the searcher and the searched—a step that dramatically improved success rates. In February 1946 the Kindersuchdienst expanded the use of media by publishing posters with pictures of forty missing children: twenty boys and twenty girls. As one Red Cross nurse recalled, “Many people still remember those posters, where a cruel fate was visible in each child's face.”Footnote 52 The posters proved much more successful than the radio broadcasts had been. After just one year, half the children pictured on the posters had been reunited with their parents; “case closed” was then stamped on the child's photograph to publicize the Kindersuchdienst's successes. Newspapers and the youth magazine Penguin also printed photographs and descriptions of missing children, and, beginning in February 1946, lists of unaccompanied children were regularly sent to the National Tracing Bureaus of Poland, Czechoslovakia, the Netherlands, France, Luxemburg, and, for Jewish children, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (AJDC) and the Jewish Agency for Palestine. Even movie houses were used to track missing children. By May 1947, 750 cinemas in the British zone alone were projecting missing children's names on the screens before showing a featured film.Footnote 53
To augment the media campaigns already being used to trace lost children, the Kindersuchdienst later began a new type of broadcast: radio advertisements that encouraged foster parents to “fulfill their duties” by registering with the organization any unaccompanied children in their households, even if those children had already been registered with a church. It was just such a broadcast that prompted Herr M. to write the Kindersuchdienst, informing them that he had taken in Jürgen S. (b. 1941) as a foster child and that Jürgen's brother lived in a neighboring town. The boys could tell them little beyond the fact that they had come from Stettin, and Herr M. wanted to know whether the boys' parents were searching for them.Footnote 54 These radio broadcasts only had limited success in persuading refugee families to report the children whom they had taken in during flight. The often harrowing experiences they shared during their flight westward caused many to integrate the children into their own families: as a result, many of these children were not even registered as being among the lost when they arrived in the West. Situations like this confounded the Kindersuchdienst's work and perplexed Eastern German authorities.Footnote 55
Even more distressing was the knowledge that registering children with the Kindersuchdienst did not necessarily guarantee a good outcome for the child. Frau W., whose story was told at the beginning of this article, followed protocol and turned over Anna, her friend's seven-year-old daughter, to the Red Cross authorities when she arrived in Berlin. Having learned that Anna's mother had been there just two days earlier looking for the girl, Frau W. was confident that a reunion was imminent. It was not. The Soviets had repatriated Anna's mother to her prewar home in Estonia before she was able to find Anna, who ultimately spent two years in East German orphanages before being reunited with her mother. Decades later, Anna admitted that she still felt she had been abandoned by Frau W., asking the woman's daughter during a 1990 visit, “How could your mother have given me up?” She remained utterly convinced that she would have been better off had she stayed with Frau W. and her daughters.Footnote 56 Frau W. had acted in what she thought was the child's best interest, but her decision led to years of misery and long-term psychological trauma for Anna.
In addition to its appeals through the media, the Kindersuchdienst also worked with Protestant and Catholic churches in the West. For many needy Germans, the church represented a safe haven—a place that provided food for the hungry, shelter for the homeless, and help in the search for lost children. Many people also registered unaccompanied children in their care with their churches. Even after churches in the West had turned over formal control of the search process to the Kindersuchdienst, both Protestant and Catholic clergy, especially nuns, continued to assist those in their congregations whose children were missing; they also answered calls from those who wished to adopt.
Single parents, especially mothers who initiated searches before their husbands had returned from war, relied on both the Kindersuchdienst and the churches in their searches for lost children. Frau M. was among the women who made the difficult choice to surrender her child to the temporary safety of the church. In 1944, as her own health deteriorated and the bombing of Berlin ramped up once more, she placed her two-year-old daughter, Helga, in a Catholic children's home in Silesia. Frau M. lost track of Helga when the children were transferred to an NSV home in March 1945 in advance of the Red Army. That NSV home was later also evacuated, and after the war, Frau M. actively searched for her daughter. She regularly wrote to newspapers, to the Kindersuchdienst, as well as to the Polish and Czechoslovakian Red Crosses; contacted the Catholic nurses who had cared for Helga and evacuated her from the Silesian children's home; and got in touch with the nurses who had run the NSV children's home that cared for her daughter at the end of the war. “I don't want to miss anything or leave anything untried to find my child again,” Frau M. explained.Footnote 57 By the time her husband returned from the Soviet Union in 1948, she had spent three years searching in vain for Helga.
Frau M.'s diligent, sometimes frantic, search motivated others to help.Footnote 58 Her most important contact was Sister Bathildis, the nun who had originally cared for Helga during her evacuation. When the sister discovered that “her children” had disappeared in 1945, she dedicated herself to finding them.Footnote 59 Although she eventually found some of the other children who had been in her charge, she failed to find Helga. This case underscores the fact that even the most dogged and tenacious mothers sometimes failed to find their children.
The likelihood of missing children being reunited with family after World War II was influenced by a number of factors, including their ages and the time and circumstances of their arrival in Germany. Older children who presented themselves to authorities and asked for shelter were among the easiest to help. They knew their own names and could give authorities important leads on how to locate their families. A second group of children who could often be traced were evacuees—youths from group homes and EKLV camps in the East who had been moved out by the Nazis as the Soviets approached. Some irresponsible Hitler Youth leaders simply abandoned their charges; left alone to find their own way home, these children were very difficult to trace.Footnote 60 But this was not the norm. In most cases, the children traveled as a group from EKLV camps to children's homes or foster families in Germany or Austria, under the auspices of the youth departments or the NSV.Footnote 61 Records often existed detailing the destinations and names of the leaders who had accompanied the children from individual EKLV camps during the evacuation process.Footnote 62 While this information alone was not always enough to locate a child, it provided authorities with leads for pursuing the search.
Wartime chaos and the passage of time were not the only factors hampering the mission of the Kindersuchdienst. The agency also faced economic constraints and local obstacles that impeded efforts to reunite families. The lengthy process of determining whether children were truly orphans strained both the patience and budgets of local youth department officials. Already in 1946, two newspapers—Tägliche Rundschau and Nachtexpress—published articles asking people from across Germany to take in war orphans voluntarily. The response included willing families from Bavaria, Switzerland, the United States, and even South Africa.Footnote 63
Many refugee children were given up for adoption immediately after the war, only for youth department authorities to discover later that they were not really orphans.Footnote 64 In time, it became clear that the failure to find a child's parents did not necessarily mean the parents were dead. Fathers held as POWs and mothers deported or held in the East as forced laborers could not communicate with child search agencies or make their own whereabouts known, sometimes for years after the war; this made it impossible to rule out their eventual return. Such uncertainty made potential adoptive couples understandably wary, leading some to drop out of the process altogether. Others began conducting their own investigations to ascertain that the child they had chosen to adopt was, in fact, “free.” When Herr G., a Lichtenburg district government employee, wanted to adopt a child, he began making regular visits to the camp for refugee children in his neighborhood and spoke at length to the nurse who worked there. Herr G. inquired about a boy named Dieter (b. 1942). The nurse revealed that Dieter had been brought in by his grandmother, who reported that Dieter's mother had died after being raped by Soviet soldiers and that his father had been killed in the war. The grandmother wanted to return to Poland on her own, without the responsibility of caring for the young boy. This information made the nurse fairly confident that no one would return later for Dieter. With this reassurance, Herr G. decided to adopt him.Footnote 65
The fear of not placing children—of leaving them in an indefinite state of limbo—sometimes caused youth department authorities to make rash decisions, which is precisely what happened in the case of Frau F., who had lost her son Rudi in 1942. When she thought she saw his picture on a Kindersuchdienst poster ten years later, she wrote the organization with a description of her child—only to learn that the child in the picture had been aboard the transport ship Moltkefels when it sank in the Baltic Sea in April 1945. He was rescued and brought with a train transport of children to Flensburg, where he became a ward of the Flensburg youth department. The youth department searched for his parents, but had no idea about his identity—not even his first name—so simply called him “Norbert S.”
In 1947, five years after she had lost her son, Frau F. was contacted by the youth department and told that the children from the sunken ship had been taken to Flensburg. But no one in the Flensburg youth department had made the connection between Rudi and “Norbert.” A year later, in the summer of 1948, the Flensburg youth department, struggling to support the large number of children for whom it still held guardianship, became more determined to place children who seemed unlikely ever to be reunited with their birth families. In was in this context that Norbert was cleared for adoption in South Africa—without first checking with the Kindersuchdienst. Thus it was that, in 1952, he was still pictured on a Kindersuchdienst poster that Frau F. came across. The Kindersuchdienst contacted the Flensburg youth department to alert them to the tragic mistake. The cultural minister from Schleswig-Holstein wrote in its defense that Norbert was unlikely to be Rudi because Rudi had been traveling with his older sister, but Norbert had been found alone. Dr. Szprelinski of the Kindersuchdienst wrote back that it was absurd to think that separated siblings were evidence of anything, given that siblings commonly became separated when ships sank. Norbert S. nevertheless remained in South Africa, and the Kindersuchdienst expressed its hope that the youth department would now realize the importance of working together and sharing information.Footnote 66
Rudi/Norbert's case represents everything that was wrong with the postwar placement decision-making process. It reveals the frustrations, misperceptions, and bitter disappointments that occurred in the ongoing struggle to determine what was best for Germany's lost children. The Flensburg youth department believed that Norbert would be better off in a secure family in South Africa rather than waiting in a children's home with only a slim hope that his parents would eventually find him. The Kindersuchdienst disagreed, at least in part, because they believed they had found his mother.
In the West, the desire of youth department workers to place displaced children, of the Kindersuchdienst to reunite families, and of families to find stability made for complicated conditions for policy makers. Youth department authorities acted as guardians for unaccompanied children; they shared potential adoptive parents' fears that long-lost parents might one day reappear to claim their children, and struggled with the belief that biological parents should be allowed to reclaim their children, even if those children had already been placed in adoptive homes. In fact, the availability of foster homes sometimes dissuaded authorities from pursuing extended searches for children's biological parents. By contrast, Kindersuchdienst officials were concerned that too many adoptions had been carried out prematurely immediately after the war, and thus insisted that adoption contracts be reversible in order to protect the rights of biological parents. Emphasizing the impediments that had kept many biological parents from carrying out their own searches, Kindersuchdienst director Kurt Wagner pointed out that such a policy had been adopted in several states in the Soviet zone, including Mecklenburg, Thuringia, and Saxony-Anhalt.Footnote 67 After much deliberation, West German justices decreed in 1952 that although it might create a hardship for some biological parents, making adoption reversible would undermine the care and security of adoptive children and adoptive families.Footnote 68
This decision did not appease Kindersuchdienst officials, who suspected that local youth department authorities were motivated more by a desire to avoid months (and sometimes years) of detective work and extra costs than by their concern for the children's best interests.Footnote 69 In a letter to the federal government from 1953, Wagner emphasized that “the motto ‘do what is best for the child,’ so often quoted by officials, is not always sufficient and certainly not unambiguous.” Children, especially young ones, grew and fit into foster families, but he worried that this could result in their “being robbed of their birth parents.” Wagner believed that the solution lay in closer communication between Kindersuchdienst authorities and local youth department workers before adoption took place.Footnote 70 Many years later, in 1972, German Red Cross authorities raised the issue once more, asking whether parents had a right to information about their children's whereabouts and whether postwar adoptions could be dissolved. In a response that likely reflected both concern for children and societal stability, the Minstry of Justice responded that biological parents did not have a legal right to demand information about their children if they had been successfully adopted—even if, in approving the adoption, the court had incorrectly assumed that the parents were dead. Biological parents could petition to have the adoption dissolved, but in considering the petition, the court would take into account the child's best interest, as well as the wishes of the adoptive parents.Footnote 71
Efforts to repair fractured families in postwar West Germany proved difficult. When Herr S. returned from the Eastern front, he searched for his wife and their daughter, Karin (b. 1942), whom he had not seen since 1943. He registered with the Kindersuchdienst, searched through records of refugees from Silesia, asked questions of many authorities, and eventually recognized Karin's picture on a Kindersuchdienst poster. The next day, he went to the house where he found Karin living and learned that Karin had been found among the ruins of a school after a bombing raid in 1945; her mother had disappeared and was presumed dead. Though overjoyed to see her, Herr S. decided that Karin was better off remaining with her new family than returning to a life with him.
Herr S.'s story did not end there, however. He returned to Hamburg, where he met and married a war widow after going through proper legal channels to have his first wife declared dead. They then had a daughter together. In 1948, he received a letter from the Red Cross informing him that his first wife and their daughter, Karin, had survived the war and were living in Hamburg—a stunning revelation. When he went to Hamburg to see them, he learned the tragic story of their flight from Silesia and about their long search for him. Despite the Kindersuchdienst's assistance and his own certainty that he had already located Karin, he discovered that the girl he had met was a different Karin—the same age and general description as his daughter, but a different child altogether. In his bewilderment, Herr S. turned to the same court that had pronounced his first wife dead. The judge gave him one year to decide which family he would choose.Footnote 72 This case, admittedly an extreme example, shows how myriad obstacles could block successful reunification—even when parents made every effort to locate their children and received aid from the Kindersuchdienst, and even when all family members were in the West. In the midst of postwar social and economic turmoil, it was clearly not just the Cold War that prevented reunifications.
The Search and Placement of Displaced Children under State Socialism
Denazification and the introduction of state socialism had a direct effect on the care and search for displaced children in the Soviet occupation zone (Sowjetische Besatzungszone, SBZ) and East Germany. The Suchdienst was founded there immediately after the war, and the scant remaining evidence of its activities indicates that authorities in the Soviet zone focused more keenly on establishing socialism than in searching for missing children. Millions of refugees from the East, including many unaccompanied children, flooded into the SBZ. The Soviets tried to send the refugees into the Western occupation zones, but about 4.3 million—including 1.17 million children by 1948—remained in the SBZ.Footnote 73 In addition, the far-reaching denazification program in the Soviet zone dramatically reduced the number of government personnel, leaving youth departments and welfare offices desperately understaffed.Footnote 74 In fact, the focus on bringing the entire youth welfare system in the SBZ under the control of the newly established Volksbildung—the administration founded by the SMAD to bring all youth education and welfare under socialist control—resulted in “near-total stagnation . . . [of] the systems and facilities which cared for the children.”Footnote 75 Thereafter, decisions regarding unaccompanied children were left largely to local authorities, whose ability to act was severely limited by dire economic conditions, personnel shortages, and food scarcity (due, in part, to Soviet military requisitions). Initially, the churches used their international connections to supplement the minimal allocations budgeted to them locally for such children, but church officials who took advantage of this resource were later criticized by authorities once the new regime had consolidated its control over youth welfare.
The focus on establishing state socialism affected the treatment of children in other ways as well. The Central Administration for German Settlers in the Soviet Occupation Zone (Zentralverwaltung für deutsche Umsiedler, ZVU) recognized that children were less attached than adults were to their former lives and, as a result, more easily incorporated into the newly developing socialist society. As ZVU officials put it: “Theirs is a new life, and it is important to us that they be educated for this new life.”Footnote 76 Unaccompanied children were brought into the Free German Youth, trained as farm laborers, and engaged in many other activities and groups intended to draw them into East German society.Footnote 77 Attitudes toward unaccompanied children were also shaped by the desire to incorporate women, including mothers, into the labor force. Children's homes and other available buildings that had housed unaccompanied children across the SBZ were now needed to provide child-care space for working mothers.Footnote 78 As a result, unaccompanied children presented a new economic challenge for building state socialism as early as 1945. Rather than engage in long searches for biological families or devote staff to time-consuming adoptions, the Soviets and the East Germans saw unremunerated foster care as the answer to widespread displacement. Some church leaders also became involved in placing children; in 1946, for example, a Catholic priest in Chemnitz wrote to state authorities describing a “true Christian and a fine woman” who had lost her son and wanted to take in either a returning soldier or someone who “had been orphaned by the Allied terror bombing.”Footnote 79
Search-related problems that drew attention in the West in 1945 were not immediately recognized in the SBZ. It was not until 1948 that officials in the East began to express alarm about the potential problems associated with children taken in by refugee families that had no biological relationship to the children and had not registered them with the Suchdienst. Authorities in the East suspected that the foster families had ulterior motives, acting not out of concern for the children, but rather out of a desire to increase their food rations or improve their housing situation. These concerns prompted new guidelines calling for youth departments, the courts, the Suchdienst, the churches, the unions, women's organizations, and the Volkssolidarität charity organization to work together to find all children not living with their biological families (including those in children's homes and foster families), and to register them with the youth departments. This decree was part of an effort to locate and bring the large numbers of parentless children under greater state control.Footnote 80
The Soviets and East Germans had a lower success rate in child placement than their counterparts in the West did. The inability to determine who was truly an orphan proved so difficult that, by 1949, only forty-six adoptions had been concluded in Mecklenburg—a state that had taken in about twelve thousand unaccompanied children.Footnote 81 This extremely low number of adoptions reflected the universally difficult process of verifying children's status as orphans, the dire shortage of youth department personnel in Mecklenburg, as well as the very high number of orphans arriving in Mecklenburg with refugee transports from the East. It did not reflect a lack of families in the East interested in adopting, however. In 1946, the Saxony State Commission of People's Solidarity told Mecklenburg authorities that they could provide volunteers to care for up to one thousand orphaned girls who had no siblings and were between ages three and five. Lucie Hardt, the director of the State Youth Office in Schwerin, requested that the twenty-seven youth departments in Mecklenburg create lists of available children; a month later, she found that the departments had submitted only 132 names. She forwarded the meager list with a warning that
each of these cases necessitates time-consuming negotiations to be able to state with [any] certainty [whether] the parents of these children are indeed deceased. In practice, very often a parent presumed dead will be found. I therefore recommend to place these children as foster children in their adoptive homes and to continue the investigation. Since we are, for the most part, forced to rely on the statements of the children themselves, each legal finalization of the adoptions should be pursued with the greatest caution.Footnote 82
She further noted that many of the children on the list had siblings, but made no mention of the Suchdienst or the children's best interests. Instead, the focus remained on the larger goal of moving unaccompanied children out of state-run children's homes in order to make space for the communal care of children of working mothers. Although foster-care arrangements were made more frequently than adoptions were in the SBZ, each of the eastern Länder (states) adjusted their interpretation of adoption guidelines to allow parents up to the age of fifty to adopt, with the understanding that adoptions could be reversed if biological parents were to return and reclaim their children.Footnote 83
The separation of German families during World War II often left parents and children on opposite sides of the postwar East-West divide. Coordination between authorities on opposite sides of the Elbe river were obviously critical to the reunification process, but Soviet military authorities and East German leaders rejected opportunities to collaborate with the West—regardless of whether such efforts might be in the best interests of the children.Footnote 84 Despite resistance in the SBZ, Western authorities knowledgeable about the problems associated with lost children persisted in trying to work with their Eastern colleagues. In December 1946, Pastor Wilhelm Schmidt founded a Search Service Working Group in the West with the express goal of exchanging information with East Berlin's Suchdienst workers. This “contractually regulated agreement” led to the sharing of lists of missing children, and between 1946 and 1948, the Kindersuchdienst sent eight thousand children's files to East Berlin. In the Soviet zone, religious authorities called on their congregations to compile lists of parentless children; ten thousand names were subsequently sent to Hamburg.Footnote 85 Individual youth departments in the Soviet zone also maintained contact with the Western Kindersuchdienst and enlisted its help with cases they could not solve alone.
As the Cold War intensified, sharing information between East and West became increasingly difficult, and the growing atmosphere of distrust jeopardized children's chances of being reunited with their families. In August and again in December 1950, East Berlin municipal authorities reminded local youth department officials to work exclusively through the Soviet zone Suchdienst in Berlin—which, it promised, would contact the Kindersuchdienst when necessary.Footnote 86 These efforts to stop Eastern youth departments from cooperating directly with the Western Kindersuchdienst only complicated the search process even further. Even after children had been located, reuniting them with their families located on the other side proved slow and difficult. Because German citizens could not move freely between the occupation zones, Red Cross nurses from the British zone took responsibility for traveling from the West to the East and then back again to reunite children with their biological parents—only to be regularly harassed and fined by East German authorities at the borders.Footnote 87 Even when children were located through collaborative efforts, getting them to the West required lengthy negotiations. As the Kindersuchdienst warned one grandmother, “You will have to be patient since experience has shown that the return of every child demands time.”Footnote 88 There were some successes, however: a group of seventy-seven children painstakingly tracked down by the DRK was brought from East Germany to West Germany in January 1954, for example.Footnote 89 Another joint effort by the Kindersuchdienst and Suchdienst included a volume containing the photographs of 405 missing children.Footnote 90 After the publication of this volume, however, collaboration between the East and the West abruptly came to an end.
German Children Stranded in Eastern Europe after 1945
Even more complicated than the reunification cases within divided Germany were the cases in which German children or their parents were stranded in Eastern European countries at the end of the war. As countries in Eastern Europe expelled their German populations, parents and children were often placed in different camps or sent West at different times; sometimes children were held in the East while adults were allowed to head westward. In other cases adults conscripted as forced laborers were separated from their children. Initially, the children of conscripted workers were placed in children's homes or sent back to Germany. For example, Frau F. reported on her search form that when she was deported to the East, “the Poles took my [daughter Bärbel] away from me, just as they did the children of all the other mothers.” In 1946, she learned that Bärbel had been sent back to Germany.Footnote 91 Dieter P. was fleeing westward with his mother and grandfather when, “around 3:00 a.m., the soldiers—Russians—rode up on horses” and took his mother. His grandfather cared for him on their former East Prussian estate (by this time occupied by Poles) until he eventually succeeded in securing permission for Dieter and himself to travel to their relatives in the Soviet zone of Germany. In the three and a half years that Dieter spent with his relatives, he received word only once that his mother was still alive—until she then unexpectedly came home in late 1948.Footnote 92
Older German youths were also sometimes sent to the East to help rebuild Poland and the Soviet Union. The brutal conditions under which they lived and worked led to the death of many of these conscripted youth. Frau B. tearfully described her brother's disappearance: “We lost him during the flight. . . . The Russians took him. He was two days short of his sixteenth birthday. My mother never heard from him again.” After years of searching, her father learned from the DRK that he had died in a train on a bitter cold day in February 1945, shortly after he had been taken from them.Footnote 93 In other cases, German children like Hans B.—whose story is told at the beginning of this article—were found in the former Nazi-occupied lands and put in orphanages, where they received rudimentary care, did work for the Soviets if they were able, and sometimes learned Russian. In late 1947, the Red Cross and the Soviets agreed to transfer back to Germany thousands of German children who still remained in Eastern Europe. The transfers occurred in two operations: the Polish transports brought children from the formerly Polish lands that now belonged to the Soviet Union; the Kaliningrad transports brought nearly six thousand orphans, including Hans B., from former Königsberg to Germany in October 1947.Footnote 94
The war's devastating impact on Eastern European demographics made the goal of replenishing the population a top priority throughout the region. German and half-German children were integrated into the native populations whenever possible. In fact, the Soviets caused outrage among German citizens, within the Catholic Church, and even on the part of the American military when they supposedly began kidnapping German boys off the streets of the SBZ in 1946.Footnote 95 In Poland, social workers reportedly visited German refugee camps—the one in Potulice among them—and selectively removed children they thought would be desirable additions to Poland's population.Footnote 96 In her memoir of a refugee childhood, Martha Kent recalls that when she and her siblings accompanied their mother from Potulice to a Polish farm to work, her mother made them repeat the sentence, “I want to stay with my mother.” What lacked sense at the time took on meaning when the farmer's wife twice tried to convince the children to stay with her—where they “would be free and have plenty to eat.”Footnote 97 One German woman even reported that children in Yugoslavia were being sold straight out of the camps.Footnote 98
After adoption by Eastern European families, German children were free to assume the nationality of their adoptive parents, becoming Poles, Czechoslovakians, Russians, or Yugoslavians.Footnote 99 Pointing to the baptism of some German children into different faiths and to the disguising of their birth names, Herr v. Zahn of the Protestant Church noted in 1949 that the “ruthless deviousness with which certain groups in Poland are stealing children could not be made more clear.”Footnote 100 Czechoslovakian law stated that any children whose parents had “disappeared” were free to be permanently adopted if their parents had not returned within one year to reclaim them. This deadline did not provide ample time to coordinate a search for missing children for the many German parents who spent months and years in custody as conscripted workers and POWs.Footnote 101 UNRRA's Child Search Branch workers were determined to repatriate all children who had been kidnapped from other countries by the Nazis and brought to Germany, but, in some cases, their efforts further complicated the problem of reuniting German children with their families. UNRRA workers routinely scoured lists of the residents of German children's homes for non-German children and, in the process, sometimes inadvertently “repatriated” German children whose names “sounded” foreign. Because UNRRA records were off-limits to German authorities, the Kindersuchdienst could not trace these children or inform parents of their fates.Footnote 102
Despite political conditions that discouraged searches, the Kindersuchdienst continued looking for German children in Eastern Europe long after the war had ended. Its workers carried on with their letter-writing campaigns, asking the Polish, Czechoslovakian, Yugoslavian, and Soviet branches of the Red Cross for information about groups of children and individual children who were lost. They even sometimes appealed to the Vatican for help in applying pressure on Polish and Czechoslovakian authorities.Footnote 103 But politics usually played a decisive role in states' decisions about the fate of German children left in Eastern Europe. After 1949, Czechoslovakian authorities were, for obvious reasons, only willing to return children to East Germany, whereas West German children were integrated into Czechoslovakian families. Romania, Hungary, and Yugoslavia were willing to return German children to West Germany, at least in theory, but this rarely occurred in practice.Footnote 104 For instance, Romanian authorities promised to return 600 West German children between Christmas and New Year's Day of 1957. Kindersuchdienst authorities learned through a phone call on December 16 that the number of children had been lowered by 160 and that there was still no list of which children would be sent.Footnote 105 Equally frustrating were the cases of children who had become separated from their mothers during the evacuation of Königsberg in 1945, and then frequently taken in by Latvian families. Because Latvia was incorporated into the Soviet Union and thus cut off from any communication with the West, the foster families, many of which subsequently adopted the children, were sheltered from inquiries from the West. Red Cross officers warned one desperate father that any attempts to locate his four young children—they had been taken in by Latvian families after his wife had died—would likely lead to their being swept further into the Soviet Union.Footnote 106
Simply locating children was not always enough to ensure their return to their parents in Germany. In 1954, a German boy named Reinhold, whom the Kindersuchdienst had found in Gdansk, wrote his father a loving letter that had to be translated from Polish, since he no longer spoke German: he thanked his father for finding him, but assured him that there was no need to worry, since the Polish “national community is really good, they look after me well, are raising me in the Polish spirit and support me.” In other cases, parents located their children, but had no way of successfully negotiating the Polish legal system, which favored keeping formerly German children in Polish families.Footnote 107 Most unfortunate were the Wolfskinder, who lived on their own, moving from barn to barn, mostly in Latvia, for years after the war. Rumors that the Soviets planned to ship them farther eastward made them fearful of all authorities; this left them unregistered and thus unable to be found.Footnote 108
These problems induced by the Cold War were exacerbated by the passage of time, which may have reduced the odds of finding lost relatives, but did not stop families and individuals from searching and sometimes succeeding in finding their loved ones. Not until 1976 did Liesabeth Otto, a surviving Wolfskind, write a letter in Russian (since she had forgotten German) that provided details she could remember about her previous life, including her German name, the names of her parents and siblings, and her hometown. Now knowing her German name, the Kindersuchdienst was able to reunite her with her father, who had conducted a decades-long search for her.Footnote 109 Some displaced German children initiated searches of their own once they were old enough to do it or after their foster parents had died. In 1973, Christa G. (b. 1944) initiated such a search for her parents and relatives. A radio broadcast announced that a girl born in 1944 had been separated from her relatives during the bombing of Dresden on the night of February 13-14, 1945, and taken to a children's home in Rathen, Saxony. Two women who had lost their daughters in the Dresden bombings responded to the announcement, but blood tests found no biological link to Christa.Footnote 110
Hannelore R., by contrast, had better luck with the search she initiated in 1970. Her parents had fled from East Prussia in January 1945 with their other three children; Hannelore was hospitalized for ear surgery at the time. After the war, her parents learned that the hospital had been evacuated by ship on January 21, 1945, but then lost all trace of Hannelore. When Hannelore wrote the Kindersuchdienst, she included what little she knew about her past: she had arrived in Schweinemunde by ship on January 21, and she had a scar behind her ear (likely from an operation) and a mole on her leg. She also included two photographs—one of her at eighteen months and one of her as an adult. A Kindersuchdienst worker in Hamburg recognized the early photograph from a poster the Eastern Suchdienst had sent to the Kindersuchdienst in 1951. Hannelore, who had grown up in East Germany and still lived there with her own three children, soon learned that her parents and siblings were in Recklinghausen in West Germany.Footnote 111 This case clearly indicates that even during the Cold War, East Germans were still able to seek help from the Kindersuchdienst. It was not until 1990, when the Eastern Suchdienst and Western Kindersuchdienst were finally integrated, that East-West coordination enabled a further 1,801 children to be reunited with their biological relatives—though, in many cases, the reunion was one between siblings, not parents and children.Footnote 112
One final noteworthy twist in the search process reflected the changing perceptions of those who had been lost. Whereas some young adults embraced the opportunity to search for their birth families, others refused to get involved in the search process at all. When the Kindersuchdienst proposed Maria R. as a possible daughter for one set of parents in 1972, the couple, who had been searching for their daughter for twenty-six years, were overjoyed. In the end, though, the girl, who was living in Czechoslovakia, refused to meet them, claiming that she already had loving parents and was not willing to have her life turned upside down.Footnote 113 As adults, these formerly lost children could now assess for themselves what they thought represented their own best interests—and act on that assessment. In this way the war's youngest victims were able to regain their own agency, at least to a limited degree, in the postwar period.
Conclusion
World War II left several million German children separated from their relatives and far from home. These children found themselves in EKLV camps, in children's homes, in former Nazi-occupied territories, or stationed throughout the Reich performing wartime duties. As the war drew to a close, they began the long trek homeward. Waves of children flooded into Germany from the East, exacerbating already desperate living conditions. Most were homeless; many had been separated from their parents; all were trying to find their families and return home. Almost all of Germany's lost children were victims of Nazi policy, which had first taken their fathers away to war, then conscripted their mothers to work, and finally displaced the children themselves to the far corners of the Reich—only to abandon them in the final months of the war. Against great odds, the vast majority of these children found their way home with a minimum of institutional help. The German and Allied militaries at times gave them rides; local authorities housed them at night as they passed through towns and villages; refugee camps fed them, and the Kindersuchdienst occasionally provided them with guidance. For the most part, these relatively fortunate children knew where they lived or where to find their families, and were thus never registered as lost.
Beyond these children, however, were the hundreds of thousands of others who had been displaced and could not return home because they were too young or too sick to travel, because they had been wounded, or because they now found themselves in newly non-German territories. Some found that the Iron Curtain marked an impenetrable barrier to information about their families or identities. Others were held in camps on farms, in children's homes, or with non-biological families. Displaced German children could be found in all of the occupation zones of Germany, though the Soviet zone had the largest share early on because of the influx from the East. Lost children whose parents had died needed immediate institutional help. It was these displaced children who were hardest hit by UNRRA's refusal to search for “enemy children,” and who suffered indirectly: first from the effects of denazification policies, and subsequently from the adverse consequences of Cold War realities.
In the West, the Kindersuchdienst devised a sophisticated system to identify and search for children. Driven by the Western German priority of reuniting families, dedicated child-search workers, together with youth department authorities and churches, enabled hundreds of thousands of children to be reunited with their families in Germany itself. As noted in a July 1946 issue of Die Neue Zeitung, a newspaper published in the American zone, “It is easy to increase unhappiness. It is difficult for a people to overcome . . . unhappiness. A mother finds her child. This happiness is a tiny contribution, a small building block for the rebuilding of Germany.”Footnote 114 With the war slowly receding into the past and the economy rebounding, West Germans strove to put National Socialism behind them and create “normalization and [the] stabilization of political, social, and cultural relationships.”Footnote 115 That “the war might have brought not only political and economic collapse but also the destruction of the smallest cell of social life”—namely, families themselves—was a fear that added urgency to the search process.Footnote 116 Intact families were heralded as critical to West German recovery and thus worthy of much-needed assistance and protection.
Yet, even in the West, the challenges posed by lost and missing children were difficult to solve. Family policy designed to encourage reproduction and to support intact families overlooked the needs of many other war-torn families.Footnote 117 Widows raising children on their own faced profound difficulties as the male breadwinner model was increasingly held up, once again, as the societal ideal. In addition, the goal of reuniting families sometimes clashed with the reality of meeting children's immediate needs. The postwar era was, in the words of Kurt Böhme, “a time of such great need and great distress that there was not adequate space for calm consideration, for plans crafted in careful detail. It was a matter of improvising so as not to suffocate in the demands of the day.”Footnote 118 Waiting for the possible return of a missing parent in the distant future was not necessarily a top priority, then, nor was it deemed absolutely vital to a child's best interests. The uncertain status of missing, lost, and displaced children continued to hamper efforts to restore the families thought to be the cornerstone of West German society.
In East Germany the determination to build a socialist state had a profound impact on the search process and the experience of displaced children. The deluge of refugee children from Eastern Europe was dealt with in myriad ways, but with considerably less emphasis on searching for biological parents than was the case in the West. In the immediate postwar months, names of children in refugee camps were entered onto lists used by both the Eastern Suchdienst and the Western Kindersuchdienst. Children who ended up in smaller towns in the Soviet zone became the responsibility of local youth departments, which were even more shorthanded than those in the West because of rigorous denazification policies. A lack of personnel, combined with dire financial shortages, made it increasingly difficult to help displaced children and further lowered the priority of searching for biological families. At the same time, the state effort to build socialism made foster care and communal living more attractive options for these children and placed a premium on incorporating them into socialist society, rather than locating biological families or building adoptive families.
Even more complicated were the cases of children separated from their families by the East-West divide. Given the tremendous displacement of populations in the immediate postwar period, cooperation between the East and the West was necessary for the child welfare system to function effectively. As we have seen, East German child-search workers were pressured to stop cooperating with their counterparts in the West. Collaborative East-West efforts to reunite children with their families consequently declined after 1946, and a growing number of cases remained unresolved despite perseverance by Kindersuchdienst authorities. Even more problematic were the cases in which German children remained in Eastern Europe. Over time, Western Allies hardened their attitudes toward the East and became less inclined to repatriate Eastern European children. Eastern countries responded in kind, making it harder to get German children out of Eastern Europe. Most German children who were recovered from Eastern Europe were placed on transports operated by the Red Cross: only a handful of these individuals were found by the Kindersuchdienst.
The state ideology that guided policy toward displaced children differed in the East and West, and yet—at the level of local implementation and in the context of the two German states in Cold War Europe—youth authorities tried to help individual children and, to the greatest extent possible, identify and act in their best interests. The challenge, of course, lay in defining each child's “best interests.” Whereas some children never wavered in their conviction that they belonged with their biological parents, others who had lost their parents when they were too young to realize what was happening subsequently became integral members of their adoptive or foster families; many refused to participate in searches when contacted by the Kindersuchdienst because they did not want to upset their new families. Others initiated searches much later in life in order to avoid hurting their foster or adoptive parents as long as they were still alive. The actions of these children confirm sociologist Diane Wolf's conclusion—based on her study of Jewish children who survived the war in hiding—that “what matters is a connection with a caring adult, even if he or she is not the biological parent.”Footnote 119 It short, many children, known to us today only through reports from their brokenhearted biological parents and inconclusive Kindersuchdienst files, did, in fact, find good homes.
Although the majority of German children displaced by the war found their way home largely on their own, a significant number was unable to do so. This group usually relied on institutional help to find their families and integrate into the two postwar German societies. By examining the trials endured by German children in the postwar era, the foregoing discussion makes clear that the root cause of most German children's displacement and suffering lay in the Nazis' failure to plan for an orderly evacuation of the East or to protect the civilian population in the face of flight and military defeat. The postwar effort to care for and place these children in new homes was substantially hampered by the chaos and deprivation that characterized occupied Germany. The implementation of denazification policies and the onset of the Cold War further compromised any sustained or unified focus on the social placement of the children themselves. Further, the experiences of displaced children were directly affected by their geographic location at the end of the war. The surviving sources reveal the positive results of the hard work carried out by the Kindersuchdienst and Suchdienst, by youth departments, by churches, and by individual parents. Their ability to aid displaced children—and even their determination of what help a child needed—was directly affected by the onset of the Cold War. By exploring the difficulties inherent in the family reunification process, the foregoing discussion reveals the way in which the Cold War produced different outcomes for displaced children in East and West Germany. That so many of these children were able to survive hunger, deprivation, cold, displacement, and loss reflects their own strength, as well as the remarkable aid offered to them by private individuals and institutional workers.
