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20 Historic Events Even the Movies Won’t Touch

Khalid Elhassan July 28, 2019 23 min

7. The Nazis Kidnapped Over 400,000 Children To Raise As German Aryans

Folker Heinecke, a tot abducted by the Nazis from the USSR, who became a poster boy for the ideal Aryan child. Awesome Stories

In May of 1940, SS Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler issued a circular titled “The Treatment of Racial Aliens in the East“. Its goal boiled down to destroying the recently conquered Poles as ethnicity and reducing them to a pool of slave labor to be used up within a decade. Within 20 years, Poles were to be completely eradicated. Not all Poles, however: children of Aryan stock were to be salvaged, and added to the Third Reich’s population. An annual selection was to be made of children between ages 6 and 10, to identify any who met German racial criterion.

Those who did were to be taken from their families, shipped to Germany, given German names, and once sufficiently Germanized, they were to be put up for adoption. Hitler approved of Himmler’s child abduction directives on June 20th, 1940. Orders to implement the plan in Poland and other conquered territories, were sent out to the SS and German governors and officials in occupied Europe. By 1945, over 200,000 children had been kidnapped in Poland, plus another 200,000 from the rest of Europe.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.