24. The Nazis Wanted to Eradicate the Poles, Except for a Minority of Polish Children of Aryan Stock
Himmler’s document about taking “racially valuable” Polish children in order to Germanize them kick-started a full-blown child kidnapping drive across Nazi-occupied Europe. It is estimated that over 400,000 unfortunate children were abducted in this portion of the Lebensborn program. About half of the victims, roughly 200,000 children, were kidnapped from Poland. Other significant sources included today’s Belarus, from which about 30,000 children were abducted; the rest of the Soviet Union furnished another 20,000; while roughly 10,000 were seized from Western and Southeastern Europe.
In May, 1940, Himmler issued another circular, this one titled “The Treatment of Racial Aliens in the East“. It called for the destruction of Poles as an ethnicity. They were to become a pool of slave labor that would toil on behalf of the Third Reich, in conditions calculated to kill most of them within a decade. Within 20 years, Poles were to be completely eradicated. Not all Poles, however: a select minority, children of Aryan stock, were to be salvaged, Germanized, and added to the Third Reich’s population.
