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