Prosecutors from the Szczecin branch of the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) in northwestern Poland have opened an investigation into the killing and starvation of children born to Polish women forced to work in Hamburg between 1940 and 1945.
The appeal is aimed at relatives of the victims witnesses, and anyone with information about crimes committed against newborns and infants in labor camps, hospitals and so-called nurseries run under the Nazi terror system.
'Most of the victims were infants up to six months old'
"Our investigation covers the deaths of newborns in 23 camps and 13 healthcare facilities, where children were selected and later killed," said prosecutor Marek Rabiega, head of the Szczecin branch of the IPN’s Commission for the Prosecution of Crimes against the Polish Nation.
"Most of the victims were infants up to six months old," he added.
Rabiega said IPN documents contain the names of 2,256 Polish women deported during the war to work in Hamburg’s factories and farms.
Investigators have established that at least 165 Polish children died there. They were starved, denied medical care, and separated from their mothers.
Prosecutors are also documenting cases of forced abortions and the deaths of women after such procedures.
Rabiega said Nazi officials subjected mothers and children to racial selection.
"Abortions were carried out when there were no racial prospects for Germanizing the child," he said. “A series of documents regulated the treatment of the woman and her offspring.”
He told Poland's PAP news agency that children were assessed according to physical build and health, while officials also considered the mother’s intelligence and ability to work.
Newborns classified as a "very desirable population increase" had a chance of survival. Others were sent to facilities Rabiega described as “storage-death rooms” for infants.
“The conditions there threatened biological existence,” he said. “Food rations were set in such a way that the children had to die. German doctors who inspected them also knew this and wrote about it.”
Rabiega said German psychologist and researcher Margot Löhr, who has studied the history of Hamburg labor camps for more than 20 years, helped shape the scope of the Polish investigation.
Her research covers women and children held in the camps, as well as Nazi crimes committed in Hamburg hospitals.
'We are looking for witnesses and descendants'
"Some children survived, perhaps under different names. These may be mysterious stories. That is why we are looking for witnesses and descendants of the victims," Rabiega said.
He added that family accounts, photographs, keepsakes, and documents could help prosecutors reconstruct what happened.
IPN investigators are seeking contact by telephone or letter with its Szczecin branch.
Rabiega said the investigation is difficult because it began 80 years after the end of World War II.
Prosecutors must analyze wartime records, verify death certificates and seek new evidence that could clarify the circumstances in which the children died.
“Every death certificate listed a natural cause of death; there were probably such cases as well. Prosecutors must verify them,” Rabiega said.
“We want to analyze all this from a criminal law perspective, but also create a deposit for other researchers," he added.
Löhr’s book on the forgotten children of forced laborers in Hamburg described 400 children. She also recalled that 246 infants were buried at Hamburg’s Ohlsdorf Cemetery, but most of the graves were removed in 1959.
Her research also identified crimes committed by Walter Kümmel, the head of the Hamburg-Eidelstedt camp and an SS-Unterscharführer, who drowned newborns with his own hands.
After the war, a British military tribunal in Germany sentenced him to 10 years in prison. He was released after seven years.
Löhr has estimated that more than 13 million forced laborers were taken to Nazi Germany, including around 1.5 million children from the Soviet Union and Poland.
In 2020, at Löhr’s initiative, 49 Stolpersteine memorial plaques were unveiled in Hamburg to commemorate murdered infants. These brass "stumble-stones," set into pavements, bear the names of Nazi victims, their year of birth, and the date and place of death.
(rt/gs)
Source: dzieje.pl