How Other People's Children Were Made German

Selection was based on appearance: children's skulls were measured, their eye and hair color examined, and their features assessed using charts. Children deemed suitable were taken from families, orphanages, and parents deported for forced labor. Consent was not required.

The third step was crucial. Children were given German names, their birth documents were forged, and they were forbidden to speak their native language. Younger children were retrained quickly, while older ones were punished for every word. Within a year or two, many stopped remembering their former lives.

Adoptive families usually knew nothing: they were told the children were orphans from German settlements. Many raised them as their own, and after the war, these families resisted their return most strongly.

Documents were deliberately destroyed, while those that survived ended up scattered across different zones. International services searched for the children, working from fragments: identifying features, age, and a few surviving lists.

The last two points made the search more than a technical problem. Returning a child years later meant taking them from people they considered their parents and sending them back to people they did not remember. Decisions varied and were often agonizing.

The total number of children taken is still only an estimate, and estimates vary widely. A smaller number were returned, and many learned the truth about themselves only as adults, by chance, through documents or relatives' words.

Another difficulty was that by the time many children were found, they spoke only German. They could not be identified by their speech or their stories, so investigators had only physical features and fragmentary records to compare.