Forgotten Victims
COLOGNE - Commemoration initiatives are calling for a memorial ceremony this Thursday, on the occasion of the anticipated verdict announcement in the damages lawsuit brought by one of the Nazi's forced Germanization victims. Nazi occupation forces kidnapped probably hundreds of thousands of children from the countries under occupation, because these children bore the physical characteristics corresponding to the Nazis' "Germanic" (blond, blue-eyed") racial concept. In the Nazi Reich, they had been placed in "assimilation camps" and assigned to foster families, robbed of their identites and "Germanized" - to reinforce the "Germanic" proportion of the population in a German-dominated Europe. Many of these victims still suffer under the psychological consequences of their abductions. The German government persists in refusing to pay compensations. The current President of Germany's Bundestag Wolfgang Schäuble once claimed that there is no "criteria of an offense under the reparations statutes" in the case of the children kidnapped by the Nazis. german-foreign-policy.com documents the "Association Stolen Children - Forgotten Victims" press statement concerning the memorial ceremony.
Nazi Victims Sue Berlin
In late June, victims of Germany's Race Policies, who had been kidnapped as children in the Nazi Reich, will be awaiting the verdict in their lawsuit against the Federal Republic of Germany. For years, Berlin has refused to assume its material responsibility for the children abducted from Poland, Russia, Slovenia, Czechoslovakia and Norway.
According to conservative estimates, Nazi occupation forces had stolen several tens-of-thousands of children from the occupied countries, because they looked Germanic and should be reintegrated into the Aryan race. They were given new names and identities, were submitted to re-education at live-in establishments and subsequent forced adoption. The objective pursued by this terrorist racism was to introduce the blood of these Germanized children into the fantasized German racial stock. These stolen children were supposed to become fathers and mothers of new German Aryans.
Thousands of these children, who now are elderly, do not know their real parents. They had to lead a life under a false name, using alien identities. German post-war administrative authorities have obstructed their research. The German government still refuses to pay indemnities for what these victims have had to endure.
"The fate of a child kidnapped for 'forced Germanization' meets, as such, none of the criteria of an offense under the reparations statutes, which is only in connection with their having been kidnapped, as such..." (Wolfgang Schäuble, former German Minister of Finance)
Hermann Lüdeking, one of the kidnapped children brought a lawsuit against Berlin on behalf of many others. We cordially invite you to attend the reading of the verdict:
Thursday, June 21, 2018
in front of
The Municipal Nazi Documentation Center of Cologne
at 11am
For a commemoration ceremony
We have solicited Mr. Jan Sobczak,
General Consul of the Republic of Poland
for introductory remarks.
Christoph Schwarz, Chairman of the Association Stolen Children - Forgotten Victims.