Pound Pup Legacy

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kidnapping_of_Polish_children_by_Nazi_Germany

Many children were kidnapped during expulsions of Poles made by Germans. For example in Zamosc County Germans expelled 30,000 children, out of which 4445 were chosen for Germanisation and sent to German Reich. Over 10,000 children died in camps of Zwierzyniec, Zamosc, Auschwitz, Majdanek or during transport in cattle wagons used normally to move livestock. Thousands of them were sent by railway to Garwolin, Mrozow, Sobolew, Losic, Chelm and other cities. As one witness reported:

I saw children being taken from their mothers, some were even torn from the breast. It was a terrible sight: the agony of the mothers and fathers, the beating by the Germans, and the crying of the children. 

The conditions of transfer were very harsh, as the children didn’t receive food or water for many days. Many children died as a result of suffocation in the summer and cold in the winter. Polish railway workers, often risking their lives tried to feed the imprisoned children or to give them warm clothes. Sometimes the German guards could be bribed by jewelry or gold to allow the supplies to go through, in other cases they sold some of the children to Poles. After the war a memorial plate was made in Lublin to railway workers who tried to save Polish children from German captivity

Selection

The children were placed in special temporary camps of health depertment, or Lebensborn E.V, child camps (German: Kindererziehungslager). Aferwards they went through special “quality selection” or “racial selection”-a detailed racial examination, combined with psychological tests and medicine exams made by experts from RuSHA or doctors from Gesundheitsamt. The child’s racial value determine to which of 11 racial types it would belong, documentation with results contained 62 points that informed about body proporations, eye colour, hair colour, the shape of the skull. During those tests children were divided into following groups: 

• Group that was “desired population growth” (German erwünschter Bevölkerungszuwachs)
• Group that was "acceptable population growth” (German. tragbarer Bevölkerungszuwachs)
• Group that was "undesired population growth” (German unerwünschter Bevölkerungszuwachs)

Because the racial examps determined the fate of children, and their unfavourable result could mean death or being put into concentration camp and other consequences: for example forceful taking of the child away from parents, an instruction was made to perform them in secret and disguise, for example as “medical exams:

Murder of Zamosc children in Auschwitz

At Auschwitz concentration camp 200 to 300 Polish children from the Zamosc area were murdered by Germans by phenol injections. The child was placed on a stool, occasionally blindfolded with a piece of a towel. The person performing the execution then placed one of his hands on the back of the child's neck and another behind the shoulder blade. As the child's chest was thrust out a long needle was injected into the chest with a toxic dose of phenol. The children usually died in minutes. A witness described the process as deadly efficient:

As a rule not even a moan would be heard. And they did not wait until the doomed person really died. During his agony, he was taken from both sides under the armpits and thrown into a pile of corpses in another room.... And the next victim took his place on the stool

To trick the children that were to be murdered into obedience Germans promised them that they will work at a brickyard. However another group of children, young boys by the age of 8 to 12, managed to warn their fellow child inmates by calling for help when they were being killed by Germans:

"Mamo! Mamo!" ("Mother! Mother!"), the dying screams of the youngsters, were heard by several inmates and made an indelible haunting impression on them.

Some of the children were also murdered in Auschwitz gas chambers.

German medical experiments on kidnapped children

Those children who didn’t pass harsh Nazi exams and criteria) selected during the operation, weresent as test subjects for experiments in special centers. Children sent there ranged from eight months to 18 years. Two such centers were located in German occupied Poland. One of them "Medizinische Kinderheilanstalt" was in Lubliniec in Upper Silesia – in this center children were also subject to forced euthanasia , while the second was located in Cieszyn. Children were given psychoactive drugs, chemicals and other substances for medical tests, although it was generally known that the true purpose of those procedures was their mass extermination.

Weaker children subject to experiments usually died in relatively short time from doses of drugs, those however that survived brought great curiosity; all side effects were recorded as well as their behaviour. As most died, the documentation was forged to conceal traces of experiments, for example giving the cause of death as from a lung infection, or a weak heart. Based on statistics of deaths in the special camp in Lublin, it was estimated that from the 235 children between ages 10 to 14 who received shots of luminal, 221 died. From August 1942 until November 1944, 94% of children subject to German medical experiments died.

Post-war

After the war the kidnapping of children by the Nazis was dealt with in the so-called RuSHA Trial. Out of the abducted only 10–15% returned home.