Database “Forced laborers and their children during the Second World War”
Bernhild Vögel's database provides an overview of birthing facilities and “Ausländerkinder-Pflegestätten” (childcare facilities for foreigners) on the territory of the German Reich in which foreign forced laborers were forced to have abortions and children of forced laborers were killed between 1943 and 1945.
Pregnancies among foreign forced laborers posed a particular problem for the National Socialist rulers, both in terms of labor deployment policy and racial ideology. On the one hand, they caused additional costs and hindered wartime economic production; on the other hand, Nazi racial ideologues feared that the “racially undesirable” children of Eastern European workers in particular would infiltrate the German people. In the first years of the war, the labor administration therefore sent these women back to their home countries several weeks or months before giving birth so that they could then return to their places of work without a child. Quite a few women took advantage of this opportunity to avoid being deployed in the Reich.
At the end of 1942, the General Commissioner for Labor Deployment, the Thuringian Gauleiter Fritz Sauckel, put an end to these repatriations. From then on, pregnant foreign women were to continue working until shortly before their due date, give birth in separate maternity stations in the Reich and then return to their workplace as quickly as possible. Meanwhile, their newborns were placed in primitive infant homes, euphemistically referred to in National Socialist official jargon as “Ausländerkinder-Pflegestätten”. Thousands and thousands of infants and young children died in these institutions as a result of inadequate nutrition, hygiene and care - a deliberately calculated result of National Socialist racial policy.
The database presented on these pages names over 400 locations where maternity stations for foreign forced laborers or “Ausländerkinder-Pflegestätten” existed or where traces such as infant graves or eyewitness accounts point to such facilities. The database is founded on the non-commercial, private project “War against children” by Bernhild and Florian Vögel, who have compiled numerous sources and literature references over many years of research in order to document the current state of knowledge about foreign infant and maternity homes. The aim is also to encourage and support further research on the subject.
The database was taken over by Prof. Dr. Isabel Heinemann and Marcel Brüntrup as part of the DFG project “Between Labor Deployment and Racial Politics: The Children of Eastern European Forced Laborers and the Practice of Forced Abortions under National Socialism”.