TY - JOUR
AU - Mouton,, Michelle
AB - Abstract During the Second World War, the Nazis evacuated over two million children from war- torn cities through the Erweiterte Kinderlandverschickung program. The program's stated purpose was to provide children and youth with the nutrition and safety no longer available to them in big cities. But an arguably equally important goal was to separate children from their families in order to indoctrinate them and incorporate them into the Volksgemeinschaft. Suddenly every German family in a threatened city was confronted with the question of whether to allow children to be evacuated by the state. The EKLV thus became an arena for struggle between the Nazi state and German parents over children's experience. This study, by expanding the focus from the institutional level to children's experiences, provides a deeper understanding of how children experienced and Germans remember the EKLV. Using archival sources, memoirs, and interviews, this article examines how German children experienced the EKLV, how families negotiated the Nazi attempt to control their children's lives, and how the EKLV is remembered today. Unlike other studies, it examines children's experiences at the end of the war. It argues that the chaotic end of the EKLV and the creation of the collective memory of the Nazi era in Germany created circumstances distinct from the youth evacuations in Britain and France and that were central to German experience and memories of the EKLV. I: Introduction On 26 September 1940, the day after an intense aerial bombing raid on Berlin, Hitler called on Baldur von Schirach, head of the Hitler Youth, to launch a new programme, the Expanded Programme to Send Children to the Countryside (Erweiterte Kinderlandverschickung, EKLV). The programme’s stated purpose was to provide children and youth with the nutrition and safety no longer available to them in big cities. An arguably equally important goal was to separate children from their families in order to indoctrinate them and incorporate them into the Volksgemeinschaft (national community). Between 1940 and the end of the Second World War, over two million German children were evacuated from their homes and sent to host families in southern and eastern Germany or to camps established in confiscated monasteries, hotels, youth hostels and other suitable locations throughout Nazi-occupied Europe. Suddenly every German family in a threatened city was confronted with the question of whether to allow its children to be evacuated by the state, to organize a private evacuation or to keep the children at home. This decision could not be taken lightly. While the EKLV programme offered the physical safety parents so desired for their children, it also undermined the private family and posed the threat that, in the absence of parental and church influence, the children would be indoctrinated in the Nazi worldview. How families made this decision reflected their evolving understanding of the risk of war, the degree to which they trusted EKLV authorities and their perception of what lay in their children’s best interest. The EKLV thus became an arena of struggle between the Nazi state and parents that changed as parents’ calculus of what lay in their children’s best interest shifted in the ever-intensifying war. We know a great deal about the institutional history of the EKLV. Two early studies staked out opposing views on the programme. Journalist Claus Larass argued that ‘for the first time in history, a large number of children were being raised during their decisive years of development not in the parental home, but by the state’, and the Nazis used this opportunity to indoctrinate them.1 In contrast, one of the programme’s originators, Gerhard Dabel has stressed that ‘regardless of which political or strategic goals the NS-state or party eventually connected or wanted to connect to this programme for millions of children, what is clear is that the KLV [Kinderlandverschickung, the original version of the EKLV] served to protect and preserve life’.2 Even though Dabel’s position in the programme calls into question his objectivity, his book does provide an unique collection of documents and an important internal perspective on the EKLV. Most recently, Gerhard Kock has published a more comprehensive study of the inner workings of the EKLV. Building on Ian Kershaw’s argument that the Nazi regime was characterized by a competition among Nazi officials acting without specific orders from Hitler as they struggled to ‘work towards the Führer’, Kock argues that the EKLV programme was characterized by competition among the Hitler Youth, the schools and the National Socialist People’s Welfare Organization (Nationalsozialistische Volkswohlfahrt, NSV) that undermined the smooth evacuation of children throughout the war.3 We also know from an increasing number of local studies—by individuals or sponsored by cities—how some local municipalities implemented the EKLV. Many of these local studies provide photographs, reports and letters from participants, but few offer broader analysis of the programme.4 Nicholas Stargardt’s outstanding analysis of children’s experiences under Nazi rule follows children as they found their footing in the EKLV camps and later struggled during the difficult return home. Julia Torrie’s comparative study of civilian evacuations organized by the French and German states also includes examples taken from the EKLV, though neither she nor Stargardt makes the EKLV programme a primary focus.5 No previous study has examined the EKLV from beginning to end from the perspective of children’s experiences, a shortcoming that prevents us from fully grasping the EKLV’s impact on German children during war. It is the intention of this article to do just that. Focusing directly on children who participated in the EKLV also provides a window into family life during the war. Despite Hitler’s promise to rejuvenate German families, even before the war Nazi organizations had drawn Germans out of private families and into state service. With the onset of war this familial diaspora intensified as family members were sent to distant geographical locations: fathers and sons to fight on the battlefront, older children to support the war effort, and younger children to the EKLV—alone or sometimes with their mothers. Many early studies emphasized the way that the war ‘tended to pull the family apart’.6 More recent studies have provided more nuanced analyses of the Nazis’ impact on families during the war. Stargardt has revealed how family dynamics changed during the war as children increasingly took on adult responsibilities.7 Hester Vaizey has argued that the German ‘family unit lost neither its sense of belonging together nor its emotional intimacy’ during the war.8 My study focuses on how families negotiated the EKLV’s threat to families and how families worked to maintain their connections despite state efforts. Examining the final months of the war and the immediate postwar era is complicated by the scarcity of source material. Deliberate destruction of records at the end of the war as EKLV camps were abandoned and the selective pruning of archival records since have rendered the written record incomplete. Records produced in the camps also frequently reflect what the Nazi leadership wanted to hear rather than the reality. The incomplete story of the EKLV also reveals shifts in German collective memory since the war. Whereas the evacuation of British children is well-documented and holds a central position in how the British remember the war, in postwar Germany the EKLV was largely overlooked and individual memories were repressed.9 This article examines archival records of the EKLV leadership and of individual towns’ implementation of the EKLV. To elucidate the final chapter of the EKLV, it uses records from the Child-Tracing Service (Kindersuchdienst) which document the fate of individual children who became lost at the end of the war. Records of the westward evacuations of individual EKLV camps are also examined. This article also uses personal stories as published in memoirs and, in particular, sixty-nine life-history interviews to expand our understanding of how German children experienced the Second World War. These personal narratives also move us beyond the institutional record to the EKLV’s ultimate end in the ruins of occupied Germany—thus adding an important chapter to the historical record. What my interview partners, like other eyewitnesses (Zeitzeugen), recount reflects not only what actually happened, but also what they remember as having happened, and sometimes even what they wish had happened.10 As Gabriele Rosenthal has argued, autobiographers use ‘narration to bring their lives into some kind of consistency, and to explain to themselves who they are and how they got there’.11 This blurring of ‘factual reality’ and ‘remembered reality’ causes some historians, like Kock in his study of the EKLV, to dismiss oral history because it ‘only tell[s] what one person remembers’.12 Such a thoroughgoing rejection of oral history weakens his analysis of the EKLV especially at the end of the war. Interviews are a dynamic process that depend, to varying degrees, on a trust being established. This trust can help to reduce the self-enhancing or white-washing tendencies that characterize many Germans’ memories.13 I conducted the interviews upon which this article is based during two separate research trips, in 1994/95 and 2011/12; all names given here for the interviewees are aliases, used for reasons of privacy. Though much public discussion of the Nazi era occurred between my research trips, memories of the EKLV in the two sets of interviews are not starkly different. While many people discussed the shifting public memory with me, because my interviewees experienced the war as children, they were not burdened by the guilt that frequently encourages memory revision.14 Most interviews took place in interviewees’ homes over coffee. They lasted one to three hours and began with the simple question of where and when the person was born. I then listened as they told their stories, only consulting a list of additional topics at the end. My first interview partners were all women who lived in Westphalia when the Nazis took power. The second group was divided roughly equally between men and women and was more geographically diverse. My interview partners were evacuated from Bremen, Munich, Leipzig, Berlin and Münster among other places. Several were sent to guest homes, but most went to Nazi-run camps or to private homes arranged by their parents. These personal narratives of people who experienced the war as children play an especially important role because children are underrepresented in most written records. Even when they are discussed, we learn more about what was done to children by adults than what children themselves experienced or thought. Oral history and memoirs, though challenging to interpret, provide a unique insight into children’s experiences and offer a richness of detail and nuance not found in official records. The ‘versions of childhood’ that I collected from my interview partners were influenced by the trauma of war and the life that has transpired in the decades since.15 The collective memory of the Nazi era has undergone significant revision. From the initial postwar belief that Hitler and his advisors bore sole responsibility for the crimes of the Third Reich to the more recent wave of studies that view Germans as victims—of the Allied bombs, of the rape by Soviet soldiers and as expellees from Eastern Europe—German collective memory has been revised. This in turn has influenced the private memories of individuals.16 For many Germans the ‘binary understanding of the roles of victims and perpetrators’ has proven to be inadequate to explain ‘the complexity of individual experiences’.17 But for children the question is yet different again. On the one hand, Stargardt warns that over-emphasizing ‘innocent suffering can … make children appear strangely passive within the accounts of harm done to them, the objects rather than the subjects of history’.18 On the other hand, most children evacuated by the EKLV were young—under the age of fourteen—and were evacuated when their cities were bombed and their schools were closed. As children, they had little choice about whether to be evacuated with the EKLV. By participating in the EKLV, celebrating Nazi military victories and singing Nazi songs, children were drawn into the National Socialist Volksgemeinschaft. Yet at war’s end few EKLV children were in a position to act in defence of the Nazi regime. Most faced the final months dependent on their EKLV leaders or, as many leaders failed to protect them, became victims of the war themselves. One woman, who described her experience in the EKLV positively, explained that she had gained insight into the ‘negative side of the EKLV’ only much later as West Germany confronted its past.19 This article argues that exploring the EKLV from the perspective of children provides a window into how children and their families understood the Nazi effort to shape their wartime experiences. The article begins with a brief overview of the EKLV before examining what children remember about their experiences. It then explores how families sought to maintain influence over their children when they were participants in the EKLV. Finally, it looks at the closing weeks of the war to help us understand how the children fared on their return home, how they remember that chaotic transition, and its place in German memory. II: The EKLV Programme The EKLV was not without precedent when it was established in 1940. Throughout the nineteenth century and the Weimar era, a variety of religious, non-religious and state organizations had sent children, especially working-class children, from industrialized areas to the countryside to restore their health.20 During the early Nazi years, children continued to be sent for health reasons, though over time the Nazis substantially changed the programme. First, they wrested control from other organizations, and by 1937 they had undermined even the Catholic Caritas organization.21 Second, the Nazis made racial heritage the highest priority and racial analysis became a central component in evaluating children’s suitability.22 Initially the NSV respected religious differences, placing children in guest families of like religion. Even political differences did not necessarily exclude a child from the KLV, since the Nazis hoped that by winning the child’s allegiance to National Socialism, they would gain ground with the parents.23 Early in the war, the Nazis evacuated children from threatened areas, but the increase in Allied bombings in 1942 gave the KLV programme a new urgency. The Nazis renamed the programme EKLV and deemed it ‘an essential instrument of the active Air Raid Protection Policy [Luftschutzpolitik]’.24 Overseen jointly by the Hitler Youth, the NSV, the Reich Minister for Science, Education and Culture, and the National Socialist Teachers League, the EKLV provided a new avenue through which to integrate the physical protection of Germany’s children and their incorporation into the Volksgemeinschaft. For EKLV authorities, no better opportunity existed to draw the German youth into National Socialism than an evacuation made necessary by an outside threat. However, the evacuation experience, the level of indoctrination and the safety individual children enjoyed depended on the age of the child evacuated, the type of evacuation they experienced and the people in charge. While the NSV evacuated the youngest children to guest families, sometimes with their mothers, the Hitler Youth and National Socialist Teachers League evacuated children aged ten and older to one of 9,000 communal camps. It was in these camps that Baldur von Schirach saw an opportunity to restructure the entire German educational system in the spirit of National Socialism. On 15 June 1943, Hitler issued a decree requiring the evacuation of entire school classes together with their teachers. Because the Nazis feared that calling the programme an ‘evacuation’ might reveal the state’s inability to protect the population from aerial bombings, they used a ‘propagandistic sleight of hand’ to designate it a ‘voluntary evacuation’ intended to preserve children’s health.25 Though over two million German children were evacuated during the war and the intensified bomb threat, the EKLV never welcomed all endangered children.26 Throughout the war, the EKLV continued to use racial guidelines to exclude Jewish children and also children who were acutely ill, had a disability or were bed-wetters. Thus the EKLV was ‘not primarily a charitable state action, rather it was a measure in line with the general Volk-racial goals of the regime’.27 III: Children’s EKLV Experiences While prior studies have recognized the important impact the EKLV had on children’s development, exactly how it fits into children’s experiences of the Second World War remains unclear. With opinions that range from ‘it was paradise’ to ‘it was the rape of children’s souls’, few explain why the EKLV has been remembered so differently.28 Some autobiographical perspectives clearly reflect a political agenda.29 Other studies have focused on young children’s hesitance to participate in EKLV.30 What can the memories of the EKLV tell us about children’s experiences? Former campers’ memories are dominated by the camp routine they experienced as the Nazi worldview replaced their families as the order of the day. Many former campers remember the ceremony which surrounded raising the flag. As one woman described it to me: Every morning the swastika flag was raised and every evening it was lowered. We had to stand in a circle, our hands outstretched in a Hitler greeting and then sing, ‘we are bringing the flag down, it rests with us and tomorrow it will fly again, bringing new battles’. That was our passing of the day. Yes, and then under the flag pole of the lowered flag came, ‘Good night comrades, await the new day.’ That was the ceremony that was performed every day.31 Another memory shared by many campers was of moving tiny flags on a large wall map to follow the progress of the German army. Some also remember praying for the soldiers who had died and for those who were still fighting.32 While these activities were clearly designed to bind campers together and create a powerful aura around the Nazi state, few people remember overtly political lectures. Instead they remember the comradeship, the military organization of the camp and being drawn into the camp community. This lack of political awareness confirms Margarete Dörr’s claim that ‘most children did not find the indoctrination noteworthy because they were used to National Socialist influence in school and in the Hitler Youth’.33 Similarly Jost Hermand’s assertion that ‘the National Socialists did not want the youth to understand the songs they sang, only to be captivated by their power’ can be vividly seen in Frau Klein’s denial of any politics in her camp even though she still remembers singing the songs laden with political meaning.34 The camp rituals and songs made the state a centrality in the children’s daily lives and, especially for younger children, gave them a new role in the Volksgemeinschaft. In their memories, these daily rituals drew them in and helped ease their separation from their families. Former EKLV participants frequently remember the location and structure of their evacuations. For some it was the magnificence of the location that remained memorable. All across occupied Europe in pockets deemed safe, German children lived in confiscated youth hostels, hotels, monasteries and schools where they enjoyed the local mountains, lakes, hills and rivers. Sometimes the communities they were integrated into even expanded beyond the camp itself. In late 1943, Hans Frank, leader of the General Government in Poland, himself welcomed the EKLV children into the ‘extended German family in the General Government’.35 Early on, some children, like Wolfgang W., found their sudden exposure to Nazi ideology in politically vetted host families surprising.36 But as the number of children to be evacuated increased, the National Socialist Women’s League (NS-Frauenschaft) and NSV were unable to rigorously examine each host family’s political outlook. Moreover, as men were called up to war and women were forced to work full-time in the fields, many politically desirable host families dropped out of the programme.37 More commonly, former campers recalled the relationship between their teachers and the camp leaders. Each camp was run jointly by a teacher and a Camp Team Leader (Lagermannschaftsleiter/in, LMF) from the Hitler Youth or the League of German Girls (Bund Deutscher Mädel, BDM), who had been politically trained. Technically, despite their young age, the LMFs had superior status to the teachers and they took control of the camp atmosphere. As one woman remembered: ‘The teachers in our school only played a secondary role. The BDM leaders … completely pushed them aside.’38 Obvious political themes like ‘Through Struggle to Victory’ and ‘My Fatherland Must Be Greater’ were provided to camp leaders by the KLV Reich Leadership (Reichsleitung) to build comradeship among the campers and tie them to the Volksgemeinschaft.39 The magazine Unser Lager published guidelines for morning celebrations. But overtly political memories appear infrequently in former campers’ memories. Frau Kutsch recalled that ‘every day we had our political education’, but she denied its significance: ‘We sort of took it in on the side’, she said. When asked more specifically about the political training she remembered: ‘well yes, principally Hitler’s life backwards and forwards. Really backwards and forwards. So that we really knew it by heart.’40 Gerhard Kock has documented that the rapid expansion of the EKLV and the growing demand for older teens to participate in the war effort created a permanent shortage of trained LMFs. As a result, LMFs grew ever younger and many lacked appropriate training.41 The conflict between LMFs and teachers marked some children’s experiences. Some people I spoke to reported that the teachers and LMFs in their camps even disagreed about how much National Socialist ideology the children should learn. Frau Farber recalled that her teacher protected her and her classmates from the BDM leaders.42 Herr Fischer remembered that his teachers were not ‘strict Nazis’. He enjoyed his time in the camps with them until the Hitler Youth leadership arrived with orders to inculcate more ideology into their daily lives and imposed ‘punishment marches’.43 In unusual cases, the conflict between the LMFs and the teachers escalated to the point that the LMFs denounced teachers as ‘defeatists’ to the KLV Reichsleitung.44 The level of Nazi ideology absorbed by young campers was determined not only by their leaders, but also by children’s own actions. In some camps, campers themselves challenged their ideological education by rejecting the LMF chosen by the KLV Reichsleitung and choosing their own. In other camps children secretly listened to Allied radio to expand their understanding of the war.45 Not surprisingly, this influenced their relationship with their LMFs. As Herr Knabe remembered: ‘Our relationship to the teachers was varied. The 100 per cent Nazis were unpopular, since we also listened to news from the London radio’.46 In other camps children perpetuated an undercurrent of counter-thought. Nazi songs were sometimes ‘vulgarized’ and Nazi ideals were mocked rather than honoured.47 To some extent the children’s criticism was meant in jest, but it also introduced youth to ideas counter to strict party rhetoric. Children’s interactions with local townspeople as they marched, sang and made use of local resources often challenged their perception of National Socialism. This was also true as they met with wounded German soldiers who were convalescing in nearby hospitals. One woman recalled that when her group sang pro-Germany songs the soldiers became visibly hostile, prompting the girls to question the content of the songs and their lessons about Germany’s happy and successful troops. Similarly, Frau Löhr remembered the hostility with which she and her friends were greeted by local townspeople in occupied Czechoslovakia. While the camp leaders emphasized how willingly Czechoslovakia had been integrated into Germany, children’s daily experiences strongly suggested otherwise.48 In sum, the memories of former campers underscore the variety of their experiences. While many remember the camp community and even its Nazi flavour, the failure on the part of the KLV Reichsleitung to provide consistent leadership, the conflicting information children received from radio broadcasts, the local populace and convalescent soldiers, the conflicts between their teachers and the LMFs, and children’s own actions all led to widely varied experiences in the EKLV. A further important influence on children’s experience in the EKLV was their parents’ attitude towards evacuation. IV: Parental Influences on Children’s Experiences in the EKLV Technically the EKLV programme was voluntary and its success depended on the willingness of parents to allow their children to be evacuated. Records of the Security Service (Sicherheitsdienst) and local KLV, school and city authorities’ reports reveal that despite the danger of allied bombing, many parents refused to allow their children to be evacuated by the EKLV. Some parents expressed frustration that they were not told exactly where their children were being sent; others wanted reassurances that they could visit. Many parents protested when their children were sent to northern Italy or Hungary and asked why the children could not be sent to rural areas closer to home.49 Many of my interviewees recall their parents’ hesitance. Annie Kraus remembers that her parents referred to the EKLV as ‘children’s abduction to the countryside’ (Kinderlandverschleppung) and declared it ‘out of the question’.50 Frau Fischer remembers that her mother sent her but kept her more frightened siblings at home.51 Some parents doubted the safety of the EKLV. Others feared the impact of Nazi indoctrination and did not believe the Nazis had a right to force them to give up their children.52 As the war progressed, parental risk assessment evolved. One 1943 opinion poll found that ‘the appeal of the EKLV has weakened in the last year … because parents do not want to separate from their children on account of the bombing danger’.53 To counter these parental reservations, the Nazis launched a propaganda campaign that underscored the safety and desirability of the EKLV programme. One poster which addressed the parents of Berlin schoolchildren claimed: ‘The enemy’s terrifying air war does not take into consideration the civilian population. The terrorizing pilots carry out a brutal war of elimination against defenceless women and children. Concern for the German youth, their health and their lives requires special measures.’54 Martin Borman, leader of the Party Chancellery, issued a decree emphasizing that the EKLV’s only goal was children’s safety and claimed that parental misgivings were based on ‘enemy propaganda’. Despite the Nazi plan to restructure the entire German educational system, Baldur von Schirach himself also reassured parents that the Führer’s only goal was to protect children. He promised that after the war all children would ‘be returned to the most beautiful and best educational community of the nation: the German family home’.55 This propaganda push occurred just as Hitler issued his 1943 decree ordering that entire school classes be evacuated along with their teachers. This directive stressed that leaders were to avoid ‘all force, absolutely’. However, since school attendance was compulsory, when schools were evacuated, parents had little choice.56 This new decree was met by strong opposition from the Catholic Church, whose authorities had long believed that a central goal of the EKLV was to replace religious and familial influence over German youth.57 As a result many church leaders, including Bishops Clemens von Galen in Münster, Franz Rudolf Bornewasser in Trier and Casper Klein in Paderborn, encouraged parents to insist that religious instructors accompany the evacuated children. Despite Westphalian parents’ writing letters insisting religion teachers accompany the children’s school, religious instruction in the EKLV was inconsistent. Many people report that church attendance was permitted in the EKLV camps but discouraged (a fact that some children found a welcome excuse not to attend).58 But even as late as March 1945 in an EKLV camp in Bavaria five girls from Hamburg were confirmed along with twenty-five local girls.59 Individual children’s memories confirm that throughout the war their parents continued to evaluate and act upon what they believed lay in their children’s best interests. Christa W. remembers that her parents opposed the regime and did not want their children evacuated. After her father’s arrest, her mother depended on Christa’s help in getting her siblings to the bomb shelters. Christa W. recalls the horrors of bombing attacks on Bremen: The alarm began and then the bombs started to fall … And we ran to the bunker in the middle of the night. And that was truly horrible, because the bombs started exploding while we were on the way to the bunker, of course not directly on us, but all around us the heavens were bright. And we ran to the bunker, me with one buggy and my mother with the other … and we ran to the bunker every night, until I just cried and was terrified. Christa’s terror forced her mother to re-evaluate and conclude that ‘this can’t go on any longer, you must be evacuated’.60 Frau Kutsch, who had earlier been evacuated and then retrieved by her parents, remembered that the misery of crying children in the Münster bomb shelters finally prompted her to tell her mother, ‘I want to leave again. I do not want to do this.’61 As the war persisted, many parents’ concerns over ideological threats were outweighed by their fear that living with bombing was both endangering and emotionally traumatizing their children. Even after children were evacuated, communication between the camps, evacuated children and their parents persisted on many levels. Elternbrief, the publication of the EKLV in the General Government, provided information about camp life for parents including group letters to parents. In the first ‘letter’ home from the Wasserturmschule EKLV camp, the leader emphasized the many benefits the camp offered the boys, including ‘education about community life, self-discipline, independence, comradeship, cleanliness, punctuality, subordination and how to fit in’. He stressed that the EKLV was strictly a ‘precaution’ that would eliminate the exhaustion so common among children in the bomb-threatened cities. He made no mention of politics and ended his letter with an urgent request for parents to trust the camp.62 Some leaders felt constrained in what they could tell parents; some were even actively discouraged from revealing problems that existed in the camps.63 Despite such efforts to control information, the postal service and sometimes also the telephone helped maintain communication between evacuated children and their families. Children wrote home twice a week during ‘writing hour’. Although teachers stamped the children’s envelopes to verify that the contents had been censored, the degree to which they actually did so depended on their support of National Socialism.64 Margarete Dörr, who has examined many children’s letters sent from the EKLV camps, concluded that ‘under no circumstances were all letters subjected to the censor’.65 Family communication reminded children of life beyond the EKLV. Sometimes letters helped children overcome homesickness. One camper wrote to her grandfather: ‘Dear Grandpa, you are right, in these hard times of war, there is no place for homesickness.’66 But the knowledge that their home cities were experiencing heavy bombing often focused campers on home. Erika Zwicker wrote, ‘Dear parents and grandparents! I got up and got dressed and was very afraid since there was shooting and bright flashes in the direction of Stuttgart and it was light as day.’67 In France, Lindsey Dodd also confirmed that ‘the distress of separation, particularly as bombs continued to fall on home, was a key vector of fear for [French] children’.68 The EKLV camps witnessed an increase in bed-wetting and other psychological troubles when home cities experienced heavy bombing.69 Late in the war, communication between children and their parents diminished as family members were evacuated or called up for work and military service in different parts of the Reich. Parents also maintained family ties by visiting children, even if the EKLV administration discouraged them. Some parents visited and reported back to other parents about camp life. Other parents pressured the KLV authorities until they organized trains for parents to visit.70 While some children were embarrassed when their parents visited, others begged their parents to retrieve them. As a result, some parents, especially mothers, simply showed up at the camps to collect their children—much to the chagrin of the camp leaders. Almost 10 per cent of children evacuated from Hagen, for example, were collected by their parents in the first four months after the evacuation.71 In fact, Erika Zwicker reported that children in her camp simply ‘disappeared’—either their parents picked them up or, if home was not too far away, the children just left.72 The Nazis were not deaf to these parental objections, but they insisted that parents must trust that ‘the measures taken lay in the best interest of their children’.73 Parents who refused to allow their children to be evacuated and those who brought their children home left city authorities in a difficult position. After a particularly heavy bombing in 1943, Oberbürgermeister Müller of Wilhelmshaven insisted that children be evacuated even if their parents did not have the ‘correct attitude’ since in the city they were endangered and would remain uneducated. City authorities ruled out offering schooling for the children since they lacked teachers and they feared that making education available would encourage other parents to keep their children home, thus further undermining the EKLV programme.74 Elsewhere authorities tried to exert greater pressure on parents. In October 1943, local authorities in Gau Westphalia-South denied ration cards to children who should have been evacuated. In response, 300 women in Witten protested. In Bochum, Lünen and Hamm, fathers refused to return to the mines until their children received ration cards. As Julia Torrie has demonstrated, these protests underscore families’ belief that they belonged together. They flatly refused to accept that Nazi authorities were better able to determine what lay in their children’s best interest.75 In all these cases, Nazi authorities ultimately capitulated and issued ration cards for the Aryan children.76 When retrieving unhappy children from the EKLV was infeasible, parents sought other solutions. Some parents, especially mothers, lessened the loneliness their children experienced in the EKLV camps not by removing them but by requesting to be evacuated to the same town. They ‘used this opportunity not only to be with their children, but also to escape the bombing attacks’.77 Even if they could not get official sanction to do so, some mothers followed their children. When Helga M.’s mother heard about her daughter’s homesickness, she immediately took her infant son and found a room in the town to which her daughter had been evacuated. This enabled Helga to spend every free moment with her mother and brother and diminished the effect of the EKLV.78 Parents also requested that their children come home to visit, especially when soldier fathers or brothers had leave from the front lines. These individual applications were discouraged by the EKLV authorities since they could not organize chaperones, border crossings and return chaperones. Instead in Elternbrief authorities wrote that they ‘warmly welcome soldiers who are on leave from the Eastern front to come and visit their girls and boys in their KLV camp in the General Government’.79 The suggestion that fathers should visit their children in their camps, rather than reuniting the family at home, reflects in part the extreme difficulty posed by transportation during the war. Whether deliberately or not, this policy also undermined private families. One way for parents to prevent the state from evacuating their children without threatening their safety or compromising their education was to organize a private evacuation. Magdelene Baumberger remembers that when her school was evacuated to Czechoslovakia she wanted to go, but her parents ruled it out categorically and organized a private evacuation for her.80 Families with relatives in rural areas were at a great advantage in organizing private evacuations. Siegrid Mueller’s mother took her to extended family in a small town in Pomerania; Dietrich Albrecht went to his god-aunt in Bavaria.81 Frau Fischer’s mother moved with her three younger children into her brother’s house so they could go to school ‘because she was afraid of the Kinderlandverschickung’.82 In fact, private evacuations were so common that by the end of the war, many more children had been sent on these ‘relative-based evacuations’, at the expense of the Nazi state, than to EKLV camps. Of the 147,308 people evacuated with the EKLV from Gau Westphalia-North, only 26,160 were sent to EKLV camps.83 Even without relatives in rural areas, families managed to organize private evacuations to avoid the EKLV. After years of state harassment—a consequence of his refusal to allow his two daughters to join the BDM—Herr Linde avoided the EKLV by sending his daughters to an acquaintance’s home in a village outside Münster where the local school was still in session.84 Towards the end of the war, as uncertainty increased, a growing number of parents decided they wanted their children with them regardless of the danger. In Nuremberg even after the huge air raid of January 1945, authorities found it ‘impossible to persuade parents to relinquish their children in order to secure their safety’.85 Many parents believed if they were going to die, the family should die together.86 Frau Roessner collected her children and brought them home because she wanted her family together.87 Frau Ludwig’s and Frau Kutsch’s mothers both fled Münster, collected their children from the EKLV camps and took them to relatives.88 If their children were close enough, some parents even picked them up by bicycle. Herr L. remembers that when his camp was evacuated west, he was allowed to get off the train in Böbing, Bavaria, where his mother had been evacuated for a short ‘holiday’. Rather than returning him to his camp as planned, his mother kept him with her for the remainder of the war.89 Children themselves also wrote to encourage their parents to come and retrieve them: ‘You must use this opportunity to come and get me since the situation is getting desperate.’90 While Hester Vaizey has successfully argued that ‘evacuation disrupted familial relationships and could lead to estrangement between parents and children’, my interview partners also reveal the great degree to which parents continued to be part of their children’s lives even after they were evacuated.91 Using a variety of strategies including the post, visits, retrieval of their children and in some cases a steadfast refusal to allow children to participate in the EKLV, many parents maintained strong bonds with their children during the war. V: The EKLV at the End of the War Perhaps the most glaring shortcoming of the EKLV programme—and the piece least studied—was the Nazi failure to plan for the well-being of evacuated children at the end of the war. On 10 January 1945, Gerhard Dabel assumed responsibility for what he called ‘the most difficult job in this entire programme’, namely bringing all the children still in EKLV camps home.92 Although he ultimately claimed that all the camps in the Nazi-occupied East had been brought at least as far as German and Austrian soil, the presence of German children in several camps in Czechoslovakia in June 1945 suggests otherwise.93 Kock has argued that there was no final breakdown of the EKLV system before the war ended.94 To support his contention he points out that many camps in the West continued to function even after the Allies had occupied Germany. He recognizes that some children had to find their own way home after their camps disbanded, but because these children blended in with the millions of other refugees who filled the roads of Europe at the end of the war, they fell outside the scope of his study. It is my contention that the abandonment of children at the end of the war—especially in southern Germany and eastern Europe—exposes a profound breakdown of the EKLV programme. Moreover, the fact that children remained in some EKLV camps after the war ended does not necessarily preclude a fundamental breakdown of the system. It is here, at the end of the EKLV, that we need to listen to the former participants and scour the archives to understand the full impact the EKLV had on children’s experiences of the war. The Nazi failure to plan for children’s safety at the end of the war was integrally tied to the overall Nazi refusal to acknowledge imminent defeat. In contrast to the planning and order characteristic of so many National Socialist endeavours, the end of the EKLV was, according to Gerhard Solbach, ‘a multi-dimensional improvisation’.95 Some parents with sufficient insight into the state of the war were able to sense the growing danger posed by evacuations to the East. Siegrid M. was eleven years old when her school was evacuated from Berlin late in 1943. Her father, who was high-ranking Nazi, withdrew her rather than allow her to be evacuated. Instead he arranged a private evacuation for her, his wife and their elder daughter, whom he had already retrieved from her EKLV camp.96 Not all parents were so well positioned or had this insight, however. In fact, sometimes children—at the insistence of the EKLV staff—deliberately misled their parents about the dangers they faced. Wilfred Mayer remembers that his camp staff instructed him and his fellow campers to write to their parents that their camp was being moved because the water supply was bad. He now realizes that the intent was to prevent parents from recognizing the grave danger the encroaching front lines posed for their children.97 Other parents who lived in the East were themselves forced to flee and could not collect their children. In January 1945, when Frau Walters was forced to flee from the Warteland in advance of the Soviet army, she was unable to contact her two elder daughters, who had been evacuated farther east with their school. After a harrowing flight with her younger daughters, she ended up in a displaced persons camp in Berlin. There she learned through the Red Cross that her elder daughters had been evacuated to another displaced persons camp, near Leipzig.98 For children who earlier had been evacuated, especially to the East, the end of the war meant a second evacuation, this time in reverse, back to the West. The Nazi refusal to admit that the war was lost kept many camps uninformed of the dire situation until close to the end of the war. As Dabel has pointed out, ‘just as four years earlier it was strictly forbidden to use the word evacuation, now it could be deadly to mention retreat’.99 In many cases, the avoidance of an unmitigated disaster was primarily the result of dedicated teachers and leaders improvising or acting under a cloak of secrecy with little or no support from the EKLV administration. When in February 1945 Hamburg school administrators decided to bring back the Hamburg children who had been sent east to Prignitz, in Poland, they were concerned first and foremost that parents not be alarmed and secondarily that they themselves not be accused of defeatism. Before proceeding they convinced the High President of Schleswig-Holstein, Hinrich Lohse, to accept the children. Then during several parents’ nights in Hamburg, they convinced the parents that moving the children to the Baltic Sea coast lay in the children’s best interest. Only then did they arrange for two special trains to take the children to the Baltic Sea coast, where they hoped the children could wait out the end of the war. However just months later this area also became threatened. In April 1945, the teachers overrode the EKLV leadership and the school administration and organized buses that brought 1,000 children safely back to Hamburg.100 Even after the decision to evacuate had been made, risks persisted. One of the few deaths documented by the EKLV leadership during the retreat occurred on 17 April 1945, when a train station in Schwandorf, Bavaria, filled with EKLV children was bombed.101 The deaths of other EKLV children, albeit in smaller numbers, went undocumented. Not all camp leaders had the foresight, integrity or determination to organize transportation for the children in their care. The children from Hagen were also evacuated from Czechoslovakia to the Baltic Sea coast in 1945, but when the Red Army’s approach again threatened them, the leader simply told the children to go home.102 One interviewee, aged thirteen at the time, remembered: ‘In February 1945, [our] director … advised us to travel home alone. A transport would no longer be provided for us.’103 This was not unique. Another boy remembered that ‘at the end of the war everything got worse and finally the camp was empty and no camp leader remained (he had taken off on bicycle to find his family)’.104 Christa W. remembers that when her Hitler Youth leader told her and her brother (aged thirteen and eleven) to go home, he did not acknowledge the physical reality that they faced a journey of more than 600 kilometres through a war-torn landscape to get from Bavaria to Bremen.105 In all these cases, the EKLV administrators washed their hands of their responsibility for the children whose safety they had originally claimed to protect. Children faced many dangers during their journeys home, usually in the absence of adult supervision. Strafing attacks threatened them from the air when they were moving both on foot and in trains. Christa W. remembers that once when her train was attacked she fled into the forest. Another time she threw herself against a wall, where she cut her hands on glass splinters. After the second time, she told her brother, ‘I would rather walk. I don’t want to take the train, it will just get attacked again.’106 The fear that the Soviet troops would overtake them from the East or the Americans or British would intercept them in the West also overshadowed children’s daily lives. When they encountered soldiers, they found that some were kind and allowed children to travel in their vehicles, while others stole from them or even raped them.107 Virtually all children suffered from a lack of food, warmth, shelter and safety. The complete breakdown of transportation also dramatically lengthened children’s treks and increased the perilous nature of travel. As Marie-Thres Goebels remembers: ‘After about ten days on foot, riding on trucks, sleeping in train stations … I arrived in Hagen twenty-three months after I had been evacuated with the EKLV.’108 When Barbel P.’s camp dissolved, her sister brought her to the camp where she herself was leader. When that camp also disbanded, the two sisters began an arduous trek from Taberz, in the Thuringian Forest, to Hamburg, more than 400 kilometres. At the end of a long and painful journey, they found their mother, still alive and overjoyed to see them.109 Not all children discharged on their own into a war zone succeeded in finding their parents. Some could not find their way home. The parents of others had also been evacuated, leaving no record of their new whereabouts. When the US military government officially ended the KLV in its occupation zone on 30 June 1946, children whose parents could not be located became wards of the youth departments.110 Hundreds of thousands of other children ended up on Red Cross search lists, where some remained for months or even years after the war. Others were placed in children’s homes: the Flüchtlings-Waisenheim in Steglitz, Berlin, for example, took in children from EKLV camps near Königsberg.111 In October 1944, Martin W.’s EKLV camp was evacuated first to a camp in Czechoslovakia, then in February 1945 to the Sudetenland, and finally to Bavaria, where the 13-year-old was placed on a farm. He contacted the Kindersuchdienst, but when the file ends in 1948 his parents still had not been located.112 Elenore W. was eight years old in August 1944, when her elementary school was evacuated from Breslau to Lower Silesia. In January 1945 they were re-evacuated to the St Johannes Children’s Home in Vilsbiburg, Bavaria. As late as August 1947 she had still heard no word of her parents’ whereabouts.113 In another troubling case, Klara (born 1936) was evacuated in 1944 to a camp in Budweis, Czechoslovakia. When the EKLV camp closed in January 1945 she was moved to a new camp, where a Czechoslovakian woman entered the camp and took her to a ‘very good foster home’. The Czechoslovakian Red Cross refused to reveal Klara’s address.114 The fact that great numbers of children were unable to make their way to their parental homes exposes for the lie that it was the adage of the EKLV: ‘The child whom the Führer evacuates, he will bring safely home.’ Even children in camps on German soil did not necessarily experience a smooth transition home from their EKLV location at end of the war. The Nazis’ desperate effort to recruit ever younger boys reached into some EKLV camps. In April 1945 the boys born in 1929 and 1930 were sent from the EKLV camp in Reichenbach, Gau Bayreuth, to military training. To avoid military service, the boys fled, but they were captured and held by American soldiers.115 In other camps, ‘the clearly looming military collapse of the NS-state left its marks’.116 In the EKLV camp in Bad Wiessee, Bavaria, to which the boys from Münster’s Oberschule am Wasserturm had been evacuated, strafing air attacks made it unsafe for the boys to be on the roads. The food supply was so insufficient that the school director reported that it was no longer possible ‘to adequately satisfy the boys’ hunger’, and they lacked sufficient coal to keep the boys warm. These deteriorating living conditions led to a decline in discipline and disarray in the camps.117 Even after the Americans arrived, the situation for the boys in Bad Wiessee did not improve.118 The Allies forbade any school instruction and disbanded all Nazi organizations, including the Hitler Youth, thus removing ‘the existential purpose’ and structure from the camp. The food supply diminished such that the school director reported: ‘Now our boys are starving.’ Discipline broke down further as many students engaged in thievery—in part to appease their hunger. The boys also committed arson, and one boy even died in a fire they had set. Teachers, who had lost their authority with the teaching ban, were unable to re-establish order. Despite these deplorable conditions, the camp was forced ‘by necessity to remain open’. The city of Münster lay in ruins and could not receive them—even if transportation could have been arranged. In the middle of May 1945, the military government ordered Munich authorities to take over running the EKLV camp, but little improved. Not until the middle of June did a delegation from the Protestant and Catholic Churches come from Münster to check on the boys and to deliver the first news the boys had received of their families since before Christmas 1944. The delegation identified the urgent need to bring the boys home immediately. However, the British occupation government, which controlled Münster, delayed their return further out of fear that in allowing trains to enter their zone they would be inundated with refugees. As a result, many older boys simply left the camp on foot. Finally, in late July as part of the American-run ‘Moving Home’ programme, the remaining students left. VI: Conclusion Though advertised as a means to protect children, the EKLV was at its core a Nazi attempt to control how children experienced the Second World War. As millions of children were moved from threatened cities, the EKLV sought to provide children with both safety and a National Socialist worldview. By redirecting the focus from the institutional level to children’s experiences, this study provides a deeper understanding of how children experienced and remember the EKLV. We realize that the end of the EKLV was formative for participants’ recollections. Former campers who returned safely with their schools generally credit the Nazis with sheltering them from the war. One man remembered his time in the EKLV as ‘the most wonderful and exciting time of my childhood’.119 Many people can still sing the songs they sang in the camps. Some attend reunions with other former participants. In stark contrast, when the Nazis failed to bring evacuated children home safely, many parents’ scepticism about the programme was confirmed and memories of the EKLV were dramatically darkened. The EKLV’s failure to return children home reflected both the general chaos at the end of the war and, in particular, the behaviour of authorities and leaders more concerned with their self-preservation and self-interest than with ensuring the children’s safe return. While Hitler had launched a revolution of youth, in the end he and his regime abandoned the children they had promised to protect. As a result, EKLV children sat in train stations in formerly Nazi-occupied lands as trains carried retreating soldiers west without stopping. EKLV children thus joined long processions fleeing west on foot. As they hiked hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of kilometres in the quest to go home, they were confronted with battlefields, emaciated survivors of Nazi brutality, and death, all of which seared images in their minds that became associated with the EKLV. For these children, what began as a Nazi evacuation to safety became a dangerous trek that only sometimes ended at home with their families. Examining children’s experiences also reminds us how profoundly these were influenced by their families. Despite significant propaganda, the introduction of school evacuations, and the increasing danger at home, the Nazis failed to overcome parental influence. Some parents collected their evacuated children early; others pressed for religious education in the camps; still others organized private evacuations. Underlying all of these acts was the fundamental belief that parents had a right to decide what lay in their children’s best interest. Hester Vaizey has argued that ‘families … were at the heart of most people’s experience of the war’.120 Children also influenced their parents’ ideas by sharing their fears, homesickness and concerns about family members. While some begged to be evacuated, others asked to be retrieved. Parents, in turn, shifted their plans for their children largely without regard to Nazi propaganda. Finally, the importance of the EKLV to children’s war experience becomes clear when we examine the voices and memories of Germans who lived through the war as children. In contrast to England, where children’s evacuations were collectively remembered, and France, where evacuation was collectively forgotten, in Germany memories of the EKLV were largely repressed. As a Nazi organization, the EKLV could not be praised (even if it saved many children’s lives) nor could the children, as Germans, be seen as victims at the end of the war. The EKLV also largely fell between the cracks of historians’ interests. But this does not mean that the EKLV was not crucial to children’s war experiences. Only by examining the EKLV through personal stories of former children do we see the extent to which the EKLV was central to how German children experienced the war, how parents maintained influence and how Germans remember the war today. Footnotes 1 Claus Larass, Der Zug der Kinder: KLV—der Evakuierung 5 Millionen deutscher Kinder im 2. Weltkrieg (Munich, 1983), p. 16. 2 Gerhard Dabel, KLV—die Erweiterte Kinder-Land-Verschickung: KLV-Lager 1940–1945 (Freiburg, 1981), p. 175. 3 Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1889–1936: Hubris (New York, 1998), p. 246, discussed in Gerhard Kock, ‘Der Führer sorgt für unsere Kinder…’: die Kinderlandverschickung im Zweiten Weltkrieg (Paderborn, 1997), p. 14. 4 Two of the best are Martha Schlegel, Von der Nordseeküste in die Kinderlandverschickung, 1940–1945 (Oldenburg,1996), and Gerhard Sollbach, Heimat Ade! Kinderlandverschickung in Hagen 1941–1945 (Hagen, 1998). 5 Nicholas Stargardt, Witnesess of War: Children’s Lives under the Nazis (New York, 2005); Julia S. Torrie, ‘For their Own Good’: Civilian Evacuations in Germany and France, 1939–1945 (New York, 2010). 6 Leila Rupp, Mobilizing Women for War: German and American Propaganda 1939–1945 (Princeton, 1978), pp. 38–9. 7 Stargardt, Witnesses of War, pp. 363–4. 8 Hester Vaizey, Surviving Hitler’s War: Family Life in Germany 1939–1945 (London, 2010), p. 33. 9 Laura Lee Downs, ‘Au Revoir les Enfants: Wartime Evacuation and the Politics of Childhood in France and Britain, 1939–45’, History Workshop Journal, 82, 1 (2016), pp. 121–50, here p. 123. 10 Martin Sabrow, ‘Der Zeitzeuge als Wanderer zwischen zwei Welten’, in Martin Sabrow and Norbert Frei, Die Geburt des Zeitzeugen nach 1945 (Göttingen, 2012), p. 13. 11 Gabriele Rosenthal, ‘German War Memories: Narratibility and the Biographical and Social Functions of Remembering’, Oral History, 19, 2 (1991), pp. 34–41, at p. 37. 12 Kock, ‘Der Führer sorgt für unsere Kinder…’, p. 24. 13 Daniel Schacter, The Seven Sins: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers (Boston, 2001), p. 151. 14 Franka Maubach, Die Stellung halten: Kriegserfahrungen und Lebensgeschichten von Wehrmachthelferinnen (Göttingen, 2009), p. 40. 15 Lindsey Dodd, French Children under the Allied bombs, 1940–45 (Manchester, 2016), p. 6. 16 For a description of these shifts see A. Dirk Moses, ‘Der nichtdeutsche Deutsche und der deutsche Deutsche: Stigma und Opfer-Erlösung in der Berliner Republik’, in Daniel Fulda, Dagmar Herzog, Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann and Till van Rahden (eds), Demokratie im Schatten der Gewalt: Geschichte des Privaten im deutschen Nachkrieg, (Göttingen, 2010), pp. 354–79. 17 Laurel Cohen-Pfister and Dagmar Wienroeder-Skinner, ‘Introduction: History and the Memory of Suffering: Rethinking 1933–1945’, in Cohen-Pfister and Wienroeder-Skinner (eds), Victims and Perpetrators, 1933–1945 (Berlin, 2006), pp. 3–26, at p. 9. 18 Stargardt, Witnesses of War, p. 11. 19 Bericht Irmgard Preβ, in Sollbach, Heimat Ade!, p. 154. 20 Staatsarchiv Münster (hereafter SAM), NS-Frauenschaft (hereafter NSF), Gau Westfalen Nord, 251, Volkswohlfahrts-Aktion, Gau Westfalen Nord, Kinder im Not, 12 July 1933. 21 SAM Kreis Siegen, Kreiswohlfahrtsamt, 10, Siegen Kreiswohlfahrtsamt an Herrn Landrat about the Besprechung der Kreisamtsleiter, Hagen, 9 May 1934. 22 SAM NSF Gau Westfalen Nord, 232, Report about KLV, 1933. SAM, NSF, 540, NSDAP Gau Westfalen Nord, an alle Kreis und Gruppenwalter der NSV, 4 Oct. 1933. 23 SAM NSF, 232, Report Leiterin, Kreis Ahaus an NSF Gau Westfalen Nord, 1933. 24 Kock, ‘Der Führer sorgt für unsere Kinder…’, p. 12. 25 Torrie, ‘For their Own Good’, p. 52; Dabel, KLV, p. 19. 26 Although we do not know exactly how many children were evacuated by the EKLV, the number of children evacuated with their mothers or sent to host families or camps exceeds 2 million; see Dabel, KLV, p. 14. 27 Kock, ‘Der Führer sorgt für unsere Kinder…’, p. 90. 28 Irmgard Preβ in Sollbach, Heimat Ade!, p. 154, and Larass, Der Zug der Kinder, p. 157. 29 For example, Dabel, KLV. 30 Kock, ‘Der Führer sorgt für unsere Kinder…’, p. 315. 31 Frau Kutsch (all names have been altered), interview conducted by the author, tape recording, Münster, 24 Nov. 1994. 32 Bärbel Probert-Wright, An der Hand meiner Schwester: zwei Mädchen im kriegszerstörten Deutschland (Augsburg, 2006), p. 68. 33 Margarete Dörr, ‘Der Krieg hat uns geprägt’: wie Kinder den Zweiten Weltkrieg erlebten (Frankfurt/Main, 2007), p. 240. 34 Jost Hermand, Als Pimpf in Poland: Erweiterte Kinderlandverschickung, 1940–1945 (Frankfurt/Main, 1993), p. 61; emphasis in the original. Frau Klein, interview conducted by the author, tape recording, Münster, 11 Jan. 1995. 35 Schlegel, Von der Nordseeküste, p. 262. 36 Frau W., interview conducted for the author, Munich, 25 Aug. 1996. 37 SAM NSV, Gau Westfalen Nord, 42, Letter NSV Bad Driburg to Gau Frauenschaftsleitung, Münster, 24 May 1939. 38 Frau Gutmar, quoted in Dabel, KLV, p. 195. 39 Unser Lager: Richtblätter für die Dienstgestaltung in den Lagern des KLV, 2/3 (1943), pp. 76, 80. 40 Frau Kutsch, interview. 41 Kock, ‘Der Führer sorgt für unsere Kinder…’, pp. 152–6. 42 Frau Farber, interview conducted by the author, tape recording, Münster, 23 May 2011 43 Herr Fischer, interview conducted by the author, tape recording, Münster, 23 May 2011. 44 Hans-Ulrich Eggert, Schul-Zeit 1938 bis 1949: zur Vorgeschichte des Wilhelm-Hittorf Gymnasiums Münster im NS-Staat und in der Nachkriegszeit (Münster, 2005) p. 172. 45 Dörr, ‘Der Krieg hat uns geprägt’, p. 218. 46 Herr Knabe, quoted in Dabel, KLV, p. 196. 47 Hermand, Als Pimpf in Poland, p. 63. 48 Frau Löhr, interview conducted by the author, tape recording, Münster, 7 Jan. 1995. 49 Niederschrift, Landeshauptmann Kolbow, 5. July 1941. Staatsarchiv Detmold M1 IS, 40. 50 Annie Kraus, interview conducted by the author, tape recording, Münster, 23 May 2011. 51 Frau Fischer, interview conducted by the author, tape recording, Münster, 23 May 2011. 52 Heinz Boberach, Meldungen aus dem Reich, vol. 15: SD-Berichte zu Inlandsfragen vom 13. September 1943 (Grüne Serie–27. Dezember 1943 (Rote Serie); Bericht an die Parteikanzlei vom 29. November 1943 (Mainz, 1971), p. 5829. 53 SAM, NSV, Gau Westfalen Nord, 1076, Stimmungsbericht Bottrop, 8 Jan. 1943. 54 Dr Goebbels, Der Reichverteidigungskommissar für den Reichsverteidigungsbezirk Berlin, ‘Eltern der Berliner Schuljugend!’ Reprinted in Dabel, KLV, p. 28. 55 Kock, ‘Der Führer sorgt für unsere Kinder…’, p. 148. 56 SAM NSV, Gau Westfalen Nord, 656, Der Reichsminister und Chef der Reichskanzlei (signed Dr. Lammers) Betr. KLV, 17 Dec. 1942. 57 SAM, Oberpräsidium Münster, 5873, Letter Domvikar Holling to Landeshauptmann Kolbow, Münster, 11 Jan. 1937. 58 Frau Gerstein, interview conducted by the author, tape recording, Berlin, 12 June 2011. 59 Fritz Hauschild, Das Ende der Kriegs-Kinderlandverschickung: die Hamburger KLV-Lager im Jahre 1945 (Norderstedt, 2004), p. 47. 60 Christa W., interview conducted by the author, tape recording, Munich, 27 May 2012. 61 Frau Kutsch, interview. 62 Eggert, Schul-Zeit, pp. 158–61. 63 Hauschild, Das Ende, p. 79. 64 Kock, ‘Der Führer sorgt für unsere Kinder…’, pp. 163–4. 65 Dörr, ‘Der Krieg hat uns geprägt’, p. 191. 66 Ibid., p. 202. 67 Ibid. 68 Dodd, French Children, p. 10. 69 Larass, Der Zug der Kinder, pp. 166–7. 70 Kock, ‘Der Führer sorgt für unsere Kinder…’, p. 189. 71 Sollbach, Heimat Ade!, pp. 25–6. 72 Dörr, ‘Der Krieg hat uns geprägt’, pp. 202–4. 73 Dr Goebbels, ‘Eltern der Berliner Schuljugend!’, reprinted in Dabel, KLV, p. 28. 74 Letter Oberbürgermeister Wilhelm Müller to Herrn Minister der Kirchen und Schulen in Oldenburg, quoted in Schlegel, Von der Nordseeküste, pp. 216–17. 75 Julia Torrie, ‘If Only Family Unity Can Be Maintained’: The Witten Protest and German Civilian Evacuations’, German Studies Review, 29, 2 (2006), pp. 347–66. 76 Boberach, Meldungen aus dem Reich, vol. 15, pp. 6025–33. 77 Nicole Kramer, ‘Frauen in Bewegung: Überlegungen zur Geschlechtergeschichte der Evakuierung und Umquartierung im Zweiten Weltkrieg’, in Fabian Lemmes, Johannes Groβmann, Nicholas Williams, Olivier Forcade and Rainer Hudemann (eds), Evakuierungen im Europa der Weltkriege (Berlin, 2014), pp. 173–88, at p. 174. 78 Frau Mohr, interview conducted by the author, tape recording, Münster, 9 Jan. 1995. 79 Elternbrief ‘Die Brücke’, May 1943. 80 Frau Baumberger, interview conducted by the author, tape recording, Berlin, 11 June 2011. 81 Frau Mueller, interview conducted by the author, tape recording, Berlin, 15 May 2012; Herr Albrecht, interview conducted by the author, tape recording, Berlin, 7 June 2011. 82 Frau Fischer, interview. 83 Kock, ‘Der Führer sorgt für unsere Kinder…’, p. 255. 84 Frau Linde, interview conducted by the author, tape recording, 14 Dec. 1994. 85 Neil Gregor, ‘A Schicksalgemeinschaft? Allied Bombing, Civilian Morale, and Social Dissolution in Nuremberg, 1942–45’, Historical Journal, 43, 4 (2000), pp. 1051–70, here pp. 1062–3. 86 Boberach, Meldungen aus dem Reich, vol. 15, p. 5829. 87 Frau Roessner, interview conducted by the author, tape recording, Münster, 20 Nov. 1994. 88 Frau Ludwig, interview conducted by the author, tape recording, Münster, 3 April 1995; Frau Kutsch, interview. 89 Herr Landsmann, interview conducted by the author, tape recording, Münster, May 2011. 90 Hauschild, Das Ende, p. 27. 91 Vaizey, Surviving Hitler’s War, p. 126. 92 Dabel, KLV, p. 275. 93 Report from Sarhage, reprinted in Hauschild, Das Ende, p. 74. 94 Kock, ‘Der Führer sorgt für unsere Kinder…’, p. 225. 95 Sollbach, Heimat Ade!, p. 43. 96 Frau Mueller, interview. 97 Schlegel, Von der Nordseeküste, p. 468. 98 Frau Walters, interview conducted by the author, tape recording, Münster, 24 May 2011. 99 Dabel, KLV, p. 275. 100 Hauschild, Das Ende, p. 20. 101 Dabel, KLV, p. 277, also Larass, Der Zug der Kinder, pp. 172–82. 102 Sollbach, Heimat Ade!, p. 169. 103 Wilhelm Ruhwedel, in ibid., p. 179. 104 Dabel, KLV, p. 280. 105 Christa W., interview. 106 Ibid. 107 Probert-Wright, An der Hand meiner Schwester, pp. 217–224. 108 Marie-Thres Goebels in Sollbach, Heimat Ade!, p. 180. 109 Probert-Wright, An der Hand meiner Schwester. 110 Kock, ‘Der Führer sorgt für unsere Kinder…’, p. 234. 111 Bundesarchiv Berlin DQ 3365, ‘Im Flüchtlings-Waisenheim’, Deutsche Volkszeitung, 11. Sept. 1945. 112 Deutsches Rotes Kreuz Archiv, Munich (hereafter DRKM), H2213, Case Martin W. 113 DRKM H2213, Case Elenore W. 114 DRKM H1603, Case Klara. 115 Hauschild, Das Ende, p. 57. 116 Eggert, Schul-Zeit, p. 171. 117 Ibid., pp. 171–2. 118 Material in this paragraph draws on ibid., pp. 171–7. 119 Werner Elsen in Sollbach, Heimat Ade!, p. 141. 120 Vaizey, Surviving Hitler’s War, p. 150. © The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the German History Society. All rights reserved. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - The Kinderlandverschickung: Childhood Memories of War Re-Examined
JO - German History
DO - 10.1093/gerhis/ghy085
DA - 2019-04-22
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/the-kinderlandverschickung-childhood-memories-of-war-re-examined-fCqkpf0KMF
SP - 186
VL - 37
IS - 2
DP - DeepDyve
ER -