Heuaktion

Heuaktion (German: "hay harvest", or "hay operation")[1] was a World War II operation in which 40,000 to 50,000 Polish and Ukrainian children aged 10 to 14 were kidnapped by German occupation forces and transported to Nazi Germany as slave labourers.

[2] "Heuaktion" was an acronym for "Homeless, parentless, unhoused [heimatlos, elternlos, unterkunftslos – HEU, "hay"] Operation".

The intentions of the mass abductions were to pressure the adult populations of the occupied territories to register as workers in the Reich and to weaken the “biological strength” of the areas that Germany had invaded.

Children considered racially unsuitable were sent either to forced labour or to concentration camps, including Auschwitz, after the destruction of their birth certificates.

[8] The Nuremberg trials classified the kidnapping of children as part of the Nazi program of systemic genocide.

Boys' roll call at the main children's concentration camp in Łódź , of which KZ Dzierżązna , for Polish girls as young as eight, was a sub-camp.