Nazi crimes against children

The Nazis and their collaborators killed children for these ideological reasons and in retaliation for real or alleged partisan attacks.

[5] In addition to the euthanasia for disabled children, Nazis also established, from 1942, "birthing centres" for "troublesome babies", based on Himmler's decree on foreign workers.

Those centers, known in German as Ausländerkinder-Pflegestätte (literally "foreign children nurseries"), Ostarbeiterkinderpflegestätten ("eastern worker children nurseries"), or Säuglingsheim ("baby home"), were intended for abandoned infants, primarily the offspring born to foreign women and girls servicing the German war economy, including Polish and Eastern European female forced labour.

The babies and children, most of them resulting from rape at the place of their forced labor (realistically, enslavement), were abducted from their mothers en masse between 1943 and 1945.

[7][8]: 400  For example, at the Waltrop-Holthausen camp, 1,273 infants were purposely left to die in the so-called baby-hut and then simply checked off as stillborn.

Already in fall of 1939, a number of massacres of Polish civilians were carried out, often in the form of collective punishment in retaliation for real or alleged acts of resistance.

[35] Hundreds of thousands of children, particularly in Eastern Europe, ended up joining anti-Nazi German resistance forces.

[36]: 85–86 Near the end of the war, in early 1945, as Germany was getting desperate, many underage males, particularly from Hitler Youth, as young as fifteen years old (and sometimes even younger), were removed from school, conscripted by the military (particularly SS) and often sent on what were essentially suicide missions.

Some children were forced to or indoctrinated to participate in atrocities such as the Holocaust; others (as young as twelve) became involved in the Werwolf Nazi partisan movement.