The order concerned the children of the Rhineland region in 1937.
In the picture, Adolf Hitler meets members of the Hitler Youth. The members of the youth organization represented National Socialist ideology to Hitler. ullstein bild, All Over Press
Chancellor of the Exchequer Adolf Hitler personally gave a secret order in April 1937. According to it, children in the Rhineland region were to be forcibly sterilized.
In the History document Shame on you kids the victims of the illegal order are told. One of them was only 13 years old Willi Barth. The forced sterilization was carried out because the German state had decided behind the scenes that the boy and others like him were not allowed to have offspring.
Will, who was born in 1923, had several hundred companions of fate. Their number is not known with certainty, but estimates range from 400 to 1,000 children. Their mother was German and their father was a conscript from the French colonies.
Between 1919 and 1928, several hundred children were born from the relationships of German women and colonial soldiers in the Rhineland region. Over
The background was the occupation that took place in 1920. In the peace terms of the First World War, the Rhineland, which belonged to Germany, was assigned to the victorious states, especially France. About 20,000 soldiers arrived in the occupied territory just from the French colonies of Tunisia, Morocco and Senegal.
Born in 1921, Gregor Bartz’s father was a soldier in the American occupation army in the Rhineland and came from the Philippines. Over
From the beginning, the children and their mothers were the targets of society’s disapproval. They experienced discrimination and racism and were eventually targeted by the authorities.
– Children born from African-German relationships were considered a potential threat. They were a reminder of the lost war and the French occupation, a professor of transnational history Sandra Mass amount.
The National Socialists pushed for forced sterilization in the name of racial hygiene and for economic reasons. Along with the documentary, there was a fear of the weakening of the “German national body”. Researcher in the history of biology Uwe Hoßfeld however, shoots down the whole concept of race Dominik Wesselyn in guidance.
– Race is only a social construct. There is no scientific basis for it, Hoßfeld points out.
– New studies show that even 8,000 years ago all people were dark-skinned, he adds.
In the documentary, Rudolf Müller tells about the life of his childhood friend Willi Barth, who ended too soon as a Wehrmacht soldier in 1944. He fell somewhere in northern Italy. Over
I’m ashamed children today on TV1 at 19:00. See all TV programs and broadcast times in Telku’s TV guide.