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08.02.2021

Facebook has once again blocked a post by the Institute of National Remembrance regarding German crimes against Polish children.

The IPN's statement-dedicated image

On 6 February, FB banned the English-language account of the Institute of National Remembrance. The reason was a post from seven months ago discussing German plans to Germanize Polish children. It must be remembered that during World War II, in so-called “Aktion Zamość” alone, the Germans took 30,000 children from their parents, sending them to camps (including a special one in Łódź) and industrial plants in Germany. Others were handed over to German families for Germanization. The crime, one of the cruelest during World War II, was among the charges against the defendants in the Nuremberg Trials. A symbol of this operation is the fate of Czesława Kwoka, who, deported from the Zamość region, was sent to Auschwitz, where she was killed with a phenol injection. She was 14 years old.

In the banned post, we wrote about German plans to Germanize children, referring to authentic documents. Despite the submitted appeal, the account has been disabled since Saturday morning.

 

Dated 15 May 1940, "Einige Gedanken über die Behandlung der Fremdenvölker im Osten ("A Few Thoughts about the Treatment of Racial Aliens in the East") by Heinrich Himmler is a blood-chilling document – especially where it comes to children.

It’s basically a kidnapper’s manual, inspired by the theories of Walther Darré, the Reich's Minister of Food and Agriculture, whose "Blut und Boden" ["Blood and Soil"] racial ideology laid foundations for the denationalization program.

In the years 1940-1945, the Third Reich removed hundreds of thousands of children from the lands it had conquered, treating them like product, and applying rigorous quality control procedures.

The Germans were looking for germanization material, and the youth deemed to qualify for it due to their "good blood" were taken from their families, and directed to special camps, where they underwent selection.

Those of them who were declared fit for the program went through initial germanization there before being sent to German families. Non-conforming "products" disappeared in concentration camps, or were re-used for "medical" experiments.

In all, out of 200,000 Polish children, only 30,000 were recovered after the war. The rest vanished – their bodies erased from the face of the earth, or identity removed from their own and other people’s memory.

The author of the kidnapper’s manual, Heinrich Himmler, worried that the uprooted kids would be ostracized by the German society, and recommended subjecting them to the procedure in tender age and secrecy, so that they could blend in and disappear.

He neeedn’t have worried: disappear they did.

 

In fact, the current situation reminds another one from mid-January, when Facebook blocked foreign promotion of the IPN’s film about the German camp in Łódź and 3,000 children imprisoned there. The Institute of National Remembrance protests against censoring information on German crimes during World War II.

See the materials on the deportations from the Zamość region, and about the children's camp in Łódź, prepared by the Institute of National Remembrance.

“The SS Sonderlaboratorium. The Zamosc region - the first settlement area in the Generalgouvernment, 1942-1943”

The camp in Przemysłowa Street in Łódź

The camp in Przemysłowa Street in łódź - exhibition

 

 


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