German childhood in World War II describes how the Second World War, as well as experiences related to it, directly or indirectly impacted the life of children born in that era. In Germany, these children became known as Kriegskinder (war children), a term that came into use due to a large number of scientific and popular science publications which have appeared increasingly since the 1990s. They describe the same phenomena from different perspectives, using diverse methods and various stylistic means. The literature on this subject has not yet been able to produce a universal and binding definition. However, there is consensus that the impact of war on children can be felt decades later, often increasing with advancing age, and that at times the impact can be passed on mute to subsequent generations.
"War child" "War does not stop when the weapons fall silent." Into this simple formula German author Sabine Bode condensed the impact of war on human health. In 2015, on the occasion of the seventieth anniversary of Germany's capitulation and liberation from the Nazis – Victory in Europe Day – she was invited by Phoenix (German TV station) to discuss "how we feel the war to this day" with respect to grandchildren of war. Together with Katrin Himmler, Randi Crott, and Jens Orback, Sabine Bode participated in a round table discussion. None of the participants provided a definition of the two main terms, children of war and grand-children of war. Katrin Himmler, however, named a critical characteristic when she stated that "by far the most" war children in Germany were impacted "not only by the war", but "also by the pedagogy of the National Socialists". Author Matthias Lore had already attempted a definition as early as 2014: "For those born between 1930 and 1945, the term war children have become understood as youth who were too young for direct participation in the war, but old enough to suffer from hunger, expulsion and bomb attacks, loss of family members, separation and fear of death."
The concept is unquestionably aimed at a generation that spent part of its childhood in Germany during the Second World War, "for whom – without necessarily being threatened by organized annihilation – experiences of violence, separation, and loss were, at least to some degree, impacting their life". Not all authors agree which age groups to include. Some writers want to include children born shortly after the war because even in 1950, according to journalist Sabine Bode, "nine million children in West Germany lived in conditions that were inadequate, often unworthy for humans." Years later, war children and their younger siblings still played in ruins left over from bombings. There is also no agreement at the other end of the scale regarding what birth years to include. While Matthias Lohre and others include the children born in 1930, Michael Ermann restricts the term in his studies, referring to the "fate of the generation of non-Jewish Germans born in the Second World War". Jewish children, who were neither deported nor murdered, are generally not included in this definition. For them, the term survivors is used as they were exposed to additional and very specific threats to their lives which necessitated living in hiding. Anne Frank describes this in her book The Diary of Anne Frank which was published in German in 1950.
It cannot be assumed that the term has comparable meanings in languages of other European countries. For example, the English term war children, as well as the French term enfant de la Guerre, define the concept narrower, as a synonym for Besatzungskind – a child of a native mother and a father who is member of an occupying military force – describing implications associated with that situation.
Additional terms describing the various aspects and experiences of the war child generation, besides Besatzungskind, have also been developed in Germany. These include, for example, the children of Lebensborn (an association in Nazi Germany whose goal was to raise the birth rate of racially pure Aryan children), the children of forced laborers, or the so-called Wolf children who grew up without parents in the Baltics and had to hide their origins. Additional issues were raised with respect to war orphans or children of war-related rape. Further, the high number of children of married parents who had lost their father in the war or had never met him represent another group which has specific characteristics, as well as those children who had not met their fathers until after the end of the war or after their release from prisoner of war camps.
An extensive amount of literature deals specifically with the fate of Jewish children, like the Kindertransport which brought Jewish children to the UK, the rescue of Jewish children by Youth Aliyah Child Rescue, or the support of these children by the Swiss charity organization for emigrant children.
Finally, there is another group of children who are usually not considered war children because of their special affiliation with Heimatvertriebene, Germans who were forced to flee after being expelled from areas that became part of other countries during post-war restructuring. These expellees were, in contrast to the war children in general, a "public topic" during the post-war period "in the West of the divided country." Still another group are the war children of the First World War. They are generally not included in the relevant literature, although they should also be considered as such.
After years of efforts to bring together what the war children have in common, psychoanalyst Michael Ermann, in his farewell lecture on the occasion of his retirement in March 2009, came to the following conclusion: "The 'German war children' do not exist. Their fates are much too diverse. [...] All of this requires individual consideration rather than a generalization." But if there is something that "connects the different fates – the ones in the East, the West, the North and the South, the children of the night bombings and the refugee children" – then it would be a striking "lack of fright and consternation about one's own fate!"
History In 2003 – almost sixty years after the end of the war – Ermann, who describes himself as a "typical war child", launched Project War Childhood at LMU Munich. He was joined by a prominent international scientific advisory board. In 2009 the project was completed with a series of scientific publications.
The Inability to Mourn, a book published by Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich in 1967 that deals with the consequences of the war experience, found broad public attention among Germans. Even though the authors were primarily focusing on adults, they provided an impetus for later research on war children where the symptoms described by the Mitscherlichs were also found. The inability to mourn, they wrote, had produced a behaviour based on "denial" which may have led to "self-confidence more uncertain than it could have been."
It was not until the late 1980s, after 20 more years had passed, that the topic of childhood of war came into the public discourse in Germany. Why so much time had to pass is attributed to various factors. Ermann recalls "feelings of guilt [...] as a result of the Holocaust" and the "refusal to remember during the years of the Wirtschaftswunder", the economic miracle after the war. Finally, "trauma-specific defense mechanisms" should be taken into account. The journalist Hilke Lorenz said that the war children had fallen into a "history gap". And the author Alexandra Senfft, the granddaughter of the war criminal Hanns Ludin, recalled the taboos: "To deal with the crimes of one's own relatives hurts, it makes you afraid and sad." Even "thinking about the worst was a taboo in my family".
"Politically more volatile" was probably the feared "accusation by Shoa survivors" that "looking at war children" could lead to "relativize the murder of the Jews". In 2005, at the first interdisciplinary conference in Frankfurt – which had devoted itself to the war children – the representative of the Jewish congregation "distanced himself" from such a proposal. The answer clarified that "it was not a matter of opening up a ‘victim competition’ but, on the contrary, classifying one's own differentiated experiences into the European memory, as well as identifying the suffering due to the silencing of the ‘deeds’ by the parent generation." It is no coincidence therefore that Sabine Bode – in her book about grand-children of war – addressed the question of "how perpetrators became victims". in a separate section.
Psychological testing was absent in the discussion until 1980 when the diagnosis of Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) was included in the DSM III, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Within less than 10 years thereafter, the publications on the psychological consequences of war on childhood increased in Germany. Since then, numerous authors have reported very personal accounts about their own childhood, have accepted this subject more generally, or have begun to publish scientific studies.
Bode noted that while 70 years after the end of the war an "academic review" had taken place – by representatives of various scientific disciplines – but that only recently an "emotional process" had begun. Katrin Himmler is also convinced that "we have not yet processed this within families". Anyone who tries to do this will sooner or later be confronted with the question of their own identity. Christa Müller drew attention to the fact that the "path to a mature national as well as individual identity [...] requires a self-critical examination of the far-reaching influences of the events in National Socialist Germany, in the Second World War and in the post-war period". For Raed Saleh, a German politician, the discussions about the term revolve around a question that "remains unresolved": "How does Germany define its national identity"? He suggests that we would have to "redefine" it:
"Politicians of the Alternative for Germany party are demanding to end memory culture in Germany, and they are not the only ones." On February 18, 2017, during a radio program titled There must be an end to it – Remembrance Culture in Germany – Ulrich Gineiger published a report about the pros and cons of this issue. In this report, representatives of both positions were heard. In the foreground were "older people [...] who spoke about their traumatic experiences during the Nazi regime" as well as how they remembered it in later years. In addition, the heads of various cultural institutions and memorial sites talked about their experiences with their visitors. The project Stolpersteine (Stumbling Blocks) by the artist Gunter Demnig which is receiving international attention also played a role in the documentation.
Raising of youth during the Nazi era