About this website

On the website www.uprootedchildren.eu, you will find teaching materials and information about children who, on the orders of the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, were abducted from German-occupied parts of countries such as Poland, the Czech Republic and Ukraine during the Second World War and taken back to Germany, to the heart of the German Reich, where they were subjected to forced “Aryanization”. To this day, their story is almost completely unknown, although they too count among the victims of National Socialist crimes.

The website is available in English, German, Polish, Czech and Ukrainian. This is, however, not the case for all of the teaching materials, as some of them are only intended for a particular audience in one of the countries in question.

Young people should learn about the children who were taken during the Second World War because, unfortunately, it not only could happen again, but is happening again, in a manner that displays quite shocking similarities. Russia and its current crimes against Ukraine are barely distinguishable from what the National Socialist regime did, and this includes the abduction of Ukrainian children and their transportation to Russia. It is important for young people to be able to draw certain parallels between then and now, and that is why it’s necessary to talk about what happened in the past and also about what’s going on in the present.

Alla Bahlei, trainer