The travelling exhibition “Stolen Children, Forgotten Victims” documented the biographies and fates of people who were deported to Germany as children from Poland, Russia, Slovenia, the Czech Republic and Norway because of their supposedly “Aryan” appearance and then forcefully “Germanized” into foster families (often prominent Nazi ones), homes or camps. The children were given false identities and dates of birth, they were “brainwashed” in “assimilation homes” and many of them had been too young to remember anything after the war. All this made returning the children after the war a mission impossible in many cases, despite the fact that the surviving parents in Poland and other countries reported to the authorities that their children had been kidnapped during the war.
Photos, documents and statements from children and young people who were deported to Germany and forcibly “Germanized” are the central part of the exhibition. The exhibition is largely supported and funded by the “Remembrance, Responsibility, Future” Foundation.
The primary aim of the exhibition is to show the extent of the injustice to those children. Firstly, the German post-war authorities did very little to help with finding the true identities of the victims and, secondly, after the war, the federal government restituted Nazi perpetrators and murderers (for example, an SS guard at Auschwitz death camp received war victim compensation until 1998), but their victims, the stolen children, have never been compensated in any way.