Countless Polish children experienced the same fate: The organized child robbery was part of the Nazi racial policy to turn "racially valuable" children from the annexed parts of western Poland into Germans.
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The youth welfare offices reported the children whose appearance they considered "Aryan." Representatives of the health authorities conducted medical examinations of them, filtered out the children with "good blood," who were then sent to a children's home where they were forced to learn German and their names were Germanized.
Afterwards, the SS-initiated association Lebensborn took responsibility of them, handing over younger children to SS families for adoption, and sending older ones to "German home schools." Over time, the children became increasingly robbed of their memories and their identity as they became Germanized.
The child abduction program was part of the Nazi reorganization plans (often called "New Order") for occupied Europe.
In June 1941, SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler declared that it was necessary to capture "particularly well-bred small children of Polish families." But it was not only in occupied Poland that children were violently torn from their families. Children were also abducted in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union. The children of forced laborers were taken away from their mothers, some were passed on to German families, others were tortured in homes. In the Reich School for Volksdeutsche in Achern and in the Lebensborn Home in Steinhöring, children were severely punished for speaking their native language rather than German: Starvation and confinement in a cellar were among the types of punishment.
Estimates vary as to the actual number of children stolen by the Nazis, but according to the German paper Handelsblatt in 2018, "it is usually stated that up to 400,000 'Aryan'-looking children were taken from their families in Eastern Europe and Nazi- occupied Norway. Half of all the abductions took place in Poland."
Seventy-five years after the Second World War, the Nazi kidnapping of children has hardly been addressed in Germany. This is a "white spot in historiography," believes lawyer Artur Wroblewski, who writes for the Polish website "interia." He and six other journalists and historians working for the website are aiming to change that.
Their book about the Nazi kidnapping of children in Poland was published in Krakow in 2018. This past February, it was published in Germany by the Freiburg-based publisher Herder Verlag. The authors traced the fates of people like Alodia, who had to experience first-hand how the Nazis' racist megalomania destroyed their childhood and often their whole lives.
Almost all of those who reveal their fates in the book Als wäre ich allein auf der Welt (As If I Were Alone in the World) say that the repeated searches for their biological families have been futile. They describe the often painful return to Poland after the war — and the further traumatization caused by their non-recognition as victims.