Jan 28, 2020 3 min read

“Mummy, I am going to be afraid, Mummy.” – A 3-year-old Jewish boy being sent from France to Auschwitz

This week (Jan. 27) in 1945, Soviet soldiers liberated the most notorious Nazi death camp of them all, Auschwitz, but it was too late to save the more than 4,000 French children who died at Auschwitz in the summer of 1942. The story of their deaths, and the deaths of all Jewish children, many of them babies, in Nazi death camps during World War II may be the most indefensible aspect of this particularly evil episode in the annals of human history.

Also evil, at least with respect to the French children deported to Auschwitz (and later to other death camps), was that French officials, not their German occupiers, mostly administered this mass deportation. Although Germany had conquered and occupied France in 1940, two years later the German military presence in occupied France was actually very small because, at that time, Hitler’s focus was on Germany’s death struggle against the Soviet Union, which required the bulk of Germany’s military resources. Meaning the only way Germany could successfully deport French Jews to the death camps was with the willing cooperation of French authorities.

However, this forced deportation of French families, including children, taught the Nazis and their French collaborators a lesson. Originally when families arrived at Auschwitz, children and their parents were immediately separated because the children, being useless to the German war effort, were to be exterminated immediately, while their parents, provided they were healthy, would be spared, for a time anyway, to work for the Reich. But the scenes of parents, particularly mothers, and their children being cruelly wrenched apart had a negative effect on the extermination process at Auschwitz.

That process greatly depended on the new arrivals at Auschwitz remaining composed and cooperative, which itself depended on them thinking that Auschwitz was a work camp, not a death camp. Yet the cries of anguish and the traumatic fits thrown by parents and children signaled to those new arrivals who, for various reasons, were to be exterminated immediately, that maybe their upcoming march to the “showers” for a good cleansing was not all it appeared to be. Thus, the process of herding them into these showers became harder.

So the Nazis decided to keep women and children together. It wasn’t about compassion, because it also meant exterminating them together. It was simply a matter of practicality.

But why kill Jewish children at all? What threat did they pose? According to an Auschwitz camp guard, “The children are not the enemy at the moment. The enemy is the blood in them. The enemy is their growing up to become a Jew.”

Bruce G. Kauffmann’s e-mail address is bruce@historylessons.net/.