Russian children's forced blood donation for Wehrmacht

[Eddy Marz]

Hello Everyone;
I just found this article claiming that Russian children were forced, in utmost secrecy (because of the obvious 'heresy' as regards to nazi racial ideology) to donate blood for wounded Wehrmacht soldiers : http://www.wlv.ac.uk/default.aspx?page=23474

Does anyone have any info on this ? True, false ? It seems that the only original clue was a one line mention from the USSR prosecution team at Nuremberg and that, since then, witness testimony has come up, but I can't find any.

Any clues anyone ?

Regards to all
Eddy

[Marcus]

This claim has been discussed before, for example at http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=88302 and http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=12292

/Marcus

[David Thompson]

A post from a previously banned member, and a reply post inquiring about the reasons for his banning, were removed by this moderator - DT.

Banning announcements are made in the Lounge at http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=7219, and we don't permit further discussion on the subject.

[Marcus]

The relevant sourced part of the removed post can be found below.

http://www.ctv.by/proj/~news=21347

Усадьба Винцента-Покревского. Огромные залы архитектурного памятника во время войны были больничными палатами для раненых немецких солдат и офицеров.

– Здесь стоял немецкий гарнизон… И в данном здании все комнаты, а здесь их было около 33, были заполнены ранеными. И этим раненым была нужна свежая донорская кровь, – рассказывает научный сотрудник мемориала «Белорусским детям – жертвам фашизма» Людмила МЕЛАЩЕНКО.

В этом же здании – оккупанты держали около 2000 детей. Преимущественно девочек от 8 до 14 лет. 1-я группа крови и положительный резус-фактор чаще всего встречались именно у них. Доброжелательные тети в белых халатах регулярно приходили и уводили ребят группами. Клали на столы под наклоном и просовывали худенькие ручки в отверстия в стене. Кровь забирали полностью, а тела сжигали.

It is the Estate Of Winczent-Pokrewski. The enormous halls of architectural monument during the war were hospital chambers for the injured German soldiers and the officers.

- Here was a German garrison… And in this building all rooms, and here them there were about 33, they were filled by the injured. And these injured needed the fresh donor blood, tells the scientific worker of memorial “Belorussian children - the victims of fascism” Ludmila MELASHCHENKO. In the same building - the occupiers held about 2000 children. Predominantly girls from 8 to 14 years. the 1st group of the blood and positive Rh factor were most frequently encountered precisely in them. Benevolent aunts in the white dressing gowns regularly came and took away children by groups. They placed to the tables under the inclination and pushed through slender knobs into the openings in the wall. They took away the blood completely, and bodies were burnt.

[Eddy Marz]

Thanks Marcus ; I did not mean to put in question any forum board ruling. I apologise

[henryk]

Benevolent aunts in the white dressing gowns regularly came and took away children by groups. They placed to the tables under the inclination and pushed through slender knobs into the openings in the wall. They took away the blood completely, and bodies were burnt.

Complete removal of blood, causing death, is not a "donation'.

[michael mills]

Complete removal of blood, causing death, is not a "donation'.

Yes, but did it actually happen?

Or is it a wartime invention of Soviet propaganda?

It looks like a variation on the medieval superstition that Jews drained the blood from kidnapped Christian children.

[little grey rabbit]

You can find quite a few variations on the theme

May 24, 1943
Nazis Use Blood from 40,000 Jewish Children for Wounded German Soldiers
JERUSALEM, May. 23 (JTA) –

In spite of their "pure Aryan blood" theory, the Nazi authorities are now using blood taken from 40,000 Jewish children in occupied countries for transfusions for German soldiers wounded on the Russian front, it is reliably reported here today.

The report reveals that no less than 40,000 Jewish children from Western Europe and occupied Poland have been concentrated by the Nazis in occupied France for the sole purpose of furnishing blood for wounded German soldiers.

[David Thompson]

See also the discussion in the "Beheadings in the Third Reich" thread
http://forum.axishistory.com/search.php ... mit=Search

http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic. ... 2#p1190402
http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic. ... 7#p1190627
http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic. ... 3#p1358143
http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic. ... 8#p1363948

and more.

[Eddy Marz]

Yes, but did it actually happen? Or is it a wartime invention of Soviet propaganda? It looks like a variation on the medieval superstition that Jews drained the blood from kidnapped Christian children.

Michael has a point there. From the various sources I have, some claim that these transfusions were 'top-secret' operations conducted in as many as 20 camps in occupied USSR as the result of an Wehrmacht-SS pact (and therefore unknown to Hitler), others say that these were Polish children (as many as 40.000) but sequestered in France; testimony is very sparse and contradictory, and some of the so-called witnesses all refer to the nazi's 'racial-taboo' (and therefore heresy of the transfusions which, therefore had to be kept secret from the KdF) in a rather schoolbook-ish way. I must say, I'm a little at loss as to what to make of all this. And how would Wehrmacht troops have reacted to all this ? And how could such an operation (obviously lasting months) be in such a total blackout (ok for absence of documents), but not even a single mention from anybody at all on the german side ?

[michael mills]

The idea that blood transfusions from non-Germans to Germans somehow transgressed against National Socialist racial theory is historically incorrect.

The use of the word "blood" in National Socialist racial theory is purely metaphorical, just as it is in normal non-ideological English usage, when we say someone is "of British blood", or is a "full-blood". It is a metaphor for "physical descent" or "genetic inheritance".

Some of the more moronic National Socialists such as Streicher took the term literally, and really did believe that Jewish blood, the physiological substance, was poisonous to Germans. Streicher did start a campaign to ban blood transfusions from non-Germans to Germans, which alarmed Hitler's doctors eg Brand, who knew quite well that there was no physiological difference between the blood of Germans and that of other humans. Brand started a counter-campaign, endeavouring to convince Streicher and his ilk that the word "blood" was being used metaphorically, not literally. He was successful, so there was never any ban on blood transfusions from non-Germans to Germans.

What was banned was sexual intercourse between Germans and some other groups, which made sense from the point of view of a racially-based political ideology, since sexual intercourse does involve the potential exchange of genetic material, a "mixing of blood" in the metaphoric sense.

Thus, it is clear where these lurid propaganda tales originated, in the misconception that National Socialist use of the word "blood" was literal, that National Socialists really did think that German blood was physiologically different from that of other humans. Accordingly, Allied propagandists made up stories that the Germans were hypocritically offending against their own ideology by taking blood from non-Germans for use in blood transfusions for German soldiers.

The motive is to appeal to the same instinct that makes people relish reports about moralistic religious revivalists getting caught having sex with young girls; the contradiction between the ideal preached and the sordid reality.

[poleshuk]

Complete removal of blood, causing death, is not a "donation'.

Yes, but did it actually happen?

Or is it a wartime invention of Soviet propaganda?

It looks like a variation on the medieval superstition that Jews drained the blood from kidnapped Christian children.

http://video.yandex.ru/users/kamen-jahr/view/53/#

[poleshuk]

http://fakty.ua/135223-zaglyanuv-v-klad ... tela-detej

If you look in the pantry, I saw a pile of bodies piled in the kids'

70 years ago in the occupied Makeyevka Samokhina Galina and her brother became prisoners of the shelter in which the Nazis used children as donors for the wounded German soldiers

In Makeevka Donetsk region there is the world's only monument to the donor children, who during the Great Patriotic War took blood for the injured occupants. Monument to murdered juvenile donors have set in place of their alleged dumping: in 1943, when Soviet troops liberated the Makeyevka, in the neighborhood Sotsgorodok of six shallow pits removed 300 children's bodies. According to the pathologists, were part of a commission to investigate Nazi crimes, these children have died from infectious diseases, and extreme exhaustion. "The complete absence of subcutaneous fat," - noted in an act of commission. They were mostly children from the Nazis set up a shelter, "Charity" in the dungeons of which have visited about 600 boys and girls aged from six months to 14 years.
...
- They fed us badly: overthrow the cart in the yard of rotten beets or corn on the cob dry, from which as much teeth chattered, and we are eagerly snapped up by all this so as not to starve to death, - says Galina. - Day of the mass poisoning, I remember very well. The street was unbearable heat. In the shelter brought the barrel with the blood of slaughtered animals, which swam green flies. This goo baked and gave us breakfast. By 11 o'clock in the morning all were poisoned. Many people, especially young children, died. I have the same dark eyes, I went outside and lay down on the bench, which stood at the entrance. The nurse grabbed me by the hair and dragged him off somewhere. "Easy to wash!" - She cried. All surviving children have a gastric lavage.

Prisoners kill shelter in no hurry: they were needed as donors for the wounded German soldiers.

- Nanny came to me and said, "You have to take a blood test," relegated to a room where I took the blood - says my companion. - But once I tried to escape. Because after these reviews I was very ill for several days dizzy.

Gale could not escape. Nurse grabbed her arm and pulled her into the room where the medical office. While the guard dragged her down the hallway, the girl saw in the room carried the lifeless body of a boy.

http://www.proshkolu.ru/club/vov1941-45/file2/120294

The world's only memorial complex of the donor children, victims of Nazism, is in Makeyevka Donetsk region, Ukraine. On the stele of black granite inscribed only the names of 120 victims of Nazism.

[Eddy Marz]

Thanks Poleshuk;
Mmmh, this is getting more complex than I thought. Is this Ukrainian memorial monument truly commemorating forced transfusion victims, or commemorating thought-to-be (or propaganda-invented) transfusion victims ? It seems incredible to me that there isn't a inkling of testimony from the german side. Did the USSR refuse to delve deeper into this serious accusation because of lack of proof, or because it was simply invented?

[michael mills]

There is a contradiction between the contents of the two posts by Poleshuk.

The first post is a video of a German-language program by the ubiquitous Guido Knopp. It claims that until the summer of 1944, all blood transfusions performed on wounded German soldiers were directly from soldier to soldier; unwounded German soldiers volunteered to provide blood for their wounded comrades.

The program states that the reason for that procedure is that the German army medical system was very primitive, unchanged since the First World War, and did not have the technology for storing blood. It also states that Germany did not have a mass program of blood donation by the civilian population, unlike the United States. Accordingly, all transfusions had to be directly from donor to recipient, in field hospitals. Because of this primitive system, many wounded soldiers died who could have been saved.

The program states that the use of Slavic blood for transfusions was prohibited for ideological reasons, and that is why only other German soldiers could be used as donors on the Eastern Front.

[My comment: That claim is entirely false. The use of the word "Blood" in National Socialist racial ideology was purely metaphorical, and did not apply to the real substance. There was never any prohibition on the German medical profession's using the blood or any other body parts of non-Germans for medical procedures.]

The program goes on to state that in June 1944, the German Army suffered its worst defeat on the Eastern Front, with the destruction of Army Group Centre; in two months it lost 400,000 men. Because of the huge number of casualties, not enough blood for transfusions could be obtained from unwounded German soldiers, so the Wehrmacht High Command made the decision to disregard the prohibition on using Slavic blood.

The program claims that the decision was made without the permission of the German Government, because of the ideological prohibition, and for that reason the process of taking blood from Slavic bodies had to be kept strictly secret. It implies that is reason why there is no documentary evidence in German sources of the alleged practice of taking blood from Slavic civilians.

[My comment: That claim is specious, since there was no such prohibition. It seems to be an excuse for the lack of documentary evidence.]

The explanation for the alleged use of Slavic children as donors rather than adults is that blood of children would be less likely to be infected with diseases such as syphilis.

So the basic claim of the program shown on the video is that the German Army started using Slavic children, Poles and Belorussians, as a source of blood for transfusions in the summer of 1944, mainly at military hospitals in Poland. It does not claim that their blood was collected; rather it claims that the children were taken to military hospitals and laid down on beds next to German soldiers and their blood conducted through a tube directly to the recipient.

If that procedure had in fact been followed, and a large number of wounded German soldiers had received blood directly from children, one would expect those soldiers to have talked about it, and the whole operation to have become the object of soldiers' scuttlebutt. The task for historians is to find out whether in fact German soldiers did talk about such things from the summer of 1944 onward.

Finally, it is stated that there is no documentary evidence of bolod being taken from children, but all the records of the German hospital system during the National Socialist period were allegedly destroyed. It is also stated that most historians reject the story of blood being taken from children.

Now for the contradiction between what was claimed in the video and what is claimed in Poleshuk's most recent contibution.

In the latter, the claim is made that blood was being taken from children in the Donetsk region in 1943, ie one year earlier than what is claimed in the video. The question is whether that claim is a propagandistic falsehood.

It is quite possible that 300 children died during the German occupation of Makeyevka, from infectious diseases and extreme exhaustion, as stated. What is not clear is whether they were used as forced blood donors before dying.

However, if the claim made in the video is true, that the German army started using Slavic children as donors in the summer of 1944, then what is claimed on the memorial at Makeyevka in the Donetsk region cannot be true, since by summer 1944 that region was no longer under German occupation, and had not been for over a year.