Russian children's forced blood donation for Wehrmacht

[wm]

The German experience with preserved blood was chiefly between 1940 and 1942. There were so many serious reactions that medical officers lost interest in it.

I suppose the problem was the lack of knowledge about the Rh blood groups, in part because of that the system was primitive. They were discovered in the US in 1940. But I think the real problem for everyone was short shelf life.

[wm]

It is not enough to insinuate that Clauberg, Oberheuser and Mengele would have set up centres for collecting blood for children. You need to demonstrate that they were involved in providing blood transfusions to wounded German soldiers.

I was trying to say "ruthless people like them" but anyway you did not have to be a monster to create a "living" blood bank if you did compensate the donors for their time and effort. You are just not supposed to kill them afterwards.
There is even precedence for this. During the war the Weigl's anti-typhus vaccine was produced by grinding up infected lice that had been drinking blood of living people. The drinking part of the procedure was dangerous for the donors but people did it voluntarily and of course were paid for this.

I know you think that Germans are capable of absolutely anything

I would say people are capable of absolutely anything and one can substitute "people" with Germans, Poles and even Australians

[little grey rabbit]

Some mention of German military medical practices is found here
http://history.amedd.army.mil/booksdocs ... s/appd.htm

Through some incredible oversight they neglected to mention the vital role of the forced child blood donor camps - the imbeciles!

[wm]

But it is an interesting link nonetheless, confirming that the system was rather primitive and inadequate:

Lack of adequate supplies and equipment was also given by this German medical officer as a reason for the deterioration of the Wehrmacht's medical service. Many patients died from exsanguination because neither blood nor a blood substitute was available at the field hospitals.

There were no blood banks to furnish blood for the restoration of blood volume. With the decreasing number of medical personnel and the increasing hunger of the Wehrmacht for more manpower the obtaining of blood for transfusions became more and more difficult. Plasma was unobtainable.

All blood transfusions were accomplished by the direct method.

The extreme pallor of many and moderate pallor of most of the wounded seen in German hospitals were further evidence that little blood was administered.

This type management of shock and hemorrhage was in sharp contrast to American methods whereby plasma is made available and used in quantities sufficient for the needs in all forward medical units of a division; and whereby banked blood is available in adequate quantities in all army hospitals including field hospitals adjacent to division clearing stations.

Finally, this medical officer felt that one of the greatest reasons for lack of immediate care was the general deterioration in German medical officers. The mental status of the average medical officer, and his morale, were low for many reasons, each resulting in deteriorating care for patients. Among these factors was the large number of infected wounds, leading doctors to feel that all wounds were automatically infected; the inadequate number of personnel; the lack of care possible because of constant evacuation; the lack of liaison, there being no uniform treatment plan throughout the German medical service; the entrance into the service of young, poorly-trained surgeons, "graduate wonders" who knew little or nothing of the principles of surgery; the class distinction favoring the Luftwaffe, SS and high-ranking officers; and the placement of medical officers in high positions by political rather than professional standards. All of these points weighed heavily on the mind of the conscientious surgeon and succeeded in wearing down professional morale.

[wm]

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.

There is another in the Belorussian village of Krasnyi Bereg. During the war a concentration camp for children was located there. it is claimed that 1990 children from the camp were forced to donate blood for the wounded German soldiers. There are witnesses to those events, for example Nina Migai, still living to this day in Krasnyi Bereg.

I would say the Krasnyi Bereg monument is quite beautiful:

from http://photobelta.by

[michael mills]

wm wrote:

I suppose the problem was the lack of knowledge about the Rh blood groups, in part because of that the system was primitive. They were discovered in the US in 1940. But I think the real problem for everyone was short shelf life.

wm,

You have made a crucial point, perhaps without realising it.

A handful of aged people from Belarus and Ukraine were brought to Berlin in 2009 by the Maximilian Kolb Foundation and created quite a stir with their claims that as young children they had had blood forcibly taken from them by Germans at camps in Ukraine, Belarus and Poland.

Among their claims was one that children with the rare Rh blood group had blood taken from them with much greater frequnecy than the other children, so that some of them died from loss of blood.

If at that time there was a lack of knowledge about the Rh blood groups, how could the German doctors have identified children with those groups, and singled them out for frequent donation?

The fact that these alleged "survivors" have made a claim about children with Rh blood-type indicates that since the war they have been given information about the existence of such blood types (which they could not possibly have known about when they were children in 1943 and 1944), and have integrated that information into their stories. That alone renders their sensational stories extremely suspect.

It is entirely possible that the "survivors" who were brought to Berlin in 2009 had indeed been inmates of camps for children in Ukraine, Belarus or Poland, but their story that blood was forcibly taken from them remains unproved and lacking in credibility.

[wm]

Well, the US was not at war at that time, the information about the discovery was available to the Germans. But there is nothing more on this subject of vampire camps of the Wehrmacht on the Russian or Belorussian websites so I agree that it is unproven for now.

[michael mills]

I would say the Krasnyi Bereg monument is quite beautiful:

Maybe, but does it tell the truth?

Here is an abstract of a paper by Sebastian Stopper given on 30 September 2010 at the conference on "Children and War: Past and Present", held at Salzburg University.

Sebastian Stopper (Humboldt-University Berlin, Germany)

The children’s camp Skobrovka: German human resources management at the eastern front and the myth of forced blood donation

Regarding the overwhelming strength of the Red Army by summer 1944 the German armies at the Eastern Front found themselves in a hopeless situation. Every able bodied German still in the Reich had to be freed to serve and every soldier was needed directly in the front lines. Under these circumstances the already launched measures regarding the mobilization of the Soviet civilian population for the German war efforts were intensified even further. Also teenagers and children now were sent westwards in order to strengthen the working force of the Reich’s armaments industries or worked for the Wehrmacht on the spot in the occupied areas. Special transfer camps were installed where a selection of kids had to await further employment. Until today in Belarus one can hear the assertion that these already malnourished children were forced to donate blood in German military hospitals, because it was needed for the medical treatment of German soldiers at the Eastern Front. In fact the Wehrmacht was supplied with means of blood replacement and native blood out of her own ranks in quantities that filled the demand. The kids had not been concentrated in camps to serve as blood donors, but were sent to Belarus education villages in order to experience national-socialist indoctrination. The Soviet myth about the under-aged blood donors and the blood donation camps as the peak of a barbaric "fascist" occupation sprang from a misunderstanding of German intentions that were rooted in the national-socialist ideology.

Sebastian Stopper successfully completed his six years of studies at the Eberhard-Karls-University of Tübingen in summer 2008 with the delivery of his degree dissertation about the military effectiveness of the Soviet partisan warfare in the rear areas of the German armies in 1943. The historiographic work is continued with a promotion project, that concentrates on the exploration of the German occupation of the Russian region of Brjansk 1941 to 1943 by analysing German military documents and Russian sources gathered at local archives.

Stopper's explanation is the one with the highest level of probability. Belorussian, Ukrainian and Russian teenagers and children were taken to transit camps on the way to Germany to be used for labour. In the camps they were given National Socialist indoctrination. The claim that they were used a blood donors is likely to be a myth, wartime Soviet propaganda that apparently some people in Belarus still believe in.

One noteworthy feature of the claims made by the aged "survivors" brought to Berlin in 2009 by the Maximilian Kolb Foundation is their allegation that after the war they were treated as collaborators by the Soviet authorities, supposedly because they had aided the enemy by helping to save the lives of wounded German soldiers.

Their claim that they were treated as collaborators may well be true. However, the most likely reason for such treatment is that while held in the collection camps for children they were given National Socialist indoctrination, as Sebastian Stopper explains. In the paranoid atmosphere that prevailed in territory reconquered by the Red Army, with the NKVD vetting the entire population that had been under German rule for the purpose of ferreting out "traitors", any person who had been an inmate of a camp where National Socialist indoctrination was given may well have been suspected of "collaboration".

What Dr Bernard Chiari said in his dismissive letter to Vincent Frank-Steiner is also relevant. Here again is part of what he wrote:

In the fascist youth organisations which existed in all occupied areas of the Soviet Union, numerous young adults would presumably have donated blood in a genuinely voluntary way and thereby have contributed to the German victory in the "campaign against Bolshevism".

It is entirely possible that the aged "survivors" who were brought to Berlin in 2009, and who also feature in the Guido Knopp video, were members of the fascist youth organisations referred to by Dr Chiari. That would certainly explain why they were later treated as collaborators by the Soviet authorities, as they claim. They may even have doanted blood voluntarily.

A person born in 1928 would have been 15 in 1943, just the right age to belong to one of the fascist youth organisations set up by the Germans in occupied Soviet territory. In 2009, that person would have been 81; the three "survivors" shown in the Guido Knopp video look as if they are in their 80s, the man in particular looks very old, possibly in his mid to late 80s.

If these "survivors" had been teen-aged members of collaborationist youth groups set up by the German occupiers, perhaps having even donated blood in the fight against Bolshevism, that could well explain the claims they are now making. By claiming to have been "forced" to give blood, they are trying to expunge the shame of having collaborated with the enemy by their possible membership in such groups. In Belarus the myth of the "Great Fatherland War" is still very much alive, and no-one would want to admit to having joined the Germans in the fight against Bolshevism.

It would be interesting to read the transcript of the debate between Frank-Steiner and Stopper at the conference at Salzburg University on 30 September last year, and of any following discussion. Unfortunately I have not been able to find it online.

[michael mills]

But it is an interesting link nonetheless, confirming that the system was rather primitive and inadequate:

The linked page, stated to be "Reproduced from the Annual Rpt of the Surg, Fifth U.S. Army, MTO, 1945, pp. 191-209",
also says this:

This, then, was the German medical establishment as it existed in Italy just after the German collapse. How it existed in, say, Russia in 1942, cannot be assumed from the material set down here. Nor can the various social, or political, or economic factors which doubtless affected all German medical practice, including the military, under National Socialism, be truly or fully evaluated. For while many of the German medical officers interviewed volunteered opinions concerning the effect of political or racial discrimination on sound medical practice in Germany, and those opinions will be set down here, it must be remembered that such opinions are hardly objective: after the German collapse all elements of the German army were busy negating their part in the Nazi regime, forswearing their allegiance to the Nazi party, and condemning such fanatical groups as the loyal party members, the Gestapo and the SS formations of the Wehrmacht. In other words, if saying "the German medical service was degraded by National Socialism" would indicate that a German doctor was not a Nazi, he would not hesitate for a moment to say just that.

That report also contains this item, not related to the question of blood tranfusions, but interesting nevertheless:

Two surgeons were found who had been using the Kuntscher nail in the treatment of certain fractures of the long bones. It was reported by two surgical consultants that for a time many surgeons attempted the use of this intramedullary nail with poor results, including osteomyelitis and death from shock. Following this experimentation, a few surgeons were designated who might use the method when they thought it indicated. The original work in Germany on this intramedullary nail was done by Kuntscher at the University at Kiel beginning in 1937. It was first tried on animals. Examination of the bones histologically at various periods after nailing led to the conclusion that approximately one-third of the marrow is destroyed and that small fat emboli are nearly always dislodged. One surgeon who participated in the original study at Kiel stated that he had records of 550 cases, not all his own, in which the Kuntscher nail had been used. Fat embolism had occurred in a few of these cases but in no instance did it lead to a fatality. This surgeon felt that its usefulness was chiefly in closed fractures of the middle third of the femur, in which the fracture line was transverse or nearly so. Such patients could walk without any splinting eight to fourteen days after the operation. This surgeon did not feel it an advisable procedure in tibial fractures and rarely used it in fractures of the humerus, radius, or ulna. It could be used in compound transverse fractures of the femoral shaft after the wound had healed or when infection was absent. One surgeon had used it in a few infected compound fractures of the humerus and femur when the desirability of fixation seemed to outweigh the danger of using it in the presence of infection.

The "Kuntscher nail" referred to in the above passage is of course the method of fusing fractured bones now used quite routinely. In that respect German surgical practice was ahead of the American.

The Kuntscher nail was also used by German surgeons to treat Allied POWs who had suffered fractures. When the Allies found out that POWs had had nails hammered into the bones of their arms and legs, they thought it was a form of torture and initially treated it as a war crime; that shows the degree of their ignorance of this revolutionary new procedure. Only gradually did they realise that the POWs had not been tortured, but had received treatment that enabled their fractures to heal quickly and restored mobility very rapidly.

[little grey rabbit]

Thats rather interesting - from Wikipedia

Gerhard Küntscher (born 1900 in Zwickau-1972) was a German surgeon who inaugurated the intramedullary nailing of long bone fractures, a process that was first performed in November 1939 at the University Department of Surgery in Kiel. The German military initially disapproved Kuntscher’s IM nailing technique but introduced it in 1942.

While in the Finnish Lapland from 1942 to 1944, Küntscher taught Finnish surgeons to do intramedullary nailings, which earned him recognition and respect in the orthopedic community. The war also prevented the knowledge of Kuntscher’s use of the IM nail to exit Germany. The German military had the upper hand in treating soldiers with the IM nail and having them return to fighting status in just a few weeks. Worldwide knowledge was not established until the prisoners of war (POW’s) returned to their home countries carrying Kuntscher’s legacy in the form of steel nails in their legs.

He invented what is known as the Küntscher nail, an internal fixation device used to maintain the position of the fracture fragments during healing. The nail is rigid and has a cloverleaf shape in cross-section.

Of Küntscher's invention, A. W. Fischer said in 1944: "This practical treatment of fractures using a nail, the Küntscher procedure, is, in my eyes, a great revolution that will conquer the world.

Did the development of this technique have any overlap with the alleged bone experiments at Ravensbruck?

[michael mills]

I do not know, but it is entirely possible, since practically all the experiments performed on prisoners had a genuine medical purpose despite their unethical nature, eg testing medicines or surgical procedures, methods of reviving from hypothermia etc.

[wm]

I would say the Krasnyi Bereg monument is quite beautiful:

Maybe, but does it tell the truth?

Well, it is not important. The monument has a safety mechanism built in, it is dedicated to the children of Chernobyl too...

Sebastian Stopper (Humboldt-University Berlin, Germany)
Until today in Belarus one can hear the assertion that these already malnourished children were forced to donate blood in German military hospitals, because it was needed for the medical treatment of German soldiers at the Eastern Front. In fact the Wehrmacht was supplied with means of blood replacement and native blood out of her own ranks in quantities that filled the demand.

but this is in contradiction of the Annual Rpt of the Surg, Fifth U.S. Army, MTO, 1945:

Lack of adequate supplies and equipment was also given by this German medical officer as a reason for the deterioration of the Wehrmacht's medical service. Many patients died from exsanguination because neither blood nor a blood substitute was available at the field hospitals.

There were no blood banks to furnish blood for the restoration of blood volume. With the decreasing number of medical personnel and the increasing hunger of the Wehrmacht for more manpower the obtaining of blood for transfusions became more and more difficult. Plasma was unobtainable.

If these "survivors" had been teen-aged members of collaborationist youth groups set up by the German occupiers, perhaps having even donated blood in the fight against Bolshevism, that could well explain the claims they are now making. By claiming to have been "forced" to give blood, they are trying to expunge the shame of having collaborated with the enemy by their possible membership in such groups. In Belarus the myth of the "Great Fatherland War" is still very much alive, and no-one would want to admit to having joined the Germans in the fight against Bolshevism.

It is a lot of "ifs" but unfortunately it is here where this hypothesis is falling apart.
The Belorussian television channel STV says this on their website about the BYU (Belarusian Youth Union) :
15 or 16 years old teenagers did not always understand what the new power wanted from them. But membership saved from transport to Germany.
http://www.ctv.by/proj/~news=21347

In the book Dreams Rooted Out, the author says:
[...] a minority sincerely believed that the Germans will help the Belarusians gain independence and a majority immediately brushed aside their deceptive declarations and tried to use the occupation for furthering the Belarusian cause.[...]
But the BYU nationalist leaders looked at it from a different perspective. They attempted to use the BYU for patriotic education and the promotion of the Belarusian language and culture.
http://kamunikat.org/7660.html?pub_star ... 66&lang=EN

In his book People of BYU (Людзі СБМ), Yury Turonak says that Soviet historians viewed the Belarusian Youth Union as a group of Nazi collaborators and traitors. After the collapse of the Soviet Union some researchers represented the BYU as one of the most progressive movements in Belarus.

So there is no shame to expunge, they were innocent children trying to save themselves from slavery or maybe even Belarusian patriots.

[wm]

The "Kuntscher nail" referred to in the above passage is of course the method of fusing fractured bones now used quite routinely. In that respect German surgical practice was ahead of the American.

As I understand it, the problem was that in Germany, as in most of the Europe, the new medical knowledge had a tendency to linger inside the ivory towers of Academia. The new stuff was slowly trickling down to the practitioners on the ground. The USA was different in this regard. I suppose that, for example, the Rh blood groups might have been known to a few German scientists but unknown to military surgeons.

[poleshuk]

The "Kuntscher nail" referred to in the above passage is of course the method of fusing fractured bones now used quite routinely. In that respect German surgical practice was ahead of the American.

As I understand it, the problem was that in Germany, as in most of the Europe, the new medical knowledge had a tendency to linger inside the ivory towers of Academia. The new stuff was slowly trickling down to the practitioners on the ground. The USA was different in this regard. I suppose that, for example, the Rh blood groups might have been known to a few German scientists but unknown to military surgeons.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_blood_group_tattoo

The SS blood group tattoo was applied, in theory, to all Waffen-SS members, except members of the British Free Corps. It was a small black ink tattoo located on the underside of the left arm, usually near the armpit. It generally measured around 7mm (0.28 inches) long, and was placed roughly 20 cm (8 inches) above the elbow. The tattoo consisted of the soldier’s blood type letter, either A, B, AB or O. The discovery of the rhesus factor had been made in 1937, but was not fully understood during World War II, so was not implemented. In the early part of the war tattoos were printed in Gothic-style lettering, while later on they were printed in Latin-style.

[sebast_sto]

Better late than never, I guess. Attached a collection of information that was / is available about the topic of forced blood donations, the German need for blood and the possible origin of the stories.

Back in 2012 I was still researching this topic and in the following years hoped the information available would develop. It didnt, unfortunately.
The original paper is in German and 40 pages long, so the condensed English version seems to be the better choice for uploading.

The topic is still a sensitive one, so please treat the text as a basis for discussion and something to build on. Maybe more details will turn up some day and our understanding of the phenomenon will improve.