The Kinderlandverschickung: Childhood Memories of War Re-Examined. Issue 2 (17th September 2018) - Mouton, Michelle
Abstract: During the Second World War, the Nazis evacuated over two million children from war- torn cities through the Erweiterte Kinderlandverschickung program. The program's stated purpose was to provide children and youth with the nutrition and safety no longer available to them in big cities. But an arguably equally important goal was to separate children from their families in order to indoctrinate them and incorporate them into the Volksgemeinschaft. Suddenly every German family in a threatened city was confronted with the question of whether to allow children to be evacuated by the state. The EKLV thus became an arena for struggle between the Nazi state and German parents over children's experience. This study, by expanding the focus from the institutional level to children's experiences, provides a deeper understanding of how children experienced and Germans remember the EKLV. Using archival sources, memoirs, and interviews, this article examines how German children experienced the EKLV, how families negotiated the Nazi attempt to control their children's lives, and how the EKLV is remembered today. Unlike other studies, it examines children's experiences at the end of the war. It argues that the chaotic end of the EKLV and the creation of the collective memory of the Nazi era in Germany created circumstances distinct from the youth evacuations in Britain and France and that were central to German experience and memories of the EKLV.