Vladimir Putin’s crimes against Ukraine are often facilely compared with those committed by Hitler’s Nazis during World War Two. The unique crimes of National Socialism are the gold standard of evil that careless people reach for all too easily when they wish to comment on, or criticize, a contemporary issue.
In one under-reported way, however, Putin is indeed imitating the hideous crimes Nazi Germany carried out in Eastern Europe’s badlands eighty years ago: by abducting Ukraine’s children from their parents and taking them abroad. An arrest warrant has today been issued against Putin by the International Criminal Court in the Hague. Among the war crimes Russia’s leader is accused of is the unlawful deportation of children. Unrestrained by either the internationally recognized rules of war, or simple human decency, Russia has deported thousands of young Ukrainians from their homes and families.
Estimates of the numbers involved vary wildly. Ukraine’s presidential advisor for children’s rights and rehabilitation, Daria Herasymchuk, has said that nearly 14,000 children have been taken by Russian troops and deported to Russia. Russia has previously said that the abductions are, in fact, “voluntary evacuations” of children. But the United Nations has said reports of this barbarity are “credible.” The website “Children of War,” which catalogs the missing, claims that 464 children have died, 935 wounded and 378 children are unaccounted for — alongside the 16,220 it says have been deported to Russia.
Once in Russia, reports say the kids are either sent to special schools, where they are made to forget their Ukrainian language and heritage and raised as Russians, or — directly copying the Nazis — given to Russian couples on the pretext that they are war orphans.
Quite rightly, crimes against children, whether committed by individuals, or as a matter of state policy, evoke a special shudder of horror in us. They touch on deeply ingrained human notions of innocence, and what should be the sacred biological bonds between parents and their offspring.
The Nazis had a famously hypocritical attitude to sex, sexuality and child rearing — not least in the infamous Lebensborn (Fount of Life) programme devised by Heinrich Himmler’s SS. As I detail in my book, Kitty’s Salon, Lebensborn was intended by Himmler to preserve the “Aryan” character of the German race. The aim was to offset the huge manpower losses caused by the war that the Nazis had launched.
The program adopted a two-pronged approach to the problem: SS officers were encouraged to mate with suitably “Aryan” women outside the “bourgeois” confines of marriage. The women would give birth and raise their racially “pure” infants in special children’s homes run by the SS.
While strict rationing was introduced for other Germans as the war turned against the Reich, the Lebensborn women and their babies were given extra portions of porridge which Himmler believed was the food that had built the British Empire.
The other aspect of the Lebensborn policy was the mass abduction of children who looked “Aryan” from countries — particularly Poland — conquered by Germany. Children who fitted Nazi racist stereotypes, such as having blonde hair and blue eyes, were snatched off the streets and taken to be adopted by childless Nazi couples in Germany where they were passed off as war orphans.
It is this hideous Nazi policy that Putin’s invaders are carrying out in the eastern parts of Ukraine that they have occupied.
Putin has repeatedly said that he regards the Ukrainians as Russians. An officially sanctioned policy of mass child abduction is the logical extension of his goal of reestablishing a “Russian Reich” in the territory of the old USSR.
Lebensborn came to an end when the Nazis were defeated in 1945, although many of the kids abducted under the program never returned to their homelands or found their families again.
Unless and until Putin is defeated, a similar tragedy is facing the lost and stolen children of Ukraine.
This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK website.
