Heuaktion

Boys' roll call at the main children's concentration camp in Łódź, of which KZ Dzierżązna, for Polish girls as young as eight, was a sub-camp.

Heuaktion (German: "hay harvest", or "hay operation")[1] was a World War II operation in which 40,000 to 50,000 Polish and Ukrainian children aged 10 to 14 were kidnapped by German occupation forces and transported to Nazi Germany as slave labourers.[2]

"Heuaktion" was an acronym for "Homeless, parentless, unhoused [heimatlos, elternlos, unterkunftslos – HEU, "hay"] Operation".[3] On arrival in Germany, the children were turned over to Organisation Todt and to the Junkers aircraft works.

The intentions of the mass abductions were to pressure the adult populations of the occupied territories to register as workers in the Reich and to weaken the “biological strength” of the areas that Germany had invaded.[4]

  1. ^ Hannes Heer; Klaus Naumann (2004). War of Extermination: The German Military in World War II. Berghahn Books. p. 139. ISBN 1571814930. Retrieved 20 May 2015.
  2. ^ Roman Hrabar (1960), Hitlerowski rabunek dzieci polskich (1939-1945), page 99.
  3. ^ Lower, Wendy (2005), Nazi empire-building and the Holocaust in Ukraine, UNC Press Books, p. 117, ISBN 978-0-8078-2960-8
  4. ^ Lynn H. Nicholas, Cruel World: The Children of Europe in the Nazi Web p 351 ISBN 0-679-77663-X