From 1944, a farmhouse in the Gantenwald settlement (in the administrative district of Schwäbisch-Hall) served as a birthing centre for Eastern European forced labourers. Many of the children who were born here died within a few months due to insufficient care. A memorial stone at the Gantenwald Children's Cemetery was set up in their honour.
History
In order to sustain the arms industry of the »Third Reich«, many factories deployed female workers. Not only German women began replacing male workers: National Socialists forced thousands of women from the occupied countries to work in arms factories from 1941 on. Until 1942, female forced labourers from Eastern Europe were deported to their home countries if they became pregnant. From 1943 on, several »nursing homes for the children of foreigners« were set up in the German Reich upon orders of Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler and the General Plenipotentiary for Labour Deployment, Fritz Saukel. Shortly after birth, the children were taken away from their mothers and handed over to such facilities. In this way the mothers could be deployed in forced labour soon after they had given birth - usually this occurred after 8 to 10 days. At first, these infant collection camps were supposed to be »nursing and child care facilities«. From 1944 on, however, the women also had to give birth there in the hope of thus concealing their fate from the public. The personnel of most of the »nursing homes for the children of foreigners« intentionally mistreated the children, giving them too little nutrition and care in order to »reduce« the offspring of foreign women.
In 1943, National Socialist authorities established a »nursing home for the children of foreigners« in a farmhouse in the Gantenwald settlement. Until 1945, about 80 babies and infants were placed here. Many of them had been born to Polish, Ukrainian or Russian forced labourers.
Victims
Due to insufficient nutrition, care and medical supplies, about 24 infants died at Gantenwald during their first year of life. 19 of them were buried in a cemetery which was specially set up in the vicinity of the »nursing home for the children of foreigners«. 18-year-old Eugenia Rossamaha from Russia died giving birth to her son. She too was buried in the Gantenwald Children's Cemetery.
The entry to power of the National Socialists in 1933 heralded the state persecution of opponents of the regime, Jews, Roma – who were classed as »gypsies« -, the sick and many other groups. For the first time, anti-semitism became part of the government policy of a modern state and the persecution of all groups was progressively heightened. The process was characterised by the interplay between state regulation, violence from supporters of the regime and rabble-rousing propaganda from the press. The acts of terror against the Jews in November 1938 (»The Night of the Broken Glass«), culminating in around one hundred deaths, marked the prelude to the complete exclusion and murder of the Jewish minority.
With the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939, large parts of Europe fell under German control. In Eastern Europe in particular a multi-tiered system of camps and extermination sites was established, in which the SS murdered up to six million Jews, among them around 165,000 German Jews. It is estimated that around seven million Germans lost their lives in the war, including almost 3.5 million civilians. Around 28 million residents of the occupied Soviet Union (both soldiers and civilians) and three million non-Jewish Poles met a violent death. These groups are still barely commemorated in Germany.
Germany came under Allied occupation in 1945 and 1949 saw the foundation of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), who had very different cultures of remembrance. The GDR profiled itself as an »antifascist« state. The former concentration camps at Buchenwald, Ravensbrück and Sachsenhausen became »National Memorials« and primarily documented the communist resistance during the war.
In the Federal Republic, the dominant memory was initially of the victims of Allied bombing raids and those who had fled or been expelled from their homes in the former territory of the Third Reich. It was left to specific groups to remember Nazi persecution, the Holocaust or the resistance. With the exception of the war crimes trials, there was no public discussion of perpetrators or involvement in crimes. However, the situation was to change in the mid-1960s, when the statute of limitations for murder was lifted following a lengthy debate. Also during this period, memorial sites were established at former concentration camps (1965: Dachau and Neuengamme; 1966: Bergen-Belsen) and the German Resistance Memorial Centre was opened in 1968 in West Berlin. However, it was not until the 1980s that a diverse and often small-scale landscape of memory developed as the result of local initiatives.
Following German unification in 1990, a national memorial site concept was developed and there was a major review of German sites of memory. The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin was inaugurated in 2005. The Topography of Terror, a comprehensive documentation of National Socialist crimes and perpetrators, has opened with a new centre in May 2010; the documentation centre »Flight, Expulsion, Reconciliation« followed suit in 2021. In the meantime, central memorials in Berlin have been erected to commemorate further groups of Nazi victims as well: the murdered Sinti and Roma, the patients murdered in the context of the Nazi’s »Euthanasia« killings and the persecuted homosexuals.
The German victims of National Socialist terror in the former Eastern territories of the Third Reich were forgotten by both German states after the end of the war. For decades, memory of these victims was only preserved by West German associations for Germans born in these territories and it mainly excluded the period from 1933 to 1945.
Remembrance
The Bühlerzell community had the small cemetery remodelled in 1984 in cooperation with the district planning office. Shortly afterwards, a memorial stone and sculpture were set up upon initiative of the Schwäbisch-Hall district administration. The Bühlerzell community tends the graves.
