As a child in 1942, Hermann Lüdeking was abducted from Nazi-occupied Poland, robbed of his identity and forcibly Germanized. He grew up in Lemgo, never knowing anything about his true roots.
"I still suffer from not knowing who my parents are," said Hermann Lüdeking, now a retired engineer from Bad Dürrheim in the Black Forest.
Although thousands of victims may have similar stories, few have the courage to talk about it the way Lüdeking has. In his lawsuit, he applied for "a one-time grant of state aid" for the kidnapping. But he said money is not the main issue. Instead, it's about "Germany recognizing us as victims."
Lüdeking said he was bitterly disappointed at the beginning of July when the Cologne administrative court's decision was finally handed down.
"In a few years, there won't be any of us left, so the problem will solve itself. Is that what Germany wants?" he asked.
As the abducted children age, some find Germany could be waiting out the issue of compensation
Court: A considerable injustice
According to the court, the plaintiff was gravely wronged by his forced "Germanization." However, no compensation has been paid so far to "stolen children," the court explained, adding that it could not expand the class of victims who receive federal compensation.
Germany pays compensation to victims of unjust Nazi actions as defined by the General War Consequences Law. It calls for payments to be made to people "who were targeted by the Nazi regime because of social or personal attitudes or special personal characteristics such as intellectual disabilities." According to the court, however, Lüdeking does not fall into this category.
Abducted children are not 'inferior'
At the hearing, the Cologne judges attempted to explain to the plaintiff which categories of people could be compensated under the guidelines. One example was homosexuals, regarded by the Nazis as "inferior human material" and persecuted for "their characteristics." According to Nazi ideology, however, Lüdeking was not considered "inferior," but quite "high quality" as the kidnapped children were those Nazis believed would strengthen the "Aryan race."
Read more: Polish children abducted during World War II still seeking truth
Nazi racial ideology
Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler declared in 1938, "I really do have the intention to gather Germanic blood from the whole world, to rob it, to steal it wherever I can."
In central and eastern European countries occupied by the Nazis, children were snatched from their parents or taken from orphanages and brought to the German Reich.
Many cases similar to Lüdeking's have been documented and victims have so far also been denied compensaion
They were then "Germanized" using brutal methods, in homes belonging to the SS association "Lebensborn," or "Fount of Life," a Nazi organization for raising the birth rate of "Aryan" children. The Lebensborn program also forged names and presented the abducted children as "children from the east." In this way, it concealed the truth from the German families who took care of the abducted children and allowed the adults to believe they were raising children of ethnic Germans in the occupied territories.
Read more: Himmler's children
Victims not recognized
Lüdeking said it found it "absurd and disgraceful" that victims are not being compensated now because the Nazis regarded them "of high quality." Although he is disappointed with the Cologne court's reasoning, it came as no great surprise to him. For years he has been involved with the Stolen Children - Forgotten Victims association, which has already received numerous negative responses from authorities. The group was founded by Christoph Schwarz, teacher and hobby historian from Freiburg.
Some children were abducted while others were born into the Nazi Lebensborn program
"A great injustice has happened to these children," Schwarz said. "They were robbed of their childhood and remain the last group of Nazi victims without recognition and compensation."
In 2013, for example, the federal finance ministry wrote of the Lebensborn children: "Over the course of the war, fate affected a large number of families and served the war strategy. The primary goal was not to destroy the victims or rob them of their freedom, but to put them to use to benefit [National Socialist] ideals. This makes it a general consequence of war."
The Petitions Committee of the Bundestag has also refused to seek a political solution.
The struggle continues
"The fact that the victims now, decades later, are once again confronted with a dismissive position on the part of the authorities is a humiliation and a renewed trauma for them," Schwarz said.
He and Lüdeking said they intend to appeal the decision of the Cologne Administrative Court.
"It can't be that we just sink into oblivion and are not recognized as victims by Germany," Lüdeking said. "I won't give up."
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'Never Again': Memorials of the Holocaust
Dachau
The Nazi regime opened the first concentration camp in Dauchau, not far from Munich. Just a few weeks after Adolf Hitler came to power it was used by the paramilitary SS "Schutzstaffel" to imprison, torture and kill political opponents to the regime. Dachau also served as a prototype and model for the other Nazi camps that followed.
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'Never Again': Memorials of the Holocaust
Wannsee House
The villa on Berlin's Wannsee lake was pivotal in planning the Holocaust. Fifteen members of the Nazi government and the SS Schutzstaffel met here on January 20, 1942 to plan what became known as the "Final Solution," the deportation and extermination of all Jews in German-occupied territory. In 1992, the villa where the Wannsee Conference was held was turned into a memorial and museum.
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'Never Again': Memorials of the Holocaust
Bergen-Belsen
The Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Lower Saxony was initially established as a prisoner of war camp before becoming a concentration camp. Prisoners too sick to work were brought here from other concentration camps, so many also died of disease. One of the 50,000 killed here was Anne Frank, a Jewish girl who gained international fame posthumously after her diary was published.
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'Never Again': Memorials of the Holocaust
Buchenwald Memorial
Buchenwald near the Thuringian town of Weimar was one of the largest concentration camps in Germany. From 1937 to April 1945, the National Socialists deported about 270,000 people from all over Europe here and murdered 64,000 of them.
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'Never Again': Memorials of the Holocaust
Nazi party rally grounds
Nuremberg hosted the biggest Nazi party propaganda rallies from 1933 until the start of the Second World War. The annual Nazi party congress as well as rallies with as many as 200,000 participants took place on the 11-km² (4.25 square miles) area. Today, the unfinished Congress Hall building serves as a documentation center and a museum.
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'Never Again': Memorials of the Holocaust
Memorial to the German Resistance
The Bendlerblock building in Berlin was the headquarters of a military resistance group. On July 20, 1944, a group of Wehrmacht officers around Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg carried out an assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler that failed. The leaders of the conspiracy were summarily shot the same night in the courtyard of the Bendlerblock, which is today the German Resistance Memorial Center.
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'Never Again': Memorials of the Holocaust
Hadamar Euthanasia Center
From 1941 people with physical and mental disabilities were killed at a psychiatric hospital in Hadamar in Hesse. Declared "undesirables" by the Nazis, some 15,000 people were murdered here by asphyxiation with carbon monoxide or by being injected with lethal drug overdoses. Across Germany some 70,000 were killed as part of the Nazi euthanasia program. Today Hadamar is a memorial to those victims.
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'Never Again': Memorials of the Holocaust
Holocaust Memorial
Located next to the Brandenburg Gate, Berlin's Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe was inaugurated sixty years after the end of World War II on May 10, 2005, and opened to the public two days later. Architect Peter Eisenman created a field with 2,711 concrete slabs. An attached underground "Place of Information" holds the names of all known Jewish Holocaust victims.
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'Never Again': Memorials of the Holocaust
Memorial to persecuted homosexuals
Not too far from the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, another concrete memorial honors the thousands of homosexuals persecuted by the Nazis between 1933 and 1945. The four-meter high monument, which has a window showing alternately a film of two men or two women kissing, was inaugurated in Berlin's Tiergarten on May 27, 2008.
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'Never Again': Memorials of the Holocaust
Sinti and Roma Memorial
Opposite the Reichstag parliament building in Berlin, a park inaugurated in 2012 serves as a memorial to the 500,000 Sinti and Roma people killed by the Nazi regime. Around a memorial pool the poem "Auschwitz" by Roma poet Santino Spinelli is written in English, Germany and Romani: "gaunt face, dead eyes, cold lips, quiet, a broken heart, out of breath, without words, no tears."
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'Never Again': Memorials of the Holocaust
'Stolpersteine' - stumbling blocks as memorials
In the 1990s, the artist Gunther Demnig began a project to confront Germany's Nazi past. Brass-covered concrete cubes placed in front of the former houses of Nazi victims, provide details about the people and their date of deportation and death, if known. More than 45,000 "Stolpersteine" have been laid in 18 countries in Europe - it's the world's largest decentralized Holocaust memorial.
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'Never Again': Memorials of the Holocaust
Brown House in Munich
Right next to the "Führerbau" where Adolf Hitler had his office, was the headquarters of the Nazi Party in Germany, in the "Brown House" in Munich. A white cube now occupies its former location. A new "Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism" opened on April 30, 2015, 70 years after the liberation from the Nazi regime, uncovering further dark chapters of history.
Author: Max Zander, Ille Simon