Die Unwertigen (2009)

The children caught up in the machinery of Nazi terror were neither Jews nor Communists nor members of any other group hated by the Nazis; they were simply children. They were punished because their parents had either been arrested by the Gestapo or because the children did not fit the ideal of the “racially valuable German.” When Waltraut Richard’s mother is sent to a concentration camp for her left-liberal political views, Waltraut and her siblings are shunted off to institutions. Their mother, who lived in a Lithuanian village, had helped political prisoners and was denounced by zealous neighbors. She had also refused to join the Nazi Party. Later, the siblings are separated. They do not see one another again until years later. Hunger is a daily companion for the children, as are brutal beatings and harassment. Seventeen-year-old Günter Discher is sent to the Moringen youth concentration camp near Hamburg because he listens to forbidden swing music, which the Nazis classify as degenerate. Günter often suffers from hunger and is subjected to harassment. Many of his fellow inmates die as a result of the catastrophic living conditions there. Nine-year-old Elfriede Schreyer, who has difficulty reading and writing, is diagnosed with “moderate feeblemindedness.” She is sent away to the Kalmenhof institution in Idstein, Hesse. For many of those taken there, this institution proves to be only a stopover: from 1941 onward, they are moved to the nearby Hadamar killing center and murdered there as part of the Nazi euthanasia program. Nearly 600 children and young people die there before the end of the war. At the children’s home, Elfriede witnesses children becoming victims of the murders of the sick. She has to work hard there; she never learns to read or write, and all she does is survive the ordeal. When the war ends, however, she is not released and has to remain in the institution for decades. Elfriede Schreyer gives birth to three children, all of whom are taken away from her because, as a “feebleminded person,” she is not allowed to raise children. The diagnosis is never properly reviewed. Only in the early 1970s, thanks to the efforts of a psychologist, is she able to take the first steps toward freedom and an independent life. Richard Sucker, a child born out of wedlock, is taken from his mother forever before he is even two years old and is forced to do hard labor at just four. His childhood is marked by beatings and imposed labor. Sucker is left with the sense that, after the war ended, essentially nothing had changed in his situation. He visits his mother’s grave for the first time; he has no memory of her at all. When he stands at her grave for the first time, the despair in his voice is clear. All these children were robbed of their childhood and youth—a stolen life that no one can give back to them. The terrible experiences they endured continued to shape their lives later on, leaving them marked by suffering. At least, they have so far been denied any meaningful reparation.