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Christian-Albrechts-University in Kiel: scientific view of human destinies
Photo: Carsten Rehder / DPA
From the 1950s, millions of boys and girls were sent to children's sanatoriums - only in recent years have many of them made serious allegations against the staff.
The Christian-Albrechts-University in Kiel (CAU) has now investigated the mistreatment of the so-called deportation children in Sankt Peter-Ording.
According to the study, former deported children very often reported physical violence such as corporal punishment, imprisonment, deprivation of food or forced eating.
The study is based on several thousand pages of archive material, ten individual interviews and several hundred questionnaires from an external survey.
Affected people often mentioned psychological violence in the interviews, it said.
This includes insults, non-compliance, shaming, showing off, belittling or prohibitions.
Very rarely, sexualised violence or forced labor were also mentioned.
According to Helge-Fabian Hertz from the Historical Seminar at the CAU, the violent measures served to provide care from the point of view of those responsible at the time.
The ban on contact with parents, which falls under psychological violence, was intended to reduce homesickness.
“It was like that back then, it goes as far as corporal punishment.
That is of course unthinkable these days.«
»Every experience of violence is one too many«
According to the authors, however, the reports from Sankt Peter-Ording cannot prove that there was systematic use of violence for base or ideological reasons, such as sadism.
According to Hertz, they also differ substantially from the correctional home scandals, which often involve sexual abuse.
This also has something to do with the length of stay.
Nevertheless: "Of course, every experience of violence is one too many."
The children's cures, lasting three to six weeks, began shortly after the war to give so-called bunker children a rest.
In the heyday of deportation in the 1950s and 1960s, there were around 30 homes in Sankt Peter-Ording.
The study assumes that a total of around 325,000 children attended convalescent cures in the North Frisian town.
According to various calculations, the number of children sent to health resorts from 1945 to 1990 was estimated at six to eight million or even twelve million for all federal states of the Federal Republic of Germany at that time.
bbr/dpa