36 Amazing Photos Showing Children During World War 2

An untold number of children were touched by the atrocities of World War II. Throughout the war, the proportion of civilian deaths to military deaths is said to have been as high as three to one — and some countries were definitely affected much worse than others.

The country most affected during the war was Poland. More than 6 million people, equal to one-sixth of the country’s pre-war population, died during World War II. All of these victims were predominantly civilian, with a great many of them being children.

However, getting caught up in the maelstrom of war, whether it be a mass execution or a bombing raid were not the only tragic circumstances that Polish children had to worry about. Many of them faced the distinct possibility of being kidnapped by their German oppressors. Under “Generalplan Ost” — the Nazi plan for genocide and ethnic cleansing in Europe — tens of thousands of Polish children were kidnapped and taken to Germany to become “Germanized.”

It has been calculated that over 250,000 Polish children were kidnapped during World War II. It is estimated that nearly 75 percent of these children never made it back home to their families in Poland after the war.

Aside from Poland, a large number of other countries suffered immensely horrifying civilian casualties during World War II. Some of the countries include include the Soviet Union, China, Germany (where an estimated 76,000 children died as a direct result of Allied bombing raids), Japan, India, and the Philippines.

Let us not forget that more than 1 million Jewish children were killed by the Nazis and their allies or packed into ghettos across Eastern Europe. In these ghettos, children often died from starvation and other privations. Those that did not die in the ghettos were either consigned to the death camps to be gassed or were executed and placed in mass graves.

Only those adults and children who were considered productive and useful to the German war effort were spared and even then, their fate was effectively secured by the horrendous working conditions and the miniscule amount of food given to each needed for subsistence. What made these mass killings even worse was the fact that, during the war, most of the world thought that these stories of mass extermination and death camps were propaganda – tales not to be belived.

Many of the most touching photographs that depict children during World War 2 show Britain during the Blitz. A large number of British children were sent away to the countryside as part of the government’s evacuation scheme known as Operation Pied Piper. The evacuation scheme had been touted as a great success in the media but in actual fact, by early 1940, more than 60 percent of children had returned home, just in time to witness the Blitz. All told, at least 5,028 children died during the Blitz.

While historians have tended to focus on other more high profiles topics relating to the Second World War the facy remains that without a doubt, children are the forgotten victims of the war.