The core of the Germanization process was to destroy the Polish identity of the boys and girls. Barbara Mikolajczyk was an adolescent when the [Third Reich] took her and her sisters to Bruczkow, where the Nazis forced them to learn German. “The Germans always said that we must forget about speaking in Polish and about Poland,” Mikolajczyk said. They beat her and the other children when they spoke Polish.

Mikolajczyk now became Baber Mickler. Placed in a German home, she had to address a German woman as “Mama.“ Like other Polish children doled out to German households, Mikolajczyk received a fraudulent birth certificate and genealogy which the [Fascists] inventively composed for her.⁴⁷

[…]

The [Fascists] examined Jan Sulisz, a Polish orphan, at Bruczkow and placed him in a school attended by German children. Forced to join the [Fascist] youth group Hitlerjugend, he, too, was cut off from his Polish roots. Interestingly, Sulisz, whose new name was Suhling, met Barbara Mikolajczyk and her sisters at a Germanization center in Salsburg. The SS gave Suhling to a [Fascist] business establishment from which he escaped. Unfortunately, he was caught and beaten. He survived the war to be reunited with relatives in Lodz.

A similar thing happened to Willi Nililek, who was sent to work in a [Fascist] factory. When he and his friends were caught speaking Polish, Nililek said, “They stuck us in the arms and back with needles. I was sick. The other two boys went crazy and were given ‘death pills.’”⁴⁹

Despite the severe penalties involved, many Polish children continued to speak Polish. Jerzy Stickel, sent to a German institution in Ujazdow where he was treated as a German youth, was one of them. After the war, when Stickel learned he was Polish, German children got so angry with him they beat him up.⁵⁰ In one institution, older Polish children used to wake up younger ones at night to use the Polish language and especially to recite their prayers so they wouldn’t forget their heritage.⁵¹

“I could not reconcile myself to denying my nationality, so I went on talking Polish,” said Sigismund Krajeski, who was 10‐years‐old when the [Fascists] sent him to Gmunden, Austria. “For this I was often tied to a post and beaten, but as I was strong and refused to give in, I managed to stand it.” When German families came to the institution to select a child for themselves, Krajeski deliberately spoke Polish.

“Of course the resulting punishment was dreadful, but I preferred it to disgracing myself and going to a Hitler family. They had no success with me.” Indeed, they didn’t. Krajeski ran away and managed to return to his home in Poznan.⁵²

There were several escapes from the [Fascist] Germanization center at Kalisz, where the [Fascists] appropriated a monastery from Polish monks to set up their racist school. According to Stanislaw Kulczinski, known as “Papa Stanislaw,” a handyman there, the [Fascists] brought thousands of children to Kalisz. Those who refused Germanization were beaten and deprived of food.

Zygmunt Swiatlowski, stubbornly refusing denationalization, was killed by the woman supervisor of the institution. “The children were always sad,” Papa Stanislaw said. “They lived in fear and were homesick, and the German supervisors felt nothing but hatred for them because they were nothing but little ‘Polacks’ and did not belong to them.”

Events that happened today (August 15):

1939: Twenty‐six Ju87 bombers commanded by Walter Sigel met unexpected ground fog during a dive‐bombing demonstration for Luftwaffe generals at Neuhammer. Thirteen of them crashed and burned.
1940: A Fascist submarine torpedoed and sunk the Greek cruiser Elli at Tinos harbor during peacetime, marking the most serious Fascist provocation prior to the outbreak of the Greco‐Italian War in October.
1941: Hungary’s leaders officially ended their large‐scale deportations because the Axis occupying forces in East Galicia did not want to handle more deportees. Elsewhen, an Allied firing squad executed Corporal Josef Jakobs at the Tower of London for his espionage on the Axis’s behalf.
1943: Superior Axis forces surround Cretan partisans during the Battle of Trahili, who manage to escape against all odds.
1945: Emperor Hirohito broadcasted his declaration of surrender following the Axis’s defeat in World War II; Korea gained independence from the Empire of Japan. Shortly before or after the broadcast, Korechika Anami, the Axis’s last remaining War Minister, committed suicide.
1953: Ludwig Prandtl, Axis physicist and aerospace scientist, expired.
1989: Minoru Genda, Axis aviator who helped plan the assault on Pearl Harbor, died.