The children should get some fresh air. Gather your strength, get out of the city. “Give her to a nice home for a few weeks,” was the advice to the parents. So parents could treat themselves to a vacation without the annoying screaming of the children. From the 1950s to the 1980s, six to ten million children in the Federal Republic were unaccompanied and sent on such spa holidays for weeks. The youngest were still infants. Home tourism was a billion-dollar business for state, church and private sponsors.
A severely traumatizing experience often awaited the children. In the institutions in the Black Forest, in the Harz Mountains, on North Sea islands, the regime was sometimes harsh. Hundreds of thousands have been traumatized by violence, intimidation and fear of death. All this remained taboo for a long time. Almost nobody believed the children. Complaints from parents petered out.
The research was initiated by the publicist Anja Röhl, who was herself sent away as a child. She published experience reports on her website, whereupon thousands of people with similar experiences came forward. They had been forced to eat their vomit, were only allowed to visit the toilets according to schedule, had to remain silent for hours, and had their mail checked. They were harassed, exposed, beaten, insulted. Röhl has the testimony of a woman who was threatened by teachers in a basement with throwing her into a blazing oven.
Some homes opened in former Nazi institutions, and some of the staff came from there. Röhl suggested a nationwide initiative to deal with the problem, and the first scientific work on the subject has now been published.
For his Study “Currency or deportation?” the historian Hans-Walter Schmuhl examined the children’s cures German Employee Health Insurance Fund (DAK), which has just apologized to those affected at the time as the first carrier ever. From 1951 onwards, the DAK was responsible around 450,000 children’s cures. The new study sheds light on what children in health insurance homes like the “Schuppenhörnle” in the Black Forest experienced. “I’m a little blob of a human. Alone, helpless,” wrote a spa child at the time in a poem about that time. The children from back then, after decades of taboo, are no longer alone.
