The ideology behind the massacres of children and the crushing of compassion

Children were the targets. The order was clear: keep an eye on them, and if necessary, shoot them on sight. This is documented. Russian children were targeted by the Nazis. Even before that, however, it was the Soviet security services who suspected that the Germans were using them as spies. It was in Stalinist Russia that the myth of little Pavlik Morozov was born – the pioneer who denounced his father as a kulak. One could end up in the Gulag, or even be shot, at a very tender age. It was presented as a response to juvenile delinquency—a sort of ‘anti-truancy’ emergency, in short. For the Nazis, however, it was structural cruelty. It was ideology that gave them licence to exterminate the children of ‘inferior’ races.

It was during the Battle of Smolensk in September 1941, a few weeks after the Nazi invasion, that the NKVD first reported numerous cases of boys aged between 13 and 18 being recruited by the Germans, and paid between 2,000 and 5,000 roubles to cross the front lines and provide details on Red Army units and airfields (from the FSB archives, cited by Chris Bellamy in his monumental Absolute War: Soviet Russia in the Second World War (Einaudi 2011)).

In the north, the invasion had caught thousands of children by surprise in the summer camps around Leningrad. Many joined the partisans, as did thousands of their peers in the vast forests and marshes. A child in the forest is the protagonist of "European Education," Romain Gary’s debut novel. Before the siege, there were 400,000 children in Leningrad. The survivors of the two-year siege – having endured hunger, hardship, disease and bombing – were rewarded with the highly coveted ‘passports’ that allowed them to travel within the USSR. In 1942, Hitler ordered that, once Stalingrad had been occupied, everyone found in the city should be killed, as they were evidently ‘Communists’. Women and children, if captured, were hanged and their bodies displayed as a warning. This was probably one of the reasons why they held out.

Wehrmacht units had, right from the start – even before the invasion began – been ordered to “stop and shoot on the spot” any civilians who “were seen wandering about” or “who appeared in any way suspicious”. This included women and children. The ‘guidelines for the conduct of troops in Russia’, delivered in sealed envelopes to divisional commands, provided for the systematic elimination of Jews and Bolsheviks, as well as ‘inferior races’. Special units – the SS and SD Einsatzgruppen – were specifically tasked with carrying out the extermination. From the very outset, the war against Russia differed, for ideological reasons, from the war fought on the Western Front. In the East, they were ‘Untermenschen’, subhumans, and were therefore to be treated accordingly. Widespread, systematic indoctrination won over the doubters and the hesitant, nipping any temptation to show humanity or pity in the bud.

The sheer volume of printed material accompanying the Reich’s armies was remarkable. Tonnes of it, even when petrol, food and ammunition were in short supply. Leaflets, service orders from divisional headquarters, and publications aimed at the rank and file and non-commissioned officers warned that “attractive women, particularly young girls, and even children are being instructed to make up stories – for example, that they are looking for their families – whilst in reality they are spying”. Woe betide anyone who “fraternised”. If they do not kill or castrate you by treachery, the diabolical Russian women will infect you with venereal diseases. A typical example is the report on the interrogation of 15 ‘agents’ carried out by the II Army Corps: 12 of these ‘spies’ were aged between 15 and 17, one was a child, and one was the child’s mother. “Despite their young age and a certain degree of stupidity, they gave the impression throughout the interrogation, which lasted several hours, of being fanatical communists and enemies of Germany. Even during the interrogation they continually attempted to lie, and every truthful statement had to be wrung from them using the most brutal methods”. All were executed immediately after the interrogation, the report states.

It became standard practice to label all civilians killed as ‘agents’, without even subjecting them to interrogation. Labelling them as spies and agents was the quickest way to justify the massacres. At that time, the term ‘terrorists’ was not yet in common use. In The Western Front: German Troops and the Brutalisation of the War 1941–1945 (Il Mulino, 2003), Omer Bartov provides an impressive body of documentation on how “the Nazi authorities, as well as senior Wehrmacht officers, made a concerted and massive effort to strip the Russian population of any semblance of humanity in the eyes of the troops”. This gave them a sense of total impunity, of being able to do whatever they wanted to the population. It is no coincidence that, later on, even in Italy and France, the worst massacres of civilians – including women and children – were committed by troops returning from Russia (one might say on ‘reward leave’). Their nemesis, in the final days of the Reich, was the massacre of Hitler’s child soldiers.

There is a vast body of research on German atrocities. However, I have no answer to a question that gnaws at me: how, on the other hand, did the Italians—allies of the Germans—behave during the Russian campaign? The ‘Children of Italy, all called Balilla’, the ‘Little Lombard Lookout’ in De Amicis’s Cuore are not bloodthirsty. Yet Italians, too, killed women and children in Africa and the Balkans.

Every war has images that remain etched in the collective memory forever. Of the round-ups of Jews in the East, there is the image of the child in a coat that is far too big, wearing a cap and with his arms raised. From Vietnam, there is the photograph of the naked, terrified little girl fleeing a napalm bombing. The photograph of the naked Chinese child amidst the rubble of Shanghai station, bombed by Zero fighters, had in its day backfired on the Japanese. The Cambodia of the Khmer Rouge is inseparable from the Killing Fields, the expanses of skulls belonging to those murdered by Pol Pot’s child soldiers. If there is anything more horrifying than murdered children, it is child murderers. People have always killed for fun. Yet never before had war itself become a children’s console video game, as it has since the advent of drones. No one is as susceptible to the call of the Pied Piper as children.

There are images, ghosts that will continue to haunt both the defeated and the victors, both victims and perpetrators, for generations to come. No ‘alternative’ narrative can exorcise them. Readers of my generation may recall a 1968 film starring John Wayne, Green Berets (the special forces sent to Vietnam). The protagonist explains to his younger comrade why they find themselves fighting so far from home: to defend Vietnamese children from the Vietcong monsters. He recounts a village where the Americans had vaccinated the children; when the Vietcong returned, they had mutilated the arms of all the children who had received the shots.

The images from Gaza – the vast expanses of ruins – are seared into the memory. The sight of the small shrouds covering tiny bodies, and children queuing with empty pots at food distribution points, is unbearable. In Israel, the army has belatedly decided to open an inquiry into the 2024 death of Hind Rajab, the little girl who cried out for help for hours from the car that had been riddled with gunfire, in which her family members were killed (the Palestinian Red Crescent ambulance sent to her aid was also bombed). Other children remain anonymous. Hard-liners in Netanyahu’s government continue to assert that they should all be killed. In Iran, on the first day of the war, in addition to killing Ayatollah Khamenei, they bombed a girls’ school in the south, killing hundreds of pupils. The UN had called for an investigation. To date, there has not been so much as a hint of regret from the US.

Greek mythology is full of children slaughtered in war or used as instruments of revenge. An Athenian princess, Procne, who had married the king of Thessaly, killed their only son and served him up at dinner after discovering that he had raped his sister. Medea sacrificed the two young sons she had had with Theseus when she learnt that he intended to remarry. In the Iliad, one laments at every turn the fate of women and infants in besieged and captured cities. Greek tragedy is all about children killing their parents (Orestes, Electra, Oedipus).

In ancient China, imperial vengeance has for millennia extended to the extermination of the entire family, up to the ninth degree of kinship: parents and grandparents, children, grandchildren, uncles, cousins, wives and concubines. However, Confucius opposed the killing of children. The entire corpus of classical Western literature—from the cycles of myths about the fall of Troy, to the great Greek playwrights, to Virgil and Seneca—is haunted and moved by the fate of young Astyanax, the son of the hero Hector, torn from Andromache’s arms and hurled from the walls of Troy. According to tradition, this was done on Odysseus’s advice, to prevent the Trojans from having someone who, when grown up, might take revenge on them. In the Odyssey, Odysseus is careful not to mention this. He is not one to be easily troubled by scruples. But perhaps even he is ashamed of it. Or it is simply in his interests to keep quiet about it. A hero of a thousand subterfuges, he is capable of twisting the narrative in whatever way suits him best at the time. It would fall to Euripides, much later, to make the Athenians weep over the killing of Hector’s son, and over their own recent war crimes, in the tragedy The Trojan Women, staged at the Dionysia in 415 BC. It was the height of the Peloponnesian War. The audience could not have failed to notice the parallel.

The Bible is second to none in terms of cruelty in war towards the elderly, women and children (and even livestock and fruit trees). The most chilling thing, however, is something else: that those ancient prescriptions for genocide, introduced by who knows whose hand in who knows what era, are today being passed off by the Israeli far right as divine prescriptions to be put into practice. The Haggadah, the ‘tradition’ of Passover, which Jews read every year at a family dinner to commemorate – especially for the children – the liberation from Egypt, teaches that the extermination of the Jews, plotted century after century, has never succeeded. Why on earth should it succeed against the Palestinians?

The historical accuracy of the Massacre of the Innocents, as recounted in the Gospel of Matthew, is much debated. It bears similarities to other, far more ancient Middle Eastern myths (where else could it have been invented, if not in the Middle East?). Few other stories have so captured the imagination of painters and artists. Bloodstained cradles, children torn from their mothers, impaled and mutilated… It clearly strikes a raw nerve in our so-called ‘Western civilisation’. Ivan Karamazov, citing newspaper reports that the Turks were impaling Bulgarian infants on bayonets, wonders why God allows children to be harmed. Dostoevsky has no answers. These are not distant nightmares. They have come true in massacres and pogroms of every kind and creed, century after century. Right up to Auschwitz, Srebrenica and Gaza.

One of the most curious episodes involving children swept up in war – or rather, seeking out war – was the so-called Children’s Crusade of 1212. It is shrouded in the mist of legends and ‘myth-history’. For reasons that remain a mystery, thousands of young boys and girls, pueri and puellae, from Northern Europe responded to the call of a ten-year-old boy, a certain Nicholas of Cologne, who claimed to have seen, between Easter and Whitsun, a great flaming cross in the sky above his city, commanding him to set out for the Holy Land to convert the Saracens. According to the sole primary source, the Chronica Regiae Coloniensis, many thousands of “boys (pueri) aged between 6 and adulthood” (at that time, 13) followed him. “They abandoned en masse whatever they were doing – the carts they were driving, the flocks they were tending.” “They did so against the will of their parents, relatives and friends, who tried to make them turn back.” A generational revolt? A medieval 1968? Bored and disillusioned youth? Fanatics? “Young as they were, they lacked the strength and were incapable of causing any trouble,” the chronicler informs us. It is unclear whether they lived off charity or theft. It is noteworthy, however, that there is no record of them massacring Jews wherever they passed through, as all the other crusaders did. They split into two main groups. One group apparently headed for Marseille, where they boarded merchant sailing ships. These ships took them to Egypt rather than the Holy Land, and sold them into slavery. The other group managed to cross the Alps, reaching Piacenza and then Rome, where they met the Pope.

The Pope, who had never either called for or blessed that crusade, told him to give it up and go home. “The only thing that is certain,” the reporter concludes, “is that of the many thousands who had set out, very few returned.” This took place eight years after the Fourth Crusade, the one in which the Latins, Catalans and Venetians, instead of going to the Holy Land, had stopped to plunder Christian Constantinople. Innocent III was interested in another crusade, not against the Muslims occupying Jerusalem, but against disobedient Christians, heretics – the Albigensians, also known as the Cathars, the ‘pure ones’ – in Provence and Languedoc. They were an entire civilisation. They were destroyed and exterminated. Since the dawn of time, priority has always been given to one’s own enemies at home – if not those within one’s own party – before those from outside.

Everything you might want to know can be found in "The Children’s Crusade: Medieval History, Modern Mythistory" by Gary Dickson (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). Countless authors have been captivated by the subject. From the late 19th-century French Symbolist Marcel Schwob, author of the delightful "Croisade des Enfants", to the American Kurt Vonnegut, whose "Slaughterhouse-Five" has a double subtitle: "Or: The Children’s Crusade. A Compulsory Dance with Death". It was published in 1969. The protagonist is an American soldier, a certain Billy Pilgrim (nomen omen, ‘pilgrim’), hospitalised for post-traumatic stress disorder. He is convinced that he is constantly reliving the Allied bombing raid that burnt Dresden and its inhabitants to the ground in 1945. Dresden had happened 24 years earlier. Vonnegut’s ‘present’ is the napalm on Vietnam.

Gabriele D’Annunzio had tried to persuade Puccini to set one of his own rather lacklustre stage adaptations of "The Children’s Crusade" to music. In 1939, Bertolt Brecht wrote "Kinderkreuzzug", a short poem of just 35 quatrains, dating from 193. Set to music by Benjamin Britten, it was staged in New York in 1943. The story is set in Poland, which has been invaded by the Germans, where groups of Polish, Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, Spanish, French, Nazi, Communist and even ‘yellow-faced’ children – Chinese or perhaps even Japanese – fleeing the war, seek peace. It was not a success; first, the war had to be brought to an end.

The Ceuta case tells the story of children desperately seeking a future – children who have been misled, ill-advised and betrayed by everyone. On a Sunday in late August, whilst Europe was on holiday at the beach, thousands of very young people stormed the Spanish enclave of Ceuta in Morocco by sea. The influx of unaccompanied minors was portrayed as a barbarian invasion. Those who did not drown are a nuisance, and Europe does not know how to deal with them. They have ruined our holidays.