Yet, despite the many postwar impediments, the effort to care for these children was remarkably successful in the end. The division of Germany and the onset of the Cold War further handicapped efforts to aid children by preventing the creation of a unified search service. It argues that despite a general agreement that children were in peril, Allied denazification policies and the decision by the UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) not to help “enemy children” compromised care for children. This article explores the struggle to locate, identify, and provide for missing, lost, and displaced German children after 1945. Most challenging for authorities were those who were alone and too young to know their own names. Some were orphaned others remained in camps, children's homes, or foster families in areas that no longer belonged to Germany. Although the majority returned home with little institutional support, hundreds of thousands of other German children could not. In the final months of World War II, more than a million German children took to the roads in search of family and home. The cost of sustaining the German war effort was consequently borne, to a large extent, by the local population, which labored under appalling conditions both in the Reich and in Ukraine itself. Yet, they were also successful: without the raw materials obtained from Ukraine, the Nazi war machine would have likely ground to a halt well before 1945. The Nazi policies of racist repression and mass murder were, then, both a means of and an obstacle to exploitation of the East. Substantial reconstruction efforts only began belatedly and were accompanied by brute force that combined economic logic with ideological zeal.
But plans for the economic exploitation of Ukraine were flawed from the beginning and remained inconsistent throughout the war. German hopes largely focused on Ukraine, which was expected to be both a giant breadbasket and a reservoir of essential minerals. The attack against the Soviet Union was ideologically motivated, but the timing owed a great deal to military and economic considerations.
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