A Dying Secret

This week, a lawsuit was filed in federal court against German car maker Volkswagen for crimes committed against children more than 50 years ago. But in the final report of her exclusive investigation, CBS This Morning Investigative Correspondent Roberta Baskin shows us that Volkswagen was only one of the participants in a Nazi plan to decide who would live and who would die.

Her three-month investigation late last year first revealed the untold tragedy of World War II. The story and its accompanying documents appeared on CBS.com in November 1998.

Sifting through documents during our nine-month investigation, we were able to trace Adolph Hitler's well-organized plan to dominate Europe. The children simply got in his way.

In Germany, the past is never far from the present. That's especially true in the town of Bruensweig. Children play near simple wooden crosses that mark the graves of infants - babies who died while in the care of the Nazis more than 50 years ago. Today, dozens of babies are buried right below a playground, concealing one of Nazi Germany's last, dark secrets.

Then, with so many German men in uniform, the factories needed workers. So the Nazis abducted millions of people from their homes in Poland and Russia, took them back to Germany, and put them to work.

Many of the forced laborers were women, and many became pregnant. At first, pregnant workers were allowed to return home to Russia and Poland. Then, in 1943, the head of the German police, Heinrich Himmler, wrote a letter ordering that crude nurseries be set up: "children's homes" for the babies of the forced laborers.

In the words of attorney Michael Hausfeld, "It was a pretense...along with many other aspects of National Socialist Policy at the time."

Hausfeld is a lawyer who has represented Holocaust victims. He says, "They came up with a concept of, rather than having the mother really care for the child, the company would care for the child and the mother would go back to work."

How well did the company care for the children? Says Hausfeld, "They killed them."

"It was premeditated," says Krystyna Smandzewska, a prosecuting attorney for the War Crimes Commission in Poland.

"They were starved," he says. "They were specificlly not given food so they would die from malnutrition. This was death by starvation. They were not given any medical attention. The nurses were there to act as murderers."

Says Hausfeld: "In a one to two-year period, over 100,000 infants under the age of six months were exterminated."

More than 300 childrens' homes, or kinderheime, were established in Germany during the war. Somehow, their horrific past has been all but erased. According to Hausfeld, "Immediately toward the end of the war, there was a central order issued to all the kinderheime to destroy the records of the facility."

In the years that followed, the deaths of the thousands of children were simply blamed on natural causes.

Prosecutor Krystyna Smandzewska says, "These were evident lies, made to camouflage the actual means of death of these children. It is well known that the actual cause of death was falsified."

Today, the only evidence of the homes sits scattered throughout dusty archives in Poland, in old photographs, and in the memories of the mothers.

Today in Braunschweig, there is a Burger King where the Brunschweig children's home once stood. A busy playground hides the graves of at least 150 babies from the home. Soon, there won't be anyone left who remembers them.

Says Hausfeld, "Most of these people are at the end of their lives, and they know it. And it's almost like a dying declaration. They want the world to know what happened."

As more documentation of the atrocities comes out involving other German companies, more lawsuits may be filed. Next week, the U.S. State Department and the German government are hosting a conference in Washington to address restitution for slave laborers. In part, it's an effort to resolve the issue out of court.

The Kinderheim Story, Part 1.

The Kinderheim Story, Part 3.

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