From Stalin’s Gulags and Nazi Camps to ICE Detention Centers, Child Suffering is a Constant

Detaining innocent children is a crime far older than Auschwitz.

During World War II, children queue at a Ustaša concentration camp in Croatia, probably Sisak, built to hold Serb and Jewish prisoners. | Image Source: Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain)

‘Thank you Stalin for our happy childhood!’ You’d find posters with Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin’s picture surrounded by doting kids plastered on the doorways of nurseries, orphanages and schools as part of Stalin’s far reaching propaganda.

This wide-spread campaign helped build a cult of personality, teaching thousands of children to see him as a kind father figure with a grand vision for their future. The idea that children should be grateful to Stalin certainly doesn’t sit right when we know that parallel to this, Stalin had thousands of children as prisoners in Gulags.

And if we look at the Nazis, in 1939, over 90 percent of German children were part of Hitler’s Youth Organization where they were being fed the ideals of the Nazi ideology and being prepared for the great future that awaited them. At the same time, that very government killed about 1.5 million Jewish and other children in the Holocaust, all to serve the same leader’s “grand vision.”

Concentration camps and detention centers are not only the doing of dictators and fascists like Stalin or Hitler though. There are examples of these all over…