In Waltrop Germany, I hiked along the Datteln-Hamm Canal which runs east and west branching off of the Dortmund-Ems Canal. The 75th Infantry Division would have crossed the canal as they moved south towards Dortmund Germany.
The Waltrop Vegetable Growers’ Cooperative established a maternity camp in the sewage fields outside of Waltrop in 1943 on behalf of the National Socialists. During WWII, the Waltrop-Holthausen Maternity Camp, a forced labor facility where hundreds of foreign female workers gave birth, and many of their infants died due to neglect, and starvation, highlighting the brutal Nazi racial policies and treatment of “Untermenschen” (subhumans). These “assembly stations” were set up by the Gestapo to manage births from Eastern European forced laborers, with infants deemed racially “valuable” (blonde/blue-eyed) often given to German parents, while others perished, a grim aspect of Nazi racial ideology.
During World War II, Nazi birthing centers for foreign workers, known as “foreign Children Nurseries“, “Eastern Worker Children Nurseries“), or “Baby Homes” were used as stations for abandoned infants. These Nazi Party facilities established in the heartland of Germany for the so-called ‘troublesome’ babies according to Himler’s decree, were for the offspring born to foreign women and girls servicing the German war economy, including Polish and Eastern European female forced labour. The babies and children, most of them resulting from rape at the place of enslavement, were taken from the mothers en masse between 1943 and 1945. At some locations, up to 90 percent of infants died a torturous death due to calculated neglect. Research indicates that over 500 babies were murdered.While liberating forced labor camps, the American soldiers were just beginning to learn of the atrocities committed.
During WWII, the Datteln-Hamm Canal, a crucial part of Germany’s inland waterway network, was severely damaged by Allied air attacks as part of the overall strategy to cripple the German transportation of war supplies. Canal walls were breached and bridges destroyed, like those near the Dortmund-Ems Canal junction. These air raids had halted most movement by March 1945. Barges lay fallow in the now empty canals.
Significant repairs were needed post-war to restore navigability. Nuclear power plants and wind turbines also came post war.