
Wolf Children in Lithuania: The Forgotten Orphans of World War Two
Luise was four years old when she fled Königsberg as the Red Army closed in, ending up alone in Lithuania with a new Lithuanian name and a ban on speaking German. She was one of hundreds of so-called wolf children, kids separated from their parents amid the mass exodus from East Prussia, where tens of thousands died of hunger and disease in the war's final months. Left without family or homes, these children begged, worked farms for bread, and hid their origins to survive among strangers in a country that had its own reasons to resent Germans. DW Documentary tracks down survivors now in their eighties, who describe decades of silence about what happened to them, too young to have been Nazis but marked by the label anyway. Interviews and archival footage reconstruct a piece of postwar history that stayed largely unrecorded until these witnesses started talking, decades after the fact, about the years they spent as children with no one.