"And the way the Krauts treated their children":

https://psychohistory.com/articles/the-childhood-origins-of-the-holocaust/

"First of all, parents openly expressed their resentment against girls when they were born, and uniformly neglected them.  When a girl was born, fathers were often reported to “fling it on to the bed by the mother so violently that he might have broken its spine.” 20 The result was that newborn girls were far more often killed than boys in central European areas, which resulted in some of the highest boy/girl sex ratios in Europe, with mothers without guilt “giving birth to their babies in the privy and treating the birth as an evacuation…Some of the women killed their children in a very crude way, by smashing their heads.” 21 Thus children growing up would usually witness either their mothers strangling about forty percent of their new siblings or at least would see dead babies everywhere in latrines and streams, giving real content to their feeling that they too had better not be “bad” or their Killer Parent might kill them too. An alternative for wealthier families (who actually killed more of their girls than poorer families) was to send them to “killing wetnurses” called Engelmacherin, “angelmakers,” who were paid to kill off the children sent to them.22

Breast-feeding of infants was so infrequent that infant mortality rates in Germany ranged from 21 percent in Prussia to an astonishing 58 percent in Bavaria during the 19th century, the higher figures in the south being due to the routine practice of not breast-feeding at all, since hand-fed babies only fed flour and water “pap” died at a rate three times that of breast-fed babies.23 Thus German and Austrian infant mortality half again higher than France and England, with Vienna having one of the highest infant abandonment rates in Europe, ­half of their newborn babies being abandoned by their mothers at the end of the 19th century.24 Visitors to German homes from abroad reported, “It is extremely rare for a German lady to nourish her own child.” 25 Breastfeeding was less practiced the further south one went.  One mother, who had moved from northern Germany where nursing was more common, was called “swinish and filthy” by local Bavarian women for trying to nurse her newborn, and her husband threatened “he would not eat if she did not give up her disgusting habit.” 26 Ende reports that “one rarely encounters a German infant who is fully breast-fed. Everywhere they got their mouths stuffed with Zulp, a small linen bag filed with bread and often alcohol,27the mothers saying they “didn’t want to ruin their figures” and breast-feeding was “too messy.” 28 Outsiders often noted that Central European mothers “paid less attention to their children than cows.” 29

Children began their history of abuse early, in fact during fetal life, since mothers usually consumed alcohol daily and since fathers routinely battered their pregnant spouses.  Upon birth, as Mayhew described the practice in Germany at the end of the 19th century, “the wretched new-born little thing has been wound up in…ells of bandages, from the feet right, and tight, up to the neck; as if it were intended to be embalmed as a mummy.” Since these bandages were rarely changed, the infant was left in its own feces and urine, with the result, says Mayhew, that “babies are loathesome, foetid things…offensive to the last degree with their excreta [and] the heads of the poor things are never washed, and are like the rind of Stilton cheese, with dirt encrusted upon their skull.” 30  The mothers were so frightened of their babies that they not only tied them up but often strapped them into a crib in a room with curtains drawn to keep out “lurking evils.” 31 The results were that the infants were covered with lice and other vermin attracted to their feces, but they could not move to drive them away as infants who were not swaddled might do. The parents routinely called them “lice,” and “useless eaters” 32 because they didn’t contribute to the family’s work until they were older, resenting their children so much that they often recalled “Rarely could we eat a piece of bread without hearing father’s comment that we did not merit it” because they did not earn their living.

The fear that the infant would become a “tyrant” over the mother was so common that any child’s crying was “exclusively described as ‘screaming’ [and the mother told to] remain hard and relentless” toward her baby and never to talk to or hold it in her lap so that “after a few nights, the child will understand that its screaming will have no effect and is quiet.” 33  (Even rats who are tied up and never handled in their early years grow up vicious.)34 Since “the small child has a notorious smell,” mothers often put them, swaddled, in a bag, which they hung on the wall or on a tree, while the mothers did other things.35 Since the pedophobia of the mothers continued after their infants were out of swaddling clothes, there were many other restraint devices available to assure that the child would not be a demanding “tyrant,” such as tight corsets with steel backboards and steel collars, long straps around the body to restrain the child,36 anti-masturbation cages, etc. Painful enemas were routinely applied in daily rituals that were actually sexual assaults on the anus, beginning around six months of age, before sphincter control is available to the infant,37 with the mother or nurse sometimes tying the child up in leather straps and inserting the two-foot-long enema tube over and over again as punishment for its “accidents.” 38 Many cities had special enema stores that German children were routinely taken to in order to be “fitted” for their proper enema size. German preoccupation with feces was so widespread that Alan Dundes wrote an entire book about it (Life is Like a Chicken Coop Ladder…short and shitty).39

Since the child’s “real” nature was considered sinful, their free will had to be broken, and beating was the main way to accomplish this. Psychohistorian Aurel Ende’s extensive analysis of German autobiographies was entitled simply “Battering and Neglect” because, as he put it, there was “no bright side” to report about the universal German practice of beating children into obedience..40 Beating, said one German doctor, must begin early, even in infancy, and “consistently repeated until the child calms down or falls asleep…[for then] one is master of the child forever. From now on a glance, a word, a single threatening gesture, is sufficient to rule the child.” 41  German parents were often described as being in a “righteous rage” during the beatings while they “hammered obedience” into them, and the children often lost consciousness. Schools were beating factories: “At school we were beaten until our skin smoked.” 42 Hitler’s father routinely battered him into unconsciousness. 43 Children regularly had to be dragged violently to school screaming, they were so afraid of the daily batterings that were inflicted there, and childhood suicides were frequent in reaction to beatings or such practices as “cold water bathing” that was often practiced to “harden” them.44  Childhood suicides in Germany were over three times higher than in other European countries.45

Other punishment methods supplemented the beatings. Children were placed on red-hot iron stoves, tied to bed-posts all night long, feces were forced into their mouths after “accidents,” and so on. Germans admitted that Kinderfeindlichkeit (rage toward children) was a common trait.46 Children were often frightened not only by being told that ghosts or other horrible monsters would carry them away if they were not obedient, but also by parents who “dressed up in terrifying costumes [as] the so-called Knecht Ruprecht, made their faces black, and pretended to be a messenger of God who would punish children for their sins.” 47  Petschauer tells of being threatened by a “hairy monster [that] chased me under the living room table, chains clanking, hoofs stomping, appearing it wanted to drag me off in its carrying basket, the Korb.” 48 Such frightening obedience rituals were especially common in Germany and Austria; studies of autobiographies at the end of the 19th century “suggest the brutal contrast between the experiences of Central European working-class children in the late nineteenth century and the dominant ideals defining childhood in other nations.” 49

Visitors to German homes at the time found that “one feels sorry for these little German children; they must work so hard and seem to lack that exuberance of life, spirits, and childish glee that makes American children harder to train but leave them the memory of a happy childhood.” 50 In order not to remain “useless eaters,” Central European children were often soon sent to other homes to work, as servants or apprentices, “to be drilled for hard work,” “to keep them from idleness,” to avoid being “useless mouths to feed,” or just to get rid of them.51  The first-born was often given away to relatives; others to anyone who would take them. When their parents came to take them home, the children usually didn’t recognize them any more. Apprentices and servants were not only routinely beaten but also sexually abused, the boys as well as the girls; in fact, sexual abuse in schools was rampant, by teachers and older students. There were even so-called “free schools” known for routine sexual use of young boys by teachers.52  Later childhood obviously brought no relief to the standard abuse of German and Austrian children.

AUSTRIAN/GERMAN CHILDREARING AND WORLD WAR I
The fear and rage that came from traditional Central European childrearing were certainly the major cause of the First World War.  Although a minority of their populace was trying out new childrearing modes and new ways of living and because of this the area was experiencing a growth rate many times that of previous decades, the majority of families were still medieval in their childrearing — a lagging psychoclass — and the social and economic progress at the end of the 19th century was driving them crazy. Fears of  “materialism, degeneration, socialism, dancing, and sexual license” swept through the two nations.53 All that progress — new freedoms, new rights, new enjoyments — threatened to bring down upon their heads the punishments that their parents inflicted upon them when they had tried to individuate during their childhoods. The Punitive Parents’ voices in their heads was imagined to be coming from abroad, and German politicians and military leaders suddenly became convinced that Russia would attack them “at some point in the future,’ so starting a preventive war  was “unavoidable, and the sooner the better.” 54 Rather than feeling “disintegrated” by their inner growth panic, better to fuse with the rejecting Motherland and provoke enemies abroad who then could be punished as “bad selves.” Austria’s provocation of various crises to the south fed into Germany’s secret plans to provoke Russia into being blamed for starting the war, and the First World War was acted out as a way to restore potency and purge the national arteries with a cleansing bloodletting. Fusing with Germania in punishing “bad self” enemies initially felt wonderful.  Despite the fact that they were facing enemies many times over their size and power and were certain to lose, going to war felt like a “sacred Union…We are no longer what we had been — alone!” 55 Fused with their Motherland, they felt “purified,” since all their “bad selves” were imagined to be abroad. Their feelings were flashbacks to childhood , with their feeling of  “strangled, encircled by enemies” actually coming from their childhood encirclement by swaddling bands, corsets and parental beatings , while their solution, war, felt “manly,”  “restoring their potency” through human sacrifice for the Motherland, perhaps even being “buried in her bosom” with their deaths."