TELEVISION / BRIEFING: Stolen childhoods

Gerard Gilbert
Tuesday 09 February 1993 19:02 EST
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TIMEWATCH (8.10pm BBC2) manages the difficult and plucks a heartwarming story from the Third Reich's ethnic plundering of Poland. The occupying Nazis stole 200,000 blond, blue-eyed ('racially valuable') Polish children and sent them back to Germany to restock the 'master race'. Forbidden to speak Polish, their names changed and the younger ones adopted, only 15 per cent ever made their way home at the end of the Second World War. Among those nabbed was four- year-old Alojzy, given the name Alfred Bindenberger by his adoptive father, a Krupp engineer and admirer of Hitler. The adolescent proto-stormtrooper's heart was broken when he was informed after the war that his real mutti was, as he saw it, an Untermensch from Poland. The heartwarming bit is Alojzy's subsequent de-Nazification and the growing bond with his tenacious mother.

Child abuse, part two: DISPATCHES (9pm C4) visits the brothel bars of Thailand to report on the increasing use of children in the sex industry there. Clients who would not normally consider themselves paedophiles are now going for younger prostitutes in the mistaken belief that this will protect them from Aids. Meanwhile, Germany is introducing laws to prosecute nationals buying under-age sex abroad. Will Britain follow suit?

(Photograph omitted)

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