Eichenberger\Reuters

"In a practice that lasted in Switzerland until 1981, tens of thousands of children and teenagers were forcibly removed from their families, who for one reason or another were deemed by the authorities to be incapable of caring for them."

"Effectively a cheap labour force, the children were sometimes beaten, malnourished, or sexually abused. For their part, unmarried teenage mothers and dropouts could be detained without trial or interned in psychiatric hospitals right up until the 1980s. The authorities sometimes even decreed that the adults should be castrated or sterilised and forced to hand their children over for adoption.

In the early 2000s, survivors’ accounts began to appear in the media, triggering questions in parliament. For a long time, the churches, cantons, communes, and government all blamed each other – some even playing down the mistreatment suffered by the children".

“It was the same elsewhere,” he explains. “There is just as little documentation as in Switzerland but the witness accounts are the same from Germany to Poland to Czechoslovakia or Norway.”

“At the time, it was normal to mistreat the children and poverty was considered a flaw to be corrected with hard work. I was invited one day to a meeting of these people and I was so completely shocked by what they said that I was speechless,” says Walter Zwahlen, president of the Association for Stolen Children".

Isabelle Eichenberger

"In an attempt to come to terms with one of the darkest chapters in Swiss history, the lower house of parliament has approved compensation for thousands of people who were separated from their families as children because the government considered their parents unfit to bring them up."

"Verdingkinder," which literally means "children for hire" in German, was a policy practised in Switzerland from the 19th century until the 1980s. Officials forcefully took away orphans, illegitimate children, children of alcoholics and boys and girls whose parents had separated or who were from socially weak families. Many villages also organized auctions, where children were sold to the highest bidder.

The juveniles were then given over to farmers or owners of small factories and forced to do physical work. They often fell victim to sexual and physical abuse.

According to historians, the "Verdingkinder" policy affected thousands of people. In the 1930s alone, 30,000 children were placed in foster families across the country".

Reuters