How Laws and Systems Contributed to the Masking and Expansion of the Verdingkinder System and Targeted Jenisch People

Did Switzerland have slavery? What did it look like? These were the questions that led me investigate the history of “Verdingkinder,” or contract children, who were placed as indentured laborers primarily on Swiss farms from 1850 to 1950. As I dug deeper, I discovered a more targeted campaign within this broader system: the “Kinder der Landstrasse” (Children of the Road) program, which ran from 1926 to 1973 and specifically removed children of the Jenisch ethnic community from their families. This discovery raised a critical question that has driven my research: How did legal frameworks and institutional systems in Switzerland facilitate both the concealment and expansion of the Verdingkinder practice, and why did the Verdingkinder system, among its other goals, particularly target Jenisch children? I argue it lies in the intersection of cultural difference and state-enforced assimilation. The systematic removal of Jenisch children was not simply about poverty relief or child welfare rather, it was about forcing a mobile, culturally different minority to conform to Swiss ideals of settlement.