One of the reasons that led to WW2 was the great depression. While today, it is often blamed on hitla, the WW2 events were mostly caused by extreme poverty.
In these photographs — taken at different times between the late 19th centuries and 1948 — one of the harshest realities of extreme poverty is seen: children literally being put “for sale.” The best-known image is the one of Chicago, 1948, where a mother places a sign that reads “4 children for sale – inquire within” while her children are sitting on the stairs, without fully understanding that their fate is being negotiated.
It wasn’t an isolated act: during the Great Depression and in previous decades, many families, suffocated by hunger, unemployment and debt, handed their children over to strangers in hopes that they would at least survive. In France, postcards with babies hung in sacks with signs saying “À vendre” or “Fillette à vendre” were part of a clandestine trade of child adoptions and servitude. Some of these children ended up in stable homes, but many others were used as labor, exploited, or separated forever from their siblings.
These images were neither montages nor propaganda: they were raw testimonies of a time when misery could break even the most sacred bond, that of a mother with her children, and today they remain one of the most poignant tests of just how far human despair can push.
It was not until they realized they could team up to exploit the bottom 70% of the planet for their benefit that their fortunes went up incredibly
