South Korea on Wednesday admitted for the first time that in its rush to send children to American and European homes decades ago, its adoption agencies committed widespread malpractices, including falsifying documents​, to make them more adoptable​.

The findings by South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a government agency,​ which said children were sent away “like luggage” for profit decades ago, were a hard-won victory for South Korean adoptees abroad. Many adoptees have returned to their birth country in recent years, campaigning tirelessly for South Korea to come to terms with one of the most shameful legacies of its modern history.

Adoption agencies falsified documents to present babies as orphans when they had known parents, the commission acknowledged. When some babies died before they were flown overseas, other babies were sent in their names. The heads of ​four private adoption agencies were given the power to become legal guardians for ​the children, signing them away for ​overseas adoption.

The commission’s report was the government’s first official admission of problems with​ the country’s adoption practices, including the lack of oversight, even though such malpractice had been exposed in the past. The agency recommended that ​the state apologize for violating the rights​ of South Korean adoptees.

South Korea is the source of the world’s largest diaspora of intercountry adoptees, with around 200,000 ​South Korean children sent abroad since the end of the Korean War in 1953, mostly to the United States and Europe.

In ​its destitute postwar decades, South Korea promoted overseas adoptions to find homes for orphaned, abandoned or disabled children abroad rather than build a welfare system for them at home. The government left it to ​the adoption agencies to find and ship children abroad for fees from adoptive families.

“Numerous legal and policy shortcomings emerged,” said Sun-young Park, the chairwoman of the commission. “These violations should never have occurred.”

The findings carry repercussions beyond South Korea, as several receiving countries — ​including Norway and Denmark​ — have opened investigations into their international adoptions. The United States, which has received more children from South Korea than any other country, has not done so.​

“This is a moment we have fought to achieve: the commission’s decision acknowledges what we adoptees have known for so long — that the deceit, fraud, and issues within the Korean adoption process cannot remain hidden,” said Peter Moller, a South Korean adoptee from Denmark who led an international campaign for the commission to launch an investigation.

The commission identified many cases where the identities and family information of children were “lost, falsified or fabricated” and where children were sent abroad without legal consent.

It cited the case of a baby girl it identified only by her last name, Chang, who was born in Seoul in 1974. Her adoption agency in Seoul knew her mother’s identity. But in the documents it sent to her adoptive family in Denmark, the agency said the girl came from an orphanage.

That agency, Korea Social Service, charged a $1,500 adoption fee, as well as a $400 donation, per child from adoptive families in 1988, the commission said. (South Korea’s per-capita national income that year was $4,571.) Some of these funds were in turn used to secure more children, turning intercountry adoptions into “a profit-driven industry,” the commission said.

South Korea’s export of babies peaked in the 1980s, with as many as 8,837 children shipped abroad in 1985. Children were “sent abroad like luggage,” the commission said, presenting a photo that showed rows of infants and young children strapped to airplane seats​.

“While this is not news to us adoptees, it is a significant victory in the sense that we are finally receiving acknowledgment of what has happened to us over the years​,” said Anja Pedersen, ​who was sent to Denmark in 1976​ under the name of another girl, who had died while waiting for adoption.

The ​truth commission does not have the power to prosecute any of the adoption agencies, but the government is required by law to follow its recommendations.​

​The adoption agencies did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Since the commission launched its investigation​ in late 2022, some 367 overseas adoptees have asked it to investigate their cases, a majority of them from Denmark.​ On Wednesday, the commission recognized 56 of them as victims of human rights violations. It was still investigating the other cases.

Mia Lee Sorensen, a South Korean adoptee who was sent to Denmark in 1987, said the commission’s findings provided the “validation” that she had been seeking. When she found her birth parents in South Korea in 2022, they couldn’t believe she was alive. They told her that her mother had passed out during labor and that when she woke up, the clinic told her that the baby had died.

Those whose cases weren’t recognized among the victims on Wednesday expressed hope that the commission would be extended to carry out more investigations.

Mary Bowers, who was adopted by a family in Colorado​ in 1982, was still waiting for answers ​to many inconsistencies in her adoption papers.

“This is only the beginning,” Ms. Bowers said.