Hitler's Forgotten Children (10 page)

Children born in this maternity home were German children born illegitimately in the Lebensborn programme for foster care or for adoption. But there were also children at Kohren-Sahlis who were trafficked from the occupied countries of Germany and who were designated for Germanisation.

I had never heard of ‘Germanisation'. Why would the Nazis traffic children from the countries they had invaded? I had always been taught that Hitler and his henchmen viewed the people of many of these conquered states quite literally as ‘sub-human'. And how did this fit with my background?

Lebensborn worked with German foster families, with the intention of later adoption after the victorious end of the war. The fall of the Third Reich prevented these plans from being realised. Most of these foreign children returned to their home countries. However, some remained in Germany with their foster families.

There were various different reasons for this. Some of the foster parents cared for their foster families. Some of the foster parents concealed the foreign origin, even from the children themselves, for fear that the children might be removed again or that they would have a yearning to return home. Ultimately, they were afraid to lose the love and affection of their foster
children. Also, they wanted to protect the children from hostility and integration difficulties.

These were often the reasons that the children were not adopted after the war, as well as the fact that they often lacked the necessary papers.

Some of the Allies did not want to send the children back to their home countries against their will, and they remained in the German family with the authorities of their home countries in agreement because they had no biological family left.

And then Lilienthal dropped his biggest bombshell.

Frau von Oelhafen, is it your belief that you might not be a child of German parents? I have known your name ‘Erika Matko', and the name of your foster parents ‘von Oelhafen', for many years from documents in the Bundesarchiv. I have researched Lebensborn for over twenty years and I know many of the fates of Lebensborn children.

Their names are mentioned in lists that were created by Lebensborn for children to be Germanised from Poland, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia (in the Lebensborn management they were called only
Ost-Kinder
) and in the records and statements of former Lebensborn employees.

Although I can present to you no papers (such as a birth certificate), giving you ultimate peace of mind, I do have documents that seem to show that you probably originated in Yugoslavia.

After you have read my letter, you may ask: what to do now? I cannot give you the answer to this. But if you want to continue to search for your identity, I will be happy to assist you. You can always contact me.

Kidnapping, Germanisation,
Ost-Kinder
: these words and notions were so alien to me, so far away from the assumptions I had made when I began my investigation, that I didn't know what to make of them. Although the Austrian authorities had been unable to find any trace of a Matko family in or near Bad Sauerbrunn, I had still believed that the search for my past would somehow take me to Austria. It had been a comforting thought in a way: the time I had spent at Innsbruck meant the country felt familiar. Nor was there any language barrier: German was the national language. Now it seemed I had to start again from square one – and in a language I had never even heard spoken. Even worse, Yugoslavia itself had ceased to exist: the last of the former Iron Curtain countries had disintegrated in a bloody civil war before splintering into a series of smaller new states. Where – how – would I begin?

I decided to take Georg Lilienthal at his word. I wrote to him, asking for guidance. Throughout my journey into the past I have been very fortunate to find people who were willing to give their time and share their expertise to assist me from one stumbling step to the next. Dr Lilienthal was the first, and probably the most important of my guides. He told me I needed to write to two German ministries in Berlin – Foreign Affairs and Internal Affairs.

He helped me compose the letters, each of which explained my situation and set out my belief that I had been brought into the Lebensborn programme from the former Yugoslavia: I requested assistance in making contact with their counterparts in Eastern Europe.

My requests fell on deaf ears. Both ministries sent abrupt and unhelpful replies, saying that they could not do anything for me: the only thing they could suggest was that I write to the government of Slovenia – the new nation that had emerged in the central part of Yugoslavia, once controlled by Hitler's Reich.

Around the same time, I received a reply to my original enquiry at the Bundesarchiv. This too was unhelpful: the state archives insisted that they held nothing relevant to my past. A pattern was developing: no
government institution seemed interested in helping me investigate my past. Since I knew that Georg Lilienthal had already found documents relating to Erika Matko and the Sonnenweise home in those very same archives, it was clear that German officials were reluctant to talk about Lebensborn
.
Over the next few months it was a reluctance I would encounter over and over again.

Georg Lilienthal pointed me toward two other, lesser-known collections of documents where, he said, I might find information about Lebensborn
.
And he agreed to use his own contacts to find out who I should write to in Slovenia.

Looking back, I realise that this was the pivotal point in my investigation: from here on there would be no turning back. Once I began digging into boxes of dusty papers, stored in archives across modern Germany, there was no way of knowing what skeletons I might disturb, what secrets I might unearth. Such is the benefit of hindsight. At the time I didn't stop to think about what I was doing: for so long I had avoided thinking about my past, but now I was determined to find out whatever was known about me, and by extension about those who had raised me. If that meant asking questions that made people uncomfortable – well, so be it.

‘Adolf Hitler has led the German people to the realisation that the Nordic race is the most creative, valuable race on earth. Therefore, caring for the valuable Nordic blood is their most important task.'
H
EINRICH
H
IMMLER
,
R
ACIAL
P
OLITICS
(1943 SS
PUBLICATION
)

B
ad Arolsen is a small, picture-postcard German town. For more than 250 years it was owned and ruled by the Princes of Waldeck-Pyrmont, then a sovereign principality stretching across the rich agricultural heartlands of Hesse and Lower Saxony. This aristocratic family constructed a large baroque-style stately home and drew up plans to build the town around it in a mathematically perfect grid of streets. But when they ran out of money, the grandiose scheme was only half-completed: to compensate, the undeveloped sections were landscaped with shrubbery.

Die Grosse Allee is the main street, running one perfectly straight mile from east to west and lined with 880 German oak trees in strict military formation. Exactly halfway down is an unprepossessing piece of post-war architecture, set back from the road behind long hedge walls
so as to be almost unnoticeable to the casual visitor. It is the archive of the International Tracing Service. Here, spread haphazardly over several floors and spilling out into satellite buildings, more than thirty million individual files record the fate of those who fell victim to the National Socialist criminal enterprise.

It is a cliché of modern history that the Nazis were painstaking record-keepers. But the 26,000 linear metres of original documents and 232,710 metres of microfilm housed at the ITS bear witness to this thoroughness and, according to Georg Lilienthal, somewhere in the vast piles of paperwork there was probably a record of how I came to be part of the Lebensborn programme.

I wrote to the archive in the early spring of 2000, asking for its help in locating any document that would help me investigate my origins. In theory, this should have been a straightforward request: it was, after all, exactly what ITS was established to do. But, as I was finding, theory and practice remained a long way apart – and what often separated them was politics.

In 1943, the Supreme Allied Headquarters in Europe asked the international section of the British Red Cross to set up a registration and tracing service for missing persons. Even by that mid-stage of the war, Washington and London had begun to plan for its aftermath, conscious that by the end there would be a vast population of the displaced or the disappeared. The Central Tracing Bureau was established in February 1944: as the war shifted eastwards into each territory successively liberated from the German armies, it moved from London to Versailles, then on to Frankfurt before finally arriving at Bad Arolsen in 1946. Here its researchers set about creating an archive of Nazi documents.

The records came from every corner of the former Reich. Allied forces had rescued them from concentration and death camps or captured them from Wehrmacht field offices and Nazi central registries. Each individual piece of paper was analysed: from them the CTB was able to begin reconstructing the fate of tens of millions of men, women
and children who had been taken for slave labour, imprisoned, or murdered in the Holocaust.

From the outset the Allies had two, sometimes conflicting, aims for this unprecedented exercise. The first was to prepare reliable documentary evidence for use at the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal: for the first time in history, the surviving leaders of a country were to be put on public trial for the newly defined offences of crimes against humanity, conspiracy to wage aggressive war and the industrial-scale murders of Jews and Eastern Europeans (among many others).

The second, longer-term ambition was to create a mechanism to enable the survivors of the war – and especially of the Holocaust – to find their families and, if possible, eventually to reunite them. And so the CTB began building from the captured files a central name index of every single person they could determine to have been a victim of the Nazis' reign of terror.

Whether or not the Allies realised the scale of the task when they began it, they were soon overwhelmed by the sheer volume of cases. The central name index alone would come to house the individual fates of fifty million people. Behind each handwritten index card was a mound of paper.

As the years passed, responsibility for managing and funding this Herculean effort was passed from one organisation to another. In July 1947, the newly formed United Nations' International Refugee Organisation took over administration of the bureau, changing its name to the International Tracing Service. Less than four years later, it was handed back to the Allied High Commission for Germany – the body set up by America, Britain and France to run their sectors of the former Reich. When the occupied status of Germany was repealed in 1954, ITS was hived off to the International Committee of the Red Cross, which promptly insisted on appointing its own manager to run all daily operations, who, for good measure, had to be a Swiss citizen. It was a sorry catalogue of financial and administrative buck-passing which
ensured that the ITS was destined to become the Cinderella of the vast post-war archives mission.

The situation worsened with the implementation in 1955 of the Bonn Agreement, which formally ratified the new nation of West Germany. One clause in this document prohibited the publication of any data that could harm former victims of the Nazis or their families. However well intentioned, the instruction effectively shut the Bad Arolsen archive off from public scrutiny: historians and journalists were not permitted to examine its contents, and although individual victims of the tyranny were theoretically able to ask for any relevant information, this too became caught up in the
Realpolitik
of modern Europe.

At the start of 2000 – just as I made my request for help – the German parliament was under pressure to set up a fund to compensate an estimated one million survivors of the Nazis' forced and slave labour programme. These were men and women who had been shipped from Eastern Europe to toil in the factories that kept Hitler's war machine running. Soon the Bundestag passed a law establishing a Remembrance, Responsibility and Future Foundation (
Stiftung Erinnerung, Verantwortung und Zukunft
) that would make payments to those who could prove they had been affected. The evidence they needed was primarily held at the ITS: it was almost instantly flooded with applications, and all other enquiries were either ignored or not properly processed. Among them was my letter: I received a brief, and as it would turn out completely inaccurate, reply to the effect that there was no trace of me in the files.

Seven years would pass before the ITS archives were opened to full public scrutiny: lost time that would have a terrible impact on the search for my biological family. But to explain the origins of Lebensborn, I need to step away from my own chronology to pull back the veil of secrecy which then surrounded Bad Arolsen. Among the millions of documents captured from the Nazi war machine were many of Heinrich Himmler's personal papers. These were sent to the ITS, where
separate folders were opened, each covering the myriad organisations the Reichsführer had set up, as well as the bizarre and obsessive belief system that underpinned them
.

The pernicious idea that one race was superior to another by virtue of the purity of its blood had begun in the last decades of the nineteenth century. By the early 1920s an entire ‘science' based on this had spread across Europe and the western world. Eugenics held that since certain peoples were of higher quality than others, it was naturally right to improve the overall human genetic strain by promoting higher reproduction among those from the superior race or class and, by extension, reducing reproduction by those less well favoured. At the time such thinking was advocated by prominent English novelists, including H.G. Wells, Marie Stopes (the founder of modern birth control) and two American presidents, Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt.