Cruel World (91 page)

As of January 10, 1950, IRO could identify at least 200 disabled children, many whom could not be rehabilitated, and felt that there would probably be many more as increased numbers of families were screened for emigration. Physical handicaps were not at issue, as these were readily identifiable, but it was often not clear to social workers if the children who seemed to have mental problems were really permanently disabled or only deeply affected by their living conditions, as was the case of eight-year-old Konstanty:

Konstanty, an orphan, was finally allowed to be resettled, partly because welfare workers who cared about him noticed that after he had spent two weeks with an Army family that had volunteered to provide DP children with short vacations he seemed transformed into “another boy—beaming, full of talk, almost lively.” But there were many who were not so lucky. For them, by early 1950, the IRO had arranged to set up one rehabilitation center for the less extreme cases and, for the rest, admission to a huge 1,200-bed institution near Darmstadt run by the Germans, not a cheery prospect.
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As one disapproving medical officer put it, these children were now “condemned to an institutional life, a terrible enough fate in any community, but in their case to be aggravated by the withdrawal of our protection and the replacement of that protection by a control from the very race who persecuted them and broke their lives.”
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And there were always more needing a place to go. In July 1951,
New
York Herald Tribune
reporter Sonia Tomara and a friend visited the IRO Children’s Village at Bad Aibling, south of Munich. The facility, soon to be closed, still had 309 young inmates of more than seventeen nationalities, all with heartrending histories. Some were about to be sent to America, others were still in various states of legal limbo. Just before leaving, the visitors were taken to see the nursery for small children:

Responsibility for sad little children such as this one, who might still not be resettled by the end of the Allied occupation, or who were discovered later, was gradually transferred to child welfare authorities in Germany or wherever else they found themselves.

The International Tracing Service still exists at Arolsen in Germany, and now has a Web site. At the end of the Cold War, it was overwhelmed with nearly 200,000 inquiries a year from families suddenly able to communicate again from Eastern Europe. The records and services of the ITS, now placed under the International Red Cross and funded in great part by Germany, are constantly used, and every year help reunite family members for whom the longing for completeness has never vanished.

Among the parents desperately seeking their children were those who had been imprisoned by Hitler after the assassination attempt of July 20, 1944. Being German, they were not eligible to use the resources of UNRRA. Fey von Hassell had returned to Italy after her liberation, but could not get permission from the U.S. Army to go to Germany to look for her children, Corrado and Roberto, who had been taken from her almost a year before. The search was, therefore, undertaken by Fey’s mother, the widow of executed conspirator Ulrich von Hassell. In the months following the surrender, travel in Germany was nearly impossible: permits from the Military Government were needed to go anywhere, and the devastated transportation system was overwhelmed with refugees. But this family was lucky. A car that had been confiscated from them was found in Munich and returned. Even better, the American Military Governor of Bavaria not only received Mrs. von Hassell, but gave her a travel permit.

The search was long and full of false leads, and each foray required new travel documents. When she returned to the Military Governor for the fourth time, seeking permission to go to Innsbruck, where the children had first been processed by the Nazis, the American officer, who by now had heard too many terrible stories, was pessimistic. He said that Innsbruck was in the French Zone of Austria and that she would have to “deal with the French … if you think it’s still worth it.” Mrs. von Hassell was not to be denied. Taking a chance, she went to a DP office, where an inexperienced young soldier, not too clear about the regulations for Germans, wrote her a travel pass to Austria.

In Innsbruck, a fortuitous encounter with the former janitor of the hotel where Corrado and Roberto had been housed finally gave her the name of the Nazi children’s home. The director, who was quite friendly, immediately recognized photographs of the boys. She reported that they had hated to be separated and that Corrado had protected his little brother and helped him dress in the morning. When the boys were brought to her, Mrs. von Hassell instantly recognized Corrado, but she was not sure about Roberto, who had been a baby when she last saw him.
Not wanting to take the wrong child, she tried speaking to him in Italian, which he clearly did not understand. She was wondering what to do next when Roberto suddenly pointed “his little finger at a tiny white spot on a photograph I was still holding on my lap” and said just one word, “Mirko!” The child had recognized the little white pony kept at his house in Italy, and there could now be no doubt of who he was.

The boys had been found just in time: arrangements had already been made for them to be adopted by farmers in the vicinity. The director, apologizing for having “done so much wrong by these children,” gave them a sack of warm clothes “to help them through the winter.” As they left, Roberto seemed to hesitate, but Corrado, pulling him along, said, “We’re going home now.… Don’t you understand? We’re really going home.”
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These boys, privileged both by birth and by the Resistance activities of their late grandfather, would find home much as it always had been. They were fortunate that their grandmother lived in an area that had undergone no major bombing or battles. For millions of Germany’s children, however, life after the surrender would be grim indeed. Some, the final sacrificial victims of the Nazis, would not live to see it. Down in the bunker where their adored Führer had already taken his own life, Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels and his wife administered morphine injections followed by poison to their six children, aged four to twelve. Allied troops found the offices of the Leipzig City Hall filled with the neatly arranged dead families of the mayor and a number of other city officials, one family to a room.
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Other Nazi parents, having dutifully produced multiple progeny for the Fatherland, had not waited for their leaders’ example. On April 16, American Military Government officials received this notice from the chief doctor of the small town of Hummelshain, near Erfurt:

Americans who came upon such scenes had considerable doubt about the “free will” aspect, especially when it came to children. Some parents were apparently driven to ultimate despair by Goebbels’s last-ditch propaganda broadcasts, which informed the German people that Allied soldiers were bent on extermination, a policy hard-core Nazis certainly understood.
Life
photographer Margaret Bourke-White found this tragedy in Schweinfurt:

Goebbels’s warnings were not entirely mistaken. The millions of ethnic Germans who had survived their flight before the Red Army in early 1945 were, despite their dreadful voyages, far better off than their compatriots who faced the Red Army in the border areas between Poland and Germany or in what would later become the Soviet Zone of the shattered Reich. In these regions the combined effects of the atrocities committed in the Soviet Union, the publicity given to the liberation of Majdanek and other camps, and the constant propaganda emanating from Moscow, which was intended to fuel a final supreme effort by the exhausted Soviet troops, fostered a vicious desire for revenge:

Rage was exacerbated by jealousy of the material comforts of the Germans that the Russian soldiers saw everywhere, and by amazement that people who lived so well would feel the need to attack the USSR. Red Army men looted, burned houses and factories, and were apt to shoot anyone they thought was a Nazi. They drank cellars dry and, particularly when drunk, they raped, sometimes in whole platoons, German women and girls as young as ten. Deaths were not uncommon after these sessions, and it is not surprising that, as the news spread of their possible fate, many Germans in the East also preferred to die by their own hand. In one village a whole BDM unit reportedly perished in a group wrist slashing, and an estimated 1,000 people committed suicide in the Pomeranian town of Stolp (population 50,000) as the Red Army approached.
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Some Soviet officers on the scene were appalled at the behavior of the troops. Among them was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who wrote a poem of outrage after seeing the body of a small girl killed in a gang rape.
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As time went on there was increasing realization in the upper echelons of the Soviet government that excessive destruction of property was not to the advantage of the USSR and that total alienation of the German populace would only make them resist more. These realities led to immediate reduction in the torching of factories and houses; but, despite the efforts of some commanders to stop them, the attacks on women and the looting of private property continued unabated for many months. Ethnic Germans who remained in Poland and the areas of Germany that would be annexed to it became the new
Untermenschen
overnight, despised and preyed upon by both Poles and Russians. It was now their turn to be thrown out of their houses, be deported to Siberia, see their families rent asunder, live in forced labor camps, and have their children given to Poles in foster care. The looting and rapine would continue in what would be the future Soviet Zone of occupation, most notably in Berlin, until early June 1945, when a zone-wide military government was established and Soviet policy turned to the creation of a pacified German Communist state.

The soldiers of the Western Allies, whose anti-German feelings were also very strong, were generally less extreme. They too looted houses and drank up liquor supplies, but their dislike of the Germans was usually
less personal, and they were not yet fully aware of the extent of the Nazi atrocities. The problem of rape, though certainly present, was frequently resolved by more or less willing arrangements that often involved food or other amenities. Unlike the Soviets, the American and British commands insisted on complete separation of their troops from the Germans, who were to be treated with the contempt and coldness befitting their guilt. Fraternization was strictly forbidden and German families were evicted when their houses were taken over for billets.

The nonfraternization policies were doomed from the beginning. American detachments that established the first small footholds in Germany in late 1944 were often greeted as liberators by the populace, who plied them with food, drink, and other comforts. Many an officer found dining with the local gentry in their schlosses quite appealing. Civil Affairs units taking control of villages in the Rhineland, after establishing their authority and appointing non-Nazi mayors, treated the rest of the citizenry in much the same way as they had the French, and often found the Germans more cooperative. The object of their exercise, before the surrender, was the usual one of preventing starvation, disease, and unrest in what was still a combat zone. In the early days, the Americans, who had also heard their share of propaganda, were amazed at the docility of the German population, which seemed more sullen and frightened than defiant, and by the peaceful normalcy of those towns and villages that had escaped destruction. Easygoing local commanders frequently allowed Germans to continue to inhabit rooms in their requisitioned houses. This folksy feeling would dissipate considerably after the Battle of the Bulge, and as the evidence of Nazi atrocities became known. It was hard for the Allies to understand the strange emotional detachment of many individual Germans from the actions of the Nazis. William Shirer, revisiting Berlin in the fall of 1945, observed: