Hitler's Forgotten Children (13 page)

The contrast was absurd. This was the organisation that was supposed to be in charge of nurturing and safeguarding new life in the Lebensborn homes. The Nazi regime had full confidence in its ‘inevitable' success, however. Two years after the start of the war Hitler had publicly declared:

I do not doubt for a moment that within one hundred years or so from now all the German elite will be a product of the SS, for only the SS practices racial selection.

Elsewhere, Dr Gregor Ebner, a family doctor-turned-SS-officer and the man appointed by Himmler as Chief Medical Officer for the Lebensborn programme, estimated that: ‘thanks to the Lebensborns, in thirty years' time we shall have 600 extra regiments'. I looked again at his prediction. A quick calculation revealed that a regiment was normally somewhere between 500 and 700 men. Six hundred new regiments composed entirely of children born in Lebensborn homes? Even at the lowest estimate that would mean 300,000 babies.

Could there really be hundreds of thousands of people like me – children of the Lebensborn programme living throughout Germany?

‘Beware of what you wish for in youth, because you will get it in middle life.'
J
OHANN
W
OLFGANG VON
G
OETHE

F
rom the moment the German Red Cross asked if I was interested in finding out about my family, I had thought of little else. But as the months crawled past with no response to the letters I had written, I came to accept that I had been searching for much longer. Looking back, my whole life seemed to have been overshadowed by secrecy. No matter how hard I worked, no matter how much I gave of myself to the poor, damaged children who came to my practice, nothing could free me from the unhappiness of not knowing who I was. And so I had longed and hoped and dreamed.

The phone call from the Red Cross had broken the spell. No longer was I half-asleep, seeing snatches of my past only in dreams: the promise of solid, reliable information had woken me. And I yearned all the harder for it.

‘Be careful what you wish for', warned Germany's most famous poet, writer and statesman. Perhaps I should have listened to Goethe.

The letter arrived in October 2000. It was from a Jože Goličnik, the director of an archive in Maribor, Slovenia's second city and the capital of the Lower Styria region. I had heard that an old repository of parish documents was held there and, having heard nothing back from the government of Slovenia, had decided to try my luck with the church. I'd written purely on chance, with little hope that it would yield anything useful. But Mr Goličnik said he had found a record of my family.

The father of Erika Matko is Johann Matko from Zagorje ob Savi. Her mother came from Croatia. Mr Johann Matko lived in Sauerbrunn and was a glass-maker.

Sauerbrunn. It existed. Not in Austria but in Slovenia – or, more accurately, in the old Yugoslavia. I was so happy that, quite spontaneously (and most unlike me), I literally burst into song, full of relief and excitement. Of course I still had to locate Sauerbrunn, which was not likely to be called that now. The fall of communism had been slower in Yugoslavia than elsewhere across the eastern bloc, but when it happened it brought civil war in its wake. As the smoke cleared from the bloody years in which Serbs fought Croats, Bosnians, Montenegrins and all the other nationalities Tito had welded into a unified republic in the 1940s, new nations rose from the ashes: many changed the names of their towns and cities.

Mr Goličnik's letter had contained a clue, though. Johann Matko had been a glass-maker. If I could find a region that had contained major glass factories, I stood a chance of tracking down Sauerbrunn and finding its new name. Better still, attached to the letter was an actual copy of the parish records, including the Matkos' birth dates. Johann had been born on 12 December 1904; his wife – Helena Haloschan – was eleven years younger, born in St Peter, Croatia, on 8 August 1915.

I wrote again to the government of Slovenia, updating my original request with the information from Maribor. But I decided my best bet
was to contact the German Red Cross. They had effectively instigated my investigation and I felt hopeful that if anyone could help me track down the Matkos and Sauerbrunn, it would be their staff. I sent off the latest in my growing volume of letters. And then I began to research glass-making in the former Yugoslavia.

It didn't take me long to discover that glass had been a regional specialty of Lower Styria for more than three centuries. From the 1700s onwards, factories had sprung up producing highly prized and beautifully crafted lead crystal. The centre of this tradition was the town of Rogaška Slatina. And its previous name? Sauerbrunn. I had tracked down the birthplace of Erika Matko; I had found my home.

I cannot describe the elation I felt at that moment. At long last it seemed as though I could almost reach out and touch my biological parents – surely soon I would be able to do so in real life.

Be careful, said Goethe.

My optimism lasted only a few weeks before reality intruded. The Red Cross replied to say they had no information about anyone called Matko from Yugoslavia in its records of those whom the Nazis had captured or killed. The letter advised that the organisation was unable to carry out any research in the archives of former Yugoslavian countries and warned that if I chose to do my own research, there was a very high probability I would discover that Erika Matko's parents were dead, and that they had not died of natural causes. The message was clear: whatever records of their existence might once have existed, my parents were likely to have been killed by the Nazis after Hitler's armies invaded Yugoslavia and, most likely, any trace of them would have disappeared at that point.

The note from the Red Cross was not the worst of it. In February 2001 I received a letter that dashed all my hopes of ever finding my family. The Slovenian government had been neither quick nor helpful in the months since I had first written asking for information. Now,
when it did finally send a substantive response, the words hit me like a blow to the stomach.

We wish to inform you that, according to the local administration of Rogaška Slatina, they have discovered [records of] an Erika Matko, born on November 11, 1941. But this woman is still living inside Slovenia: therefore the assumption that Ingrid von Oelhafen was born as Erika Matko is wrong.

The generation from which my parents (whoever they were) came had known more physical suffering than I would ever experience, but still it seemed to me that the cruellest pain of all was that of being offered hope, tentatively reaching out to grasp it – and then seeing it snatched away.

I sat at the table in my flat, the letter in my hand, as my dreams dissolved in front of me. Please believe me: this was not merely self-pity. I had known for decades that I was not really Ingrid von Oelhafen. I had salved that wound with the knowledge, derived from the few scraps of paper that had travelled with me through the years, that I was once Erika Matko. Now I was neither Ingrid nor Erika. I was, truly, no one.

When the shock wore off I took time to reflect on the toll this quest was taking. I forced myself to look at how the ups and downs of my investigation were affecting me and realised that I had spent a whole year riding an emotional roller coaster, soaring high one minute, plunging down the next. Was it really worth the pain? I had made a life – a successful and generally happy life – as Ingrid von Oelhafen, regardless of my true origins, and I had official German papers which said that I was Ingrid. Really, what did it ultimately matter that I might – or might not – have once been called Erika Matko? Would it make me happier to continue pursuing the mystery of the Matko family and the country where this Erika had started life?

I decided that the answer was no. I bundled my letters and research notes into a file and put it away in a drawer. I resolved to forget about
them, at least for the time being. Even when the archivists at Bad Arolsen later wrote to me with the news that they had, after all, found some documents relating to Erika Matko and Lebensborn, I simply filed the letter away with the other documents.

Months flew by, then a full year. I buried myself in work and studying music. I had been learning to play the flute; now I practised harder, immersing myself in the notes and melodies of the classical composers.

By the time another envelope dropped onto my doormat, a year and a half had passed since I had put away the folder marked ‘Erika Matko'. Perhaps if the letter had been from anyone else it might have joined the others. But this note was from Georg Lilienthal and it contained an invitation. For the first time ever, a group of Lebensborn children was to meet: would I like to come?

Would I? Honestly, I was not sure. My journey so far had been full of dead ends, false trails and seemingly insurmountable obstructions. Did I really want to risk opening up old wounds all over again? And even if the answer was yes, what did I actually have to contribute? I took out my abandoned file of paper, with its obscure Nazi documents and contradictory modern correspondence: what could I really tell anyone? I agonised about it, turning the whole business over and over in my mind.

In the end, I realised that I had no choice. The questions about where and who I came from had been part of my life ever since the day Frau Harte had told me I was not Hermann and Gisela's real daughter. They had been at the back of my mind, pressing down on my emotions – and perhaps shaping my actions – for more than fifty years. Hiding from them simply didn't work: I would have to go to the meeting.

In October 2002, I packed up my car and began the long drive south: it was 260 kilometres from my home in Osnabrück to the town where the meeting was being held. I was sixty-one years old, and it was time to learn about my childhood.

‘We aren't perfect. We've got all the same illnesses and disabilities as other people.'
R
UTHILD
G
ORGASS
, L
EBENSBORN CHILD

B
etween Cologne and Frankfurt, the small town of Hadamar sits on the southern edge of the Westerwald, the long, low mountain range running down the eastern bank of the river Rhine.

It is known today for its highly regarded institutes devoted to forensic and social psychiatry, and for a stark obelisk commemorating the victims of the Nazis' Aktion T-4 euthanasia programme, which had been based in the town. Through their research, Georg Lilienthal and other historians had revealed that between 1941 and 1945, thousands of disabled or otherwise ‘undesirable' men, women and children were brought to Hadamar to be sterilised or put to death.

Although Aktion T-4 officially ended in 1941, the programme had, in fact, continued until the Nazis' surrender in 1945. In total, nearly 15,000 German citizens were sent to Hadamar's hospital: most were subsequently murdered in a gas chamber. This was the town where I was to meet the other Lebensborn children.

They were not, of course, children any longer. Like me, the twenty men and women sitting around the room that morning in October were in their sixties and close to retirement. As I took my place, I was very nervous. One by one, we introduced ourselves: when it came to my turn I made myself speak the single sentence I had rehearsed. ‘My name is Ingrid von Oelhafen. I don't know anything.' And then I burst into tears.

My new companions were kind and caring. Each was much further into their personal investigations than I, and because they had been through the same emotions they understood my anxiety. As they told their stories, the callous brutality of the Lebensborn programme became clearer to me; and though each new revelation was shocking, learning the truth also somehow put me at ease.

Ruthild Gorgass had been one of the first Lebensborn children to look for others who had been born or brought up in the programme. She was around my age; tall with blue eyes and a brush of short blond hair. She was a physiotherapist too and, like me, she had inherited a diary kept by her mother, which had helped her understand the story of her birth. I liked her immediately and felt comforted by her presence.

Her story was also a good introduction to Lebensborn. Ruthild's father was forty-nine when she was born. He had been a lieutenant in the German army during the First World War. In 1916 he was badly injured at the battle of Verdun, his back and chest a mass of shrapnel splinters.

In the 1930s he had become a committed Nazi and by the start of the Second World War he was a big shot in the chemical industry. He was also married with a teenage son. Despite this, at some point he met and began an affair with Ruthild's mother, who was a clerk in the Leipzig Chamber of Commerce, eighteen years younger than him. Just before Christmas 1941, she found that she was pregnant. Her position fitted precisely Himmler's original aim for Lebensborn: both her parents were dead, she was unmarried and carrying an illegitimate child and
therefore at risk of the opprobrium of her family and prejudice from her community. Above all, her child's father was a card-carrying Nazi, and both he and Ruthild's mother were able to demonstrate their genealogical racial purity. In the summer of 1942, the two of them made the 170-kilometre journey from Leipzig to Wernigerode, a small town deep in the spectacular Harz Mountains of Saxony. There, in the heartland of old Germany, Himmler had established a Lebensborn maternity unit. In August 1942, Ruthild was born.

Heim Harz, I learned, was one of twenty-five Lebensborn homes established across Germany and in the countries its armies overran. There were nine homes in Germany itself, two in Austria, eleven in Norway, and one each in Belgium, Luxembourg and France. Often they occupied buildings taken from Hitler's political enemies or wealthy Jewish families: the organisation's central headquarters in Munich had belonged to the writer and exiled anti-Nazi activist, Thomas Mann. Some of the premises were furnished with property confiscated from people who had been sent to the death camps, and each was equipped with state-of-the-art medical equipment to ensure that Himmler's precious pure-blood babies were delivered safely into the world.