Hitler's Forgotten Children (14 page)

And they were. In 1939, Dr Gregor Ebner, Lebensborn's chief medical officer, sent a report to Himmler detailing the success of the programme. More than 1,300 pregnant women had applied to give birth in the homes. Racial and hereditary health examinations had reduced this number by half, so that a total of 653 mothers-to-be were admitted. The neo-natal mortality rate for Germany as a whole at the time was 6 per cent: in the Lebensborn homes this figure was cut in half.

The births are very easy, without many complications. This is attributable to the racial selection and the quality of the women we get.

Their success came at a price, however. Ebner reported that the cost
per mother was a substantial 400 Reichsmarks
.
But, he noted, ‘that isn't much of a sacrifice if you can save a thousand children of good blood'.

Blood was all-important. Lebensborn was charged with ensuring a racially selected future master race to rule over the global empire of Hitler's Thousand Year Reich. There was even a slogan that encapsulated the duty of the women who gave birth in the homes: ‘
Schenkt dem Führer Ein Kind
' (give a child to the Führer)
.

The physical health of the Lebensborn mothers may have been uppermost in Himmler's mind, but he was also determined to monitor and guide their political wellbeing. To ensure that they left the homes even more zealous than when they arrived, women were required to attend three sessions of ideological ‘education' every week of their stay. During these classes they watched propaganda films, read chapters from
Mein Kampf
, listened to radio lectures and took part in communal singing of party anthems.

Staff members were themselves carefully monitored and instructed to complete detailed questionnaires about each of the mothers under their care. These RF-Fragebogen (the initials stood for Reichsführer) recorded every aspect of the women's personalities, from their behaviour in the home to their bravery (or otherwise) during birth and their commitment to the National Socialist cause: each document was sent to Berlin, marked for the personal attention of the Reichsführer-SS.

This was not just a bureaucratic nicety. Even in the midst of the war – at a time when he was overseeing wholesale murder in the death camps and the entire apparatus of the Nazi terror throughout Europe – Himmler applied himself devotedly to these questionnaires, deciding, on a case-by-case basis, whether a woman would be allowed to give birth to a second child in Lebensborn at any point in the future. In fact, he supervised every aspect of life in the homes, from the trivial to the absurd. On one occasion he instructed his personal aide, SS-Stamdartenführer Rudolph Brandt, to write to the head of Lebensborn demanding that a record be kept of nose shapes.

The Reichsführer-SS wants a special card index to be kept of all mothers and parents having a Greek nose or the rudiments of one. As an example of the type required, you should refer to the mother in Questionnaire L6008, Frau I.A.

Himmler's hands-on control extended to diet. He issued a stream of memos, instructing cooks on the correct way to steam vegetables and demanding that the homes' supervisors make the women eat porridge – apparently because he had identified this as a vital factor in forming the racially admirable characteristics of the English aristocracy. For good measure he insisted on the application of regular doses of cod liver oil, much to the evident disgust of the recipients. He regularly visited the homes, checking upon the progress of the women and their children. So complete was his involvement that babies born on Himmler's birthday were formally registered as his godchildren and received a special memento – a silver cup, engraved with his name as well as that of the baby.

I found these bizarre details of life in Lebensborn homes bewildering. How did the second most powerful man in the Reich find the time to control day-to-day life in twenty-five maternity homes?

But beyond the oddities, the stories told by the Lebensborn children that day in Hadamar revealed the programme's darker elements. Ruthild told me that she and other children underwent a quasi-religious naming ceremony in which they were dedicated to Hitler and the brotherhood of the SS. This
Namensgebung
ritual was a distorted version of the traditional Christian baptism, with an altar draped in a swastika flag and a bust or photo of the Führer in pride of place. In front of a congregation made up of Lebensborn staff and black-uniformed SS officers, mothers like Ruthild's promised that their children would be raised as good National Socialists: they then handed over their babies to an SS man who intoned a ‘blessing'. There appeared to be different versions of this liturgy in different homes, but the essence of each was the same.

We believe in the God of all things

And in the mission of our German blood

Which grows ever young from German soil.

We believe in the race, carrier of the blood,

And in the Führer, chosen for us by God.

An SS dagger was held over the baby and the senior officer read out a formal welcome to the brotherhood of the SS.

We take you into our community as a limb of our body. You shall grow up in our protection and bring honour to your name, pride to your brotherhood and inextinguishable glory to your race.

How could a mother hand over her precious baby to the care – if that's what it was – of an organisation like the SS? What parent could do something so horrific? As I had told the gathering right at the start, the only thing I knew about my origins was that I had been a baby in the Lebensborn home at Kohren-Sahlis: had I too been dedicated to the service of the Nazis?

There were more terrible revelations to come. I already knew what Himmler was planning with the Lebensborn programme. But I had not realised just how far his organisation would go to ensure that the new
Herrenrasse
– this master race – was free of any physical defect.

They called them
Kinderfachabteilung
. Literally translated, this means ‘children's ward'. It sounds such an innocent phrase, but it wasn't. Under the Aktion T-4 euthanasia programme, babies born in the Lebensborn homes with developmental delay, disease or mental disabilities were killed.

Jürgen Weise was born in the Lebensborn home at Bad Polzin on 5 June 1941. The head of Lebensborn – a Nazi named Max Sollman – ordered that Jürgen be taken to a
Kinderfachabteilung
in Brandenburg,
near Berlin. There he was given tranquillisers and deliberately left untended and unfed. On 6 February 1942, the little boy died; he was eight months old.

Jürgen Weise was not the only disabled baby to be murdered in the name of racial purity and strength. In 2002, when we met, research into this was at an early stage, hampered by the reluctance of staff at official archives to allow access to Nazi-era documents.

But the Brandenburg
Kinderfachabteilung
had been exposed several years before, and there was convincing evidence that 147 babies were murdered there – including an unknown number from the Lebensborn homes
.

I struggled to take all this in. I had dedicated my life to disabled children. I had seen the joy that my efforts brought to them and to their parents. I had felt the love that comes from helping children like Jürgen. What sort of heartless bureaucrat could so easily extinguish such precious life?

Perhaps my reaction sounds naive. History has told us that the Nazis ruthlessly and quite openly murdered millions of Jews in Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen and the other camps: why would the deaths of a few babies, born in secret and hidden from public view, matter to men like Himmler and Hitler? But according to their own twisted ideology these children were special: they were in the Lebensborn homes because their parents had been examined and ultimately proven to be suitable blood-stock for the master race.

I looked around at the men and women who had also been part of the Lebensborn programme. I assessed each body, searched each face for evidence that these survivors of Himmler's experiment were truly super-human beings. Were they taller, stronger, healthier than anyone else?

Ruthild answered my unspoken question. She took off her glasses, rubbed her eyes and said: ‘We aren't perfect. We've got all the same illnesses and disabilities as other people.'

What, then, was it all for? Himmler's great dream was a generation of super-Aryans who would be so strong, so flawless that they would grow up to become the natural aristocracy of the National Socialist state and the lesser nations it ruled. Yet his scheme seemed to have produced nothing more notable than the group of perfectly ordinary men and women seated around me.

There were, though, two striking characteristics shared by most of these Lebensborn children: deep emotional hurt and a palpable sense of shame. The former stemmed from a problem I was very familiar with. Each of us who began life in that clandestine programme had grown up with the pain of not knowing the truth about our birth.

This secrecy was both deliberate and carefully managed from the outset. Doctors and staff in the Lebensborn homes were required to swear an oath of silence which committed them to respecting ‘the honour of pregnant women, whether they conceived before or after marriage', and in June 1939, Himmler had issued an order to protect the identity of illegitimate children born in the programme.

Following an agreement between the genealogical office Reich Minister of the Interior and the L organisation, it is possible to maintain secrecy about the origin of illegitimate children born in Lebensborn homes for an unlimited period. The Reich office will provide a certificate confirming the child's Aryan descent. This certificate can be produced by a child born in a Lebensborn home when they start school, for the Hitler Youth and for institutions of higher education, without the slightest difficulty arising.

This determination to throw a cloak of confidentiality over all aspects of the Lebensborn children extended to the records kept of their delivery. Himmler's organisation set up a special registry office for recording the births: this was kept separate from any other office of the
Reich and operated in total secrecy. Mothers' names might be shown in the files, but the identity of the father was generally deliberately omitted.

And many of these deliberately redacted records had themselves disappeared: in the final days of the war, with Allied forces closing in on the homes, Lebensborn staff destroyed much of the organisation's paperwork. As a result, most of the children born within Lebensborn grew up not knowing who their fathers were – and, unless their mothers broke the bonds of secrecy, completely unable to find out.

In particular, this affected the children who had been handed over to foster parents. But even those who, like Ruthild, were kept by their biological mothers, often found it impossible to prise out the information. Many mothers were very vague about their time in Lebensborn homes; others refused point-blank to discuss it.

I knew how that felt. Although I didn't yet fully understand how I fitted into the story of Lebensborn, I was familiar with parental walls of secrecy: as Georg Lilienthal had warned me, Gisela undoubtedly withheld much of what she knew throughout my life.

Why did other mothers do this too? The reason was the second characteristic evident in many of the Lebensborn children sitting beside me in Hadamar. Shame is a powerful emotion, and the political climate in post-war Germany was hardly conducive to honesty about involvement with an organisation as reviled and feared as the SS.

One of the men in our group talked openly about the guilt and the shame that had blighted his life. His story opened my eyes to another aspect of the Lebensborn programme. Hannes Dollinger had grown up in Bavaria, where the couple he thought of as his parents owned an inn. But after he started school, he heard rumours that he was a foundling. He asked his parents whether this was true, but they refused to answer and when he persevered they punished him and forbade him from ever raising the subject again.

It was not until he was fifty that he learned the truth. Just as Frau Harte had once broken the news to me that Hermann and Gisela were
not my real parents, a former employee of Hannes' family told him on her deathbed that he had been adopted. That alone was a shock, but the story of how he came to Bavaria was worse.

Norway was the northernmost country occupied by Hitler's army. The Wehrmacht invaded in April 1940 and from then until the end of the war, Norway was run by a collaborationist government which enthusiastically did the Nazis' bidding.

Himmler had for many years viewed the largely blond and blue-eyed local population as de facto Aryans. He and his officials actively encouraged liaisons between SS or Wehrmacht troops and Norwegian women, establishing a network of Norwegian Lebensborn homes in which the resulting babies were born, then shipped back to the Reich and handed over to suitable couples either for adoption or fostering.

The legacy of this collaboration was long and bitter. Unlike the desperate bonfires built by Lebensborn staff across Germany, in Norway the SS never managed to destroy its files. As a result, after the war thousands of Lebensborn babies and their mothers were identified and faced the fury of their countrymen. Women and their children were harassed by their neighbours or schoolmates. Police arrested between 3,000 and 5,000 women who had slept with German soldiers and marched them off to internment camps. The head of Norway's largest mental hospital publicly stated that women who had mated with Germans were ‘mental defectives' and declared that 80 per cent of their children were retarded.

Hannes discovered that he was one of these children. He began researching his origins and found that his real name was Otto Ackermann and that he was born in September 1942 in a Lebensborn home near Oslo. From there he had been sent like a parcel across Germany, first to a Lebensborn home in Klosterheide, near Berlin, then on to Kohren-Sahlis, the home in which I had been raised.