Hitler's Forgotten Children (21 page)

I was big, blond and Aryan, different from the southern Germans, and everyone asked me where I had come from. I couldn't answer them.

The only document Helga possessed was a cryptic birth certificate from an ‘SS Mothers Home'. It showed her mother's name but not that of her father. Nor was Margarete Kahrau willing to help her daughter understand. She deliberately concealed the truth, saying only that
Helga's father had been a soldier who died in the war. She was also reluctant to discuss what she had done in the service of Hitler's Reich: like most Germans of her generation, Margarete preferred to forget about the Nazis.

When Margarete died in 1993, Helga began investigating. She discovered Nazi files that provided detailed information about her foster father and the crimes he committed in the service of the Final Solution. But there was nothing in the documents about her biological father. Then, in 1994, she received a phone call. The man told her that he had been a Wehrmacht officer in Paris, that he had met Margarete for a single night of passion. He was now suffering from terminal cancer and wanted to reach out to his daughter. It was a bittersweet moment for Helga: she had found her real father at last, but only as he was dying. She decided to make the most of the time they had left and devoted herself to nursing him round the clock.

Her father had enjoyed a very successful post-war career in property, which had made him a multi-millionaire. As his eldest child, Helga might have expected to inherit at least some of his estate. But when he died she encountered another legacy of her birth. Her father left no will: shortly after his funeral Helga received a letter from his lawyers stating that because she was illegitimate, she could legally inherit nothing.

Since then, Helga had found some solace in visiting her birthplace, the Lebensborn home at Steinhöring. But she never came to terms with her identity and worried constantly that people would assume that she, like her mother and stepfather, was a Nazi.

I grew up on the side of the murderers. Being a Lebensborn child is still a source of shame.

Shame – the word that has blighted the lives of so many of those who had been part of Himmler's plan to create a new Master Race. The more I heard from those who had been born into Lebensborn, rather than
kidnapped to strengthen it, the more I felt lucky to have been one of the
Banditenkinder
, the child of courageous partisans who fought against Nazi rule.

Gisela Heidenreich, a tall, strikingly Aryan-looking woman from Bavaria, was four years old when she first encountered shame: she overheard her uncle describe her as ‘an SS bastard'. She was a family therapist, a fact I noted with interest. There seemed to be a common trait in Lebensborn children: by accident or design many of us had chosen careers in which we helped others overcome problems, while struggling with our own.

Gisela described vividly the confusion she had suffered throughout her life and the web of lies that blighted her childhood. Her mother was Emilie Edelmann, the Lebensborn secretary who had given evidence at Nuremberg and who had been responsible for finding foster parents to take children stolen from the occupied countries.

Like so many of those who had been part of Lebensborn, Emilie was secretive and deceitful. At first she had led Gisela to believe that she was not her real mother but her aunt. Later she admitted that this was not true and told her daughter that she fell pregnant following an affair with a married man. The SS packed her off to occupied Norway, to give birth in the Lebensborn home near Oslo. Several months later, Emilie brought Gisela back to Germany.

Throughout her childhood, Gisela's mother refused to answer any questions about the war. Only after Emilie's death did Gisela discover the depths of her mother's involvement with the Nazis. She found a bundle of love letters written to Emilie by Horst Wagner, the director of ‘Jewish Affairs' in the Reich's Foreign Office and its link-man with the SS. In this role, he helped carry out the round-ups, deportation and extermination of both German and foreign Jews. Emilie's love affair with Wagner grew to the point where the couple considered formally making him Gisela's stepfather. Their relationship continued when the Reich fell and he was arrested by the Americans and held for trial at
Nuremberg. But before he could be brought to justice, he fled down one of the infamous ‘Ratlines' – clandestine escape routes for Nazi war criminals – to South America.

Shocking though the relationship was, it did not bring Gisela any closer to discovering who her real father was. She continued to search for him and, many years later, she eventually tracked him down. He was the head of the SS officer school at Bad Toelz in Bavaria. Her own reaction to their reunion both surprised her and helped her understand how so many Germans were able to live with knowledge of the crimes committed by the Nazis:

When I first met him it was on a station platform. I ran into his arms and all I thought was ‘I've got a father'. In that instant I sanitised the person I knew my father was. And I never asked him what he did. My own reaction – that of an educated adult with knowledge of the Lebensborn programme – has helped me to understand how people in those days just put the blinders on and ignored the terrible things that were happening.

Gisela brought to our group a determination to rehabilitate the image of Lebensborn children. In part this was due to her experience of the postwar treatment of Norwegian babies born in the programme's homes. As I had heard at the first meeting in Hadamar, Norwegian hatred of the occupying German armies led to discrimination against the 8,000 children like Gisela born in its Lebensborn homes. At first the post-war government in Oslo tried to have all the children shipped to Germany. When that plan failed, many of them were locked away in mental institutions or children's homes.

Gisela believed that this hatred and persecution was driven by Norway's national guilt at being occupied, the shame of its leaders having collaborated with the Nazis and, above all, the wildly inaccurate rumours about Lebensborn homes being ‘SS stud farms'. Three years
earlier, the Norwegian government had quietly paid on average €24,000 compensation to each of the children it had victimised. Now, Gisela argued, the time had come to end the lies and the discrimination.

It's high time to tell the truth. There's been too much talk about Nazi babies, women being kept as SS whores and tall, blond people being bred. The Holocaust was about extinguishing so-called lesser races. Lebensborn was the reverse side of this coin: the idea was to further the Aryan race by whatever means were available.

What I have learned is that I, and every other Lebensborn child, have a feeling of deep uncertainty about our identity. This has to stop.

The stories of these ‘pure' Aryan children were harrowing. But theirs was only half the picture: there were others, like me, at the inaugural Lebensspuren meeting who had been forced, not born, into Himmler's programme. Their accounts helped me understand how the process had worked.

What happened to Barbara Paciorkiewicz was typical. She was born in 1938 in Gdynia, near Gdansk in Poland. Her family name was Gajzler but, because her mother had died and her father had disappeared, she and her sister were separated, each sent to live with one of their grandparents.

Gdansk was in the part of Poland under German occupation and the Nazis had renamed it Danzig. In 1942, when Barbara was four, the Youth Welfare Office issued instructions for all children to be brought to the regional youth welfare office in Łodz. Her grandmother took Barbara and was forced to leave her there.

There were a lot of children in the centre. Each was measured – heads, chests and hips – and weighed on scales. Their faces were photographed from three angles. The people making these measurements were some
of Himmler's race examiners: they were looking for racially suitable children to Germanise. Barbara had blond hair and looked Nordic. She was shipped off to a succession of different homes in Łodz.

Here I was subjected to more tests – always there were more tests. We were forbidden upon pain of punishment to speak Polish. Every one of us was crying.

Barbara's account of her kidnapping was similar to others I had heard. But her recollections of life in the Lebensborn home at Bad Polzin gave me new information about what my own experience might have been like.

This is where my memories truly begin. I can remember exactly where we were kept, the conditions there, and the treatment we received. There was a separation between us stolen children and those who had been born in the home.

The stolen children were kept on the ground floor of the building. The babies born in the home were kept on the floor above and we were never allowed to mix with them; nor were the staff who looked after these babies allowed to mix with the staff in charge of us. It was as if there was a hierarchy of our value: apparently the Nazis viewed the babies as more important than us children brought in for Germanisation.

In the home we were constantly given medical tests – I think it must have been every day. We were in a big room on the ground floor which had a large semi-circular wall of windows. I have been there since and this room still exists: it looks almost the same. There was a very sinister atmosphere in the room and we were individually taken into a side room and given injections by a doctor. I fear now that these were to tranquillise us: I cannot see any other reason for it. We were
terrified of these injections. All the children were crying in that room: no one ever laughed.

Even for the precious Aryan babies like Guntram Weber, the regime in Lebensborn homes was cold to the point of severity. They were separated from their mothers immediately after birth, and kept apart for the next twenty-four hours. Thereafter they were allowed just twenty minutes together every four hours: even during that brief period of contact the SS staff strongly discouraged mothers from caressing or talking to their children.

The older children were monitored constantly, and reports made about their behaviour. Uncleanliness, bedwetting, farting, nail-biting and masturbation (which older boys were told on arrival was forbidden) were enough to ensure expulsion: these rejects were shipped off to forced education camps where they were brutalised or used as slave labour.

This Spartan regimen was intended to produce strong and ruthless future leaders for the Master Race. But children need love, not unyielding discipline: Barbara Paciorkiewicz remembered clearly how the rules frequently produced the opposite effect to Himmler's objective.

The children often reacted to them by wetting their beds. In the mornings when this was discovered, the children were beaten for this: even if only one had wet the bed, all of us were punished.

Himmler's overall plan was the same for both types of Lebensborn children: wherever possible, for the duration of the war, they were to be handed over to carefully vetted foster parents who would raise them as model Aryans. After Germany's eventual victory, the boys were to be sent to elite schools – the network of SS-run
Nationalpolitische Erziehungsanstalten
– where they would receive a strong physical and
political education. The girls were to be sent to schools run by the Bund Deutscher Mädel (the female equivalent of the Hitler Youth) and trained to become housewives and mothers.

Barbara had also uncovered the way in which Lebensborn deliberately obscured the true identities of children stolen from the occupied territories. First it cut an essential link to their home country by forbidding them to speak their own language; then it told would-be foster parents that the children were the orphans of fallen German soldiers. The men who ran the programme – those who had been indicted and then acquitted at the Nuremberg trial – knew this to be a lie but Himmler's orders made it clear that for youngsters like Barbara and me, every single trace of our previous life in Poland or Yugoslavia was to be erased.

Barbara's foster parents were from Lemgo in North Rhine-Westphalia. The Rossmanns were in their fifties and had two grown-up sons who had been drafted into the Wehrmacht: they had also had a daughter who had died of scarlet fever when she was nine. Neither was, as far as Barbara had been able to discover, a member of the Nazi Party. Herr Rossman was the director of a school and his wife was a housewife.

Although they were good and kind people who longed for a child to replace the daughter they had lost, even as a young child Barbara felt out of place in her new family. She suffered from bad nightmares in which unknown men came in through an open window to steal her.

There was always an air of uneasiness at home. When I entered a room, everyone stopped talking. And I always asked myself: ‘What is it about me that makes this happen?'

Back in Poland, Barbara's grandmother had never given up hope of finding her. At the end of the war she contacted the Red Cross: it located documents showing where Barbara was living. Not long after, she was taken from her foster family and placed in a temporary children's
home run by the British Army. Six months later, she was put on a train to Poland. She was eleven years old and had never been told about her biological parents, nor that she was anything other than a normal German child.

I was very frightened and confused: I still thought the Rossmanns were my real parents and I didn't know anything about Poland. It didn't mean anything to me. I didn't speak Polish and I didn't even know I had a grandmother. It all seemed like a terrible journey into the unknown.

I realised that I had never given any thought to what had happened to other stolen children after the end of the war. It had never occurred to me that some children might have been traced and sent back to a country they could not remember. Barbara's story made me wonder whether, had I been given the choice, I would have wanted to be returned to Yugoslavia.

The journey to Poland took a terribly long time. The train sometimes stood for days in a siding. And then, suddenly, I heard people around me shout out ‘Poland, Poland' and everyone was happy. I felt no joy when I arrived.