Hitler's Forgotten Children (3 page)

The search for an answer was not confined to America, of course. Each Allied power faced the problem of how to pull out the roots of National Socialism while ensuring that its own zone of occupation kept functioning. The first step was to outlaw the party. On 20 September 1945, Control Council Proclamation No. 2 announced that ‘The National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP) is completely and finally abolished and declared to be illegal' throughout the former Reich.

But the party itself was only the most visible of a byzantine tangle of Nazi organisations. Beneath it were more than sixty other official associations, ranging from internationally notorious bodies like the SS, Gestapo and Hitler Youth to more obscure societies (even within Germany) such as the Reich Committee for the Protection of German Blood and the Deutsche Frauenschaft, the National Socialist Women's Movement. All were duly made illegal: more importantly, previous association with any one of them would be enough to mark someone as a possible Nazi sympathiser.

Neither Hermann nor Gisela were – to the best of my knowledge – Nazi Party members. I never heard them express fascist opinions or support for Hitler. But their personal histories (my father as a career soldier, who had been a desk officer in the Wehrmacht for much of the war; my mother as a former member of Deutsche Frauenschaft) must have led to some investigation by the denazification officials of their respective Occupation Zones.

The Americans were initially fiercely committed to denazification, but quickly became the most pragmatic of the occupying armies. Washington's military government realised that, however desirable,
widespread purges of suspected Nazis would mean that the entire responsibility for organising day-to-day life fell exclusively on its shoulders – a burden that, for a war-weary nation anxious to bring its troops home, was simply too onerous.

And so while my father, like every adult living in the American zone, was required to fill out a questionnaire (termed variously a
Fragebogen
or a
Meldebogen
) in which he affirmed that he had never been a member of any Nazi organisation, there was little follow-up or detailed examination of these self-declarations. With little or no oversight, most applicants were issued with official documents pronouncing them to be ‘good Germans', free of the stain of fascism. They quickly became known as
Persilschein
– pieces of paper that were able to wash the past as clean as any soap powder.

The Soviet approach was very different. Perhaps because it had suffered greater losses and devastation than any of the four Allied powers – or, more likely, because Stalin had clear plans for the future of the Soviet zone – Moscow adopted a much less relaxed approach.

The Soviet Military Administration in Germany – known by its acronym, SMAD – controlled a vast swathe of territory from the Oder river in the east to the Elbe in the west. On April 18, 1945, Lavrenti Beria, Stalin's much-feared head of secret police, issued order Number 00315: it mandated the immediate internment of active Nazis and senior members of Party organisations. No investigations were required prior to these arrests. Ultimately, 123,000 Germans were rounded up and incarcerated in ten special camps set up across the Soviet zone.

The existence of these prisons – run by the NKVD, Stalin's equivalent of the Gestapo, and frequently on the site of former Nazi concentration camps – was in itself a secret. No contact was allowed between prisoners and the outside world, but inevitably word did leak out: the often random nature of arrests and internment (by February 1946, genuine Nazi Party members formed less than half of the total number of prisoners), and fear of being dragged off to the network of
Schweigelager
(literally,
‘Silence Camps') weighed heavily on an already fearful German population under Soviet military rule.

Almost anything – anonymous denunciation, previous membership of an obscure Nazi society or contact with anyone in the other three Occupation Zones – was enough to earn a knock on the door and transport to a
Schweigelager
. All too often this proved to be a one-way ticket: almost 43,000 men and women would die behind the barbed wire of these post-war concentration camps.

Did my mother worry about the risk that her involvement with Deutsche Frauenschaft posed to our household in Bandekow? I do not know: the von Oelhafens were a close-lipped family, rarely given to discussion of emotions, much less those of the past. It would be many years before I discovered the secret at the heart of my childhood, a secret that tied Gisela, Hermann and me to a sinister Nazi organisation, one which would certainly have spelled trouble for us if SMAD came to hear of it.

Was this an added worry, clouding my mother's mind? Again, I do not know. What I do know is that as summer turned to winter, Gisela was terrified of something else: rape.

Throughout 1945, as the Soviet Army fought its way into Germany, its troops mastered one phrase above all:
Komm, Frau
. It was an order that brooked no disobedience and led to the same inevitable conclusion. Tens of thousands – perhaps ten times that number – of German women paid, with their bodies, the price for Hitler's brutal treatment of Russian cities and populations. Rape was so commonplace in the Soviet sector that the question for many women, of all ages, was not
whether
they had been violated but
how many
times.

It was also quasi-officially sanctioned. Although SMAD commanders in some parts of the Occupied Zone paid lip service to stamping out the violation of German women, in reality others paid a heavy price for doing so. One young Red Army captain, Lev Kopelev, intervened to stop the gang rape of a group of girls and was sentenced for his troubles
to ten years in a labour camp: a tribunal convicted him of the crime of ‘bourgeois humanism'.

It was, of course, true that neither the internment camps nor rape were confined to the Soviet sector. The Americans imprisoned thousands of suspected Nazis, often in appalling conditions for years, and French troops frequently ravaged German women in cities under their control. But in the final months of the war, Hitler and Goebbels had fanned the flames of national fear by issuing a constant stream of propaganda about the brutality of the Red Army – and from the moment they fought their way onto German soil, the Soviet occupiers fulfilled the worst of these predictions.

Our family was as vulnerable as any, if not more so. My mother and my Aunt Eka were young and pretty and we came from the hated bourgeoisie: our home was large, comfortable and well-stocked with food from the farm, but it was also isolated, and my brother was the only man in the household. The fear of rape hung over us as the winter wore on. My mother would later remember – one of only a sparse handful of personal feelings she ever shared with me – hiding under the bed whenever she heard rumours that Red Army soldiers were in the area.

But however debilitating the fear, in truth we were better off than most of the population in the Soviet Zone. We had a roof over our heads, unlike the vast majority of people in the bombed-out cities. The winter of 1946–7 was one of the harshest in living memory: temperatures plummeted to -30° and for the millions struggling to exist in the bombed-out basements of their former homes there was no protection from the biting cold. And since what remained of the rail network after the final, disastrous months of fighting was rapidly dismantled by the Soviet Army and taken back east as war reparation, there was little coal to be had: thousands of people simply froze to death.

But it was food – or rather, the lack of it – that soon became the overriding preoccupation. German ration cards were no longer valid: whatever limited provisions had previously been available were now
being claimed by SMAD to feed the Red Army. In cities across the country, hunger joined fear as the measure of existence.

In the areas under Moscow's control, new rationing measures were introduced. The Russians created a new five-tier system: the highest level was reserved, bizarrely, for intellectuals and artists; the next level down was assigned to the women –
Trümmerfrauen,
as they were called
–
who worked in chain gangs, tearing down and clearing semi-derelict buildings, often with nothing more than their bare hands. This was much more valuable than the official wages of 12 Reichsmarks they received for cleaning up every thousand bricks. Hard physical labour was the only way to survive and, in the ruins of the nation, Germany's women dug for the salvation of their families.

The levels of rationing below this fell incrementally and dramatically. The lowest card, nicknamed the
Friedhofskarte
(literally meaning ‘cemetery ticket'), was issued to those who performed no useful function in the eyes of our Soviet masters: housewives who did no work and the elderly.

Two new words joined the lexicon of post-war lives that winter. The first was
Fringsen
: it emerged after the Catholic cardinal of Cologne, Josef Frings, gave formal blessing to what many of his flock were already doing – stealing in order to survive. Crime rose dramatically: in addition to the uncountable tally of thefts and rapes by Red Army soldiers, Germans under Soviet occupation began preying on each other. Berlin alone averaged 240 robberies and five murders every day. Urban crime may not have been a pressing concern for the von Oelhafens, living in the relative security of rural Mecklenburg, but the second new word had a very real meaning.
Hamstern
meant, quite literally, ‘to hamster': in practice, it was a constant procession of city dwellers to and from the countryside, desperate to trade their few remaining possessions for the food we had in relative abundance.

This was the reality of
Stunde Null
: an existence defined by three constant companions: fear – especially of the Red Army and of its
determination to exact revenge on German civilians for Hitler's war – hunger and cold. This was Germany, my country and my life on my fourth birthday. This was the legacy of the glorious Reich. And there was worse in store. Throughout 1946, as relations between the occupying powers worsened, Moscow's intentions towards those under its rule in SMAD grew starker. As well as stripping the zone of wealth and food, it began the process of removing the one, flickering hope we had enjoyed when the war ended: freedom.

The boundaries between the four zones were becoming ever less passable. An ‘Inner German Border', as SMAD termed it, had been established around the Soviet-held territory in July 1945, but since then it had been only sporadically policed. Although anyone wanting to move between the Soviet sector and the other Allied Occupation Zones officially needed an
Interzonenpass,
at least one and a half million Germans had managed to flee into the American or British zones. Now that began to change.

In the summer of 1947, preparations were underway for the eventual transformation of SMAD into the new communist-ruled German Democratic Republic. New contingents of Soviet soldiers were assigned to the official border checkpoints. Unofficial crossing places would soon be blocked by newly dug ditches and barbed wire barricades. The Cold War was beginning and we were living on the wrong side of the coming Iron Curtain. In the summer of 1947 my parents – separated both physically and emotionally – made a remarkable joint decision. It was time to escape.

‘Ingrid is very brave and overcomes the strenuous walk without complaining.'
G
ISELA VON
O
ELHAFEN
'
S DIARY
, J
UNE
1947

M
y mother kept a journal. Unknown to me – she never told me about it, even when I was an adult – she jotted down the barest of details of my early years across a sparse handful of pages. This slim, black leather-bound notebook contains all I know about my first eight years of life.

It begins with a small black and white photo of me, three years old, barefoot and wearing shorts, captioned: ‘Bandekow – Ingrid, Summer 1944'. Over the page is an envelope dated June 4, 1944 and containing – according to my mother's note – a few strands of my hair. If that seems fairly conventional, the sort of journal any loving mother might keep as a record of her daughter's childhood, the rest of the content fails to match that impression. There are very few entries – no more than four or five for each of the five years my mother wrote in it. And the nature of the inscriptions themselves are curious: they are all in the third person. Gisela refers to herself as ‘
Mutti
' (the German colloquial word for Mummy) throughout, never ‘I'.

This sort of third-person journal was, I have since gathered, not uncommon in Germany during the later war years – perhaps she did it to make it easier for her children to read later. But given that she never told us about it, that benign explanation seems unlikely. Her curiously detached writing style seems rather to emphasise the difficulty my mother found in conforming to a maternal stereotype, and the distance I always felt between us.

Still, the journal does give me some idea of what sort of child I was. The entry for my birthday on 11 November 1944 reads:

Today Ingrid is three years old. At her age she is not tall, but she thrives and prospers wonderfully and has a healthy constitution. She has a strong will and a disposition to violent temper. Her character is calm and persistent. She does not pay attention to people she does not know: at that point her little ego takes centre stage and claims a little too much of her small world.

The next item, dated a month afterwards, hints at a desire to win my mother's affections. For reasons undisclosed, I was left alone with Dietmar at lunchtime; when my mother returned she noted that:

Ingrid – with a serious face – was very busy feeding her brother just as Mummy always does.

If the diary is any guide, I appear not to have succeeded. Throughout the twelve months of 1945, my mother only managed to put pen to paper on five occasions: two to record the effect of measles on me, one noting the happy news that I was no longer afraid of our family dog, and two more in which my slowness to speak (‘She doesn't make complete sentences, her maximum is three or four words') is observed and preserved. There was, as my mother must have known perfectly well, a very good reason
why I might be slow to get my childish tongue around German words. But there is no mention of this in the pages of the notebook.