The Invisible History of the Human Race

by Christine Kenneally

  After she turned eighteen, Heidenreich answered the door one day to find a young girl standing there. Her visitor was the same height as Heidenreich, and she looked as if she was the same age. “Hello, Gisela,” the girl said. “I am your sister.” Heidenreich slammed the door shut but a minute later opened it again. Her new sister told her that they shared three other siblings and a father. Not only that, but their father was still alive and, most amazing of all, she said, “Our father is a beautiful father, a wonderful father, and he is very kind and loving.”

  It was like a fairy tale: Gisela loved her new siblings and her new father, who told her that he had always wanted to find her. Even her father’s wife—the woman to whom he had been unfaithful—welcomed her and made her feel like a daughter. Heidenreich still lived with her mother, though they rarely discussed the situation. For the most part, when Heidenreich headed out to visit her father, her mother would say, “Say hello to him.” When she was on her way back again, her father would say, “Say hello to her.”

  Heidenreich’s father told her that almost twenty years earlier he had had an affair with her mother. It was a love affair, and yet he also told her, “It was an order from Himmler for his SS men to produce children out of the marriage to pass on their precious blood.” Not wanting to give up the happiness she had so longed for, Heidenreich didn’t ask for any other details, nor did she ask her father what he had done in the war. No one ever mentioned it.

  In fact the founding principle of the Nazi Lebensborn program was to ensure that no Aryan children were aborted. Abortion was illegal, and doctors who performed the operation were executed. If a woman found herself pregnant outside of marriage, and if she could prove that both she and the father were Aryan dating back to at least 1800, she could give birth to her child in a Lebensborn clinic in secret. If she wished to leave her child with the program, it would be adopted out to an SS family or raised in a Lebensborn home. The clinics were not actually brothels or places of rape, as the lurid coverage from the 1950s had suggested, but rather were deluxe destinations for the wives of SS officers to give birth to their children. SS soldiers paid for the clinics out of their salary.

  Still, Himmler’s zeal to create a master race included not just providing sanctuary for unwed mothers but actively encouraging SS soldiers to father more children. Eight thousand Lebensborn children were born in the homes. Heidenreich told me that about half of them were taken home by their mothers, and half were left for adoption. In Nazi-occupied foreign territories, children who looked Aryan were kidnapped and deposited at Lebensborn homes to be raised as Germans. It’s thought that twelve thousand children were born or abducted in Norway. Up to one hundred thousand were taken from Poland, and it may be that overall more than two hundred thousand children were removed from their parents in the Eastern Bloc countries to be Aryanized. Documents show that some parents signed their children away, but this took place in occupied territory so it’s doubtful how voluntary their choice was.

  After the war the Lebensborn clinics were investigated by the Nuremberg trials, but it was concluded that they were charitable institutions. Heidenreich’s mother was a witness in the trials. “She lied,” Heidenreich told me. “She testified that the clinics were merely places to help women give birth, but they committed many crimes against humanity,” she recalled. “She always said she had been just a secretary, but that was not true.” Heidenreich’s mother was a senior member of the staff and managed the identity change and dispersal of stolen Norwegian children. “I think she even spoke Norwegian,” Heidenreich said, “but she never confessed.”

  The fate of the Lebensborn children was a miserable one. Many were abandoned by their mothers and brought up in orphanages—most of which were terrible places in which to grow up. Gudrun Sarkar, who is now seventy-three years old, was left in a Lebensborn home until she was eight years old and still suffers phobias because of it. The Lebensborn nurses were so particular about how children ate, Sarkar told me, they insisted that children wear a bib when eating and that half of it cover their top and the other half be stiffly lodged under the plate to catch any food. It was such a tense balancing act that Sarkar still has trouble eating or sitting in a dark room. In elementary school Sarkar discovered that she was a Lebensborn child when her teacher asked her where she was born. When she told him it was a Lebensborn clinic, he explained that she was born for Hitler, and she should be ashamed of herself.

  Eventually Sarkar was adopted by elderly Germans who remained committed Nazis long after the war ended. They believed it was their duty to raise an Aryan child, but they were not kind to Sarkar. Hitler was good for Germany, they said, but she was born in shameful circumstances. When she was a teenager, Sarkar brought home photos of dying Jews in concentration camps, but her parents said they must be fabricated.

  Few Lebensborn children were able to find their original families, and many were rejected when they did attempt to make contact. As an adult Sarkar was discovered by her mother’s sister, who found her only after her mother died. They had a loving relationship. She also found out where her father, a member of the SS, lived, and she learned that she had three half-brothers. She never got in touch for fear they would not want to know her.

  In Norway one doctor declared that any child of the SS must be mentally defective, so he placed them in mental asylums, only to be released when they were in their twenties. Even when children were kept by their mothers, local communities often stigmatized them. Heidenreich was unusual for having found a father who wanted to claim her and an extended family who embraced her. Still, as a young woman she was almost six feet tall, with blonde hair and blue eyes, and she was deeply embarrassed to so obviously embody the ideal of the Reich. For a long time she dyed her hair dark brown.

  Heidenreich became a special-education teacher who worked with disabled children. She believes now that unconsciously she wanted to help children who would have been exterminated by Hitler. Later she became a family therapist specializing in family-systems therapy, a method that explicitly encourages exploration of the past. Issues that are unresolved in previous generations, Heidenreich advised her clients, have a way of surfacing in the present one. It was fifty years after the terrible events that took place when she was thirteen before Heidenreich realized she should take her own advice.

  In fact, documents relating to the program and containing the names of parents were released to the public only in the early twenty-first century. It was then that most Lebensborn children became aware of the circumstances of their conception and birth. A support group was started in 2006, and some individual Lebensborn children have begun to speak publicly about their experiences. Allegedly some are proud to be part of an elite group, but there is little evidence of special status. In 2006 Lebensborn child Ruthild Gorgass told the New York Times, “My eyes aren’t perfect. We’ve got all the same illnesses and disabilities as other people have.”

  Heidenreich went through SS records and found that her father ranked high in the organization, but he was posted in communications and never accused of a crime against humanity. She discovered that her mother was a Nazi and read transcripts from her testimony at the Nuremberg trials. “She always told me that she brought me back with a transport of other babies to Berlin,” said Heidenreich. “I never knew what it meant, but in the end of course I found out this was one of the transports of Norwegian children.” In fact, Heidenreich’s mother first told her own family that Gisela was a Norwegian orphan. Later she acknowledged that she was her own child.

  “After all the shocks and shame, we also feel guilt, which is funny,” said Heidenreich. “But most of us feel guilty . . . [because we were] the product for the Aryan race, for this madness of this regime.” Still, Heidenreich said she has turned her guilt into responsibility. Now she gives talks to schools throughout Germany, and she marvels at how little even the teachers now know about this side of Nazi eugenics.

  • • •


  Joe Mauch has lived in Australia for more than four decades. Now a slim and fit septuagenarian, he spent most of his adult life working with books, apart from eleven years when he tended his own olive grove. He has visited Germany a few times, and it was on one of his trips that his mother gave him the Einheitsfamilienstammbuch. He told me the pendulum had finally swung back—all children in Germany are now educated about what happened during the war. Mauch’s brother, a professor who stayed, told Mauch there was even a school whose motto was “No more Auschwitz.” “It’s pretty brutal,” Mauch said. “I feel sorry for these poor little kids who walk through that gate.”

  Genealogy doesn’t worry him anymore either. “I can understand that people are interested in their ancestors and where they come from,” he said. “Genealogy is just like doing history. It’s nothing to be sneered at.”

  It’s hard to reconcile the criticism that family histories aren’t worthy of serious attention with the experiences of Joe Mauch and Gisela Heidenreich and their peers, for whom big history was very personal. This paradox will only increase. The more we digitize records and make them accessible, the more we learn how to read DNA, then the more we will see extraordinary, fine-grained intersections between world history and personal history in the lives of ordinary individuals—not just royalty, not just the bourgeoisie, and not just Cleopatra.

  Yet for all the people who took the journey through time that Mauch and Heidenreich did, there is still a strong current against the notion that examining the history of the people who formed us may help us learn about ourselves. Even as Western society devises ever-new ways to think about itself and help us understand “who we really are,” and even despite the millions of people who subscribe to services like Ancestry .com and FindMyPast, curiosity about lineage outside the ranks of committed genealogists isn’t taken very seriously. But history—if we care to examine it—shows us that genealogy is potent. Simply asserting that it shouldn’t be is meaningless.

  No doubt many people today have inherited the fear that genealogy is the first step down the path to eugenics, without ever quite knowing the basis of that fear. But awareness of one’s role in the great historical narrative does not necessarily lead to delusion or bigotry. Nor does curiosity about personal history mean someone wants to be a queen. Rather, it is delusion and bigotry that lead to the misuse of records and ideas. The misuse then creates a fear of those records and ideas.

  In the 1950s Friedrich von Klocke, who was a genealogist during the Third Reich, came to rue the role he and his associates played in it. He thought it had happened because he and his colleagues tried to make a science out of a field that was not scientific. But Eric Ehrenreich argues that genealogists like Klocke were merely doing what everyone else at the time was doing: embracing a racist ideology.

  Still, the dogma that people shouldn’t ask how their ancestors shaped them will not prevent a twenty-first-century eugenics movement. Indeed, the insistence that we shouldn’t know these facts or try to analyze them or have feelings about them doesn’t mean that the details of our personal history won’t be interesting to those who may yet choose to investigate them for the wrong reasons.

  Most recently, during the financial crisis in Greece in 2012, as the fascist Golden Dawn political party became more and more powerful, the question of how long a person had been in Greece and whether he could prove it began to be raised. In a New York Times article, a local cracked a joke about needing to show that you were Greek for three generations back. While some people will remain personally indifferent to their forebears—and there’s no reason to argue that they shouldn’t—it would be wise to be vigilant about how information about families is kept or lost or found or shaped by powerful socioeconomic and cultural forces over time.

  The bureaucratization of genealogy in Nazi Germany was a suffocating expression of totalitarianism. Yet as genealogy can be used by totalitarian forces to persecute people, so can antigenealogy. Some regimes, whether institutional or political, control people by targeting their personal histories, not by using them against them but by taking them away altogether.

  Part II

  What Is Passed Down?

  Chapter 5

  Silence

  History is important. If you don’t know history it is as if you were born yesterday. And if you were born yesterday, anybody up there in a position of power can tell you anything, and you have no way of checking up on it.

  —Howard Zinn

  In 1937, at the age of fourteen months, Geoff Meyer appeared before a magistrate, who made him a ward of the state and handed him over to a state-run orphanage. By the time he was four, Meyer lived in a “boys’ depot,” which housed thirty to fifty children until they were fostered, though many were fostered, returned, and fostered again. For all the years he lived there, Meyer never learned any of the other boys’ names. “We weren’t allowed to talk to each other,” he said, “and the staff always said, ‘Hey you’ or used terrible words.”

  Every day at the depot began with a reckoning for children who wet their beds. Staff draped the urine-soaked sheets around bed wetters’ heads and made them parade around the dormitory. The other boys laughed, Meyer said, until it happened to them. “I was too small to laugh at anyone,” he told me. “I was scared of being bashed up.” The food was often rotten, and when Meyer threw up after eating weevil-ridden porridge, he was forced to eat his own vomit. Punishments included floggings and scrubbing the floor with a toothbrush, but the most feared was the small cupboard under the stairs. Boys were locked in with no food or water, and they soiled themselves until they were released. They never spoke, Meyer said. “We held hands.”

  When prospective foster parents visited, the boys were lined up along the front veranda to be inspected. Meyer was fostered out eight times, and in his final placement he was sent to an old woman at Wentworthville, New South Wales. Meyer didn’t know who his parents were, why he was a ward, or if he had any family members at all, and—like every other adult in his life—his new foster parent wouldn’t tell him anything. It was only when he overheard her enrolling him at the local school that he found out his birthday for the first time. Still, everyone at the school knew Meyer was a ward because the assistant principal made him and another boy stand up and announced to the class, “They are under child welfare because their mothers never loved them.”

  On May 10, 1954, his eighteenth birthday, Meyer simply fled, never to return. He had twenty-four pounds and eighteen shillings, the clothes he was wearing, a tennis racket, a cricket bat, and no friends, acquaintances, or family that he knew of. He had no idea how to find a job or a place to stay.

  In Australia, where Meyer grew up, at least half a million children were placed in institutional care in the last century. In the United States today there are more than thirty thousand children in such circumstances; and in Africa, Asia, and Latin America the official figures are in the tens of thousands, although it’s believed that there are many more unofficial cases. For a long time these children were ignored, but in the last twenty years many stories about their mistreatment in homes and its long, damaging aftermath have emerged. All over the Western world, adults who were once institutionalized children have recounted vividly similar experiences of floggings, forced labor, sexual abuse, and emotional torment. In some homes children were not allowed to look one another in the eye.

  The long-term consequences of such treatment have been the same the world over too. When the children reached a certain age and were ejected from their “homes,” they entered their own country like refugees, knowing nothing about “councils or libraries or voting.” Many died from drug- and alcohol-related causes, and some built careers in institutions, like the navy, or in the religious orders that ran their homes. Some became successful, but many struggled. Figures suggest that one in three attempted suicide, many experienced homelessness, and they had a high incidence of mental illness and physical injuries. Most “ex-orphan
s” were noticeably short (a trait usually attributed to malnutrition), and while they lived in terror of being forced into old people’s homes, a number of their own children ended up in care. There is also a well-worn path from children’s homes to jail: The last three people to be hanged in Australia grew up in such places.

  Despite the fact that most people today know that terrible things sometimes happened to children in group homes, few comprehend that these institutions operated like totalitarian states within a democracy. As well as being places of mental and physical torture, the institutions systematically controlled children’s access to information while they were institutionalized as well as once they left. In many homes the staff had authority over every connection children had with the outside world, not sharing news and even confiscating letters from family. Some children were even schooled at the institution and did not leave the grounds for years. Many were not taught to read or write or do basic mathematics. Their names were arbitrarily changed, and it was common for them to be addressed only by a number. Some children were told that their parents were dead when they weren’t or that they never wanted to see them again when they did.

  Even though it has been decades since group homes closed, vital information about their residents is still being withheld. For the children it’s as if someone pushed them through the looking glass, and decades later they still can’t find their way back.

  • • •

  What gets passed down? Records, of course, by definition are one key source of personal data. It may be a banal observation, but sometimes you don’t notice what gets passed down until it doesn’t. Birth certificates, school records, the names of family members, and all the other bits of information that we take for granted only become disturbingly obvious in their absence. The ordinary records that chart the passage of a life matter a great deal—not just to governments and corporations and librarians but to ordinary people too.