HITLER’S
FORGOTTEN
CHILDREN
This book is dedicated to all the victims of Nazi Germany –
men, women and, above all, children – and to those throughout
the world today who suffer from the persisting evil which
teaches that one race, creed or colour is superior to another.
CONTENTS
Preface
ONE
August 1942
TWO
Year Zero
THREE
Escape
FOUR
Home
FIVE
Identity
SIX
Walls
SEVEN
Source of Life
EIGHT
Bad Arolsen
NINE
The Order
TEN
Hope
ELEVEN
Traces
TWELVE
Nuremberg
THIRTEEN
Rogaška Slatina
FOURTEEN
Blood
FIFTEEN
Pure
SIXTEEN
Taken
SEVENTEEN
Searching
EIGHTEEN
Peace
Afterword
Acknowledgements
Index
PREFACE
Blood runs through this story. The blood of young men spilled on the battlefields of war; the blood of civilians that ran through the gutters of cities, towns and villages across Europe; the blood of millions destroyed in the pogroms and death camps of the Holocaust.
But blood, too, as an idea: the Nazi belief – absurd as this seems today – in ‘good blood’, precious Ichor to be sought out, preserved and expanded. And with it, the inevitable counterpart: ‘bad blood’, to be ruthlessly eradicated.
I was born in 1941 in the depths of the Second World War. I grew up in its wake, and under the shadow of its brutal progeny, the Cold War.
My history is the history of millions of ordinary German men and women like me. We are the victims of Hitler’s obsession with blood, as well as the beneficiaries of the post-war economic miracle that transformed our devastated and pariah nation into the powerhouse of modern Europe. Our story is that of a generation raised in the shadow of infamy, but which found a way to struggle towards honesty and decency.
But my own story is also that of a much more secret past, still cloaked in silence and shrouded in shame.
I am a child of Lebensborn.
Lebensborn is an ancient German word meaning ‘fountain of life’, twisted and distorted by the word-smelters of National Socialism. What did it mean in the madness of Nazism? What does it mean today? My search for the answers – to uncover my own story – has taken me on a long and painful road: a physical journey that has led me across the map of modern Europe. It has been an historical expedition, too: an often uncomfortable return to the Germany of more than seventy years ago, and into the troubled stories of those countries overrun by Hitler’s armies.
The journey has also forced me to make a psychological voyage into everything I have known and grown up with: a fundamental questioning of who I am, and what it means to be German. I will not pretend that this is a simple story: it will not always be easy to read. But neither has it been easy to live.
I am not, by nature, overtly emotional. The expression of emotion, such a commonplace thing in twenty-first-century society, does not come easily to me. I have spent my life attempting to suppress my inner self, to subordinate my feelings to the circumstances in which I have grown up, as well as to the needs of others.
But this is a story which, I believe, needs to be heard. More, much more, it needs to be understood. It is not unique, in that there are others who have endured much of what has shaped my life. But while I share a common thread with thousands of others who passed through the vile experiment of Lebensborn, to the best of my knowledge no one else shares the particular twists of fate, history and geography that have defined my seventy-four years on earth.
Lebensborn. The word runs through my life like the blood coursing through my body. To see it, to understand it, demands much more than a superficial examination. The search for the roots of this story requires a deep and intrusive investigation of the most hidden places.
We must start in a town and a country that no longer exist.
ONE | AUGUST 1942
‘Men … must be shot, the women locked up and transported to concentration camps, and the children must be torn from their motherland and instead accommodated in the territories of the old Reich.’
REICHSFÜHRER-SS HEINRICH HIMMLER, 25 JUNE 1942
Cilli, German-occupied Yugoslavia, 3–7 August 1942
The schoolyard was crowded. Hundreds of women – young and old – clutched the hands of their children and found what space they could in the packed courtyard. Nearby, Wehrmacht soldiers, rifles slung over their shoulders, looked on as the families slowly drifted in from towns and villages across the area.
These women had been summoned by their new German masters, ordered to bring their children to the school for ‘medical tests’. Upon arrival they were arrested and told to wait. Otto Lurker, commander of the police and security services for the region, watched relaxed and impassive – his hands resting comfortably in his pockets – as the yard filled with families. Once, Lurker had been Hitler’s gaoler: now he was the Führer’s leading henchman in Lower Styria. He held the rank of SS-Standartenführer – the paramilitary equivalent of a full colonel in the army – but that summer’s morning he was casually dressed in a two-piece civilian suit.
Yugoslavia had been under Nazi rule for sixteen months. In March 1941, with the surrounding countries of Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria having recently joined the Reich’s alliance of Balkan nations, Hitler put pressure on the kingdom’s ruler, the Regent Prince Paul, to fall into line. He and his cabinet bowed to the inevitable, formally tying Yugoslavia to the axis powers, but the Serb-dominated army launched a coup d’état, replacing Paul with his seventeen-year-old second cousin, Prince Peter.
News of the revolt reached Berlin on 27 March. Hitler took the coup as a personal insult and issued Directive 25, formally designating the country an enemy of the Reich. The Führer ordered his armies ‘to destroy Yugoslavia militarily and as a state’. A week later, the Luftwaffe began a devastating bombing campaign while divisions of Wehrmacht infantry and tanks of the Panzer Corps swept through towns and villages. The Royal Yugoslavian Army was no match for Germany’s Blitzkrieg troops: on 17 April the country surrendered.
The occupying troops immediately set about fulfilling Hitler’s instruction to dismantle all vestiges of the state. Some 65,000 people – primarily intellectuals and nationalists – were exiled, imprisoned or murdered, their homes and property handed over to their new German masters. The Slovene language was prohibited.
But for the rest of 1941 and throughout the first half of 1942, partisan groups, led by the communist Josip Broz Tito, fought a determined campaign of resistance. Germany retaliated with a brutal crackdown: the Gestapo swooped on fighters and civilians alike, deporting thousands to concentration camps across the Reich. Others were executed as a warning against resistance. In the nine months following September 1941, 374 men and women were lined up against the walls of the prison yard at Cilli and summarily shot. Photographers recorded the murders for the purposes of both posterity and propaganda.
On 25 June 1942, Heinrich Himmler – the second most powerful and feared man in Nazi Germany – issued orders to his secret police and SS officers for the elimination of partisan resistance.
This campaign possesses every required elem
ent to make harmless the population which has supported the bandits and provided them with human resources, weapons and shelter. Men from such families, and often even their relatives, must be shot, the women locked up and transported to concentration camps, and the children must be torn from their motherland and instead accommodated in the territories of the old Reich. I expect to be provided with a special report on the number of children and their racial values.
Against this bloody backdrop, 1,262 people – many the surviving relatives of those executed as an example to the rest of the population – assembled in the schoolyard that August morning to await their fate.
Among them was a family from the nearby village of Sauerbrunn. Johann Matko came from a family of known partisans: his brother, Ignaz, had been one of those lined up and shot against the wall of Cilli prison in July. Johann had been dragged off to Mauthausen concentration camp. After seven months in the camp he was allowed to return home to his wife, Helena, and their three children: eight-year-old Tanja, her brother Ludvig – then six – and nine-month-old baby Erika.
When all the families were accounted for, an order was given to separate them into three groups – one each for the children, the women, and the men. Under Lurker’s direction the soldiers moved in and pulled children from the grasp of their mothers; a local photographer, Josip Pelikan, recorded the harrowing scene for the Reich’s obsessive archivists. His rolls of film captured the fear and alarm of women and children alike: his shots included scores of toddlers held in low pens of straw inside the school buildings.
As the mothers waited outside, Nazi officials began a cursory examination of the children. Working with charts and clipboards, they painstakingly noted each child’s facial and physical characteristics.
These, though, were not ‘medical tests’ as any doctor would know them: instead they were crude assessments of ‘racial value’ which assigned each youngster to one of four categories. Those who met Himmler’s strict criteria for what a child of true German blood should look like were placed in Category 1 or 2: this formally registered them as potentially useful additions to the Reich population. By contrast, any hint or trace of Slavic features – and certainly any sign of ‘Jewish heritage’– consigned a child to the lowest racial status of Categories 3 and 4. Thus branded as Untermensch, their value was no more than future slave labour for the Nazi state.
By the following day this rudimentary sifting had finished. Those children deemed racially worthless were handed back to their families. But 430 other youngsters, from young babies to twelve-year-old boys and girls, were taken away by their captors. Marshalled by nurses from the German Red Cross, they were packed into trains and transported across the Yugoslavian border to an Umsiedlungslager – or transit camp – at Frohnleiten, near the Austrian town of Graz.
They did not stay long in this holding centre. By September 1942, a further selection had been made – this time by trained ‘race assessors’ from one of the myriad organisations established by Himmler to preserve and strengthen the pool of ‘good blood’.
Noses were measured and compared to the official ideal length and shape; lips, teeth, hips and genitals were likewise prodded, poked and photographed to sort the genetically precious human wheat from the less-valuable chaff. This finer, more rigorous sieving re-assigned the captives within the four racial categories.
Older children newly listed in Categories 3 or 4 were shipped off to re-education camps across Bavaria in the heartland of Nazi Germany. The best of the younger ones in the top two categories would – in time – be handed over to a secretive project run by the Reichsführer himself. Its name was Lebensborn and among the infants assigned to its care was nine-month-old Erika Matko.
TWO | YEAR ZERO
‘It is our will that this state shall endure for a thousand years. We are happy to know that the future is ours entirely!’’
ADOLF HITLER: TRIUMPH OF THE WILL, 1935
At 2.40 a.m. on Monday, 7 May 1945, in a small red-brick schoolhouse in the French city of Reims, Generaloberst Alfred Jodl, Chief of the German Armed Forces High Command, signed the unconditional surrender of the Thousand Year Reich. The five terse paragraphs of this act of capitulation handed over Germany and all its inhabitants to the mercy of the four victorious Allied powers – Britain, America, France and Russia – from 11.01 p.m. the following night.
A week earlier, Hitler and most of his inner circle had committed suicide in the bowels of the Berlin Führerbunker. Heinrich Himmler – Hitler’s chief henchman and the man in charge of the entire Nazi apparatus of terror – was on the run, disguised in the coarse grey serge of an enlisted soldier and equipped with forged papers proclaiming him to be a humble sergeant.
It was over: six years of ‘total war’ in which my country had murdered and plundered its way across Europe. Now we had to live with the peace.
Who were we then, on that May morning? What was Germany – once the begetter of Bach and Beethoven, Goethe and Schiller – in the aftermath of the brutality of the Blitzkrieg, let alone the Final Solution? What would peace look like to the victors and to the vanquished?
A new term was coined to describe our situation in 1945: Die Stunde Null. Literally translated, this means ‘zero hour’ but for the smouldering remains of Germany – a country of ruins, shame and starvation – it was more accurately ‘Year Zero’: both an end and a beginning.
What did it mean to be a German from 11.01 p.m. on Tuesday, 8 May 1945? To the Allies – the new owners of every metre of turf and of every individual life from the Mass in the west to the Memel in the east – it meant subjugation, suspicion and suppression. Never again, said the four occupying powers, would the poisonous twin rivers of German nationalism and militarism be allowed to rise up and flood the continent. Within hours there would be mechanisms and procedures in place to enforce this ideal – systems that, though I was too young to know then, would direct the course of my life.
To Germans, this question of identity meant something different. Something much less philosophical, something that could perhaps be categorised as the three Ps: physical, political and psychological. Of these, the greatest – the most pressing – was undoubtedly the physical.
Germany in May 1945 was a wasteland of blown-up bridges, damaged roads, burned-out tanks. In the dying weeks and months of his Reich, consumed by madness and impotent rage, Hitler had issued orders to create ‘fortress cities’. The Fatherland was to be defended to the last drop of pure German blood and the last brick of German building. There was to be no surrender but, instead, a Götterdämmerung of flame and sacrifice to mark the final days of his self-proclaimed Master Race.
The result was less a noble funeral pyre than a thousand-mile-wide bonfire of his vanity. Forced to fight for every inch of territory – and bludgeoned by Allied carpet-bombing – Germany was reduced to a post-apocalyptic desert. Piles of rubble lay where buildings had once stood: in Berlin alone there were seventy-five million tons of it piled up along and across almost every street. Other German cities suffered equally, obliterated by bombing and house-to-house fighting that damaged or left derelict seventy per cent of their buildings. And everywhere, now hollow and haggard, a once-proud people who had subjugated those they believed to be inferior.
Newsreels and photos (Allied ones, since the German press had been shut down from the moment of surrender) captured previously unimaginable scenes. Clustered around half-destroyed buildings, blown apart so that the remnants of a once normal life were exposed for all to see – a fireplace, shreds of wallpaper, the remains of a toilet – were the living ghosts of women and children. Orphans, refugees, the aged and the wounded: everywhere a dystopian tableau of anonymous bodies lying dead in the street, watched – or more often avoided – by skeletal figures who might well soon join them.
All of Germany, at least in the cities, was picking through debris, creating makeshift shelters, scrounging for food and either hiding from or fearfully fraternising with the victorious occupying armies. Not fr
om choice, but from necessity.
In the last weeks of the war, the country’s economy – so long directed by and for the benefit of the Nazi Party – had collapsed as badly as its buildings. Ironically, there was plenty of money, but coins and paper bills were useless: as every available resource was diverted away from the people to the needs of the army, and as explosions ripped up the railway network, preventing what food was harvested from being distributed, there was little or nothing to buy with the now-useless marks.
Nor did Germany’s new masters appear to have a coherent idea of what to do with it. Between July and August 1945, the Allied leaders – Churchill (and, later, Attlee), Truman and Stalin – met at Potsdam to plan the future. Unlike the end of the First World War, when Germany was defeated and subjected to severe punishment and reparations but not wiped from the geographical and political map, the decision was taken that the country would cease to exist once the war ended. In its place would be four separate ‘Occupation Zones’, each owned and ruled by one of the war’s victors, according to its own principles and plans.
Yet beyond that there had been little concerted thinking about what, practically, would be done with the former German state once Hitler had been defeated. France had favoured breaking the Reich into a series of small independent states while America had considered returning Germany to a pre-industrialised nation focused and dependent on farming. Washington would come to relent, to accept that requiring tens of millions of Germans to live as medieval peasants was unworkable as well as undesirable. But the Allies failed to contemplate how their separate occupations would function, or to address the monumental problem of feeding both a conquered people – a population swelled by more than ten million refugees from the east – and the massive armies imposing the peace.
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