Hitler's Forgotten Children

by Ingrid Von Oelhafen

  In 1943, the Supreme Allied Headquarters in Europe asked the international section of the British Red Cross to set up a registration and tracing service for missing persons. Even by that mid-stage of the war, Washington and London had begun to plan for its aftermath, conscious that by the end there would be a vast population of the displaced or the disappeared. The Central Tracing Bureau was established in February 1944: as the war shifted eastwards into each territory successively liberated from the German armies, it moved from London to Versailles, then on to Frankfurt before finally arriving at Bad Arolsen in 1946. Here its researchers set about creating an archive of Nazi documents.

  The records came from every corner of the former Reich. Allied forces had rescued them from concentration and death camps or captured them from Wehrmacht field offices and Nazi central registries. Each individual piece of paper was analysed: from them the CTB was able to begin reconstructing the fate of tens of millions of men, women and children who had been taken for slave labour, imprisoned, or murdered in the Holocaust.

  From the outset the Allies had two, sometimes conflicting, aims for this unprecedented exercise. The first was to prepare reliable documentary evidence for use at the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal: for the first time in history, the surviving leaders of a country were to be put on public trial for the newly defined offences of crimes against humanity, conspiracy to wage aggressive war and the industrial-scale murders of Jews and Eastern Europeans (among many others).

  The second, longer-term ambition was to create a mechanism to enable the survivors of the war – and especially of the Holocaust – to find their families and, if possible, eventually to reunite them. And so the CTB began building from the captured files a central name index of every single person they could determine to have been a victim of the Nazis’ reign of terror.

  Whether or not the Allies realised the scale of the task when they began it, they were soon overwhelmed by the sheer volume of cases. The central name index alone would come to house the individual fates of fifty million people. Behind each handwritten index card was a mound of paper.

  As the years passed, responsibility for managing and funding this Herculean effort was passed from one organisation to another. In July 1947, the newly formed United Nations’ International Refugee Organisation took over administration of the bureau, changing its name to the International Tracing Service. Less than four years later, it was handed back to the Allied High Commission for Germany – the body set up by America, Britain and France to run their sectors of the former Reich. When the occupied status of Germany was repealed in 1954, ITS was hived off to the International Committee of the Red Cross, which promptly insisted on appointing its own manager to run all daily operations, who, for good measure, had to be a Swiss citizen. It was a sorry catalogue of financial and administrative buck-passing which ensured that the ITS was destined to become the Cinderella of the vast post-war archives mission.

  The situation worsened with the implementation in 1955 of the Bonn Agreement, which formally ratified the new nation of West Germany. One clause in this document prohibited the publication of any data that could harm former victims of the Nazis or their families. However well intentioned, the instruction effectively shut the Bad Arolsen archive off from public scrutiny: historians and journalists were not permitted to examine its contents, and although individual victims of the tyranny were theoretically able to ask for any relevant information, this too became caught up in the Realpolitik of modern Europe.

  At the start of 2000 – just as I made my request for help – the German parliament was under pressure to set up a fund to compensate an estimated one million survivors of the Nazis’ forced and slave labour programme. These were men and women who had been shipped from Eastern Europe to toil in the factories that kept Hitler’s war machine running. Soon the Bundestag passed a law establishing a Remembrance, Responsibility and Future Foundation (Stiftung Erinnerung, Verantwortung und Zukunft) that would make payments to those who could prove they had been affected. The evidence they needed was primarily held at the ITS: it was almost instantly flooded with applications, and all other enquiries were either ignored or not properly processed. Among them was my letter: I received a brief, and as it would turn out completely inaccurate, reply to the effect that there was no trace of me in the files.

  Seven years would pass before the ITS archives were opened to full public scrutiny: lost time that would have a terrible impact on the search for my biological family. But to explain the origins of Lebensborn, I need to step away from my own chronology to pull back the veil of secrecy which then surrounded Bad Arolsen. Among the millions of documents captured from the Nazi war machine were many of Heinrich Himmler’s personal papers. These were sent to the ITS, where separate folders were opened, each covering the myriad organisations the Reichsführer had set up, as well as the bizarre and obsessive belief system that underpinned them.

  The pernicious idea that one race was superior to another by virtue of the purity of its blood had begun in the last decades of the nineteenth century. By the early 1920s an entire ‘science’ based on this had spread across Europe and the western world. Eugenics held that since certain peoples were of higher quality than others, it was naturally right to improve the overall human genetic strain by promoting higher reproduction among those from the superior race or class and, by extension, reducing reproduction by those less well favoured. At the time such thinking was advocated by prominent English novelists, including H.G. Wells, Marie Stopes (the founder of modern birth control) and two American presidents, Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt.

  Eugenics societies sprang up, often funded by wealthy American foundations, to promote (in the words of a 1911 Carnegie-supported research paper) ‘the Best Practical Means for Cutting off the Defective Germ-Plasm in the Human Population’. Sterilisation and euthanasia were the most popular suggested methods.

  It was a belief system and a climate tailor-made for the Nazis. It supported their spurious belief that Germans were the true descendants of a breed of Aryan (sometimes called Nordic) supermen whose destiny was once again to rule the world. In 1925 Hitler had promulgated this concept in his autobiographical Nazi manifesto, Mein Kampf.

  The products of human culture, the achievements in art, science and technology with which we are confronted today are almost exclusively the creative product of the Aryan. That very fact enables us to draw the not unfounded conclusion that he alone was the founder of higher humanity and was thus the very essence of what we mean by the term ‘man’.

  What we must fight for is to safeguard the existence and reproduction of our race and our people, the sustenance of our children and the purity of our blood …

  Four years later, he followed this up in a speech to a party rally.

  If Germany were to get a million children a year and remove 700,000 to 800,000 of the weakest people, the final result might be an increase in strength.

  It was a refrain taken up by the man who became the Führer’s most powerful henchman. When Himmler was appointed head of the SS that same year, he told his senior officers:

  Should we succeed in establishing our Nordic race again in and around Germany … and from this seed bed produce a race of 200 million, then the world will belong to us. We are called, therefore, to create a basis on which the next generation can create history.

  One of the first pieces of legislation passed by Hitler was the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring. This required doctors to register every case of hereditary illness among their female patients of childbearing age. Failure to comply was punishable by substantial fines. The opening paragraphs of the new law set out both the problem (as the Nazis saw it) and its primary cause.

  Since the National Revolution [the quasi-legal putsch by which Hitler gained the power to rule by decree], public opinion has become increasingly preoccupied with questions of demographic policy and the continuing decline in the birth rate.

  However, it is not o
nly the decline in population which is a cause for serious concern but equally the increasingly evident genetic composition of our people.

  Whereas traditionally healthy families have for the most part adopted a policy of having only one or two children, countless numbers of inferiors and those suffering from hereditary conditions are reproducing without restraint, allowing their sick and disadvantaged offspring to be a burden on the community.

  The solution was – to Nazi thinking – obvious: sterilisation. A system of 181 Genetic Health Courts was set up to order the enforced neutering of those deemed substandard. A measure of the programme’s immediate effect was the volume and outcome of appeals: in less than a year almost 4,000 people tried to overturn the decisions of the sterilisation authorities. Just 41 were successful. Five years later, by the start of the Second World War, at least 320,000 people had been forcibly sterilised under the legislation.

  But if the draconian new law addressed the perceived problem of ‘inferiors’ polluting or weakening the nation’s blood-stock, it did not define just what that blood-stock should be. In September 1935, a leading Nazi doctor called Gerhard Wagner announced in a speech that the government would soon introduce a ‘law for the protection of German blood’. Within days this was codified into the Nuremberg Laws.

  These introduced four official categories of human beings in the National Socialist state. People with four German grandparents were classified as ‘German or kindred blood’; those who had one or two Jewish grandparents were deemed to have come from ‘mixed blood’ and were placed – in order of descending value – into two classes of Mischling; while anyone descended from three or four Jewish grandparents was irredeemably Jewish.

  Only those who were formally registered as being the product of ‘German or related blood’ were now ‘racially acceptable’ and granted the status of Reichsbürger (citizens of the Reich). Mischlings were placed in the lesser category of Staatsangehörige (state subjects). Jews were from that point on deprived of all citizenship rights, and marriage between Aryans and non-Aryans was outlawed.

  The Nazis proceeded to formalise these race classifications. A new set of official documents, Der Ariernachweis (the Aryan Certificate), were introduced to prove that the holder was a true member of the Aryan Race. Those able to satisfy the requirement that their racial ancestry dating back to 1800 showed that ‘none of their paternal nor their maternal ancestors had Jewish or coloured blood’ were granted a Grosser Ariernachweis. Others who could only produce seven birth or baptism certificates (covering themselves, their parents and grandparents), as well as three marriage certificates from their parents and grandparents, were provided with a ‘lesser’ document, the Kleiner Ariernachweis.

  Two other pieces of paperwork became vital for life in the Nazi state. An Ahnenpass was a certificate, drawn from church records, which recorded the racial characteristics of a person’s ancestors: quite literally, an ‘ancestors’ passport’. It was often supplemented by an Ahnentafel – a carefully tabulated version of the ancestral family tree.

  The Nuremberg Laws and the racial certificates that flowed from them were the foundations of the Nazis’ determination to arrive at a ‘final solution’ for the extermination of the Jewish population. But they were also the key cornerstones of the flip-side of that policy: the programme to create a new Master Race of pure-blooded Aryans who would rule Hitler’s Thousand Year Reich. The organisation which was to deliver that outcome was Lebensborn, and its architect was Heinrich Himmler.

  Himmler’s papers contained his own explanation for establishing Lebensborn. His motive was, he claimed, benign and caring.

  I have created the Lebensborn homes because I believe it is not right that an unfortunate girl who expects a child out of wedlock is kicked around by everybody … by all these paragons of virtue, of male and female gender, who feel entitled to condemn her and to mistreat her. I cannot think it right that she is being punished when the state does not provide the facility for help.

  Every woman in these homes is addressed by her Christian name. One is Frau Maria and the other Frau Elisabeth – or whatever her name is. Within the homes nobody asks whether they are married or unmarried: we simply educate them, protect them and look after these mothers.

  Even if this were true, I had to remind myself that Lebensborn homes were not open to every woman who found herself unexpectedly pregnant. Jewish women and Mischlings were excluded because they were seen as racially worthless.

  As war loomed, the Reichsfüher’s papers revealed a change in the purpose of the Lebensborn programme. No longer was it driven purely by the desire to increase pure Aryan blood-stock within the German population. By October 1939, Himmler had looked into the near future and seen a major threat to his plans for a future master race.

  Every war involves a tremendous loss of the best blood. Many victories won by force of arms have inflicted a shattering defeat for a nation’s vitality and blood. But the sadly necessary deaths of the best men – deplorable though they are – is not the worst of this. Far more severe is the absence of the children who were never born to the living during the war, or to the dead after it.

  And so he issued a revolutionary order to the men under his command. In a proclamation marked ‘secret’ and issued to every member of the SS and police, the Reichsführer instructed them to fulfil their sacred duty to the Reich by fathering its next generation, whether or not they were married to the mothers.

  Berlin, 28 October 1939

  Beyond the limits of bourgeois laws and conventions, which are perhaps necessary in other circumstances, it can be a noble task for German women and girls of good blood to become even outside marriage, not light-heartedly but out of a deep moral seriousness, mothers of the children of soldiers going to war of whom fate alone knows whether they will return or die for Germany.

  During the last war, many a soldier decided from a sense of responsibility to have no more children during the war so that his wife would not be left in need and distress after his death. You SS men need not have these anxieties; they are removed by the following regulations:

  1. Special delegates, chosen by me personally, will take over in the name of the Reichsführer-SS, the guardianship of all legitimate and illegitimate children of good blood whose fathers were killed in the war.

  We will support these mothers and take over the education and material care of these children until they come of age, so that no mother and widow need suffer want.

  2. During the war, the SS will take care of all legitimate and illegitimate children born during the war and of expectant mothers in cases of need. After the war, when the fathers return, the SS will in addition grant generous material help to well-founded applications by individuals.

  SS-Men and you mothers of these children which Germany has hoped for, show that you are ready, through your faith in the Führer and for the sake of the life of our blood and people, to regenerate life for Germany just as bravely as you know how to fight and die for Germany.

  The order did not merely authorise free sex; it demanded it. Racially pure men and women were ordered to procreate, whether or not they were married, so that the nation’s stock of ‘good blood’ could be safeguarded. There was to be neither financial penalty for producing illegitimate children nor social stigma.

  It is hard to overstate the radical nature of Himmler’s decree. Although the Nazis had been in power for six years and had done much to undermine the country’s family-based traditional foundations, Germany was still a religiously conservative society. Sex outside marriage was taboo and neither the public nor the churches appeared ready to abandon their social mores.

  Even representatives of the Nazi Party and the Wehrmacht reacted badly to the Reichsführer’s new population policy. Yet Himmler stood firm. Three months after his ‘procreation order’, he issued an unyielding and unrepentant statement to his forces.

  Office of the Reichsführer-SS and Chief of the German Police

  Berlin, 30 January
1940

  SS Order for the whole of the SS and Police

  You are aware of my order of 28 October 1939, in which I reminded you of your duty if possible to become fathers of children during the war.

  This publication, which was conceived with a sense of decency and was received in the same sense, states and openly discusses actual problems. It has led to misconceptions and misunderstandings on the part of some people. I therefore consider it necessary for every one of you to know what doubts and misunderstandings have arisen and what there is to say about them.

  Objection has been taken to the clear statement that illegitimate children exist, and that some unmarried and single women and girls have always become mothers of such children outside marriage and always will.

  There is no point in discussing this; the best reply is the letter from the Führer’s Deputy to an unmarried mother, which I enclose together with my order of 28 October 1939.

  The Deputy Führer was Rudolf Hess. On Christmas Day 1939, the Nazi Party’s daily paper, Völkischer Beobachter, had published an open letter to a notional unmarried mother in which Hess set out the new morality.

  The National Socialist philosophy of life has given the family the role in the State to which it is entitled. However, in times of special national emergency special measures can be instituted, which are different from our basic principles. In wartime, which involves the death of many of our best men, every new life is of special importance to the nation. Hence, if racially unobjectionable young men going on to active service leave behind children who pass on their blood to future generations through a girl of the right age and similar healthy heredity … steps will be taken to preserve this valuable national wealth.

  By calling on Hess, then more established in the hierarchy of Hitler’s regime, Himmler was doubtless giving himself some political cover. But his own command of the SS was absolute and his faith in its fundamental importance to the next generation unshakeable.