The worst misunderstanding [of my original order] concerns the paragraph which reads: ‘Beyond the limits of bourgeois laws and conventions ...’ According to this, as some people misunderstand it, SS men are encouraged to approach the wives of serving soldiers. However incomprehensible to us such an idea may be, we must discuss it.
What do those who spread or repeat such opinions think of German women? Even if, in a nation of 82 million people, some man should approach a married woman from dishonourable motives or human weakness, two parties are needed for seduction: the one who wants to seduce and the one who consents to being seduced.
Quite apart from our own principle that one does not approach the wife of a comrade, we think that German women are probably the best guardians of their honour. Any other opinion should be unanimously rejected by all men as an insult to German women.
For all the Reichsführer’s protestations of outrage, this was far from an outright denial of the charge that he was promoting sex outside marriage. Fears about lax morals in Nazi organisations had been growing for several years: in the summer of 1937, several thousand copies of a privately printed open letter to Goebbels, the Party’s propaganda minister, had circulated throughout the country. Signed with the pseudonym ‘Michael Germanicus’, it pointedly referred to promiscuity throughout the National Socialist movement:
… the sexual excesses in country homes and Hitler Jugend [Hitler Youth] camps; the bad camp morals and the Bund Deutscher Mädel [League of German Maidens] girls made ‘young mothers’ …
Neither the imprisonment of those caught in possession of the open letter nor Himmler’s defence of his ‘procreation order’ ever completely suppressed this deep-seated public anxiety that Lebensborn homes were being used for sexual liaisons between SS officers and suitable Aryan mates. Himmler’s own statements sometimes added fuel to this unfounded rumour, notably his description of the role of the SS in the process: ‘We only recommended genuinely valuable, racially pure men as Zeugungshelfer [procreation helpers]’. It was easy, with hindsight, to see where the ‘SS stud-farm’ myth of Lebensborn began.
But rumours aside, the central role of the SS in the project was beyond doubt. Himmler’s statement of January 1940 set out its parental role in the Lebensborn programme.
The question has been raised as to why the wives of the SS and police are looked after in a special way and not treated the same as all the others. The answer is very simple: because the SS through their willingness to make sacrifices and through comradeship have raised the necessary funds, through voluntary contributions from leaders and men, which have been paid for years to the Lebensborn organisation.
Following this statement all misunderstandings should have been cleared up. But it is up to you SS men, as at all times when ideological views have to be put across, to win the understanding of German men and women for this sacred issue so vital to our people and which is beyond the reach of all cheap jokes and mockery.
To properly understand Lebensborn, I needed to delve into the history and nature of an organisation which, more than fifty years after the end of the war, retained the power to instil fear and loathing. I had to immerse myself in the Schutzstaffel.
NINE | THE ORDER
‘One basic principle must be the absolute rule for the SS. We must be honest, decent, loyal and comradely to members of our own blood and nobody else.’
HEINRICH HIMMLER, SPEECH TO SS OFFICERS,
6 OCTOBER 1943
Wewelsburg Castle sits on a steep bluff above the rolling hills and dense forests of North Rhine-Westphalia. It was originally built for the medieval prince-bishops who ruled the Landkreis of Paderborn; it was they who created its unique triangular layout of three round towers connected by massive stone walls.
In November 1933, Heinrich Himmler was touring the region. Since taking charge of the SS, he had been searching for a suitable location both to house an ideological training school and to become its spiritual headquarters. When he saw Wewelsburg, he immediately decided to commandeer it.
The Reichsführer had grandiose plans for his acquisition. His obsession with Germany’s past had convinced him that Westphalia was the heartland of the (entirely fictional) tradition of Aryan supermen. When he formally took control of the castle in September 1934, the Völkischer Beobachter informed its readers that a lavish ceremony had been held to mark the opening of an SS school dedicated to researching early Germanic history and mythology as the basis for ‘ideological and political training’.
The Nazi daily paper did not report Himmler’s real motivation: to create a stronghold that would, in his own words, be ‘the centre of the world after the Final Victory’. Since the organisation responsible for delivering this triumph was the Schutzstaffel, Wewelsburg must be transformed into a fortress that served and glorified its mystical bonds of brotherhood.
The SS began life as a small, rag-tag paramilitary force, set up to guard Hitler in the roughhouse era of the 1920s when armed Nazis fought street battles with their political opponents in the streets of southern Germany. When Himmler was promoted to its head in 1926, he was determined to transform the organisation. New and deliberately sinister-looking black uniforms replaced the previously favoured provincial Stiefelhosen; new rules were imposed, banning smoking and instituting military drill sessions.
By the time he ascended to the formal rank of Reichsführer-SS three years later, membership had risen from a few hundred to five thousand. Himmler drew up new criteria for recruitment. All applicants had to be at least 1.7 metres (5 feet 6 inches) tall and those who wished to enter its basic ranks had to sign on for four years, rising to twelve for NCOs and twenty-five for would-be officers. Despite these strict demands, tens of thousands of men applied.
But the height requirement and years of promised service were only the beginning. From the moment he assumed control of the SS, Himmler was determined to form its ranks exclusively with those of sound racial pedigree. He drew up a grading system by which specially appointed ‘race experts’ would assess the Erscheinungsbild (physical appearance) of each applicant, before sorting them into one of five categories: ‘Pure Nordic’ was at the top, followed, in descending order of worth, by ‘Predominantly Nordic’, ‘Light Alpine with Dinaric, or Mediterranean Additions’, ‘Predominantly Eastern’ and ‘Mongrels of Non-European Origin’. Only those placed in the top three groups were considered for membership of the new SS: the remainder were rejected out of hand.
This was just the first hurdle. Those who passed the racial test were then subjected to a rigorous assessment of their other physical attributes. On a scale of one to nine, those who were assessed in the four top categories were deemed automatically acceptable; those whose fitness or physique condemned them to rungs seven or worse were shown the door; and the middle-ranking levels of five and six were graciously allowed to become SS men if their zeal for the Nazi cause outweighed their physical inadequacy.
There was, however, one criterion that was rigidly enforced. Every potential member, regardless of rank, had to be able to provide documentary proof of his racial ancestry. For enlisted men this pedigree had to stretch back to 1800; officers were required to provide evidence of their heritage from the mid-1700s. Just as ordinary citizens of the National Socialist state would soon be issued with certificates proclaiming them to be greater or lesser Aryans, every member of the SS carried a Sippenbuch – genealogical documentation attesting to their historic racial ‘health’.
In writing this I have struggled to express the horrific nature of the Nazi philosophy. It is easy to reach for words like ‘obscene’ or ‘grotesque’, but how does one get beyond clichés to truly convey the horror of such ideas? As a German woman raised in Hitler’s Reich, I have always been acutely aware of where this obsession with race ended: in global war and devastation, of course, but also in the extermination camps of Auschwitz, Treblinka and Bergen-Belsen. I am conscious that mere words cannot do it justice, but also that I cannot shy away from this history to
which my own past is inextricably bound.
The Reichsführer was not simply intent on creating a force of racially pure men: in his mind, the SS was to be the foundation of a new generation, the begetters of a Master Race. This plan had first been articulated by the man Himmler appointed to head up his ‘Race and Settlement’ organisation, RuSHA. Walther Darré, a former chicken-breeder who had returned to Germany from Argentina, wrote a manifesto entitled ‘Blood and Soil’. In 1929, it was printed by the Nazi Party’s own publishing house.
From the human reservoir of the SS we shall breed a new nobility. We shall do it in a planned fashion and according to biological laws – as the noble-blooded of earlier times did it instinctively.
Himmler, who had also once been a chicken farmer, wholeheartedly endorsed this agricultural analogy, noting that by adopting Darré’s principles it would be possible to ‘attain the kind of success in the human sphere that one has had in the realm of animals and livestock’.
But the Reichsführer was also clear that this attempt to create an entire new generation must be kept within the SS as an organisation: he had no intention of allowing members of his precious brotherhood to mate outside its strictly guarded bonds. To ensure this, in 1932 he issued a ten-point Engagement and Marriage Decree to every member of the Schutzstaffel.
1. The SS is an association of German men of Nordic determination selected on special criteria.
2. In accordance with National Socialist ideology and in the realisation that the future of our Volk [people] rests upon the preservation of the race through selection and the healthy inheritance of good blood, I hereby institute the ‘Marriage Certificate’ for all unmarried members of the SS, effective January 1, 1932.
3. The desired aim is to create a hereditarily healthy clan of a strictly Nordic German sort.
4. The marriage certificate will be awarded or denied solely on the basis of racial health and heredity.
5. Every SS man who intends to get married must procure for this purpose the marriage certificate of the Reichsführer-SS.
6. SS members who marry despite having been denied marriage certificates will be stricken from the SS; they will be given the choice of withdrawing.
7. Working out the details of marriage petitions is the task of the ‘Race Office’ of the SS.
8. The Race Office of the SS is in charge of the ‘Clan Book of the SS’, in which the families of SS members will be entered after being awarded the marriage certificate or after acquiescing to the petition to enter into marriage.
9. The Reichsführer-SS, the leader of the Race Office, and the specialists of this office are duty bound to secrecy on their word of honour.
10. The SS believes that, with this command, it has taken a step of great significance. Derision, scorn, and incomprehension do not move us; the future belongs to us!
To assure this future, prospective couples seeking Himmler’s blessing had to complete an exhaustive questionnaire, detailing the colour of their hair, eyes, skin and physical attributes, and to which, even more bizarrely, they had to affix photographs of themselves in bathing costumes.
In case the purpose behind the process was unclear, the Reichsführer explicitly set out his reasoning in a directive to the SS about its responsibility to raise the new generation.
A marriage with few children is little more than an affair. I hope members of the SS, and especially its leaders, will set a good example. Four children is the minimum necessary for a good and healthy marriage.
Himmler also had a plan for those SS men who did not – or could not – produce offspring: the Lebensborn programme. In 1936, just nine months after establishing the secretive society, he placed it under the direct control of the SS. And he made clear that childless officers would be expected to help Lebensborn place at least some of the babies born in its homes.
In the event of childlessness it is the duty of every SS leader to adopt racially valuable children, free of hereditary illnesses, and inculcate them in the spirit of our philosophy.
That sentence sent a chill through my bones.
The relationship between Lebensborn and the SS was not simply a matter of bureaucratic control. In the first Lebensborn prospectus, Himmler explicitly described the deep intertwining of his ostensibly benevolent society with the black-uniformed Schutzstaffel.
The expenses in carrying out [Lebensborn’s] tasks will be met in the first instance by member’s subscriptions. Every SS leader attached to head office is honour-bound to become a member. Subscriptions are graded according to the SS leader’s age, income and number of children …
If he is still childless at twenty-eight, a higher subscription will be due. At the age of thirty-eight his second child should have arrived: if not, his subscription will again be increased.
If at the appropriate ages further children have failed to appear, corresponding increases in the subscription will again become payable. Those who believe they can escape their obligations to the nation and the race by remaining single will pay subscriptions at a higher level that will cause them to prefer marriage to bachelorhood.
I found it hard to reconcile the compassionate image of maternity homes with the evil reputation of the SS. How could anyone – even someone as blinkered and racially-obsessed as Himmler – not have understood that the sinister Death’s Head regiments would engender fear and suspicion, not warmth and confidence? The answer, as it turned out, was that he didn’t care. At the same time as he handed control of Lebensborn to the Order, he wrote:
I know there are people in Germany who feel ill when they see our black tunic. We understand this: we do not expect to be liked by too many people.
The more I read, the more I understood that the SS was ultimately a clan, insular and secretive, moulded to fit Himmler’s belief in a modern order of Teutonic knights, forever striving for the Holy Grail of racial purity. Under the Reichsführer’s direction, Wewelsburg Castle was reconstructed to reflect his obsession. Rooms were named after characters from mythology – one was called ‘Grail’, another ‘King Arthur’, and in the crypt two special chambers were created. Der OberGruppenführersaal, the lower of the pair, was the location for the mystical rituals Himmler drew up for the twelve most senior SS leaders. Around a central eternal flame, beneath a swastika carved into the arched roof, the Reichsführer planned to hold ceremonies to celebrate death. The worship of death was central to the SS ideology, hence the Death’s Head badge on their caps. It stemmed from Himmler’s belief in a mystical Götterdämmerung – an apocalyptic vision of the destruction of the world in fire and water before its rebirth in a new and purified form.
The contrast was absurd. This was the organisation that was supposed to be in charge of nurturing and safeguarding new life in the Lebensborn homes. The Nazi regime had full confidence in its ‘inevitable’ success, however. Two years after the start of the war Hitler had publicly declared:
I do not doubt for a moment that within one hundred years or so from now all the German elite will be a product of the SS, for only the SS practices racial selection.
Elsewhere, Dr Gregor Ebner, a family doctor-turned-SS-officer and the man appointed by Himmler as Chief Medical Officer for the Lebensborn programme, estimated that: ‘thanks to the Lebensborns, in thirty years’ time we shall have 600 extra regiments’. I looked again at his prediction. A quick calculation revealed that a regiment was normally somewhere between 500 and 700 men. Six hundred new regiments composed entirely of children born in Lebensborn homes? Even at the lowest estimate that would mean 300,000 babies.
Could there really be hundreds of thousands of people like me – children of the Lebensborn programme living throughout Germany?
TEN | HOPE
‘Beware of what you wish for in youth, because you will get it in middle life.’
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
From the moment the German Red Cross asked if I was interested in finding out about my family, I had thought of little else. But as the months crawled pa
st with no response to the letters I had written, I came to accept that I had been searching for much longer. Looking back, my whole life seemed to have been overshadowed by secrecy. No matter how hard I worked, no matter how much I gave of myself to the poor, damaged children who came to my practice, nothing could free me from the unhappiness of not knowing who I was. And so I had longed and hoped and dreamed.
The phone call from the Red Cross had broken the spell. No longer was I half-asleep, seeing snatches of my past only in dreams: the promise of solid, reliable information had woken me. And I yearned all the harder for it.
‘Be careful what you wish for’, warned Germany’s most famous poet, writer and statesman. Perhaps I should have listened to Goethe.
The letter arrived in October 2000. It was from a Jože Goličnik, the director of an archive in Maribor, Slovenia’s second city and the capital of the Lower Styria region. I had heard that an old repository of parish documents was held there and, having heard nothing back from the government of Slovenia, had decided to try my luck with the church. I’d written purely on chance, with little hope that it would yield anything useful. But Mr Goličnik said he had found a record of my family.
The father of Erika Matko is Johann Matko from Zagorje ob Savi. Her mother came from Croatia. Mr Johann Matko lived in Sauerbrunn and was a glass-maker.
Sauerbrunn. It existed. Not in Austria but in Slovenia – or, more accurately, in the old Yugoslavia. I was so happy that, quite spontaneously (and most unlike me), I literally burst into song, full of relief and excitement. Of course I still had to locate Sauerbrunn, which was not likely to be called that now. The fall of communism had been slower in Yugoslavia than elsewhere across the eastern bloc, but when it happened it brought civil war in its wake. As the smoke cleared from the bloody years in which Serbs fought Croats, Bosnians, Montenegrins and all the other nationalities Tito had welded into a unified republic in the 1940s, new nations rose from the ashes: many changed the names of their towns and cities.
Hitler's Forgotten Children Page 9
