Mr Goličnik’s letter had contained a clue, though. Johann Matko had been a glass-maker. If I could find a region that had contained major glass factories, I stood a chance of tracking down Sauerbrunn and finding its new name. Better still, attached to the letter was an actual copy of the parish records, including the Matkos’ birth dates. Johann had been born on 12 December 1904; his wife – Helena Haloschan – was eleven years younger, born in St Peter, Croatia, on 8 August 1915.
I wrote again to the government of Slovenia, updating my original request with the information from Maribor. But I decided my best bet was to contact the German Red Cross. They had effectively instigated my investigation and I felt hopeful that if anyone could help me track down the Matkos and Sauerbrunn, it would be their staff. I sent off the latest in my growing volume of letters. And then I began to research glass-making in the former Yugoslavia.
It didn’t take me long to discover that glass had been a regional specialty of Lower Styria for more than three centuries. From the 1700s onwards, factories had sprung up producing highly prized and beautifully crafted lead crystal. The centre of this tradition was the town of Rogaška Slatina. And its previous name? Sauerbrunn. I had tracked down the birthplace of Erika Matko; I had found my home.
I cannot describe the elation I felt at that moment. At long last it seemed as though I could almost reach out and touch my biological parents – surely soon I would be able to do so in real life.
Be careful, said Goethe.
My optimism lasted only a few weeks before reality intruded. The Red Cross replied to say they had no information about anyone called Matko from Yugoslavia in its records of those whom the Nazis had captured or killed. The letter advised that the organisation was unable to carry out any research in the archives of former Yugoslavian countries and warned that if I chose to do my own research, there was a very high probability I would discover that Erika Matko’s parents were dead, and that they had not died of natural causes. The message was clear: whatever records of their existence might once have existed, my parents were likely to have been killed by the Nazis after Hitler’s armies invaded Yugoslavia and, most likely, any trace of them would have disappeared at that point.
The note from the Red Cross was not the worst of it. In February 2001 I received a letter that dashed all my hopes of ever finding my family. The Slovenian government had been neither quick nor helpful in the months since I had first written asking for information. Now, when it did finally send a substantive response, the words hit me like a blow to the stomach.
We wish to inform you that, according to the local administration of Rogaška Slatina, they have discovered [records of] an Erika Matko, born on November 11, 1941. But this woman is still living inside Slovenia: therefore the assumption that Ingrid von Oelhafen was born as Erika Matko is wrong.
The generation from which my parents (whoever they were) came had known more physical suffering than I would ever experience, but still it seemed to me that the cruellest pain of all was that of being offered hope, tentatively reaching out to grasp it – and then seeing it snatched away.
I sat at the table in my flat, the letter in my hand, as my dreams dissolved in front of me. Please believe me: this was not merely self-pity. I had known for decades that I was not really Ingrid von Oelhafen. I had salved that wound with the knowledge, derived from the few scraps of paper that had travelled with me through the years, that I was once Erika Matko. Now I was neither Ingrid nor Erika. I was, truly, no one.
When the shock wore off I took time to reflect on the toll this quest was taking. I forced myself to look at how the ups and downs of my investigation were affecting me and realised that I had spent a whole year riding an emotional roller coaster, soaring high one minute, plunging down the next. Was it really worth the pain? I had made a life – a successful and generally happy life – as Ingrid von Oelhafen, regardless of my true origins, and I had official German papers which said that I was Ingrid. Really, what did it ultimately matter that I might – or might not – have once been called Erika Matko? Would it make me happier to continue pursuing the mystery of the Matko family and the country where this Erika had started life?
I decided that the answer was no. I bundled my letters and research notes into a file and put it away in a drawer. I resolved to forget about them, at least for the time being. Even when the archivists at Bad Arolsen later wrote to me with the news that they had, after all, found some documents relating to Erika Matko and Lebensborn, I simply filed the letter away with the other documents.
Months flew by, then a full year. I buried myself in work and studying music. I had been learning to play the flute; now I practised harder, immersing myself in the notes and melodies of the classical composers.
By the time another envelope dropped onto my doormat, a year and a half had passed since I had put away the folder marked ‘Erika Matko’. Perhaps if the letter had been from anyone else it might have joined the others. But this note was from Georg Lilienthal and it contained an invitation. For the first time ever, a group of Lebensborn children was to meet: would I like to come?
Would I? Honestly, I was not sure. My journey so far had been full of dead ends, false trails and seemingly insurmountable obstructions. Did I really want to risk opening up old wounds all over again? And even if the answer was yes, what did I actually have to contribute? I took out my abandoned file of paper, with its obscure Nazi documents and contradictory modern correspondence: what could I really tell anyone? I agonised about it, turning the whole business over and over in my mind.
In the end, I realised that I had no choice. The questions about where and who I came from had been part of my life ever since the day Frau Harte had told me I was not Hermann and Gisela’s real daughter. They had been at the back of my mind, pressing down on my emotions – and perhaps shaping my actions – for more than fifty years. Hiding from them simply didn’t work: I would have to go to the meeting.
In October 2002, I packed up my car and began the long drive south: it was 260 kilometres from my home in Osnabrück to the town where the meeting was being held. I was sixty-one years old, and it was time to learn about my childhood.
ELEVEN | TRACES
‘We aren’t perfect. We’ve got all the same illnesses and disabilities as other people.’
RUTHILD GORGASS, LEBENSBORN CHILD
Between Cologne and Frankfurt, the small town of Hadamar sits on the southern edge of the Westerwald, the long, low mountain range running down the eastern bank of the river Rhine.
It is known today for its highly regarded institutes devoted to forensic and social psychiatry, and for a stark obelisk commemorating the victims of the Nazis’ Aktion T-4 euthanasia programme, which had been based in the town. Through their research, Georg Lilienthal and other historians had revealed that between 1941 and 1945, thousands of disabled or otherwise ‘undesirable’ men, women and children were brought to Hadamar to be sterilised or put to death.
Although Aktion T-4 officially ended in 1941, the programme had, in fact, continued until the Nazis’ surrender in 1945. In total, nearly 15,000 German citizens were sent to Hadamar’s hospital: most were subsequently murdered in a gas chamber. This was the town where I was to meet the other Lebensborn children.
They were not, of course, children any longer. Like me, the twenty men and women sitting around the room that morning in October were in their sixties and close to retirement. As I took my place, I was very nervous. One by one, we introduced ourselves: when it came to my turn I made myself speak the single sentence I had rehearsed. ‘My name is Ingrid von Oelhafen. I don’t know anything.’ And then I burst into tears.
My new companions were kind and caring. Each was much further into their personal investigations than I, and because they had been through the same emotions they understood my anxiety. As they told their stories, the callous brutality of the Lebensborn programme became clearer to me; and though each new revelation was shocking, learning the truth also somehow put me at eas
e.
Ruthild Gorgass had been one of the first Lebensborn children to look for others who had been born or brought up in the programme. She was around my age; tall with blue eyes and a brush of short blond hair. She was a physiotherapist too and, like me, she had inherited a diary kept by her mother, which had helped her understand the story of her birth. I liked her immediately and felt comforted by her presence.
Her story was also a good introduction to Lebensborn. Ruthild’s father was forty-nine when she was born. He had been a lieutenant in the German army during the First World War. In 1916 he was badly injured at the battle of Verdun, his back and chest a mass of shrapnel splinters.
In the 1930s he had become a committed Nazi and by the start of the Second World War he was a big shot in the chemical industry. He was also married with a teenage son. Despite this, at some point he met and began an affair with Ruthild’s mother, who was a clerk in the Leipzig Chamber of Commerce, eighteen years younger than him. Just before Christmas 1941, she found that she was pregnant. Her position fitted precisely Himmler’s original aim for Lebensborn: both her parents were dead, she was unmarried and carrying an illegitimate child and therefore at risk of the opprobrium of her family and prejudice from her community. Above all, her child’s father was a card-carrying Nazi, and both he and Ruthild’s mother were able to demonstrate their genealogical racial purity. In the summer of 1942, the two of them made the 170-kilometre journey from Leipzig to Wernigerode, a small town deep in the spectacular Harz Mountains of Saxony. There, in the heartland of old Germany, Himmler had established a Lebensborn maternity unit. In August 1942, Ruthild was born.
Heim Harz, I learned, was one of twenty-five Lebensborn homes established across Germany and in the countries its armies overran. There were nine homes in Germany itself, two in Austria, eleven in Norway, and one each in Belgium, Luxembourg and France. Often they occupied buildings taken from Hitler’s political enemies or wealthy Jewish families: the organisation’s central headquarters in Munich had belonged to the writer and exiled anti-Nazi activist, Thomas Mann. Some of the premises were furnished with property confiscated from people who had been sent to the death camps, and each was equipped with state-of-the-art medical equipment to ensure that Himmler’s precious pure-blood babies were delivered safely into the world.
And they were. In 1939, Dr Gregor Ebner, Lebensborn’s chief medical officer, sent a report to Himmler detailing the success of the programme. More than 1,300 pregnant women had applied to give birth in the homes. Racial and hereditary health examinations had reduced this number by half, so that a total of 653 mothers-to-be were admitted. The neo-natal mortality rate for Germany as a whole at the time was 6 per cent: in the Lebensborn homes this figure was cut in half.
The births are very easy, without many complications. This is attributable to the racial selection and the quality of the women we get.
Their success came at a price, however. Ebner reported that the cost per mother was a substantial 400 Reichsmarks. But, he noted, ‘that isn’t much of a sacrifice if you can save a thousand children of good blood’.
Blood was all-important. Lebensborn was charged with ensuring a racially selected future master race to rule over the global empire of Hitler’s Thousand Year Reich. There was even a slogan that encapsulated the duty of the women who gave birth in the homes: ‘Schenkt dem Führer Ein Kind’ (give a child to the Führer).
The physical health of the Lebensborn mothers may have been uppermost in Himmler’s mind, but he was also determined to monitor and guide their political wellbeing. To ensure that they left the homes even more zealous than when they arrived, women were required to attend three sessions of ideological ‘education’ every week of their stay. During these classes they watched propaganda films, read chapters from Mein Kampf, listened to radio lectures and took part in communal singing of party anthems.
Staff members were themselves carefully monitored and instructed to complete detailed questionnaires about each of the mothers under their care. These RF-Fragebogen (the initials stood for Reichsführer) recorded every aspect of the women’s personalities, from their behaviour in the home to their bravery (or otherwise) during birth and their commitment to the National Socialist cause: each document was sent to Berlin, marked for the personal attention of the Reichsführer-SS.
This was not just a bureaucratic nicety. Even in the midst of the war – at a time when he was overseeing wholesale murder in the death camps and the entire apparatus of the Nazi terror throughout Europe – Himmler applied himself devotedly to these questionnaires, deciding, on a case-by-case basis, whether a woman would be allowed to give birth to a second child in Lebensborn at any point in the future. In fact, he supervised every aspect of life in the homes, from the trivial to the absurd. On one occasion he instructed his personal aide, SS-Stamdartenführer Rudolph Brandt, to write to the head of Lebensborn demanding that a record be kept of nose shapes.
The Reichsführer-SS wants a special card index to be kept of all mothers and parents having a Greek nose or the rudiments of one. As an example of the type required, you should refer to the mother in Questionnaire L6008, Frau I.A.
Himmler’s hands-on control extended to diet. He issued a stream of memos, instructing cooks on the correct way to steam vegetables and demanding that the homes’ supervisors make the women eat porridge – apparently because he had identified this as a vital factor in forming the racially admirable characteristics of the English aristocracy. For good measure he insisted on the application of regular doses of cod liver oil, much to the evident disgust of the recipients. He regularly visited the homes, checking upon the progress of the women and their children. So complete was his involvement that babies born on Himmler’s birthday were formally registered as his godchildren and received a special memento – a silver cup, engraved with his name as well as that of the baby.
I found these bizarre details of life in Lebensborn homes bewildering. How did the second most powerful man in the Reich find the time to control day-to-day life in twenty-five maternity homes?
But beyond the oddities, the stories told by the Lebensborn children that day in Hadamar revealed the programme’s darker elements. Ruthild told me that she and other children underwent a quasi-religious naming ceremony in which they were dedicated to Hitler and the brotherhood of the SS. This Namensgebung ritual was a distorted version of the traditional Christian baptism, with an altar draped in a swastika flag and a bust or photo of the Führer in pride of place. In front of a congregation made up of Lebensborn staff and black-uniformed SS officers, mothers like Ruthild’s promised that their children would be raised as good National Socialists: they then handed over their babies to an SS man who intoned a ‘blessing’. There appeared to be different versions of this liturgy in different homes, but the essence of each was the same.
We believe in the God of all things
And in the mission of our German blood
Which grows ever young from German soil.
We believe in the race, carrier of the blood,
And in the Führer, chosen for us by God.
An SS dagger was held over the baby and the senior officer read out a formal welcome to the brotherhood of the SS.
We take you into our community as a limb of our body. You shall grow up in our protection and bring honour to your name, pride to your brotherhood and inextinguishable glory to your race.
How could a mother hand over her precious baby to the care – if that’s what it was – of an organisation like the SS? What parent could do something so horrific? As I had told the gathering right at the start, the only thing I knew about my origins was that I had been a baby in the Lebensborn home at Kohren-Sahlis: had I too been dedicated to the service of the Nazis?
There were more terrible revelations to come. I already knew what Himmler was planning with the Lebensborn programme. But I had not realised just how far his organisation would go to ensure that the new Herrenrasse – this master race – was free of any physical de
fect.
They called them Kinderfachabteilung. Literally translated, this means ‘children’s ward’. It sounds such an innocent phrase, but it wasn’t. Under the Aktion T-4 euthanasia programme, babies born in the Lebensborn homes with developmental delay, disease or mental disabilities were killed.
Jürgen Weise was born in the Lebensborn home at Bad Polzin on 5 June 1941. The head of Lebensborn – a Nazi named Max Sollman – ordered that Jürgen be taken to a Kinderfachabteilung in Brandenburg, near Berlin. There he was given tranquillisers and deliberately left untended and unfed. On 6 February 1942, the little boy died; he was eight months old.
Jürgen Weise was not the only disabled baby to be murdered in the name of racial purity and strength. In 2002, when we met, research into this was at an early stage, hampered by the reluctance of staff at official archives to allow access to Nazi-era documents.
But the Brandenburg Kinderfachabteilung had been exposed several years before, and there was convincing evidence that 147 babies were murdered there – including an unknown number from the Lebensborn homes.
I struggled to take all this in. I had dedicated my life to disabled children. I had seen the joy that my efforts brought to them and to their parents. I had felt the love that comes from helping children like Jürgen. What sort of heartless bureaucrat could so easily extinguish such precious life?
Perhaps my reaction sounds naive. History has told us that the Nazis ruthlessly and quite openly murdered millions of Jews in Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen and the other camps: why would the deaths of a few babies, born in secret and hidden from public view, matter to men like Himmler and Hitler? But according to their own twisted ideology these children were special: they were in the Lebensborn homes because their parents had been examined and ultimately proven to be suitable blood-stock for the master race.
Hitler's Forgotten Children Page 10
