There were 473 children identified in these documents. Halfway down one I read the following:
Matko, Erika.
[Born on] 11.11.41.
[Transferred to] Oberst Hermann von Oelhafen, Munich, Gentzstrasse 5.
[On] 3.6.44.
I had found my original name.
It had to be genuine: not only were these official court records but the address shown for Hermann – and the date on which I was handed over to him – was correct.
I sat back, the list in front of me. I was surprised to find that I was not emotional: ever since I had received the letter from the Slovenian government telling me that I could not be Erika Matko, because that person was still living in the Rogaška Slatina area, I had felt lost. Now as I looked at this fading Lebensborn list, I felt my purpose and true identity coming back to me.
Accompanying the lists were two sworn statements by former Lebensborn staff who had been interrogated by investigators for the Nuremberg prosecutors. The first was a woman called Maria-Martha Heinze-Wissede, who had worked in the Lebensborn head office. On 9 August 1948, she had been shown the documents and identified the origin of some of the children. Erika Matko was one of them.
From the lists before me, I recognised the following names of Yugoslavian children...
… Erika MATKO
These children, I know only their files a little, since they had already been transferred to ... German families by Lebensborn.
As was clear from the documents, they were called ‘bandit children’, and Lebensborn took them over from Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle [VoMi] ... As far as I remember, the Lebensborn took these children from a Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle camp in the district of Bayreuth.
My heart raced. There it was in black and white: I had been brought from Yugoslavia and passed to Lebensborn by this VoMi organisation.
A quick search revealed VoMi to have been another of the confusing and overlapping bodies answering to Himmler: it was set up before the war, ostensibly to manage the interests of the Volksdeutsche – ethnic Germans who lived outside the borders of Nazi Germany. But once Hitler’s armies overran Poland, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, VoMi settled half a million German volunteers in the conquered territories, simultaneously shipping out or imprisoning the rightful occupants. It was essentially a precursor to what we now call ethnic cleansing, and the organisation’s involvement in my origins did not bode well for the fate of my biological family.
Who were they? There was a clue, a thrilling hint, in Maria-Martha Heinze-Wissede’s affidavit. The other Yugoslavian youngsters and I were listed as ‘bandit children’. In Nazi terminology this meant partisan fighters. I felt a surge of pride: our fathers were rebels, they had opposed the Nazi occupiers. How brave they must have been. I doubted that in their position I would have found the courage to fight back against Hitler’s armies.
The second witness statement was from a former Lebensborn clerk called Emilie Edelmann. She had joined the organisation in 1939 and worked within it until the very end, rising to a position that gave her responsibility for the care of children being readied for placement with foster families. On 3 April 1948, she too told her American interrogators that children had been snatched from Yugoslavia, and filled in a few of the missing details of my journey to a Lebensborn home. She described these kidnapped children as Südost-kinder – VoMi-speak for those taken from the south-eastern territories conquered by Germany.
I re-read everything obsessively, desperate to be certain. It was unequivocal: here in the Nuremberg files was definitive proof that I had been one of at least twenty-five infants who in 1942 and 1943 were kidnapped and transported from Yugoslavia to the Fatherland. I had been taken to a VoMi holding camp at Werdenfels in southern Germany before being shipped on to the Sonnenwiese home at Kohren-Sahlis and then eventually given to the Oelhafen family in Munich.
I had only one question left to answer before I left Nuremberg: how did the trial end – what punishment was meted out to the senior Lebensborn officials in the dock?
Astonishingly, although most of the top RuSHA officials had been convicted and sentenced to lengthy terms in prison, the four Lebensborn defendants had been acquitted of crimes against humanity and war crimes. The three men had been found guilty of membership of the SS – as a woman, Inge Viermetz was excluded from its ranks – but none spent a single additional day behind bars. Despite all the evidence presented to them, the judges had reached the incredible conclusion that Lebensborn had been no more than ‘a welfare organisation’.
I was furious. I had read the evidence and I had listened to the harrowing accounts from my fellow survivors at the meeting in Hadamar. I knew the truth now, and it made me more determined than ever to discover more about how I had originally fallen into Lebensborn’s clutches.
Whatever the government of Slovenia thought, I had definitely come from there. I just had to prove it.
THIRTEEN | ROGAŠKA SLATINA
‘I would be very, very grateful if you could answer some questions about your childhood … I am not asking out of mere curiosity …’
LETTER TO ERIKA MATKO, JUNE 2003
I found a large number of people throughout Germany with the surname Matko. I wrote to each address, asking if they knew anything about my background or that of Hermann and Gisela von Oelhafen. It was a succession of shots in the dark but, to my surprise, letters began trickling back: each thanked me for contacting them and wished me well but none of them were able to help with my investigation.
In the meantime, Josef Focks was busy. The ‘Father Finder’ was not deterred by the results of my letters to the German Matkos; instead he expanded his geographical search.
Josef Focks is one of the people without whom I would never have found the truth about my past. He was a former army officer who had been seconded to NATO in the 1980s. During a posting to Norway he first encountered the stories of children fathered by German troops and the plight of those who had been born in the Lebensborn programme. Moved by their pain and the sense of shame that had blighted their lives, he offered to help them track down their families.
From the outset, he ran into the problem that the Lebensborn officials had deliberately concealed many of the fathers’ names. Ironically it was the logistical difficulty of genealogical searching in the days before the Internet and online records that led him to find innovative solutions. He made use of local contacts (he found that taxi drivers were good sources of information), dug into obscure archives and the libraries of old newspapers, and even visited cemeteries to examine the names carved into headstones. Gradually he developed a way to unlock the puzzle.
By the time I met him, he had taken on more than a thousand cases, not all of them Lebensborn children, successfully tracing family members in most of them. His investigations had led him across Germany and as far afield as America and Australia, and his office in Bonn was stuffed with innumerable files, each one bulging with paper. All of this he did without charging a penny for his time: he had long since retired from the army and lived on his state pension, helping people like me for nothing more than the reward of easing our pain. I cannot thank him enough.
It was Josef who found the most promising Matkos. He had tapped up one of his contacts, a woman whose mother had been taken from Yugoslavia by the Nazis as slave labour: with her help, he discovered contact details for several Matkos still living in or near Rogaška Slatina. They seemed to be an extended family: some were my age or slightly older, others clearly a generation younger. Most promising of all, one of them was named Erika.
Josef unearthed an address for her and also the telephone number for a Maria Matko, who, he thought, might be a relation. We agreed that he would phone Maria and that I would write to Erika.
I sat down at the computer and thought about what to say. It was not an easy letter to compose: I knew nothing about this woman nor the country in which she lived. In the end, I decided to speak openly about my need to discover the truth about my past. I told
myself that since many of the unrelated Matkos in Germany who I had contacted out of the blue had taken the trouble to reply even though they could not help me, this person bearing my name and who lived in the place I knew I came from might also be moved by my plea for help.
Osnabrück, Germany
16 February, 2003
Dear Mrs Matko,
I am writing to you today about a very personal matter and hope that you can help me. The problem, of course, is that I do not speak Slovenian and I cannot hope that you speak German. But I hope that there is somebody who can help you to translate my letter.
For some years I have been researching my biological parents and during this research I found out very strange things, which have made me very anxious and disturbed, but I know that I must keep going on.
My foster parents picked me up from the Lebensborn home ‘Sonnenwiese’. There I was given two vaccination documents in which my name is shown as Erika Matko, born in St Sauerbrunn. I don’t have any other documentation about my early life. I don’t know the circumstances which brought me to the home. My foster parents didn’t give me any information.
Ten years ago I didn’t even know that I was a Lebensborn child. The Red Cross couldn’t find out any information about my identity. I asked Dr Georg Lilienthal, who is a researcher about Lebensborn and has published a book about the subject.
He gave me the idea that maybe I’m a member of the group of kidnapped children, and my origins lie in Yugoslavia.
Now in the course of my research I have discovered you. I don’t ask from curiosity but I only want to know how this double identity has occurred. Did you ever live in a Lebensborn home or were you lucky enough to spend your whole life in Rogaška Slatina?
I would be very, very grateful if you could answer my questions about your childhood.
Best wishes, Ingrid von Oelhafen
There was nothing more I could say or do. I posted the letter, hoping that something in it would strike a chord with this other Erika Matko.
In the meantime, Josef had made progress. He got in touch with Maria Matko and they had a good conversation via phone with the help of a translator, as he didn’t speak Slovenian and she could not understand German. She was apparently my age and had spent her whole life in Rogaška Slatina.
From what Maria told Josef, she was the matriarch of the extended Matko family, which had once been involved with the anti-Nazi partisan movement. She was slightly hazy on the details, remembering only that one member of the family had been executed by the Nazis and that she had heard a story, long ago, that three children might have been kidnapped in the early 1940s. It sounded close to the likely Matko family history that I was looking for, and even more promising was the news that she knew the mysterious Erika very well.
But it was the final piece of information that threw me. Herr Focks had persuaded Maria that she should meet me – and that she should bring Erika with her. I was instantly nervous: I wanted desperately to go, but the prospect terrified me. What if these were the ‘wrong’ Matkos, and the trip turned out to be a wild goose chase? I would, I knew, be devastated. And even if these people were my relatives, that didn’t mean a meeting would go well; perhaps they would be hostile or somehow resent me, which would be even worse.
The Father Finder was having none of it. He pushed and pushed until I agreed to his plan. This involved flying first to Munich, then on to Ljubljana, the Slovenian national capital. From there I would find a taxi to take me the eighty kilometres to Celje, the main town in the region.
There was an additional reason for going: every autumn a handful of survivors of the Nazis’ kidnapping and deportation programme met in Celje. Josef had arranged for me to join them before heading on the next day to Rogaška Slatina, where I was to meet Maria in a cafe. Nor was I to go alone: he had asked a friend of his who spoke Slovenian to accompany me as my translator.
I knew precious little about Slovenia or its history at that point. I didn’t even know how the country had come into being after the breakup of Yugoslavia. As the date for my departure approached, I started reading up, hoping to gain some insight into what life might have held for me had I not been stolen for the Lebensborn programme.
Yugoslavia had been one of the first countries to overthrow its German conquerors. Under the leadership of Josip Tito, the partisans were the most effective anti-Nazi resistance force in occupied Europe; by the middle of 1943 their activity had grown from running sporadic guerrilla raids to causing major military defeats and inflicting heavy casualties that Hitler’s army could ill afford. By the start of 1944 they had managed to push the Wehrmacht out of the Serbian regions; a year later all German troops were expelled.
They achieved this with only limited support from the Soviet Union and although Tito’s post-war regime was unashamedly communist – a single-party state with little tolerance of dissent or democracy – for the next twenty-five years the country was the most independent of all the Soviet Union’s satellites behind the Iron Curtain. It began to distance itself from Moscow in 1948, determined instead to forge its own brand of socialism. It felt free to criticise the Kremlin and the West in equal measure and was one of the founders of the Non-Aligned Movement – the group of states which defiantly refused to ally themselves with either side in the Cold War.
But there were always tensions beneath the surface. The new nation was welded together from six separate and frequently hostile republics: Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia, Montenegro and Slovenia. Each of these had very different ethnic, religious and political histories. What held them together was the inspirational figure of Josip Tito. His death in 1980 precipitated an unravelling of the whole country.
Serbs had always been the largest ethnic group in Yugoslavia and prior to the Second World War had been the most dominant force in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. With Tito gone, Serbian communist leader Slobodan Milošević sought to restore this historic supremacy. The other republics, especially Slovenia and Croatia, denounced this power grab but were unable to stop it.
Industrial action by ethnic Albanian miners in Kosovo in 1989 was the spark that ignited the simmering tension. Slovenia and Croatia supported the Albanian miners and the strikes turned into widespread demonstrations demanding a Kosovan republic. This angered Serbia’s leadership, which proceeded to use police force against the miners before sending in the Federal Army to restore order.
In January 1990, an extraordinary Congress of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia was convened. Since the country was a one-party state, this was effectively the ruling body for all of the Federal Republic. The meeting degenerated into an argument between Slovenia and Serbia about the future of the nation: in the end the League dissolved itself. The writing was on the wall for the future of Yugoslavia.
The immediate outcome was a constitutional crisis. Fuelled by a toxic rise in ethnic-based nationalism and inspired by the fall of communism across the rest of Eastern Europe, five of the republics demanded independence and an end to Serbian dominance. The stage was set for war.
What followed was Europe’s worst conflict since the Second World War, and one that once again raised the spectre of crimes against humanity. Over the next decade, at least 140,000 people died in the fighting. Hundreds of thousands more – possibly millions – endured ethnic cleansing, rape as a weapon of war, concentration camps and mass bombing.
The first of these dirty wars broke out in Slovenia. In December 1990, 88 per cent of the population voted for full independence from the disintegrating federal republic, knowing that to do so would inevitably lead to an attempted invasion by the Serb-dominated Yugoslav People’s Army. The fledgling Slovenian government secretly reorganised its antiquated territorial defence force into a well-trained and equipped guerrilla army and the partisan resistance which had once driven Hitler’s troops from the country was effectively reborn.
The Slovenes knew that they stood no chance in a conventional battle: the YPA was simply too big and too power
ful. So the country prepared for a campaign of guerilla warfare – a return to the resistance tactics of blowing up bridges and small close-quarter attacks in the towns and villages of their nascent nation.
At the same time, Slovenia sought help from the European Community and the United States. Neither was prepared to recognise the country’s independence since they found it more convenient to deal with a single federation rather than a series of small states. The rebuff emboldened the Serbs and made a full-blown civil war inevitable.
The first shot was fired by the YPA on 27 June 1990 in the small village of Divača, just seventy-five kilometres from Ljubljana. That same afternoon, Slovenian soldiers shot down two Yugoslavian army helicopters.
Over the next ten days, the fighting moved westward towards Ljubljana, then on past the capital and into the eastern heartland around Celje and Rogaška Slatina. A ceasefire was announced on 6 July: Slovenia won its independence, though at the cost of at least sixty-two deaths and almost 330 wounded. By contrast with the ensuing conflicts in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo, this was a small war, but it was the first time since the Nazis had been expelled that Slovenians had their freedom. In some rather inexplicable way, I felt proud.
At the end of September 2003, I flew to Munich. Josef Focks had arranged for me to meet his translator at the airport so we could fly on to Ljubljana together. But by the time our flight was called he had not arrived and I boarded the plane alone. I was already nervous about who or what I would find in Slovenia and, since I spoke only German, I felt vulnerable and exposed. Fortunately the translator managed to get a message to the plane and asked a stewardess to tell me that he had been held up in traffic and would catch a later flight and meet me at Ljubljana.
I waited all day in the airport. I had no signal on my mobile phone, no one seemed to speak German and I could not work out how to use the local payphones. All I could do was sit and hope that my contact would turn up.
Hitler's Forgotten Children Page 13
