Hitler's Forgotten Children

by Ingrid Von Oelhafen

  In the ten months since I had received the scientific tests that proved who I was, I had made no real progress in discovering how I had been brought into the Lebensborn programme, nor did I fully understand the extent of the experiment itself. In this I was far from alone. The meeting in Hadamar had been a first step for the handful of Lebensborn children to come together and share our stories. Each of us had a little part of the overall jigsaw, but even together we could not complete the full picture.

  The title of our new organisation was a deliberate twist on Lebensborn: where that had been, in Himmler’s vision and language, the Fount of Life, our association was to be the way for its survivors to explain it. But I was also aware of a possible play on words: that middle syllable, ‘pur’, was an acknowledgement of the Nazis’ obsession with racial purity which lay at the root of all our problems.

  We chose a particular quotation to head our articles of association:

  Uprootedness is by far the most dangerous disease to which human society is exposed. Whoever is uprooted, uproots others. Who is rooted himself, doesn’t uproot others. To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognised need of the human soul.

  It came from the French philosopher and activist, Simone Weil. She had fought fascism in Germany in the early 1930s and later as a volunteer on the Republican side during the Spanish Civil War. In 1943 she wrote a book called The Need for Roots, examining the social, cultural and spiritual malaise undermining western society; the quotation we selected from it perfectly encapsulated the story of our lives.

  I liked Guntram Weber the moment I met him at the Lebensspuren meeting. We were staying in the same guesthouse and we shared a common interest in working with young people: Guntram was a creative writing teacher specialising in helping disadvantaged youngsters. He was two years younger than me, but his face bore witness to the pain he had experienced throughout his life. When he stood up to tell his story, his eyes filled with tears as he described his struggle to find the truth about his origins as well as the overwhelming desire to run away from it.

  He had grown up in an outwardly normal post-war German family, living with his parents and two siblings – an older sister and a younger brother. But behind closed doors it was a different story.

  As a child I remember sensing that I wasn’t quite normal. Relatives seemed to treat me awkwardly and it gradually became clear that the man I called Father was actually my stepfather. Of course I wanted to find out who my real father was, but the subject was taboo in our house.

  Relatives had been well drilled by my mother to hide the truth behind vague statements. ‘It was the war,’ they would say. ‘Things were very confusing. We didn’t see much of each other – you will have to ask your mother.’

  It wasn’t until he was thirteen that Guntram’s mother agreed to discuss the issue.

  ‘Well, Guntram,’ she said, ‘You are old enough to know the truth about your father now.’ Then she gave me a name, told me when his birthday was and that she had married him in 1938 on a beautiful sunny day and that they had driven to church in a horse-drawn cart.

  During the war he had been a truck driver for the Luftwaffe, far away from the front, who had died driving over a landmine in Yugoslavia. She added that he certainly wasn’t involved in killing anyone.

  But there were no documents and no photos of this man, and when I pressed her, my mother she said she didn’t want to say any more about him because it was too painful.

  It was a plausible story. Guntram was a little suspicious, but the climate of German society during the 1950s actively discouraged awkward questions. Many children were told lies about what their parents did in the war and, as I knew from my own experience, it wasn’t the ‘done thing’ to challenge them.

  Curiosity and uncertainty gnawed away at Guntram. Sometimes he thought about confronting his mother about his doubts, but he never managed to do so. The lack of any photos or documents led him to question the story of the non-combatant Luftwaffe driver: instead he began worrying that his father had been a Nazi and that this was the reason for his family’s secretive behaviour. He began inspecting his facial features in the mirror and poring over history books in the school library, searching for photos of soldiers who could be his father or for women concentration camp guards who looked like his mother. For one terrible period he even convinced himself that Joseph Goebbels, Reich Minister for Propaganda and one of Hitler’s most devoted followers, might be his father. A year or so later he made a disturbing discovery.

  My mother had a strongbox in the bottom right-hand corner of her wardrobe. One afternoon when she was out, I decided to look in. I had terrible qualms about doing this; I knew I was breaking the trust between us and she was my only security in the world. But I felt I had no choice.

  Inside the trunk, Guntram found the first clue to his identity: a small silver cup. It bore a profoundly unsettling inscription.

  We were a fairly poor family at the time. Like many others, my mother had lost everything during the war, so to find a silver object in the house was extremely unusual. I picked it up carefully and discovered my Christian name on it; my second name, though, was shown as ‘Heinrich’. And then I turned it over and saw the writing on the other side. It read: ‘From your godfather, Heinrich Himmler.’

  Guntram desperately wanted to ask his mother about the cup. But, like Gisela with me, she was secretive – and he knew how badly she would react to the revelation that he had been rummaging through her things. It remained an unspoken and unsettling mystery.

  In 1966 he first heard the word Lebensborn. His older sister needed her birth certificate in order to get married and was surprised to discover that she didn’t have one. When she questioned their mother she was obstructive and told her daughter she didn’t know where it was.

  An enquiry at her place of birth turned up the unexpected news that Guntram’s sister was the illegitimate child of an army officer. Her records were still intact and showed that she had been born in a Lebensborn home. That led to the revelation that Guntram had also been a Lebensborn child. Rather than question his mother further though, he chose instead to get away, and moved to the United States. He stayed there for eight years and had a family of his own, putting aside questions about his past.

  But when his partner died in a car crash, he returned to Germany with his son. Before long the uncertainty about his roots began nagging at him again and finally, in 1982, he decided to confront his mother during a long car journey where, as he put it, ‘she could not escape from me’. He pulled off the road and forced his mother to talk to him.

  My mother was angry but she uttered three sentences that I will never forget. First she said: ‘I don’t want to talk about that.’ Then she tried to stop me digging into my past: ‘People will throw dirt at you,’ she told me. Eventually, when she saw that I would not be put off, she made a promise to write the whole story down for me. I believed her and felt better, trusting that she would give me the truth.

  Sadly she never did. For Guntram’s mother the truth was simply too difficult to speak about: she died two years later, taking her secrets to the grave and leaving Guntram both frustrated and angry. As she had once told him in an unguarded moment: ‘The relationship between mother and child is a power struggle.’ Guntram felt he had been powerless in that struggle.

  It wasn’t until 2001, when he was fifty-eight, that Guntram discovered who his father was – not, as his mother had told him, a young soldier who died honourably, but an SS major-general who oversaw the deaths of tens of thousands of people while stationed in what is now western Poland. He had been convicted of war crimes and sentenced to death by a Polish court in 1949, but had escaped to Argentina, where he died in 1970.

  My father was a war criminal. He was a man who allowed himself everything. And the SS enabled him to live that way. I assume my mother fell in love with a powerful military man. He died peacefully and at his funeral his old comrades stood beside his grave and raised their right
arms in the Nazi salute. I knew then that a racist is always a racist.

  There was a bitter irony to Guntram’s description of his life. As a Lebensborn baby, his ‘racially pure’ genes were supposed to have ensured that he grew up strong and confident – a future leader of the Master Race. Instead he had suffered for more than sixty years from feelings of low self-esteem, loneliness and uncertainty. The only thing that helped, he told us in Wernigerode, was finding other Lebensborn children.

  It has been a huge relief for me, although I haven’t been able to shake this feeling of inadequacy. Maybe in ten years it will be gone. It’s important that other children in Germany and abroad hear about this group because it could help us all.

  I agreed wholeheartedly with Guntram: Lebensspuren needed to be publicly visible so that other men and women who had been through the Lebensborn programme could make contact with us and perhaps find some solace. But in 2005 our group was not ready to do that: we met privately – partly due to the sense of shame still attached to our past.

  To some extent Helga Kahrau exemplified the dichotomy we all faced, that of needing support and acceptance while simultaneously struggling with the painful reality of her birth. A tall and forceful woman, with her blond hair dyed a striking red, Helga had been born into the heart of the Nazi regime. During the war her mother, Margarete, had been a secretary in the offices of Hitler’s top aide, Martin Bormann, and of Joseph Goebbels. She had memories of growing up in privilege and comfort, surrounded by important-looking men in crisp uniforms.

  In the decades that followed the end of the Third Reich, Margarete refused to talk to Helga about the war, much less tell her about the father she had never known. It was only after Margarete’s death in 1993 that Helga began to examine her family’s past. She was horrified by what she discovered.

  Margarete was a fervent Nazi who barely knew Helga’s father. He was a German army officer and they met in June 1940 at a party celebrating Hitler’s conquest of France. They had a one-night stand, which left Margarete pregnant. She was a perfect candidate for Himmler’s Master Race programme: politically committed, racially pure and expecting an illegitimate child from an equally Aryan German soldier. Nine months later, Helga was born in the main Lebensborn home at Steinhöring, outside Munich.

  When Helga was three months old, Margarete left the home and returned to work in Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry. Helga was handed over to foster parents: her new father was a high-ranking Nazi official in the occupied Polish city of Łodz. Here, Helga believed, he helped oversee the gassing of thousands of Jews at the nearby Chelmno concentration camp.

  I spent the first four years of my life raised and tutored by the Nazi elite. I was involved, in a fundamental way, with murderers.

  At the end of the war, unlike many Lebensborn children, Helga was sent back to Munich to live with Margarete. Here she encountered the irony of Himmler’s obsession with Nordic features. Although the city and its surrounding regions were the birthplace of Nazism, most Bavarians are dark-haired: the very racial characteristics which Lebensborn valued ensured that Helga stuck out.

  I was big, blond and Aryan, different from the southern Germans, and everyone asked me where I had come from. I couldn’t answer them.

  The only document Helga possessed was a cryptic birth certificate from an ‘SS Mothers Home’. It showed her mother’s name but not that of her father. Nor was Margarete Kahrau willing to help her daughter understand. She deliberately concealed the truth, saying only that Helga’s father had been a soldier who died in the war. She was also reluctant to discuss what she had done in the service of Hitler’s Reich: like most Germans of her generation, Margarete preferred to forget about the Nazis.

  When Margarete died in 1993, Helga began investigating. She discovered Nazi files that provided detailed information about her foster father and the crimes he committed in the service of the Final Solution. But there was nothing in the documents about her biological father. Then, in 1994, she received a phone call. The man told her that he had been a Wehrmacht officer in Paris, that he had met Margarete for a single night of passion. He was now suffering from terminal cancer and wanted to reach out to his daughter. It was a bittersweet moment for Helga: she had found her real father at last, but only as he was dying. She decided to make the most of the time they had left and devoted herself to nursing him round the clock.

  Her father had enjoyed a very successful post-war career in property, which had made him a multi-millionaire. As his eldest child, Helga might have expected to inherit at least some of his estate. But when he died she encountered another legacy of her birth. Her father left no will: shortly after his funeral Helga received a letter from his lawyers stating that because she was illegitimate, she could legally inherit nothing.

  Since then, Helga had found some solace in visiting her birthplace, the Lebensborn home at Steinhöring. But she never came to terms with her identity and worried constantly that people would assume that she, like her mother and stepfather, was a Nazi.

  I grew up on the side of the murderers. Being a Lebensborn child is still a source of shame.

  Shame – the word that has blighted the lives of so many of those who had been part of Himmler’s plan to create a new Master Race. The more I heard from those who had been born into Lebensborn, rather than kidnapped to strengthen it, the more I felt lucky to have been one of the Banditenkinder, the child of courageous partisans who fought against Nazi rule.

  Gisela Heidenreich, a tall, strikingly Aryan-looking woman from Bavaria, was four years old when she first encountered shame: she overheard her uncle describe her as ‘an SS bastard’. She was a family therapist, a fact I noted with interest. There seemed to be a common trait in Lebensborn children: by accident or design many of us had chosen careers in which we helped others overcome problems, while struggling with our own.

  Gisela described vividly the confusion she had suffered throughout her life and the web of lies that blighted her childhood. Her mother was Emilie Edelmann, the Lebensborn secretary who had given evidence at Nuremberg and who had been responsible for finding foster parents to take children stolen from the occupied countries.

  Like so many of those who had been part of Lebensborn, Emilie was secretive and deceitful. At first she had led Gisela to believe that she was not her real mother but her aunt. Later she admitted that this was not true and told her daughter that she fell pregnant following an affair with a married man. The SS packed her off to occupied Norway, to give birth in the Lebensborn home near Oslo. Several months later, Emilie brought Gisela back to Germany.

  Throughout her childhood, Gisela’s mother refused to answer any questions about the war. Only after Emilie’s death did Gisela discover the depths of her mother’s involvement with the Nazis. She found a bundle of love letters written to Emilie by Horst Wagner, the director of ‘Jewish Affairs’ in the Reich’s Foreign Office and its link-man with the SS. In this role, he helped carry out the round-ups, deportation and extermination of both German and foreign Jews. Emilie’s love affair with Wagner grew to the point where the couple considered formally making him Gisela’s stepfather. Their relationship continued when the Reich fell and he was arrested by the Americans and held for trial at Nuremberg. But before he could be brought to justice, he fled down one of the infamous ‘Ratlines’ – clandestine escape routes for Nazi war criminals – to South America.

  Shocking though the relationship was, it did not bring Gisela any closer to discovering who her real father was. She continued to search for him and, many years later, she eventually tracked him down. He was the head of the SS officer school at Bad Toelz in Bavaria. Her own reaction to their reunion both surprised her and helped her understand how so many Germans were able to live with knowledge of the crimes committed by the Nazis:

  When I first met him it was on a station platform. I ran into his arms and all I thought was ‘I’ve got a father’. In that instant I sanitised the person I knew my father was. And I never asked him what he did.
My own reaction – that of an educated adult with knowledge of the Lebensborn programme – has helped me to understand how people in those days just put the blinders on and ignored the terrible things that were happening.

  Gisela brought to our group a determination to rehabilitate the image of Lebensborn children. In part this was due to her experience of the postwar treatment of Norwegian babies born in the programme’s homes. As I had heard at the first meeting in Hadamar, Norwegian hatred of the occupying German armies led to discrimination against the 8,000 children like Gisela born in its Lebensborn homes. At first the post-war government in Oslo tried to have all the children shipped to Germany. When that plan failed, many of them were locked away in mental institutions or children’s homes.

  Gisela believed that this hatred and persecution was driven by Norway’s national guilt at being occupied, the shame of its leaders having collaborated with the Nazis and, above all, the wildly inaccurate rumours about Lebensborn homes being ‘SS stud farms’. Three years earlier, the Norwegian government had quietly paid on average €24,000 compensation to each of the children it had victimised. Now, Gisela argued, the time had come to end the lies and the discrimination.

  It’s high time to tell the truth. There’s been too much talk about Nazi babies, women being kept as SS whores and tall, blond people being bred. The Holocaust was about extinguishing so-called lesser races. Lebensborn was the reverse side of this coin: the idea was to further the Aryan race by whatever means were available.

  What I have learned is that I, and every other Lebensborn child, have a feeling of deep uncertainty about our identity. This has to stop.

  The stories of these ‘pure’ Aryan children were harrowing. But theirs was only half the picture: there were others, like me, at the inaugural Lebensspuren meeting who had been forced, not born, into Himmler’s programme. Their accounts helped me understand how the process had worked.