Hitler's Forgotten Children Read online

  But I did none of these things. As I stood on the street outside the apartment block, I realised that my emotions were not merely unproductive but corrosive. I had no right to force my own needs on a sick and vulnerable woman who – just as much as me – had been a victim of the Nazis and of Lebensborn. I knew I had to learn not just to understand but to forgive. I walked quietly away.

  Two days later, after a last meeting with my Slovenian family, I went home to Osnabrück. As I settled back into my life there, I reflected on what the previous fifteen years had taught me. I seemed to have travelled a great distance, yet my journey had really been a giant circle and I had arrived back at the very place where I began.

  It had not been easy or painless, but I was glad – I am glad – to know the truth about Lebensborn and how I came to be caught up in it. I draw comfort from the extended ‘family’ of those who were born or kidnapped into Himmler’s experiment; in the years since that first meeting in Hadamar, hundreds of us have discovered what we were searching for.

  I am certain that I was once a Yugoslavian child called Erika Matko. I am certain that I was stolen from my family and I am grateful to have had the chance to be reunited with them. I wish, of course, that I could have met my biological mother; I wish I could remember her love for me, and I will always regret not having had the chance to ask her about her life or about why she didn’t search for me after the war.

  I do not feel close to the Matkos in the way that families should feel close. Too much has happened; too great a separation of time and of place. There is a gulf between us that is more than simply language. I realise that I can no more understand what it means to have grown up in Yugoslavia than I can understand Slovenian. In fact I feel much greater kinship with my late step-brother, Hubertus. We were not blood relations but in our relationship lies the ultimate defeat for the Nazis’ ideology: blood is not all-important.

  I can smile at that now. How did it take me so long to see something so obvious? I have spent a lifetime working with children burdened with physical or mental disabilities; I have seen how love and patience can overcome these challenges. Nurture can always find a way to beat nature; the hammer does not necessarily shape the hand.

  For years I had allowed my life to be overshadowed by the search for something that could not be found. There is for all of us, I believe, a gap between what we want and what we can have, and regret flourishes in that space. I spent too long trapped in a disappointing No Man’s Land between dreams and reality. I lost sight of the fundamental truth that we are not defined by the facts of our birth but rather by the choices we make throughout our life.

  Mahatma Gandhi once said: ‘The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.’ It has taken me all my life to understand this. Yet although I am back exactly where I started, if I had not embarked on my journey I don’t think I would ever have worked this out. I now know who I was and who I am. Erika Matko was a Lebensborn baby, stolen from Yugoslavia, who disappeared in the madness of the Lebensborn programme. Ingrid von Oelhafen is a German woman, a physical therapist who has brought comfort to generations of children.

  My name was Ingrid von Oelhafen. It was also Erika Matko. Ingrid is German; Erika is from Yugoslavia. Both of them were me. But now? Now I am Ingrid Matko-von-Oelhafen. As I always have been.

  AFTERWORD

  ‘That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.’

  ALDOUS HUXLEY

  This is a story of what happened more than seventy years ago. It would be easy to think of it only as history: easy, but wrong.

  Since 1945, the world has not known a global conflict. Nor has there been a criminal enterprise on the scale of the Third Reich, nor an ideology that so openly worships the mystic importance of pure blood. But the key words are ‘global’ and ‘openly’. The twisted creed that one person is inherently superior to another by virtue of his race has not disappeared. Nor have the wars fought because of it.

  From Southeast Asia to the Middle East, from Africa to the Balkans, there have been those convinced that neighbouring peoples, races or nations are inherently inferior, that these post-Nazi Untermenschen are ‘other’ and therefore less deserving of respect, food, land or life. In the two generations since the Lebensborn experiment died in the rubble of a devastated Europe, the world has known a succession of smaller, more localised conflicts. Most have had, at their root, a version of Himmler’s belief in greater and lesser races.

  This book is a personal memoir as well as an examination of history. It has been written at a time when the world is fracturing into ever greater hostility between nations, regions or religions. Some of this hostility blossoms into nasty little wars: one ethnic group hacking another to pieces, one branch of a belief system blowing up those it deems to be unworthy in the eyes of its God.

  In Europe particularly, and at its borders with countries that were once behind the Iron Curtain, politicians toy with nationalism, stoking the fires of hatred based on racial or historical inferiority. Not since 1945 has the continent – and beyond it, the world – been so dangerously divided.

  The lesson of history is that no one learns the lesson of history. It is time we began.

  Ingrid aged nearly three with Dietmar, the boy she believed to be her brother.

  Hermann and Gisela von Oelhafen with Ingrid and Dietmar, Bandekow, summer 1944.

  Ingrid aged eleven at Bad Salzuflen.

  The Lebens-born home, Sonnenwiese, in 1942, from a wartime postcard.

  Ingrid aged twenty-one with Hubertus, her foster-mother’s son.

  The Lebensborn logo, from the Lebensborn Society brochure, circa 1939.

  The Nuremberg Laws’ Racial Identification chart, 1935, showing the racial classifications between Germans, ‘Mischelinge’ (‘crossbreeds’) and Jews. Only those with four German grandparents were considered to be of German blood.

  The four most senior Lebensborn officials, photographed before their trial at Nuremburg in 1947.

  Heinrich Himmler inspects SS troops.

  A Lebensborn baby is handed over to the care of the SS during the Namensgebung ‘baptism’ ritual inside a Lebensborn home.

  An SS officer intones the Namensgebung liturgy, with the baby lying in front of an altar dedicated to Adolf Hitler.

  A boy’s head is measured using calipers during a racial examination, 1937.

  The SS flag flies outside a Lebensborn home.

  The schoolyard, Celje, former Yugoslavia, August 1942. Mothers plead in vain with German soldiers as their children are taken away for racial examination. Ingrid and her parents were among them;

  Stari Pisker prison, Celje, former Yugolsavia, summer 1942. Partisans are lined up against a wall prior to being shot;

  Stari Pisker prison, Celje, former Yugolsavia, summer 1942. The partisans’ bodies lie where they fell.

  Inside the school, Celje, former Yugoslavia, August 1942. The children are held in makeshift enclosures, packed with straw, as they wait for their racial examinations.

  Ingrid Matko-von-Oelhafen today, with the first official document of her existence, a vaccination certificate issued by Lebensborn.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Finding my roots has been a long and rocky road, but I have met many wonderful people who accompanied me along the way.

  I particularly want to say thank you to my best and most long-standing friend, Dorothee Schlüter. She has been with me from the first timid steps I took in the search for my origins. She has supported me mentally and emotionally and has been deeply involved as I progressed. Thanks are also due to Jutta Schröder, who has always been there with help and care.

  I must express my gratitude to Dr Georg Lilienthal for guiding me and to Josef Focks, who pushed me over and over again (as I hesitated) until at last I agreed to go to Slovenia.

  To my friends in Lebensspuren, where I first met other children of the Lebensborn programme: you, above all, know
how important you have been.

  For their company and support on my trips to Rogaška Slatina, I thank my friends Ute Grünwald, Ingrid Rätzmann and Helga Lucas. And I am grateful to my Slovenian family for being so friendly and open.

  I owe a special debt to Dr Dorothee Schmitz-Köster. From the moment I met her, she has been a great help. She not only encouraged me to believe that my story could be written but also contributed her extensive knowledge of Lebensborn. She was very good and sensible company on my last trip to Slovenia.

  When Tim suggested this book, I made myself examine all the stages of my life. So much had been unknown and troublesome, but as we worked together I found the darkness which had enveloped me gradually disappearing. I also discovered that in the process of writing I was able to ‘talk’ to Helena, Johann and even Erika Matko. I was able, on the page, if not in reality, to ask ‘why’. I did not necessarily find all the answers. But these conversations (some of them heated!) helped me to forgive and to love life as it is.

  Ingrid Matko-von-Oelhafen

  Osnabrück, April 2015

  This book grew out of a film I made in 2013. I had heard of Lebensborn several years earlier and had tried, unsuccessfully, to persuade various television networks to commission a documentary about it. Finally, Channel 5 agreed to fund a sixty-minute film: I am indebted to its commissioning editor, Simon Raikes, for seeing the importance of the story and backing it.

  I met Ingrid while researching the programme: she agreed to be filmed and was immensely generous when I was unable, for reasons of space, to include her story within the documentary. She was also kind enough to listen when I subsequently suggested that we should write a book about her extraordinary and brave journey to discover the truth about Lebensborn and her past.

  Neither that film nor this book could have emerged without the efforts and encouragement of Dr Dorothee Schmitz-Köster. The Lebensborn children have no greater champion than Dorothee, and her commitment to telling their stories in her own books (sadly published only in Germany) has been crucial in bringing Himmler’s shadowy organisation into the light.

  Our thanks are also due to our British publishers, Elliott & Thompson, for so enthusiastically supporting this book, and to our editor there, Olivia Bays: her cool-headed advice significantly improved our manuscript.

  Similarly, Andrew Lownie is the very model of a perfect literary agent. His initial guidance, and thereafter his relationship with publishers across the world, has ensured that this story will be read in countries as far apart as Finland, Italy and the United States.

  Finally, I could not write without the love and support of my partner, Mia Pennal. After a lifetime of searching, I was lucky enough to be found. Cursum Perficio: my journey ends here.

  Tim Tate

  Wiltshire, April 2015

  INDEX

  Aktionen 179–180, 183

  Aktion T4 103, 108

  Aller, river 23–24

  Allies 5–8, 10–13, 17, 24, 60, 71, 77, 111, 114, 122, 123

  Supreme Allied Headquarters in Europe 76

  Alnova 118

  America see United States

  Andersen, Ingrid (‘Eka’) 9, 15, 27, 29, 30, 40, 46, 48–50, 55

  Andersen family 42, 50, 54

  Ansbach 10

  Argentina 92, 158

  Aryans 65–66, 79, 82–83, 88, 89, 91, 110, 112, 116, 117, 121, 124, 126, 129, 160, 162, 164, 166, 180–181, 185

  Auschwitz 91, 180

  Australia 136

  Austria 10, 43, 45, 52, 67, 72, 98, 105, 144, 173, 180

  Avenarius, Ingeborg von 128

  Bad Arolsen 75–88, 101, 118, 172, 174

  Bad Polzin 108, 116, 165

  Bad Salzuflen 28, 32–34, 37, 49

  Bad Sauerbrunn 63, 67, 72

  Bad Toelz 163

  Bahrdorf 24

  Bandekow 8–11, 14, 19, 22

  Banditenkinder 162, 188

  Bavaria 4, 111–112, 163, 183, 191

  Bayreuth 133

  Beck, Anneliese 195

  Belgium 10, 105

  Bergen-Belsen 91, 109

  Beria, Lavrenti 13

  Berlin 16, 21, 45, 53, 72, 84, 85, 109, 112, 122

  Wall 51–53, 60

  Black Forest 45–46

  Blitzkrieg 6, 176

  bombing 7, 15, 23, 39, 122, 141

  carpet 6

  RAF 114

  Bonn 136

  Agreement 78

  Bormann, Martin 114, 159

  Bosnia-Herzegovina 140, 142

  Brandenburg 108–109

  Brandt, Rudolph 106

  Britain 5, 11, 77, 122

  British Army 29, 115, 168

  Budapest 52

  Bund Deutscher Mädel 87, 167

  Bundesarchiv 60, 63, 67, 71, 72

  Bundestag 78

  camps vii, 4, 10, 87, 105, 109, 130, 131, 143, 144, 166, 168, 180, 182–183

  concentration 1, 3, 13–14, 131, 141, 146, 160, 169, 173, 180, 188

  see also Schweigelager and named camps

  Caritas 173

  Celje (Cilli) 1, 3, 139, 141–144, 149, 176, 179, 180, 183, 184, 187, 191, 194

  Central Tracing Bureau see International Tracing Service

  Chelmo 130, 160

  Churchill, Winston 7

  Cold War vii, 11, 17, 123, 140, 173

  Cologne 16, 103

  communism 17, 52, 98, 115, 139, 179

  Congress of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia 140

  Constance, Lake 43

  Crimea 118

  Croatia 98, 140, 142

  Czechoslovakia 71, 125, 130, 133

  Danzig 164–165

  Darré, Walther 92

  Death’s Head regiments 59, 95–96

  denazification 11, 12, 60

  Deutsche Frauenschaft 12, 14

  Dietmar see Holzapfel, Dietmar Divača 141

  Doležalová, Marie 130–131

  Dollinger, Hannes 111–113

  Dömitz 22

  Ebner, Gregor 96, 105–106, 115, 125

  Edelmann, Emilie 133, 162, 183

  Elbe, river 13, 22

  Emi, Sister 30

  Engagement and Marriage Decree 92–93

  England 44, 49, 188

  ethnic cleansing 39, 133, 141

  eugenics 79

  European Union 60

  fascism 12, 154, 177

  Final Solution 6, 82, 160

  First World War 7, 9, 104

  Focks, Josef 119, 135–136, 138–139, 142, 144–145

  Fragebogen 13, 106

  France 5, 8, 10, 11, 77, 105, 122, 123, 188

  Frankfurt 76, 103, 195

  Frings, Josef 16

  Frohnleiten 4, 144, 180, 182, 183

  Führerbunker 5, 122

  Gdansk see Danzig

  Gdynia 164–165

  Gehrendorf 23

  Geneva Convention 179

  German Democratic Republic 17, 22, 53

  Germanisation 70–72, 113, 116–117, 121, 124–128, 130, 165, 190

  Germany viii, 4–8, 10–14, 16, 17, 20, 28, 39, 41, 43, 45, 50–53, 59–61, 63–67, 70, 73, 77, 78, 84, 85, 88–90, 92, 95, 96, 105, 112, 115, 117, 126, 129, 133, 135–137, 154, 157, 159, 162, 163, 166, 168, 172, 177, 178, 185, 186, 188

  re-unification 54

  Supreme Command 179

  Gestapo 12, 13, 130, 176, 178, 185, 188

  Globke, Hans 60

  Goebbels, Joseph 11, 15, 87, 156, 159, 160

  Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 6, 97, 99

  Goličnik, Jože 98

  Gordonstoun 44

  Gorgass, Ruthild 103–105, 107, 109, 111, 113

  Göring, Hermann 11, 122

  Gran Canaria 54–55, 59

  Graz 4

  Greifelt, Ulrich 123

  Hadamar 103, 107, 111, 123, 126, 133, 154, 163, 197

  Haloschan, Helena 98

  Hamburg 9, 28–29, 31, 34, 37, 40, 44–46, 48–50, 55, 113, 174, 188

  Hanover 25, 28

  Harte, Emmi 32
, 35–37, 101, 111

  Harte, Karl 32, 33, 37

  Harz Mountains 105

  Heidenreich, Gisela 162–164, 171, 183

  Heiligenholz 43

  Heim Harz 153

  Heinecke, Folker 113–118

  Heinze-Wissede, Maria-Martha 132–133

  Hertfordshire 44

  Hess, Rudolf 11, 86, 122

  Hesse 75

  Heydrich, Reinhard 130

  Himmler, Heinrich 1, 4, 5, 11, 58, 59, 65–66, 70, 75, 78–80, 82–90, 92–96, 105–107, 109–110, 112–16, 121–23, 126–128, 130–133, 147, 150, 153, 154, 157, 160, 161, 164–166, 171, 178, 179, 182, 185, 190, 193, 197

  Hitler, Adolf vii, viii, 1, 5, 6, 8, 10–12, 14, 15, 17, 41, 60, 63–65, 72, 75, 80, 82, 85, 86, 90, 91, 96, 99, 105, 106, 109, 112, 115–117, 121, 122, 126, 133, 139, 141, 156, 159, 160, 169, 177–179, 185

  Mein Kampf 79, 106

  Hitler Youth 12, 87, 110, 167

  Holland 10

  Holocaust vii, 77, 121, 164, 172

  Holzapfel, Dietmar 8, 20–22, 24, 25, 27–29, 31–33, 36, 51, 174

  Honecker, Erich 52

  Hungary 52

  Huxley, Aldous 199

  Innsbruck 49, 72

  International Refugee Organisation (IRO) 41

  International Tracing Service (ITS) 76–78, 118, 172, 174

  Iron Cross 9

  Iron Curtain 17, 24, 53, 72, 115, 139, 200

  Italy 10

  Jews 4, 36, 65, 77, 81–83, 105, 109, 116, 126, 160, 162

  Jodl, Alfred 5, 11

  Kahrau, Helga 159–161

  Kahrau, Margarete 159–161

  Katowice 168

  Keitel, Wilhelm 179

  Kinderfachabteilung 108–109

  Klosterheide 112

  Kohren-Sahlis 58, 69, 108, 112–113, 116, 117, 134, 174–175, 183, 195

  Kosovo 140, 142