When this didn’t produce results quickly enough, new laws were introduced to ban the advertisement and display of contraceptives and Germany’s pioneering birth control clinics were shut down (in the 1920s Germany had been a world leader in developing contraceptive devices such as the IUD). Abortions were criminalised as ‘acts of sabotage against Germany’s racial future’.
That phrase, ‘racial future’, was my first clue to the reality hiding behind the seemingly innocuous Lebensborn Society. Although the ostensible aim of the homes was to allow women who might otherwise abort their pregnancy to give birth in safety and in secret – thus helping to boost Germany’s population – they weren’t open to everyone.
I was, of course, aware of the Nazis’ obsession with race: it was the altar on which Hitler and his regime had sacrificed more than six million Jews. What I hadn’t encountered was the extraordinary and convoluted web of organisations that had been established to safeguard the ‘purity’ of the German race. As I continued my research, I could feel myself being pulled down the rabbit hole of National Socialist madness. At its heart was the sinister figure of Heinrich Himmler.
Himmler had joined the Nazi Party in August 1923, three years after its birth. He was not one of its early fanatics – his membership number was 14,303 – but within six years he had taken charge of its most powerful paramilitary organisation, the Schutzstaffel, more infamously known by its initials: SS.
As Reichsführer-SS, Himmler began creating a parallel, and ultimately much more powerful, organisation to control and monitor the Nazi Party. He had long been interested in the then-fashionable quasi-science of eugenics and became obsessed with the idea of a mystical past in which a Nordic race of pure-blooded warriors had conquered much of Europe. He began reorganising the SS to be the vanguard of a reborn race of Aryan ‘supermen’. Under his direction applicants were vetted for their racial ‘qualities’: he described the process as being ‘like a nursery gardener trying to reproduce a good old strain which has been adulterated and debased; we started from the principles of plant selection and then proceeded quite unashamedly to weed out the men whom we did not think we could use for the build up of the SS’.
In 1931, he created a separate department within the SS to ensure his ‘plant selection’ ran smoothly: Das Rasse-und-Siedlungshauptamt-SS, or RuSHA. A literal translation would be ‘SS Race and Settlement Main Office’; what it meant in practice was an organisation dedicated to safeguarding the ‘racial purity’ of the Schutzstaffel. One of its duties was to oversee the marriages of SS personnel: on Himmler’s personal orders, RuSHA only issued a permit to marry after detailed background investigations had proved that both partners had an uninterrupted racial pedigree showing them to have come from pure Aryan blood-stock as far back as 1800.
As I read further, I discovered that the Lebensborn Society had been formed and fostered under RuSHA’s banner. In a circular issued on 13 December 1936, Himmler had set out both the lineage and the aims of his new organisation:
The Lebensborn Society is under the direct personal control of the Reichsführer-SS. It is an integral part of the Race and Settlement Head Office and its objects are:
1. To support racially and genetically valuable large families.
2. To accommodate and look after racially and genetically valuable expectant mothers who, after careful investigation of their families and those of the fathers of their children by RuSHA, can be expected to give birth to equally valuable children.
3. To look after those children.
4. To look after the mothers of those children.
Even to me – a German woman, born during the war, who had lived her whole life in a country trying to come to terms with the legacy of Hitler’s twisted vision – this sounded the stuff of madness. In German we have a very expressive word for this sort of fantastic lunacy: unglaublich, meaning unbelievable. How could anyone ‘prove’ their racial or genetic value – and what in any event did such a bizarre concept mean in practice?
I was not, it emerged, alone in being confused. I found a succession of references to rumours which had grown up about Lebensborn facilities. Some of these dated back to the war years and suggested that ordinary Germans had become worried by stories that these ostensible maternity homes were in fact SS stud farms: places where the cream of Himmler’s brigades were introduced to suitable Aryan women in order to breed racially valuable babies for the Reich. The gossip was false but the secrecy that surrounded Lebensborn ensured that the rumours had persisted over the years. There was even an entire genre of Nazi exploitation films and books dedicated to mythologising the programme: one typical example, a movie made in 1961 by a German director and widely available on the Internet, had the English title ‘Ordered to Love’ and the screaming subtitle ‘Frauleins Forced into Nazi Breeding!’
I felt ashamed and horrified. I understood that the SS stud farm stories were no more than absurd fantasies (and as often as not, cynical attempts to sell tawdry films and novels), but if this was what the world knew – or thought it knew – about Lebensborn, was it any surprise that modern Germany was unwilling to talk openly about it? Perhaps this explained why my requests for information from the Bundesarchiv were still unanswered, two months on. Alone, I had little chance of being able to investigate Lebensborn, much less to uncover its role in my origins. I needed help, but there seemed to be a wall of silence surrounding anything to do with this corner of Nazi history.
In February 2000, my hopes were dashed further. The Austrian government finally replied to my letter about Matko family records in Bad Sauerbrunn: there was no such record and never had been. My journey seemed to be over almost before it had started. If I hadn’t come from Austria, where had I been born?
And then, a few days later, a letter arrived from Georg Lilienthal in Mainz. For the first time it contained clues – solid, historical information – about Lebensborn and how it fitted into my own story. He wrote cautiously, hinting once again at painful secrets lying in wait for me.
Dear Frau von Oelhafen,
I would first like to thank you for the trust you have placed in me with your letter because it’s all about the question of your identity. Therefore, I am also glad that Ms Fischer of the German Red Cross in her conversation with you was very careful … I have to apologise to you. My response to your letter took a long time. And while you were waiting for a sign from me, you might have come to doubt whether your request was the right thing to do. I can reassure you.
My long silence was partly due to external reasons (too little time to find the documents together and write): but on the other hand I was also aware that the answer would not be easy because I know what it could mean to you. That’s why I have been writing my letter on and off since early January. That is what has led me to outline your presumptive fate so soberly and in a seemingly emotionless way. I did not want to influence your feelings with my feelings.
Now for your request. As you write, the fact that you have two names (Erika Matko and Ingrid von Oelhafen) has long been known. I assume that you have therefore always wondered what it’s all about. Apparently your foster parents were not completely open with the little they knew about you.
After reading the letter, I could not have told you exactly what my feelings were: there was anxiety and apprehension, but these were also shot through with excitement.
I knew, of course, that neither Hermann nor Gisela had ever told me the truth about my origins. I had, to some extent, convinced myself that if this hadn’t been the result of the tensions of post-war life, it must have been because they didn’t really know my history. Lilienthal’s letter was the first time I had to confront the possibility that my foster parents might have deliberately withheld information.
And then came the revelation I had been waiting for and half-expecting. Lilienthal’s research had found the name Erika Matko in some long-forgotten records of the Lebensborn programme. She had been raised in one of its children’s homes: a place called Sonnenwe
ise (literally: ‘Sunny Meadow’) at Kohren-Sahlis. Since I was – or once had been – Erika Matko, that meant I was a Lebensborn baby. What’s more, his investigations had convinced him that Hermann and Gisela had deliberately concealed this information from me.
There was now solid documentary evidence linking me to this bizarre and evidently still-shameful Nazi organisation: one which had been under the direct control of the SS. And yet my overall response was exhilaration rather than shock. It seemed incredible, but it also offered the chance finally to find out more about who I was and where I had come from. And in a way, the revelation also brought me a little peace. Although I did not yet understand the true nature of Lebensborn, I could now let go of one of the worries which I had lived with ever since I discovered that I had been fostered.
If, as my initial research indicated, Lebensborn was a political programme in which the demands of the Nazi regime overrode the feelings of those it ruled, perhaps the reason my real parents had given me up was also political, not (as I had feared) the much more upsetting idea that they simply hadn’t wanted to keep me. That realisation brought me some comfort, but also a hint of fear. In some way I had been involved with an organisation which, nearly sixty years later, still evoked fear and loathing. I mentally added the SS to the growing list of Nazi groups I would need to investigate.
Lilienthal’s letter contained more surprises. Realising that I knew little about how Lebensborn had operated, he explained how children had arrived at Sonnenweise. Some had been born in Lebensborn maternity homes, then brought to Kohren-Sahlis as part of Himmler’s programme to increase the population of the Reich. Others, though, had apparently been kidnapped.
Children born in this maternity home were German children born illegitimately in the Lebensborn programme for foster care or for adoption. But there were also children at Kohren-Sahlis who were trafficked from the occupied countries of Germany and who were designated for Germanisation.
I had never heard of ‘Germanisation’. Why would the Nazis traffic children from the countries they had invaded? I had always been taught that Hitler and his henchmen viewed the people of many of these conquered states quite literally as ‘sub-human’. And how did this fit with my background?
Lebensborn worked with German foster families, with the intention of later adoption after the victorious end of the war. The fall of the Third Reich prevented these plans from being realised. Most of these foreign children returned to their home countries. However, some remained in Germany with their foster families.
There were various different reasons for this. Some of the foster parents cared for their foster families. Some of the foster parents concealed the foreign origin, even from the children themselves, for fear that the children might be removed again or that they would have a yearning to return home. Ultimately, they were afraid to lose the love and affection of their foster children. Also, they wanted to protect the children from hostility and integration difficulties.
These were often the reasons that the children were not adopted after the war, as well as the fact that they often lacked the necessary papers.
Some of the Allies did not want to send the children back to their home countries against their will, and they remained in the German family with the authorities of their home countries in agreement because they had no biological family left.
And then Lilienthal dropped his biggest bombshell.
Frau von Oelhafen, is it your belief that you might not be a child of German parents? I have known your name ‘Erika Matko’, and the name of your foster parents ‘von Oelhafen’, for many years from documents in the Bundesarchiv. I have researched Lebensborn for over twenty years and I know many of the fates of Lebensborn children.
Their names are mentioned in lists that were created by Lebensborn for children to be Germanised from Poland, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia (in the Lebensborn management they were called only Ost-Kinder) and in the records and statements of former Lebensborn employees.
Although I can present to you no papers (such as a birth certificate), giving you ultimate peace of mind, I do have documents that seem to show that you probably originated in Yugoslavia.
After you have read my letter, you may ask: what to do now? I cannot give you the answer to this. But if you want to continue to search for your identity, I will be happy to assist you. You can always contact me.
Kidnapping, Germanisation, Ost-Kinder: these words and notions were so alien to me, so far away from the assumptions I had made when I began my investigation, that I didn’t know what to make of them. Although the Austrian authorities had been unable to find any trace of a Matko family in or near Bad Sauerbrunn, I had still believed that the search for my past would somehow take me to Austria. It had been a comforting thought in a way: the time I had spent at Innsbruck meant the country felt familiar. Nor was there any language barrier: German was the national language. Now it seemed I had to start again from square one – and in a language I had never even heard spoken. Even worse, Yugoslavia itself had ceased to exist: the last of the former Iron Curtain countries had disintegrated in a bloody civil war before splintering into a series of smaller new states. Where – how – would I begin?
I decided to take Georg Lilienthal at his word. I wrote to him, asking for guidance. Throughout my journey into the past I have been very fortunate to find people who were willing to give their time and share their expertise to assist me from one stumbling step to the next. Dr Lilienthal was the first, and probably the most important of my guides. He told me I needed to write to two German ministries in Berlin – Foreign Affairs and Internal Affairs.
He helped me compose the letters, each of which explained my situation and set out my belief that I had been brought into the Lebensborn programme from the former Yugoslavia: I requested assistance in making contact with their counterparts in Eastern Europe.
My requests fell on deaf ears. Both ministries sent abrupt and unhelpful replies, saying that they could not do anything for me: the only thing they could suggest was that I write to the government of Slovenia – the new nation that had emerged in the central part of Yugoslavia, once controlled by Hitler’s Reich.
Around the same time, I received a reply to my original enquiry at the Bundesarchiv. This too was unhelpful: the state archives insisted that they held nothing relevant to my past. A pattern was developing: no government institution seemed interested in helping me investigate my past. Since I knew that Georg Lilienthal had already found documents relating to Erika Matko and the Sonnenweise home in those very same archives, it was clear that German officials were reluctant to talk about Lebensborn. Over the next few months it was a reluctance I would encounter over and over again.
Georg Lilienthal pointed me toward two other, lesser-known collections of documents where, he said, I might find information about Lebensborn. And he agreed to use his own contacts to find out who I should write to in Slovenia.
Looking back, I realise that this was the pivotal point in my investigation: from here on there would be no turning back. Once I began digging into boxes of dusty papers, stored in archives across modern Germany, there was no way of knowing what skeletons I might disturb, what secrets I might unearth. Such is the benefit of hindsight. At the time I didn’t stop to think about what I was doing: for so long I had avoided thinking about my past, but now I was determined to find out whatever was known about me, and by extension about those who had raised me. If that meant asking questions that made people uncomfortable – well, so be it.
EIGHT | BAD AROLSEN
‘Adolf Hitler has led the German people to the realisation that the Nordic race is the most creative, valuable race on earth. Therefore, caring for the valuable Nordic blood is their most important task.’
HEINRICH HIMMLER, RACIAL POLITICS
(1943 SS PUBLICATION)
Bad Arolsen is a small, picture-postcard German town. For more than 250 years it was owned and ruled by the Princes of Waldeck-Pyrmont, then a sovereign principality s
tretching across the rich agricultural heartlands of Hesse and Lower Saxony. This aristocratic family constructed a large baroque-style stately home and drew up plans to build the town around it in a mathematically perfect grid of streets. But when they ran out of money, the grandiose scheme was only half-completed: to compensate, the undeveloped sections were landscaped with shrubbery.
Die Grosse Allee is the main street, running one perfectly straight mile from east to west and lined with 880 German oak trees in strict military formation. Exactly halfway down is an unprepossessing piece of post-war architecture, set back from the road behind long hedge walls so as to be almost unnoticeable to the casual visitor. It is the archive of the International Tracing Service. Here, spread haphazardly over several floors and spilling out into satellite buildings, more than thirty million individual files record the fate of those who fell victim to the National Socialist criminal enterprise.
It is a cliché of modern history that the Nazis were painstaking record-keepers. But the 26,000 linear metres of original documents and 232,710 metres of microfilm housed at the ITS bear witness to this thoroughness and, according to Georg Lilienthal, somewhere in the vast piles of paperwork there was probably a record of how I came to be part of the Lebensborn programme.
I wrote to the archive in the early spring of 2000, asking for its help in locating any document that would help me investigate my origins. In theory, this should have been a straightforward request: it was, after all, exactly what ITS was established to do. But, as I was finding, theory and practice remained a long way apart – and what often separated them was politics.
Hitler's Forgotten Children Page 7