I looked around at the men and women who had also been part of the Lebensborn programme. I assessed each body, searched each face for evidence that these survivors of Himmler’s experiment were truly super-human beings. Were they taller, stronger, healthier than anyone else?
Ruthild answered my unspoken question. She took off her glasses, rubbed her eyes and said: ‘We aren’t perfect. We’ve got all the same illnesses and disabilities as other people.’
What, then, was it all for? Himmler’s great dream was a generation of super-Aryans who would be so strong, so flawless that they would grow up to become the natural aristocracy of the National Socialist state and the lesser nations it ruled. Yet his scheme seemed to have produced nothing more notable than the group of perfectly ordinary men and women seated around me.
There were, though, two striking characteristics shared by most of these Lebensborn children: deep emotional hurt and a palpable sense of shame. The former stemmed from a problem I was very familiar with. Each of us who began life in that clandestine programme had grown up with the pain of not knowing the truth about our birth.
This secrecy was both deliberate and carefully managed from the outset. Doctors and staff in the Lebensborn homes were required to swear an oath of silence which committed them to respecting ‘the honour of pregnant women, whether they conceived before or after marriage’, and in June 1939, Himmler had issued an order to protect the identity of illegitimate children born in the programme.
Following an agreement between the genealogical office Reich Minister of the Interior and the L organisation, it is possible to maintain secrecy about the origin of illegitimate children born in Lebensborn homes for an unlimited period. The Reich office will provide a certificate confirming the child’s Aryan descent. This certificate can be produced by a child born in a Lebensborn home when they start school, for the Hitler Youth and for institutions of higher education, without the slightest difficulty arising.
This determination to throw a cloak of confidentiality over all aspects of the Lebensborn children extended to the records kept of their delivery. Himmler’s organisation set up a special registry office for recording the births: this was kept separate from any other office of the Reich and operated in total secrecy. Mothers’ names might be shown in the files, but the identity of the father was generally deliberately omitted.
And many of these deliberately redacted records had themselves disappeared: in the final days of the war, with Allied forces closing in on the homes, Lebensborn staff destroyed much of the organisation’s paperwork. As a result, most of the children born within Lebensborn grew up not knowing who their fathers were – and, unless their mothers broke the bonds of secrecy, completely unable to find out.
In particular, this affected the children who had been handed over to foster parents. But even those who, like Ruthild, were kept by their biological mothers, often found it impossible to prise out the information. Many mothers were very vague about their time in Lebensborn homes; others refused point-blank to discuss it.
I knew how that felt. Although I didn’t yet fully understand how I fitted into the story of Lebensborn, I was familiar with parental walls of secrecy: as Georg Lilienthal had warned me, Gisela undoubtedly withheld much of what she knew throughout my life.
Why did other mothers do this too? The reason was the second characteristic evident in many of the Lebensborn children sitting beside me in Hadamar. Shame is a powerful emotion, and the political climate in post-war Germany was hardly conducive to honesty about involvement with an organisation as reviled and feared as the SS.
One of the men in our group talked openly about the guilt and the shame that had blighted his life. His story opened my eyes to another aspect of the Lebensborn programme. Hannes Dollinger had grown up in Bavaria, where the couple he thought of as his parents owned an inn. But after he started school, he heard rumours that he was a foundling. He asked his parents whether this was true, but they refused to answer and when he persevered they punished him and forbade him from ever raising the subject again.
It was not until he was fifty that he learned the truth. Just as Frau Harte had once broken the news to me that Hermann and Gisela were not my real parents, a former employee of Hannes’ family told him on her deathbed that he had been adopted. That alone was a shock, but the story of how he came to Bavaria was worse.
Norway was the northernmost country occupied by Hitler’s army. The Wehrmacht invaded in April 1940 and from then until the end of the war, Norway was run by a collaborationist government which enthusiastically did the Nazis’ bidding.
Himmler had for many years viewed the largely blond and blue-eyed local population as de facto Aryans. He and his officials actively encouraged liaisons between SS or Wehrmacht troops and Norwegian women, establishing a network of Norwegian Lebensborn homes in which the resulting babies were born, then shipped back to the Reich and handed over to suitable couples either for adoption or fostering.
The legacy of this collaboration was long and bitter. Unlike the desperate bonfires built by Lebensborn staff across Germany, in Norway the SS never managed to destroy its files. As a result, after the war thousands of Lebensborn babies and their mothers were identified and faced the fury of their countrymen. Women and their children were harassed by their neighbours or schoolmates. Police arrested between 3,000 and 5,000 women who had slept with German soldiers and marched them off to internment camps. The head of Norway’s largest mental hospital publicly stated that women who had mated with Germans were ‘mental defectives’ and declared that 80 per cent of their children were retarded.
Hannes discovered that he was one of these children. He began researching his origins and found that his real name was Otto Ackermann and that he was born in September 1942 in a Lebensborn home near Oslo. From there he had been sent like a parcel across Germany, first to a Lebensborn home in Klosterheide, near Berlin, then on to Kohren-Sahlis, the home in which I had been raised.
Eventually, after being transported to the Lebensborn home in what was now Poland, he was handed over to his adoptive parents in Bavaria. It took him many years to retrace this long and complicated route. Finally he managed to obtain the name of his biological mother, but by the time he discovered this, she had died. His father, a Wehrmacht soldier, had been killed in the last months of the war and his adoptive parents had also passed away.
In many ways, Hannes was typical of our generation of Germans – ironically, since by birth he wasn’t actually German. He was then a local government official and a stickler for doing things by the book. He informed the federal government of his real name and that he was originally Norwegian, and asked to change his identity documents to make them accurate. For his trouble, the government declared him stateless – and by law stateless people were forbidden from employment in any public office. It took two long and difficult years before he was offered German citizenship. Even then, to get it he had to give up his original real name.
It was heartbreaking to listen to Hannes’ story. So much of it mirrored my own life – the home at Kohren-Sahlis, the problem of being declared stateless – but his experiences seemed to have been much worse. I began to feel almost lucky, and perhaps grateful, that I knew so little about where I had come from.
But at the same time the question was still hanging over me. I had learned a great deal about the Lebensborn programme and about life in its homes, but I did not know how I fitted in to this history. The documents I had found in Gisela’s room showed that I had been fostered as part of something called ‘Germanisation’. Neither Ruthild’s story nor Hannes’ contained anything to shed light on this mysterious word.
And then another member of the group stood up to speak, and I began to see the worst horror of Himmler’s terrible experiment – and how I had come to be a part of it.
Folker Heinecke was six months older than me. He was a big, well-dressed man who had made a small his fortune as a shipping broker in Hamburg and London. Though he was financiall
y well off, for much of his life he had been deeply troubled by the knowledge that he had been raised in a Lebensborn home, before being put up for adoption by the home in 1943 before the age of three.
My first memory is of being in a room with thirty other children. I remember these people coming in, while we were lined up like pet dogs to be chosen for a new home. The people were to be my parents. They went away and came back a day later. My ‘mother’ apparently wanted a girl, but my ‘father’ wanted a boy who would be able to take on his family business in the future. I laid my head on his knee and that did it for him – I was to be their son.
Folker’s new family was financially secure and well connected. Adalbert and Minna Heinecke were fanatical Nazis and owned a successful Hamburg shipping company. Adalbert was also deaf and, under Lebensborn’s strict rules, should not have been allowed to foster – let alone adopt – one of its precious children.
But Adalbert was also a personal friend of Heinrich Himmler: both the Reichsführer and Martin Bormann (Hitler’s personal secretary and one of the most powerful men in the Nazi regime) visited the family’s home.
Like many other Germans, the Heineckes kept a small flock of hens. As Himmler had once been a chicken farmer and was a firm believer in applying the principles of poultry breeding to the human species, it was only natural that he and Adalbert talked as they studied the family’s birds. When they had finished, Himmler agreed to rubber-stamp Folker’s adoption.
Folker remembered a happy childhood, insulated from hunger or want due to his family’s wealth. Even at the height of the Allied assault on Germany, when he watched RAF bombers weave through the flak and searchlights to launch raids into enemy territory, his chief memory was of finding the war exciting. It was not until after the war that he discovered he had been adopted.
One of the local kids I was playing with said: ‘You know you’re a bastard, don’t you, they’re not your real mum and dad.’ But back then I didn’t really know what that meant.
His parents never talked to Folker about where he had come from or how he came to be adopted. When his father retired, he took over the family shipping business and enjoyed a successful career.
In 1975, after his parents died, he found among his father’s papers a series of official documents he had never seen before. These recorded that he had been born at Oderberg in Upper Silesia: this area had been annexed into Hitler’s Reich, but after the war it had been transferred back into the territories of the new republic of Poland. The papers also indicated (falsely, as it turned out) that both of his biological parents had died – hence the need for his adoption.
The discovery prompted Folker to investigate his origins. He approached the German Red Cross, the British Army of Occupation, the American authorities and more than thirty other agencies and church offices: slowly he began piecing together the confusing jigsaw of his past. But Poland was then still locked away behind the Iron Curtain, and it was difficult even for a man of his wealth to gain access to its archives. It wasn’t until the fall of communism and the restructuring of Eastern Europe after 1989 that he finally unearthed the truth.
By 1941, Himmler’s great hope that the Lebensborn programme would produce tens of thousands of racially pure babies was fading fast. In part this was due to the rigorous selection criteria, which led more than half the pregnant women who applied to give birth in the network of homes to be rejected.
Nor had the SS lived up to its leader’s expectations: far from meeting the minimum requirement of fathering at least four children, the birth rate stayed stubbornly around an average of 1.5 per man. The 600 new battalions of Lebensborn babies predicted by its chief medical officer Gregor Ebner were a long way off – if they were achievable at all.
The Thousand Year Reich needed its future warriors to survive. Hitler’s vision had always been for a total and global war, followed by permanent occupation of conquered lands. But by 1941 the war was claiming thousands of German lives a week. The Lebensborn homes could not hope to fill the gap. And so Himmler decided on a new strategy: he issued secret instructions to his troops and officials to kidnap ‘racially valuable’ children from the countries they overran.
The wholesale stealing of children – could it really be true? Shockingly, it was: there was even a recording of Himmler giving a private speech to SS officers in which he justified the policy.
What good blood there is of our kind in these peoples, we will take in; we will steal the children if necessary and bring them up here with us.
The name given to this plan was Germanisation. It was the word on my documents, which I had never understood: now I began to learn what it meant in practice.
Folker’s tragedy was that at the age of two he looked German: he had blond hair, blue eyes and looked for all the world like a pure-blooded Aryan boy. Because of this he was snatched from his parents by SS officers and taken to a medical institute for full racial assessment.
I was measured everywhere – head size, body size – and doctors checked to be sure that I had no ‘Jewish Aspects’. When I passed those tests the Nazis declared I was capable of being Germanised and shipped me off to a Lebensborn home in the Fatherland.
After a brief stay in Bad Polzin, he was then sent on to Kohren-Sahlis. There were no completely reliable dates for his arrival there, but from what he had discovered it sounded as though we must have been in the home at the same time. The possibility excited me and I tried hard to unearth any memories from the back of my mind, but I could recall nothing more about the place. It was so frustrating to meet someone with whom I might have shared my earliest years and yet to be unable to dredge up any recollection of the place or people.
There were other similarities in our stories. Folker’s documents indicated that he had been picked up from Kohren-Sahlis by the Heinecke family. That was where Hermann and Gisela had come to collect me. Had I been lined up for inspection, one of the ‘pet dogs’, as Folker put it, to be examined by my prospective foster parents?
Folker’s investigations had also revealed that Lebensborn frequently gave new identities to the kidnapped foreign babies shipped to its homes and issued false documents proclaiming them to be either German orphans or ethnically Aryan children of the German diaspora: Volksdeutsche. Once again I recognised the word Folker used: it was on the papers I found when clearing out Gisela’s room.
The clues were beginning to add up. According to my documents I had been born Erika Matko, a Volksdeutsches Mädchen. I had been brought from Sauerbrunn to the Lebensborn home at Kohren-Sahlis for Germanisation, before being handed to the von Oelhafens to be raised as a ‘real’ German girl. I was part of the scheme to ‘Schenkt dem Führer ein Kind’. I was one of Hitler’s children.
It was horrific – and yet for the first time in years I felt I was finally getting close to solving the mystery of where I came from.
The biggest question I had been struggling with was whether I really was (or had once been) Erika Matko. The Slovenian government’s response to my letter had seemed to prove that I could not be, and yet the few original documents I had been able to find all showed the opposite.
Folker Heinecke’s story suggested an answer to the puzzle. His investigations had led him to believe that the name recorded on his Lebensborn papers might not be genuine and that the birthplace listed might also be false. The Lebensborn head office evidently went to great lengths to erase the original identity of those children stolen from the Reich’s occupied territories. Folker had discovered documents in the archives of the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal that told the story of a baby named Aleksander Litau, stolen from parents living in Alnova on the Crimean Peninsula. There were strong indications that Folker might have been this child: the dates matched, as did the Lebensborn homes the little boy had been shipped off to. Could I have suffered a similar fate?
Folker had ultimately run into the same bureaucratic stone wall that had previously defeated me: the documents he needed to confirm or disprove this theory were
almost certainly somewhere in the ITS files in Bad Arolsen, but the archive was still not yet fully open. It was, he told us, painful to be so close and yet still so far away from the truth.
All I really want is to find the grave of my biological mother and father. I don’t want to end up driven bitter and mad by wondering what might have happened to them. I just want to know who I was and what I might have been if things hadn’t turned out the way they did.
I have to keep searching to find something that might lead me to who my parents really were and where they are buried. Then I will have done my duty as a son. I will have honoured my real parents.
I was determined that I too would keep searching and that one day I would track down my true family. Meeting the other Lebensborn children – fellow survivors of such a terrible experiment – gave me renewed strength to restart my own investigations. Now I knew how and where to begin: Nuremberg.
There was one final conversation I needed to have before making the long drive home to Osnabrück. One of the few non-Lebensborn people in the room that day was a man called Josef Focks. I had not heard of him before but he had established a reputation for tracking down documents and information about families who had become separated during or after the war. For his efforts the press had nicknamed him ‘the Father Finder’.
I spoke with him briefly and explained my situation. I described the difficulty I had faced in getting information from official archives and told him about the documents I possessed showing me to have once been Erika Matko from St Sauerbrunn, and how this had been explicitly contradicted first by the Austrian authorities and then by the government of Slovenia.
Herr Focks listened and took notes. When I finished, he agreed to help me.
I was grateful, of course, but to be completely honest I was thinking more about the enquiries I would make in Nuremberg than what the Father Finder might unearth.
Hitler's Forgotten Children Page 11