What happened to Barbara Paciorkiewicz was typical. She was born in 1938 in Gdynia, near Gdansk in Poland. Her family name was Gajzler but, because her mother had died and her father had disappeared, she and her sister were separated, each sent to live with one of their grandparents.
Gdansk was in the part of Poland under German occupation and the Nazis had renamed it Danzig. In 1942, when Barbara was four, the Youth Welfare Office issued instructions for all children to be brought to the regional youth welfare office in Łodz. Her grandmother took Barbara and was forced to leave her there.
There were a lot of children in the centre. Each was measured – heads, chests and hips – and weighed on scales. Their faces were photographed from three angles. The people making these measurements were some of Himmler’s race examiners: they were looking for racially suitable children to Germanise. Barbara had blond hair and looked Nordic. She was shipped off to a succession of different homes in Łodz.
Here I was subjected to more tests – always there were more tests. We were forbidden upon pain of punishment to speak Polish. Every one of us was crying.
Barbara’s account of her kidnapping was similar to others I had heard. But her recollections of life in the Lebensborn home at Bad Polzin gave me new information about what my own experience might have been like.
This is where my memories truly begin. I can remember exactly where we were kept, the conditions there, and the treatment we received. There was a separation between us stolen children and those who had been born in the home.
The stolen children were kept on the ground floor of the building. The babies born in the home were kept on the floor above and we were never allowed to mix with them; nor were the staff who looked after these babies allowed to mix with the staff in charge of us. It was as if there was a hierarchy of our value: apparently the Nazis viewed the babies as more important than us children brought in for Germanisation.
In the home we were constantly given medical tests – I think it must have been every day. We were in a big room on the ground floor which had a large semi-circular wall of windows. I have been there since and this room still exists: it looks almost the same. There was a very sinister atmosphere in the room and we were individually taken into a side room and given injections by a doctor. I fear now that these were to tranquillise us: I cannot see any other reason for it. We were terrified of these injections. All the children were crying in that room: no one ever laughed.
Even for the precious Aryan babies like Guntram Weber, the regime in Lebensborn homes was cold to the point of severity. They were separated from their mothers immediately after birth, and kept apart for the next twenty-four hours. Thereafter they were allowed just twenty minutes together every four hours: even during that brief period of contact the SS staff strongly discouraged mothers from caressing or talking to their children.
The older children were monitored constantly, and reports made about their behaviour. Uncleanliness, bedwetting, farting, nail-biting and masturbation (which older boys were told on arrival was forbidden) were enough to ensure expulsion: these rejects were shipped off to forced education camps where they were brutalised or used as slave labour.
This Spartan regimen was intended to produce strong and ruthless future leaders for the Master Race. But children need love, not unyielding discipline: Barbara Paciorkiewicz remembered clearly how the rules frequently produced the opposite effect to Himmler’s objective.
The children often reacted to them by wetting their beds. In the mornings when this was discovered, the children were beaten for this: even if only one had wet the bed, all of us were punished.
Himmler’s overall plan was the same for both types of Lebensborn children: wherever possible, for the duration of the war, they were to be handed over to carefully vetted foster parents who would raise them as model Aryans. After Germany’s eventual victory, the boys were to be sent to elite schools – the network of SS-run Nationalpolitische Erziehungsanstalten – where they would receive a strong physical and political education. The girls were to be sent to schools run by the Bund Deutscher Mädel (the female equivalent of the Hitler Youth) and trained to become housewives and mothers.
Barbara had also uncovered the way in which Lebensborn deliberately obscured the true identities of children stolen from the occupied territories. First it cut an essential link to their home country by forbidding them to speak their own language; then it told would-be foster parents that the children were the orphans of fallen German soldiers. The men who ran the programme – those who had been indicted and then acquitted at the Nuremberg trial – knew this to be a lie but Himmler’s orders made it clear that for youngsters like Barbara and me, every single trace of our previous life in Poland or Yugoslavia was to be erased.
Barbara’s foster parents were from Lemgo in North Rhine-Westphalia. The Rossmanns were in their fifties and had two grown-up sons who had been drafted into the Wehrmacht: they had also had a daughter who had died of scarlet fever when she was nine. Neither was, as far as Barbara had been able to discover, a member of the Nazi Party. Herr Rossman was the director of a school and his wife was a housewife.
Although they were good and kind people who longed for a child to replace the daughter they had lost, even as a young child Barbara felt out of place in her new family. She suffered from bad nightmares in which unknown men came in through an open window to steal her.
There was always an air of uneasiness at home. When I entered a room, everyone stopped talking. And I always asked myself: ‘What is it about me that makes this happen?’
Back in Poland, Barbara’s grandmother had never given up hope of finding her. At the end of the war she contacted the Red Cross: it located documents showing where Barbara was living. Not long after, she was taken from her foster family and placed in a temporary children’s home run by the British Army. Six months later, she was put on a train to Poland. She was eleven years old and had never been told about her biological parents, nor that she was anything other than a normal German child.
I was very frightened and confused: I still thought the Rossmanns were my real parents and I didn’t know anything about Poland. It didn’t mean anything to me. I didn’t speak Polish and I didn’t even know I had a grandmother. It all seemed like a terrible journey into the unknown.
I realised that I had never given any thought to what had happened to other stolen children after the end of the war. It had never occurred to me that some children might have been traced and sent back to a country they could not remember. Barbara’s story made me wonder whether, had I been given the choice, I would have wanted to be returned to Yugoslavia.
The journey to Poland took a terribly long time. The train sometimes stood for days in a siding. And then, suddenly, I heard people around me shout out ‘Poland, Poland’ and everyone was happy. I felt no joy when I arrived.
We were taken to a Red Cross camp at Katowice. It was chaos with people running around shouting out names. My grandmother had sent my uncle and he was shouting, but I had no idea who he was or what he was saying because he was speaking Polish. It was only when he shouted ‘Gajzler/Rossmann’ that I realised. And I also realised at that moment that I had completely lost my identity.
In the ruins of post-war Poland, a country with every reason to hate Germany, Barbara felt confused and isolated. Her uncle and his wife had been in a Nazi forced labour camp together with older children stolen from Gdynia but who were not deemed racially valuable.
Barbara was taken to visit the former Stutthof concentration camp near Gdansk. Her uncle forced her to look at the piles of children’s shoes and the gas chambers: 85,000 people had died here and he wanted her to see and understand what the Germans had done. But she still thought of herself as German. She found it impossible to believe what her uncle said.
I thought German people were all good: that was how I had been brought up. It was even worse in school: the children played games in the playground in which Hitler was the bad guy. Because I w
as German, I was always picked as Hitler: but I didn’t mind – in fact, in my ignorance, I shouted out with pride that Hitler was my uncle.
I always thought that a terrible mistake had been made: that I had been mistaken for someone else, and this was why a good German girl like me was in this strange place.
Barbara Paciorkiewicz spoke quietly and with dignity. But in her story I recognised the truth of our Lebensspuren motto. As Simone Weil had realised, all of us were still desperate to find and connect with our roots. Not being able to – because Lebensborn had destroyed our original identities and because our foster families often erected a wall of secrecy – had eaten away at the fabric of our lives for decades. Barbara spoke for all of us when she said how it had affected her, and how important our new organisation could be.
All my life I never felt good enough – nor did I know really who I was or where I was truly from. It hurts very much inside. I’ve always wanted to ask questions but until recently there was no one to ask. Now I want to talk about this, even though it hurts, so the world does not forget the terrible idea of stealing children and racial tests. It must never happen again.
The question was how to achieve this. There were only a few dozen of us at our first meeting – a fraction of the number of children born or kidnapped into Lebensborn – and already it was clear that there were differences between us. Some people felt we should step out of the shadows and hold a press conference; others wanted to concentrate on building a memorial in Wernigerode, on the site of the old Lebensborn home. I sensed then that there would be difficulties in the years ahead.
SIXTEEN | TAKEN
‘At 6.30 a.m. about 430 children aged between one and eighteen years were brought by cars to the railway track. The children had only such hand luggage as they could carry themselves. For breakfast they got black coffee and a small piece of bread.’
GERMAN RED CROSS MEMO, AUGUST 1942
In October 2007, the final pieces of the jigsaw fell into place. The previous two years had been busy. I was still working in my physiotherapy practice (though beginning to think about retiring) and Lebensspuren occupied much of my spare time.
We went public in 2006: around forty Lebensborn children attended our second meeting in Wernigerode, along with journalists from the German and international press. Articles began appearing in quality newspapers and the BBC broadcast a story around the world about what they called Hitler’s Children. Guntram Weber, Gisela Heidenreich and I answered a never-ending stream of questions, convinced that openness was vital to educate the public about the truth of Himmler’s Master Race experiment.
The publicity seemed to work. Gradually it became possible to discuss Lebensborn in public and the more it was talked about, the more enquiries Lebensspuren received from people who suspected they might have been part of the programme. The following year, more than sixty people came to our annual meeting in Wernigerode.
It would be pleasant, though probably naive, to believe it was our frankness that had helped open the archives, which had previously proved so resistant to giving out information. But for whatever reason, formerly unhelpful organisations finally began to open their files. The most important was the International Tracing Service in Bad Arolsen.
The ITS had long been criticised for refusing fully to open up its millions of files. It had claimed, with the backing of the German government, that federal law required one hundred years to pass from the creation of records to their public release. It was an odd argument given that, due to its multinational funding and oversight arrangements, ITS was not technically subject to German law. Its critics alleged that a desire to repress information about the Holocaust in Germany was the real reason for its secrecy.
The fact that in January 2000 all eleven governments sitting on the International Commission of the ITS had endorsed a call for the opening of Nazi archives worldwide seemed to support this view. In March 2006, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum publicly accused the International Tracing Service and the International Committee of the Red Cross of obstruction: ‘The ITS and the ICRC have consistently refused to cooperate … and have kept the archive closed.’
Two months later, the ITS announced that it would finally open its archives in the autumn of 2007.
For seven years I had waited to see the documents it held about me and my family. Two requests had produced only an acknowledgement that there were relevant files but that it needed time ‘to evaluate’ them, followed by a letter in 2003 asking me for any information I had discovered myself.
When I finally saw them, the documents told me a great deal about both my biological family and Gisela von Oelhafen. The first was a set of papers detailing what had happened to Johann Matko: they showed the dates he had been arrested for partisan activity and held in Mauthausen concentration camp. His name appeared on several lists of political prisoners made by the Nazis: I could not see any reason why the ITS had withheld these from me for so long.
The second tranche of documents came from Lebensborn files: these showed that Ingrid von Oelhafen was once known as Erika Matko from St Sauerbrunn in Yugoslavia. They even included a copy of an insurance policy that Lebensborn had taken out in my name. I had wasted valuable time trying to locate St Sauerbrunn in Austria, while all along the ITS had withheld clear evidence showing I came from Yugoslavia.
The third bundle of records I saw was a series of letters from various branches of the Red Cross dating back to the immediate post-war years. These showed that in 1949 two separate agencies had been searching for me, with a view to returning me to my real family. The first was Caritas, the international Catholic relief organisation, which was responsible for overseeing the work of all welfare organisations accredited to the United Nations. Caritas officials had been tracking children stolen from Nazi-occupied countries – and in particular from Yugoslavia – and must have found my name on the list of transports. They had written to the Yugoslavian Red Cross asking for help in locating me.
At the same time the International branch of the Red Cross, which then had overall responsibility for tracking down and repatriating displaced persons, was also searching for me. It, too, had written to the Yugoslavian Red Cross in an attempt to confirm my true identity.
Surprisingly, given the difficulties caused by the Cold War and their focus on creating a new, unified country, Yugoslavian officials responded. They did not have much in the way of documents themselves – most Nazi files had been destroyed in the fighting or in desperate last-minute bonfires – but they were able to issue an urgent request to the International Tracing Service office in Hamburg. It asked for social workers from the German branch of the Red Cross to visit the von Oelhafen family in Hamburg to ascertain whether I was living with them and whether I was Erika Matko.
I thought back; in 1949 I was not in Hamburg but in the children’s home at Langeoog to which Gisela had sent me the day after we escaped to the west. Unless my foster parents chose to help them, the officials would have had no chance of finding and interviewing me. The final document showed that Gisela, at least, was not terribly forthcoming.
GERMAN RED CROSS,
Central Zone, Hamburg
25 October, 1950
To: The International Tracing Service, Child Search Branch, Arolsen
Subject: MATKO, Erika, born on 11/11/1941 in St Sauerbrunn
The wife of von Oelhafen was visited by us. We could not get information from the husband because he does not currently live in Hamburg.
Frau von Oelhafen has been away on a trip for some time. She picked up in person the child identified above from the children’s home Kohren-Sahlis at Leipzig and therefore should be able to provide the best information.
However, the only thing she has on paper is a vaccination certificate from Kohren-Sahlis, of which we enclose a copy. Frau von Oelhafen drove to Kohren-Sahlis at the instigation of The Lebensborn Society in Munich. There she was told that Erika Matko was an ethnic German child.
At that point the child Dietma
r Holzapfel had already been living with the von Oelhafens for half a year: he had been picked up from the Municipal baby nursing home at Munich. The father of this child is missing at Stalingrad.
Erika MATKO will continue to remain as a foster child with Frau von Oelhafen. An adoption of the child is not intended. Frau von Oelhafen is always happy to make additional information available. She also has a self-interest in learning about the origin of the child, so that she can answer the child’s questions. However, she cannot contribute to any further details, having no documents about the child.
The von Oelhafens also fled from the Russians, and in doing so lost their belongings. Frau von Oelhafen remembers that she probably received a transfer note [for Erika Matko] from the children’s home at Kohren-Sahlis. This was lost while she was on the run.
We regret that we can currently give you no further information. We would be very grateful if you would inform us of the outcome of your negotiations in St Sauerbrunn.
Without Gisela’s cooperation – and because Lebensborn had destroyed all records of my true identity – there was no hope of finding my biological parents, much less returning me to them. All the organisations involved abandoned their efforts at this point.
I was astonished. Gisela had never once told me that the Red Cross had contacted her – not even during the years when I was struggling to obtain official documents from the German government. Nor had she ever even hinted that she knew my original identity. Worst of all, she had misled the social workers: she had told them that the ‘transfer note’, given to her and Hermann when I was handed over to their care by Lebensborn, had been lost when we escaped from the Russian sector in 1947. Yet I had found that same document when I cleared out her room in the 1990s.
Hitler's Forgotten Children Page 16