Hitler's Forgotten Children

by Ingrid Von Oelhafen

  I find it hard, even now, to speak badly of Gisela. Deep down I still want to be loved by her, even though she is long gone. But I have tried to put aside these emotions, to recognise this for what it was: a betrayal. She knowingly hid the truth from me. I was glad – happy, even – to know that someone had been looking for me all those years ago, but I was very hurt to learn how that search had been obstructed by the woman I had once called my mother.

  That same month I made my second visit to Slovenia. I organised my trip to coincide with the annual meeting of stolen children in Celje, and I arranged to travel on from there to Rogaška Slatina, where I was to meet up again with Maria Matko and her family. I was also being filmed for a German television programme: the reporter had arranged for me to spend a day with local historians in Maribor.

  I don’t know whether it was the presence of the cameras or simply that the Slovenian authorities had managed to unearth more evidence, but my welcome there was warmer than it had been two years earlier, and the meeting much more productive. At last I learned exactly what had happened in Celje – and the truth about Erika Matko.

  The occupation of Yugoslavia in the spring of 1941 began well for Germany. Its troops advanced swiftly through the country and in just ten days the Yugoslav High Command capitulated. On 16 April, the day of surrender, the Gestapo moved into Celje and began to arrest local anti-Nazi partisans. Three days later, Himmler himself arrived to inspect the town’s ancient prison, Stari Pisker. In the coming months it would be used for the torture and execution of hundreds of resistance fighters.

  But unlike other countries overrun by the German Blitzkrieg, Yugoslavia was never fully conquered. Resistance was organised by the charismatic Josip Tito. On 4 July 1941, he issued a secretly printed call to rise up against the Nazi occupiers.

  Peoples of Yugoslavia: Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Montenegrins, Macedonians and others! Now is the time, the hour has struck to rise like one man, in the battle against the invaders and hirelings, killers of our peoples. Do not falter in the face of any enemy terror. Answer terror with savage blows at the most vital points of the Fascist occupation bandits. Destroy everything – everything that is of use to the Fascist invaders. Do not let our railways carry equipment and other things that serve the Fascist hordes … Workers, Peasants, Citizens, and Youth of Yugoslavia… battle against the Fascist occupation hordes who are striving to dominate the whole world.

  This led to an intensive guerrilla campaign against the Germans. By September 1941, there were at least 70,000 resistance fighters active in Yugoslavia. Tito’s partisans engaged in classic hit-and-run tactics and when the Germans launched a major counter-offensive against the rebels, they simply retreated into the mountains. Hitler’s response to this (and partisan activity across all the occupied countries) was the Nacht und Nebel decree. The phrase meant ‘night and fog’: in practice, it was an order to murder anyone who dared oppose Nazi rule. On 7 December, the instructions were sent out to commanders in the field.

  Within the occupied territories, communistic elements and other circles hostile to Germany have increased their efforts against the German State and the occupying powers …

  The amount and the danger of these machinations oblige us to take severe measures as a deterrent. First of all the following directives are to be applied:

  1. Within the occupied territories, the adequate punishment for offences committed against the German State or the occupying power which endanger their security or a state of readiness is, on principle, the death penalty.

  2. The offences listed in paragraph I as a rule are to be dealt with in the occupied countries only if it is probable that sentence of death will be passed upon the offender, or at least the principal offender, and if the trial and the execution can be completed in a very short time. Otherwise the offenders, at least the principal offenders, are to be taken to Germany.

  3. Prisoners taken to Germany are subject to military procedure only if particular military interests require this. Should German or foreign authorities enquire about such prisoners, they are to be told that they have been arrested but that the proceedings do not allow any further information.

  4. The commanders in the occupied territories and the court authorities within the framework of their jurisdiction are personally responsible for the observance of this decree.

  The same day, Himmler issued instructions to his Gestapo and SS forces.

  After lengthy consideration, it is the will of the Führer that the measures taken against those who are guilty of offences against the Reich or against the occupation forces in occupied areas should be altered. The Führer is of the opinion that in such cases penal servitude or even a hard labour sentence for life will be regarded as a sign of weakness. An effective and lasting deterrent can be achieved only by the death penalty or by taking measures that will leave the family and the population uncertain as to the fate of the offender. Deportation to Germany serves this purpose.

  It was a deliberate rejection of the laws of war. No longer would the Geneva Convention or any other regulations protect the civilian population of occupied territories. On 12 December, Feldmarschall Wilhelm Keitel, Chief of the German Supreme High Command of German armed forces, issued his own re-enforcement of Hitler’s decree to Wehrmacht troops throughout the expanded German Reich.

  Efficient and enduring intimidation can only be achieved either by capital punishment or by measures by which the relatives of the criminals do not know the fate of the criminal.

  In order to nip disorders in the bud the sternest measures must be applied at the first sign of insurrection. It should also be taken into consideration that in the countries in question a human life is often valueless. In a reprisal for the life of a German soldier, the general rule should be capital punishment for 50–100 communists. The manner of execution must have a frightening effect.

  But the campaign failed to terrorise the population into submission. Tito’s Partisan Army grew in numbers and effectiveness. By the middle of 1942, Himmler issued orders for an even greater crackdown on resistance. On 25 June he put Obergruppenführer Erwin Rösener, Head of SS forces in the region, in charge of anti-resistance operations and ordered him to murder or imprison all families suspected of involvement with the rebels.

  Rösener planned six separate Aktionen, or campaigns, in the Lower Styria area, centred on Maribor. In the first of these, on 22 July 1942, 1,000 people were arrested and brought to Celje. The men were separated from their families and one hundred of them were lined up against the walls of Stari Pisker, then summarily executed by firing squad. The killings were photographed by Nazi cameramen as a warning against partisan activity. The images were processed at a local photographer’s studio: he made extra copies in secret and hid them until the end of the war. It was sobering to hold these pictures in my hands. Among the murdered men that day was Ignaz Matko. Was he one of the bodies lying against the courtyard wall or being lifted on to a stretcher by those who would be shot next?

  Some adults were held as hostages, to ensure compliance from the surrounding towns and villages with future Aktionen. The remainder were shipped to concentration camps like Auschwitz, where they were murdered or worked and starved to death. Their children were transported to Frohnleiten, in Austria, for racial examinations. Those deemed suitably Aryan – there were not many – were taken away for Germanisation, the rest were sent to ‘education camps’ where they were treated brutally and suffered from hunger and disease.

  The second Aktion was scheduled for the beginning of the following month. All families in the nearby villages were ordered to report to the school at Celje on 3 August. Johann and Helena Matko were among the hundreds of families who arrived at the schoolyard that morning with their three children, Tanja, Ludvig and Erika. Heavily armed soldiers quickly separated them into three groups: men, women and children, who were pulled from their parents and taken inside.

  Once again, a photographer recorded the event. One picture showed families lined u
p against the outside wall; another captured the moment when the troops separated them. In this frame a woman in a headscarf was being restrained by a Wehrmacht officer while a second soldier, his rifle slung from his shoulder, stood in front of a mother carrying a baby: she seemed to be pleading with him. A third photograph was shot inside the school: in a crude wooden structure, lined with straw, children and babies were being undressed by unidentified helpers. One little boy was struggling; the faces of others, though, were blank.

  Looking at these pictures I felt two quite separate emotions. Somewhere in the crowded yard or among the babies in the schoolroom was Erika Matko: these grainy black and white photographs recorded the day I was stolen from my family. My first reaction was fear. I do not wish to sound melodramatic but I felt a shiver run through my body, a sensation of loneliness and vulnerability. But there was anger, too, at the people who had treated children like this. These soldiers had snatched babies from their mothers and imprisoned them in what amounted to a cattle stall.

  Throughout my life I have tried to hide my emotions, to bury them so deeply that the feelings of abandonment and powerlessness could not rise up to engulf me. Those photographs stripped away my defences. I was Erika once again.

  The other children and I were kept in the schoolroom for two days. We were crudely assessed for racial value: blond hair, light-coloured skin and blue eyes were taken as a sign of Aryan blood, while brown hair and dark skin or eyes were the marks of worthless Slavonic ancestry. I was designated valuable while Tanja and Ludvig were rejected. They were sent outside and handed back to our parents.

  In total, 430 children were judged to be Aryan. We were held in the schoolroom and then taken to the train station. The older children carried babies like me in baskets. The German Red Cross (DRK) was on hand to supervise this children’s transport. The DRK’s leadership were committed Nazis – even to the point of wearing uniforms and ceremonial daggers – but below them was a civilian army of volunteers. I saw a report by one of these workers, a woman named Anna Rath.

  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.

  The embarkation went smoothly. At 10.30 a.m., a delay of one hour was announced. The train started but only travelled until 2.45 p.m. The children then had to endure a four-hour wait: during this time neither the Red Cross nor officials from the National Socialist Peoples’ Welfare Organisation provided any food for them. Fresh water was only brought by a DRK helper who accompanied the train.

  Once they arrived in Frohnleiten, the DRK helpers and the young children (two to five years of age) had to walk to the resettlement camp, carrying suitcases and bundles. The children were half-naked and hungry, some with very dirty nappies: this was because there were no clothes to change them. They were screaming and crying.

  When we arrived [at the camp], there was another delay for the children because no food was ready for them. They had to stay outside in the courtyard and in a meadow. Finally, at 5 p.m. the children were allowed to go into the eating room. The sixteen DRK accompanying assistants, although tired and weary themselves (they had been on duty since 4.30 a.m.), had to look after the children because the all the camp staff, save for four people, were on vacation.

  This was how the Nazis treated the children they stole. This was how my life in their hands began. No wonder, then, that I have struggled all my life with a longing to be loved.

  In Frohnleiten there were more tests. Himmler’s race examiners prodded and poked us, measuring and recording our every characteristic before assigning us to one of four categories. The top two ensured a place in a Lebensborn home; the others guaranteed a ticket to a re-education camp. Among those assessing the kidnapped Yugoslavian children was Inge Viermetz, the female official who had been tried and acquitted at Nuremberg: she was operating on written instructions to ‘take only young children who have not yet reached school age’. But it appeared Lebensborn was not the only organisation that wanted us. Officials from VoMI, the agency Himmler had set up to ‘protect’ ethnic Germans living outside the old Reich, wanted their share of the children who were to become the future leaders of the Master Race. According to testimony given at Nuremberg: ‘a real competition for these children arose between VoMI and Lebensborn, and it was thanks to Frau Viermetz’s efforts that Lebensborn won in the end’.

  I looked at all this evidence and marvelled again at the decision of the judges at Nuremberg to acquit Viermetz and the other senior Lebensborn officials. She had quite literally handled stolen goods: she had decided the fates of hundreds of children, from all over the occupied countries – sending some into a programme that erased their identities and the rest to camps where many died. How could this woman have been declared innocent?

  I was moved from Frohnleiten to another camp, at Werdenfels, near Regensburg in Bavaria. At the end of 1942, Lebensborn sent Emilie Edelmann – Gisela Heidenreich’s mother – to supervise further racial selection tests. She must have decided that I was good enough: the forms were signed and I was shipped off to Kohren-Sahlis.

  Ours was not the last transport of Yugoslavian children. The documents I saw in Maribor revealed that there had been four further Aktionens in which hundreds more families were summoned to Celje for racial examination, sifting and separation. They too were divided up between Lebensborn homes and re-education camps.

  The officials who showed me these papers had one more revelation for me. Johann and Helena had arrived at the schoolyard with three children. When they were permitted to leave, the records showed that they went home with three children – Tanja and Ludvig, and a baby girl called Erika. I knew that my sister and brother had been handed back to my parents, but who was this other child? Somehow Erika Matko had been simultaneously on the train to Frohnleiten and on the journey back to Rogaška Slatina with Johann and Helena. It made no sense.

  It was Maria Matko who led me towards the answer. We met in her house the day after my visit to Maribor. After the initial shock of the DNA results she had accepted that I was her sister-in-law. Now, with her help, I was finally able to piece together what had happened to me.

  On the day that the children were handed back to Johann and Helena, the Nazis executed several suspected partisans in Celje prison. Witnesses recalled that the families waiting outside the schoolyard heard the volleys of shots. The children of those murdered men and women were being held with me inside the schoolroom: some were now orphans.

  When Tanja and Ludvig were returned to her, Helena must have complained that her third child was missing. Perhaps to appease her, or because they did not know what to do with it, the Germans gave her an orphaned baby. This was the girl who grew up as Erika Matko.

  I was torn between pain, anger and bewilderment. My mother must have known that the baby thrust into her arms was not her own. It wouldn’t have looked the same nor would it have smelled right, in that indefinable way that mothers know the smell of their own baby. So how could she have accepted this cynical substitution?

  The only explanation I could imagine was that she did not dare to argue; that the sound of the firing squads made her fearful for her own life and those of her husband and children. But rational understanding was one thing; emotion quite another. For almost sixty years I had struggled with not knowing who I really was; for the past seven years I had been on a long and harrowing journey to unravel the mystery of my past and discover how I had been transformed from Erika Matko to Ingrid von Oelhafen.

  Now I knew. And it didn’t help at all.

  SEVENTEEN | SEARCHING

  ‘What are we doing? I asked myself. What in God’s name are we doing?’

  GITTA SERENY: FORMER UNRRA

  CHILD WELFARE OFFICER

  I was angry at everyone. Angry with Hitler and Himmler for the orders to kidnap me in the first place; angry with Inge Viermetz and the Leb
ensborn officials for concealing my true identity and reinventing me as a German child; angry with the soldiers who had given my parents another child in my place. I hated what the Nazis had done to me and to all the other victims of their obsession with pure blood and the Aryan master race. All the resentment and hurt I had suppressed in years gone past was rising to the surface.

  My rage was also focused on those much closer to home. Gisela and Hermann von Oelhafen had been willing accomplices in this wretched scheme. They surely should have realised that Lebensborn was not to be trusted: even in wartime Germany there had been enough information – and indeed rumour – about the organisation for them to have had doubts about the provenance of a baby it was offering for fostering.

  Then there was Gisela’s strange maternal ambivalence: sending me away to foster homes hardly suggested someone who was committed to bringing up a child in a warm and loving environment. Above all, her evasiveness and deceptions about my origins had hampered my search for the truth: how much easier my life would have been if she had only told me where I came from. I knew from my friends in Lebensspuren that some women who fostered Lebensborn children had been open and honest, and that this had eased some of their anxieties. Why did Gisela choose not to talk to me?

  But it was the actions of my biological family that hurt the most. I could just about understand why Helena and Johann Matko had accepted the baby handed to them by the Nazis. A family of known partisans could not – especially on a day when their compatriots were being executed – have done anything else. I put myself in their place and tried to imagine the fear of a knock on the door and the discovery of a Gestapo or SS officer standing outside. Although I was haunted by the thought that this other Erika grew up to live what should have been my life, safe in my mother’s love, I could not condemn them for it. What I could not accept was that Helena had carried on with the lie long after the end of the war. Barbara Paciorkiewicz’s story had shown me that some families of kidnapped children had been determined to bring home their stolen youngsters, yet Helena had lived with the knowledge that her real baby was somewhere in Germany. How could she have carried on without once trying to find me?