by Daša Drndic
There are absolute and unquestionable principles which every S.S. man must uphold, shrieks Himmler before his companions in Poznan in 1943. One basic principle must be an absolute rule for S.S. men: we must be honest, decent, loyal and comradely to members of our own blood and to nobody else. What happens to a Russian, to a Czech, does not interest me in the slightest. What other nations can offer in the way of good blood of our type, we will take, if necessary, by kidnapping their children and raising them here with us. Whether nations live in prosperity or starve to death interests me only so far as we need them as slaves for our culture; otherwise, this is of no interest to me. Remember, we will be unfeeling and rough only as much as this is necessary. We Germans are the only people in the world who treat animals decently, and we will treat this human animal kind courteously and humanely.
Himmler opens the first Lebensborn home in Steinhöring near Munich in August 1936. At Steinhöring certified Aryan women can give birth to their illegal children in secrecy, most of them hand their children over to the S.S. officials after shedding a few tears, or simply abandon them. The children who are ill, who are mental or physical invalids, are sent off to the paediatric ward of the Leander Institut at Brandenburg-Gorden near Berlin, where under the guidance of Dr Hans Heinz, “expert in child euthanasia”, they are first killed, and then their brains are examined.
I was born at Steinhöring, Olaf told me. I met Olaf at one of the meetings to which people go looking for their lives. First they seek themselves, then they seek forgiveness for the sins of their fathers. Confused and angry people attend these meetings. The descendants of well-known and not so well-known Nazis attend, as do the descendants of those who disappeared in concentration camps. At these meetings the Nazi descendants vomit up hatred and impotence; they excavate long years of silence, feelings of guilt and a plea for forgiveness which ends in unthinkable embraces and timid friendships. At these meetings people try to heal wounds that, like cancer, invisibly take over the body and eat it from inside. These meetings are interesting meetings. Those who do not go to such meetings write books.
I was born at Steinhöring in 1942, said Olaf, who is taller than I am, and I am quite tall, 190 centimetres. I was very good looking, he said.
I was good looking, too, I said. When we stand next to each other, it’s as if we’ve stepped down off a macho billboard, as if we were Hollywood actors, although both of us are greying.
If Hitler were alive, Olaf said, he would be pleased. I was one of the 2,800 babies born at Steinhöring, he said, at the Hitler-Himmler fertility clinic, at the breeding ground of Nazi Aryans, he said. I haven’t told anyone about this, Olaf said at the meeting. At school they didn’t teach us about Lebensborn. It was never mentioned. When I turned five my mother told me I was special, Olaf said. You are absolutely exceptional, she said. You are Hitler’s boy, and as Hitler’s boy you were born at a special clinic, my mother told me, Olaf said. I worked at the hospital, she said. I asked for a job at the hospital so I could serve the Third Reich, my mother told me, Olaf said. I was a member of the Nazi Party. I was an aide to a very powerful man and I always wore the party badge on my chest, my mother said, and to this day I am a believer, and I will remain a Nazi until the day I die, my mother said. She died in 1976, Olaf said. And my father stayed a fervent Nazi to his death, Olaf said. They were both attractive, my mother and my father, but they didn’t live together. I saw my father only a dozen times. The Nazis had guards around the hospital, my mother said, because the local people of Steinhöring threw stones at the women from the centre and called them whores, she said. But we were serving Germany and Hitler, she told me, Olaf said. My mother hit me whenever I cried. Stand up straight! she shouted. Straighten up! You are a soldier of the homeland! One day you will rule the world! she said. The more she loved Nazism, the more I despised it. It’s a lucky thing that her dreams did not come true, Olaf said. When she realized Hitler was gone and there was no new Hitler in the offing any time soon, my mother came to despise me, she rejected me. It would be better if you’d never been born! she shouted, Olaf said. Then I joined the ballet, Olaf said. Then I became a homosexual, he said, but my mother said, If Hitler were alive, you would have ended up under the gas showers. I danced for three years in Paris, Olaf said. We toured Europe, he said, then I went to Israel. There I explained to people what had happened to me. They said, Don’t worry, it’s OK. My mother hates Jews, I said to the Jews in Israel. And my father hates Jews, I told them. When he came back from the Russian front, my father hid, changed his name, changed his identity, and he never worked, he just drank and took drugs. He died at the age of sixty-three, homeless, Olaf said. The last time I saw my father he was lying drunk on the pavement, he said. Many Lebensborn children live today in Canada, England, America, Australia, Norway, Sweden. They are everywhere, Olaf said, and we correspond, now that we’re old. Now that our parents are dead it is too late to disown them, or spit in their faces, Olaf said.
Counting on the high fertility of the German woman, Himmler opens centres all over Germany, and when he decides there are enough there, he proceeds to Norway, where the women are also blue-eyed and blonde and where so many pure-blood German soldiers are stationed. They adapt hotels and villas, castles and ski resorts, some of them donated, many taken from Jews. Medical and administrative personnel are first checked, then hired. The food is good, the rooms are light and decorated with German symbols, the air is pure, the natural surroundings are beautiful and the care is first-rate. The war is going on somewhere far off and—for these select children—it is inaudible. Himmler spares no expense in equipping the Lebensborn homes, he takes as much as he needs, dipping chiefly into funds from confiscated Jewish property.
So from December 1935 to April 1945 it is lively at Heim Hochland in Steinhöring. There are 50 beds for mothers and 109 beds for children in Heim-Hochland. The building, previously the property of the Catholic Church, had been used as a hostel for retired priests. Himmler gives the Church 55,000 Reichsmarks for the building, and then invests another 540,000 in it so that the facility can house his dreams. Then, in 1937, Heim Harz is furnished in Wernigerode with 41 beds for mothers and 48 beds for children. That same year Heim Kurmak is set up in Klosterheide—23 beds for mothers, 86 for children. From 1938 to February 1945 Heim Pommern is built in Bad Polzin (today in Poland) with 60 beds for mothers and 75 beds for children. Only 217 babies are born at Heim Friesland near Bremen with its 34 beds for mothers and 45 beds for children. Heim Friesland ceases to operate in January 1941, because at the time a small allied bomb attack begins on Bremen and the surrounding areas. So the children and mothers are sent to other homes, and the head nurse comes to Norway to set up the Norwegian Lebensborn homes in which the S.S. will accommodate the sons of the homeland. Not four years later these sons become nullius filii, needed by no-one, forgotten. Heim Friesland was the most luxurious within the Lebensborn organization, having previously belonged to the Lahusens, a wealthy family, industrial magnates from Bremen and the surrounding area, but the Lahusen family declared bankruptcy before the war and sold their property, and Himmler immediately nabbed the estate for his project of the sweeping Germanization of select European peoples.
From 1939 to March 1945, Kinderheim Taunus was up and running in Wiesbaden with 44 children’s beds; Kriegsmütterheim opened at Stettin in 1940, followed by Kinderheim Sonnenwiese in 1942 in Kohren-Sahlis near Leipzig, with 170 children’s beds, where the “aunties” took the children out for walks each day to make them strong and fit for adoption, for a better life, stable, planned and set, for a life full of the love that had been stolen from them, from which they were stolen. Heim Schwarzwald opens in 1942 in Nordrach near Baden, and a little later Kinderheim Franken I and Kinderheim Franken II are adapted at Schalkhausen near Ansbach, and then the S.S. confiscates the villa belonging to the Mann family in Munich, on Poschinger Strasse, and houses newly obtained children there.
In Austria at Pernitz-Muggendorf, today a suburb of Vienna, Wi
enerwald House opens in 1938 with 49 beds for mothers and 83 beds for children, and in 1943 “my” house, Alpenland, opens at Schloss Oberweis near Gmunden, where they change my identity and hand me over to Martha and Jürgen, having done a superficial screening, sloppy and hasty. By then the S.S. are in a big rush, because the house is about to shut down, because Himmler will soon be biting into his cyanide capsule, because cinders are all that is left of his magnificent dream of cloning a super race, a superman of a new race. In Austria there is another Kinderheim at Neulengbach near St Polten, about which I have no information. I might have ended up in Luxembourg at Heim Moselland in Bofferding, because mainly stolen children are accommodated at Moselland. After all that searching I finally ascertain that I, too, was stolen from the Adriatisches Küstenland, not saved after my parents were killed, as Martha Traube told me on her deathbed. Isabella Fischer (Rosenzweig by marriage) tells me in 1999 that there were about a hundred, roughly one hundred high-level S.S. officials milling around the Adriatisches Küstenland, so go to the Berlin archive and search through their dossiers. By digging through all the local and central Church and city archives of Germany, Austria, Italy, Slovenia and Croatia, I discover precisely 1,532 male children with the name Antonio born in the Adriatisches Küstenland in the second half of 1944.
Let me finish with the homes.
Belgium: the Ardennen in Wegimont near Lüttich (from 1943 to September 1944) for mothers of German blood, fertilized by S.S. soldiers.
France: the Westland in Lamorlaye near Chantilly.
The Netherlands: the Gelderland in Nijmegen with 60 beds for mothers and 100 beds for children, and, finally,
Norway, where this was a flourishing activity and from whence today there is a little army, not of baby boomers, but of baby doomers, about 12,000 all told, born between 1942 and 1945:
Heim Geilo (1942), 60 beds for mothers, 20 for children.
Kinderheim Godthaab near Oslo, opened in 1942.
My name is Ester, today. I was born at Kinderheim Godthaab as Gisela. When I turned two my mother advertised in the local newspapers that she was putting me up for adoption. I had blonde curls and I was pretty. When the people who adopted me found out my father was German, they returned me to my mother and drew a large swastika on my little rucksack. Then another family came forward and my mother told them the truth. They were wonderful parents, but they never told me I was adopted. When I turned forty-three a woman called and said, For years I have been shadowed by a little girl with blonde curls and a swastika on her rucksack. I am your mother.
Twenty-seven children from Kinderheim Godthaab were declared mentally retarded and consigned to institutions for the retarded throughout Norway. Many of them spent their whole lives there. Some thirty children were secretly sent to Sweden. In Sweden their names were changed and they were put up for adoption. Those who adopted them were told they were children of members of the Resistance who had been killed, or Jewish orphans. Most of these people don’t know to this day that they are not the people they believe themselves to be. Most of them have no idea they are someone else. I only found my German relatives in 1995.
I, too, lived at Godthaab. I was assigned number 603. My mother brought me there and left right away. The discipline was rigorous. The nurses had white, starched uniforms and spoke only German. Then in 1946 they moved me to a lunatic asylum. I almost went mad with terror. Inmates were bound with chains. Some defecated in their clothes. Wherever. They screamed. I was five. When I turned twenty-three they released me. They said, You’re free, good luck. I was fortunate, however. No-one ever raped me. I completed two grades of elementary school. I worked in a factory at the hardest physical jobs. I tried to kill myself, shoving my arms into a machine for cutting waste, but I survived. My name is Hansen. I found my mother in 1970. She said, Get out of my sight. She said, Your S.S. father croaked in 1953.
I was born in 1943. My father died that same year and my mother was too ill to look after me. They sent me to Godthaab when I was six months old. At the end of the war they decided I was mentally retarded. At the age of seven I was sent to the Emma Hjorth mental hospital where they put me in a straight jacket at night. When they released me I got a job as a housecleaner. I don’t know who my mother was. I don’t know who my father was. I am a member of the society of Lebensborn children who are demanding compensation from the Norwegian government. I know Hansen. After the war they had to hate someone, so they hated us, the children of German soldiers. But there was no talk about us in public. We are a footnote to a history which Norway would like to expunge. After the war they tried to send us all to Germany, but Germany at that point was poor and devastated and couldn’t take us in.
Then the Lebensborn home in Trysil, then
the Hurdalsverk, opened in 1942, with 40 beds for mothers and 80 beds for children.
The Klekken opened in 1942.
Heim Bergen in the town of Hop near Bergen opened in 1943.
Kinderheim Stalheim opened in 1943, could accommodate one hundred children.
I lived at Stalheim. When the war ended they returned me to my mother, who didn’t want me. My mother sent me to a home. I sat in a doctor’s office with six doctors who confirmed I was mentally retarded and that I must never have children. Two staff members from the social welfare centre abused me with oral sex and told me this was obligatory therapy. I was five. I spent twelve years in the Merchant Marines. In 19961 had a nervous breakdown. My wife left me. I spent a year being treated for manic depression at a psychiatric clinic. My mother died in 1988. I found my German father in 1997 and in 1998 he, too, died. I am sixty-five. I am an empty man. My name is Karl Otto Zinken.
Stadtheim Oslo in downtown Oslo opened in 1943. That same year, another state home opened in Trondheim.
I was born at the Trondheim home. My mother was one of the 14,000 who got pregnant with an S.S. man, one of the 5,000 women who were sent to work camps after the war, and before that their hair was cut on the main square in Tro ndheim. I was one of the 12,000 children who posed a threat to Norwegian society. When I turned two they gave me to a family for care and the family kept me chained in the yard with their dog. When I turned six a man threw me into a river, shouting, Let’s see if the witch sinks! When I was ten, drunken villagers from Bursur near Trondheim branded my forehead with the shape of a swastika using bent nails, and howled, Now we will rape you! I was saved by a woman. Afterwards, I used sandpaper to rub at the swastika on my forehead to remove it. When I turned thirty I wrote a book called The German Child. Then I found my mother.
Then, Heim Os near Bergen
My mother’s name was Synni Lyngstad. My mother fell in love with Alfred Haase, a married S.S. sergeant. During World War Two, from 1940 on, once Norway had been occupied, there were about 350,000 German soldiers roaming around Norway. My mother was eighteen when she fell in love with S.S. Sergeant Alfred Haase. I was born in Ballangen, near Narvik, on 15 November, 1945, a bastard. In early 1946 my mother, grandmother and I moved to the little town of Eskilstuna in Sweden. We were safe there: no-one knew of my mother’s past. At Eskilstuna in Sweden no-one would say to my mother after the war, You are a Tyskerhor. You are a German whore, a traitor of Norway. No-one shaved my mother’s head in Sweden, nor did they send her to a work camp. They did not consign me to an orphanage or a mental hospital, nor did they ship me off to Germany or overseas to get rid of me. We were safe in Sweden. Sweden knew who we were, but kept quiet. That was the agreement between Norway and Sweden, that Sweden would keep quiet. Sweden agreed to receive several hundred children like me, several hundred half-German, traitorous children who are sixty-year-old Swedes today. My mother Synni died in 1948 of kidney disease, and for thirty years I believed that my father had been killed at the end of the war on his way back to Germany from Norway. That is what my grandmother told me, Your father is dead, she’d say whenever I asked. Then in 1977 a German magazine published a story about my background and claimed that former S.S. Sergeant Alfred Haase was alive. So I fo
und my father, who came to Sweden to meet me. It was difficult to talk with him. He was an elderly S.S. man and a retired pastry chef. I don’t believe he was a war criminal; he was never taken to court. The two of us are physically similar and this disturbs me. My name is Anni-Frid Lyngstad. I was a singer in ABBA. The brunette.
My uncle breeds dogs, so he trained me as if I were a dog. My aunt recently said to me, I won’t leave you anything when I die, because you are an S.S. bastard. I am sixty-three.
For fifty years they were putting us down. For fifty years what happened to us had been a taboo. Nothing was said about us until 1990. We didn’t exist. But our dossiers are still open. In them crouch ruined lives. We, the children of Lebensborn, are already old. Many of us will never learn who we are. We started searching too late. They doused me with scalding water at the orphanage. This is how filthy German children are washed, they said. A teacher abused me sexually. A priest said, I recommend sterilization.
I changed orphanages twenty times. They locked me in a pantry because I “stank”. They scrubbed me with ammonia; the older boys raped me; the teacher pretended not to see what was happening. They force-fed us swill until we vomited, and then made us eat the vomit. The Ministry of Defence and the C.I.A. took some of us for experimentation with L.S.D. Four of the children died, six killed themselves. One boy was raped by nine men, and afterwards all nine of them urinated on him “to wash away the S.S. disgrace”. For sixty years they called us Tyskerbarna, German bastards. We sued the Norwegian government. Then the Norwegian government apologized in 2001 to the “German bastards”. We have barristers helping us obtain compensation, which, I hear, will be $3,000.