Trieste
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At all Lebensborn homes the files with information about the mothers and their children were closely guarded under lock and password, and this information is not entered into the municipal or Church records. But something somewhere fell flat. Despite Himmler’s generosity, only about 8,000 babies were born throughout the war as part of the initial Lebensborn project. New solutions had to be devised.
Apart from the German children born there, children collected by Himmler’s activists from orphanages throughout the Third Reich are also placed in Lebensborn homes where they are trained, brainwashed, fed with Nazi stories about the greatness of the German nation, about the need to bow down to Adolf the god, and once they are prepared, shaped, turned into marionettes, they are sent to ideologically acceptable adoptive families. Decades after the war had ended these children still did not know what happened to them, what Himmler’s officials did, especially the children in what was then East Germany, who also had no inkling that their parents were not their parents. There were many such children, thousands. Some learned only forty years later about Hitler’s and Himmler’s top secret pro-Aryan Kinder-swindle, while some do not know even to this day, because the Communist authorities held this little truth, meaningless to them, this piddling episode of historical reality, in such secrecy. The secret archives with information about the birth of the Lebensborn children, with information about those put up for adoption, the files listing the changed names, are shunted during the war from one centre to another, and after the war many of these files are destroyed, some intentionally, some not. When the Allies start milling around Germany in the spring of 1945, the staff burn records and abandon most of the Lebensborn homes in panic. And so it is that the identities of thousands and thousands of people disappear forever in flames, which still does not mean that these people did not exist and that they don’t have other interesting, alternative, replaceable identities, as do I. At the end of the war, registers surface in Steinhöring with detailed information on 2,000 children stolen, adopted, displaced in orphanages, while the Federal Archive in Berlin makes public in 1999 that they have come upon a set of files with information about an additional 7,000 children, which profoundly disturbs the lives of some of these former children, who decide to dig through the files and through their genes. In the information at Steinhöring there is no mention of me.
Files found in Heidelberg and information preserved (and hidden) in the former East Germany are also in Berlin, and the only ones with access to this archive, once they have overcome the numerous bureaucratic hurdles, are those who hope to find a lost piece of themselves among the boxes on shelves resembling the shelves in Bad Arolsen.
I was in Ludwigsburg, near Stuttgart. At a former women’s prison in Ludwigsburg is the Central Office of the State Justice Administrations for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes (Zentrale Stelle der Landesjustizverwaltungen zur Aufklärung von N.S. Verbrechen). The Office opened in 1958 and to date they have investigated more than 7,000 cases with more than 100,000 suspects. Ludwigsburg is a picturesque little town on the outskirts of Stuttgart. The Dukes of Württemberg used to spend time in Ludwigsburg. Schiller was born there; in the house where he was born there is now a restaurant, one of the Wienerwald chain, and right next to the Wienerwald restaurant they sell McDonald’s hamburgers. The Duke of Württembergs financial adviser, a Jew named Süs, was hanged there in the eighteenth century, and at the entrance to the Duke’s palace stands a plaque which says, This castle shows its bright and cheery face. Its lively, liberal atmosphere is visible even today, as long as one is prepared to visit the other parts of Ludwigsburg, and not just its palaces and parks. Next to the Central Office is a seventeenth-century fortress which housed a prison until 1990; the oldest prison in Germany, now in the fortress, is a museum of crime.
I was at the museum in Ludwigsburg, Ian Buruma told me. The boy who brought me in smiled and enumerated the museums treasures, Buruma said. This is a guillotine that was in use until the late 1940s, the boy said, these are thumbscrews, here, these are the uniforms, ropes and belts they used to hang prisoners, here are the renovated death cells, here, the boy said, is the executioner’s axe, Buruma said, then he showed me lively copper etchings with torture scenes, and the menu for Sus the Jew’s last meal, Buruma said. Sus the Jew was given bouillon, stewed veal, beans and white bread. Then Buruma told me of a taxi driver who had brought him to the Central Office for Investigating Nazi Crimes, when Buruma was looking for something or someone there. He told me how the taxi driver first claimed he didn’t know where the Office was. No clue, the taxi driver said, and went on to say, that office should be scrapped; it’s high time for us to forget those old tales about the Nazis, that is exactly what the taxi driver said, those old tales, as if there aren’t more important things to be doing, as if the Communists weren’t every bit as bad, the taxi driver said, and so on and so forth, repeated the taxi driver, said Buruma.
The Office in Ludwigsburg is the brain, a paper memory, a bureaucratic memory of the Nazi past. In the Central Office, as in Bad Arolsen, lost lives huddle in steel cabinets. At the Ludwigsburg Central Office, filed tidily in alphabetical order, are more than 1,400,000 testimonies of witnesses and victims, various dossiers, Gestapo documents, archival court transcripts, not just from Germany but from everywhere—Poland, the former Soviet Union, France, Romania, Hungary and the Netherlands (Buruma is from the Netherlands), and so forth, as the taxi driver would say. Lord, it’s as if all of Germany is crisscrossed with hidden, underground waterways, subterranean conduits of lamentation, woe and oblivion, the inexhaustible Acheron, the Cocytus and the Lethe.
I was at the Berlin Federal Archive—the largest Nazi archive there is, with more than 50 million pages registered, including the originals of the personnel files of members of the National Socialist Party and S.S. officials—and there I stumbled upon a little clue that took me further. Later, when I established that my genetic father might have been S.S.-Untersturmführer Kurt Franz, I went back to the Berlin Archive and leafed through his past, which was a source of incredible distress to me, in fact, of physical revulsion, though I kept telling myself I had no tie to this man, which was not, of course, true. In Kurt Franz’s dossier there were photographs, especially from Treblinka, showing Kurt Franz riding, or in white sports shorts, running through a lovely, dense forest, Aryan and sexy, all the more nauseating. The Berlin Federal Archive, like the International Tracing Service in Bad Arolsen, is in a dense forest. But unlike Bad Arolsen, which is completely hidden, the Berlin Archive is not far from downtown Berlin, though both buildings—the main building in Bad Arolsen and the one in Grunewald on the outskirts of Berlin—used to belong to the Gestapo, which can be quietly chilling for the visitor.
Aud Rigmor Harzendorf from Kohren-Sahlis told me that they never spoke of the past in East Germany before 1989, and I told her that in West Germany they didn’t speak of it either, nor did they in Austria, though, of course, they talked a lot about the more distant past, they spoke of several distant pasts, the more distant the pasts were, the greater the detail in which they spoke of them, but there was very little talk, only quiet and secretive talk, about the recent past, on the basis of which one might conclude that the recent past was quite a dirty past. Then I learned that in East Germany there was a major secret scam perpetrated with the names of the Lebensborn children, which was why the whole story had been unknown there until recently. The Stasi needed new names for its spies, so they stole the original identities of the Lebensborn children who had been given up for adoption, meaning their real names, and if these children decided to poke around the archives later, they would come upon a whole heap of alarming political and police hurdles. My adoptive mother told me I have no parents, that I was left with no parents. You were left without both parents, my adoptive mother said, Aud told us. And that is why they gave you to me, said my adoptive mother, whom I loved as if she were my own, and that is absolutely all she said, said Aud, but we lived five hundred metres from t
he former Lebensborn home in Koren-Sahlis, and I had no idea what kind of a home it was, what went on there, I didn’t know I was born inside. Today there is a children’s nursery school in the building, it is very cheery, but I still don’t know who gave birth to me or what her name was, Aud told me when I met her at a gathering of other children who are searching for themselves, frantically, and who are no longer children, of course, some have children of their own, grown children, some even have grandchildren, like me, for example. I am sixty-two and I will have to tell my children, my grandchildren, everything I have discovered in the course of my eight years of searching, which will confuse them, because everything I have come across since 1998, when my mother Martha Traube told me You are not Hans Traube as she was dying, until today, 3 July, 2006, all of this sounds incredible, and I will have to speak with them about it, and they will have to drag this shit around with them for years, decades, like a punishment, a curse, and they will forever be wondering What is hidden in my genes? and I will tell them and I’ll say it over and over: Your genes contain the genes of a member of the S.S. and a war criminal and the genes of a Jewish woman. I will have to tell them, and they will have to find a way of dealing with it. History, history which we Germans (and Austrians) have repeatedly mucked up, as Grass says, is a clogged toilet. We flush and flush, but the shit keeps coming up.
Then Aud showed me this photograph, which her adopted mother had been hiding for fifty years, a picture from the Lebensborn home at Kohren-Sahlis, and in it is Aud, of course, and then Aud told me, Look, that’s us, Hitler’s children.
There were various ways of bringing children to the Lebensborn homes. Other than the German children, there were children who had been stolen from the occupied countries of the Reich. Little Poles were the largest number to stay at the Lebensborn homes, about 250,000 little Poles, but there were children stolen from Ukraine (about 50,000), the Baltic countries (about 50,000) and Yugoslavia (600 children are known to have been taken from Slovenia alone). There were many children from different places, much like the little fair-skinned, blue-eyed German children of pure German blood. Even French children weren’t spared, and Norwegian children. Today only 50,000 of these children know of their origins and who their parents were or are.
Himmler adored Lebensborn homes, over which special Lebensborn banners flew, in which they used special Lebensborn dishes and special Lebensborn cutlery on which there was a special Lebensborn stamp (today the cutlery goes for a lot of money at auction). The bedding and tablecloths and towels had Lebensborn monograms, and the staff wore a special Lebensborn pin on their chest, so that everyone would know.
Every single object at the Lebensborn homes was marked with little runes resembling a hissing stroke of lightning: S.S. Himmler loved making the rounds of “his homes”, so that he could be sure the Germanization of the right sort of children was progressing at a desired pace, and sometimes he would be present at the ceremonial rite of pseudo-Christian baptism under the Nazi flag, during which the newborn would be given candlesticks made by camp inmates from Dachau.
Himmler’s favourite child, Gudrun, her father’s “Puppi”, who grieves even today for her fanatically Catholic and equally fanatically racist father, had the opportunity to ascertain personally how creative the Dachau prisoners were when, at the age of twelve, she wrote in her diary after a visit to the camp in 1941: Today we visited Dachau S.S. concentration camp. We saw everything there was to be seen. We saw the tended gardens, we saw orchards, we saw beautiful paintings made by the prisoners. And after all that, we had a lot to eat . . . it was wonderful.
During a baptism, an altar would be draped with a cloth embroidered with a swastika, the baby would be laid on a pillow in front of the altar, and then a Nazi would read excerpts from Mein Kampf, then Haydn’s Variations on the German National Anthem would reverberate throughout the room, a uniformed S.S. man would bless the (male) child by holding an S.S. “honour dagger” to its brow, a second S.S. officer would give a brief speech, the child would be given a name, and they all would sing.
Himmler gave the children born on his birthday (7 October) special gifts. I think it entirely right that we are taking little children from Polish families, writes Himmler in 1941. We are placing these children in special homes and schooling them, writes Himmler, because these are children with particularly robust racial characteristics. I order that after six months every child who has proved to be acceptable be furnished with a new family tree with valid accompanying documents, orders Himmler, and that after one year of observance, those children be given for adoption to racially authenticated parents with no children. Because among so many people there will obviously be some persons of high racial quality, writes Himmler. Hence our task is to remove these children from their environments, if necessary by violence and theft, because, Himmler writes, either we will keep all the good blood for ourselves . . . or we will destroy that blood.
Racial selection of stolen children was stringent, entailing medical examinations and tests: they measured the head, its size and shape, the limbs, their length and girth, the structure of the female’s pubis, the coordination of movement, the intelligence, the shape of the nose, fingernails, mouth, eyes, all of it was regulated and explicit. Top-category children went off to famous, wealthy S.S. families; second-category children qualified to receive social and financial aid; the less valuable children were sent to orphanages. It was known exactly what perfect German babies should look like.
Photographs of perfect German babies began cropping up everywhere. They were used in advertisements and on propaganda posters, on food labels, in school textbooks. Thanks to Himmler’s obsession with the need to produce as many perfect Aryan children as possible, competitions for the most beautiful, perfect Baby of the Month, Year and Nazi Eternity were regularly announced, just like similar ghastly competitions the world over today, filling the pages of cheap newspapers with their ads. It so happened in 1935 that the title of Most Beautiful Aryan Baby of Berlin was won by Hessy Levinsons, whose parents had brought her to a prominent Berlin photographer to have her picture taken. Several months later, this photograph of Hessy Levinsons appeared on the front page of the magazine Sonne ins Haus. Jacob and Pauline Levinsons, who were both famous opera singers, originally from Latvia, froze when they saw the front page. They went to the photographer to ask how it had happened, and the photographer confessed he had known Hessy was a little Jewish girl, but he had deliberately submitted her photograph in order to prove that the racist Nazi theory of blood and soil was plain nonsense, confirmed by the fact that Hessy had been chosen in fierce competition with pure-bred German babies. The picture was printed on postcards. Hessy was sent out as a birthday greeting to travel all over Germany, and perhaps beyond as well. In 1939 the Levinsons decided to flee the Third Reich, first to France, then over the ocean to Cuba, and finally on to New York.
Nazi family pasts are hard to expunge. Now, as the next generation is already ageing and on its way out, Nazi family stories are winging their way into the homes of the third generation and wreaking havoc there. Compared to me, Sam Thacker is a mere kid at thirty, living in England. Pasts are free-thinking, pasts like to roam, pasts traverse borders, glittering gaily, pasts are bold travellers, sliding through their own molehill-like labyrinths. Recently, among mislaid, discarded family documents, Sam Thacker’s mother comes upon several undeveloped rolls of film, which her father, Sam’s grandfather, a member of an elite unit of the Waffen-S.S., the Leibstandarte S.S. Adolf Hitler, and decorated with the Iron Cross for his merits, brought back from the front at some point. In these pictures life is so lovely and so ordinary. In special combat gear the young S.S. men tour the sites of Paris, they swim, attend football matches, visit the military cemetery at Verdun, sit in bistros in the company of three lively French women; nothing inhumane, nothing monstrous on the faces of the young men who are serving their leader and their homeland. But Sam Thacker is disturbed. Photographs testify. The Nazis cultivated a special wea
kness for the amateur photographer snapping shots with expensive photographic equipment. Photographs, of course, can be burned, but that doesn’t often happen. When photographs are burned, crumbs of memory remain from which sprout fear and shame, the sins of the fathers and grandfathers are difficult to eradicate. The children of these fathers and grandfathers are still tiptoeing through their own minefields today. And once they step into the field of anger and condemnation, once they cross it, a heavy cloak of pain settles upon them. And small, though dangerous, geysers of the past continue to erupt unexpectedly under their noses, until these descendants, and they are many, these descendants of big and little Nazis rub their family excrement deep into the pores of their own bodies, after which they will at last be able to rinse themselves clean. History, an ornate lady who does not die easily, dresses again and again in new costumes, but keeps telling the same story. History as Dracula, History as the Vampire, the vampiric fate of history, History the Bloodsucker, that great mistress of humanity.
Whenever the quota of children at homes and orphanages got low, the Nazis kidnapped children from streets, playgrounds, parks; they tore children from their mothers’ arms, which is what happened with me. A week before I left for Gorizia on Monday, 26 June, 2006 I received a letter from the International Red Cross, or rather from the I.T.S. (International Tracing Service) in Bad Arolsen, in which that organization—or rather a Mrs Helga Mathias—informs me that they have found a copy in Bad Arolsen of a baptism certificate which matches one sent to them on 2 February, 1946, with a black-and-white photograph of a three-month-old infant by a Haya Tedeschi of Gorizia, asking for their help in finding her son Antonio Tedeschi, born 31 October, 1944, in Görz, then part of the Adriatisches Küstenland. The baptism certificate, writes Mrs Mathias, says that the father of child Antonio Tedeschi is S.S.-Untersturmführer Kurt Franz, born on 17 January, 1914, in Düsseldorf, where he died in 1998. Helga Mathias adds that they compared the photograph, which I, Hans Traube, born in Salzburg on 1 October, 1944, sent them on 23 January, 1999. We compared the picture on which you are, as you say, about eight months old, writes Helga Mathias, with the picture of the three-month-old infant sent to us by Mrs Haya Tedeschi of Gorizia, writes Helga Mathias, and we ascertained that the similarity is striking. In a displaced box, among the rare documents preserved about the secret Lebensborn project, Mrs Mathias writes further, we found a letter from Father Carlo Baubela of Görz, now Gorizia, who baptized the child and then handed over to an unknown party a copy of the document about the birth of Mrs Haya Tedeschi's son, being Antonio Tedeschi, who could be you. With the letter from Carlo Baubela, writes Helga Mathias, we found an official order from the Central Office of Reich Security, signed by Reichsführer-S.S. and Minister Heinrich Himmler, who was in charge of that ministry at the time, an order to send the male child of Aryan descent with the temporary name of Antonio Tedeschi to the Alpenland Lebensborn home, to Schloss Oberweis near the town of Gmunden, region of Traunsee, in Austria. Since the registers with documentation of almost all the Lebensborn homes throughout the Third Reich were destroyed just before Germany surrendered, writes Helga Mathias, we are unlikely to find any information pertaining to Schloss Oberweis. I had a week to learn the details of the life of S.S.-Untersturmführer Kurt Franz, though he was already in my private archive, among the officials who were stationed then, between 1943 and 1945, in the Adriatisches Küstenland.