Hitler's Forgotten Children (15 page)

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 financially 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.

‘Lebensborn was responsible, amongst other things, for the kidnapping of foreign children for the purpose of Germanisation … numerous Czech, Polish, Yugoslav and Norwegian children were taken from their parents.'
I
NDICTMENT:
T
HE
N
UREMBERG
M
ILITARY
T
RIBUNALS
, C
ASE
8

I
t was spring 2003 by the time I set off for Nuremberg, 500 kilometres south.

Nuremberg was the dark heart of National Socialism. Between 1927 and 1938 it was the city where Hitler held spectacular torchlit rallies – serried ranks of tens of thousands of supporters screaming ‘Sieg Heil' beneath an ocean of swastika banners, all captured in melodramatic propaganda films – and where the 1935 Race Laws that signalled the start of the Holocaust were promulgated.

For the Nazi Party, Nuremberg's position at the centre of the country symbolised, in some mystical way, the connection between the Third Reich and the supposed Aryan supermen of Himmler's imagination. It was also heavily fortified, which made it one of the last cities to fall to
the Allied forces in the final weeks of the war. Despite systematic bombing that destroyed 90 per cent of the medieval centre, the city was only captured after four days of fierce house-to-house fighting.

The three main Allied Powers, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom and the United States, had long planned to mount public trials of the Nazi leaders, even before the war ended. On 1 November 1943 they published a joint ‘Declaration on German Atrocities in Occupied Europe', issuing ‘full warning' that as and when the Nazis were defeated, the Allies would ‘pursue them to the uttermost ends of the earth … in order that justice may be done'.