Hitler's Forgotten Children (17 page)

The women of Lidice, almost 200 in number, some heavily pregnant, were transported to Ravensbrück concentration camp. Their children were snatched from them: 184 youngsters were pushed into buses and transported to a former textile factory in Łodz. On Himmler's staff orders they were not fed, and were forced to sleep on cold dirt floors without blankets.

Once RuSHA's ‘race examiners' arrived in Łodz, they assessed each child for signs of Aryan qualities. They ‘failed' 103 children: of them, seventy-four were immediately handed over to the Gestapo for onward transportation to the extermination camp at Chelmo, seventy
kilometres away. Here they were gassed to death in specially adapted killing trucks. Just seven children were selected as suitable candidates for Germanisation. Marie Doležalová was one of them.

When she arrived at the children's home, she found herself among many other children from different countries. She was forced to learn German and was punished if she was caught speaking Czech. Lebensborn eventually handed her over to an approved German family. Her foster parents were kind, giving her two new dresses to mark her arrival with them, but she was encouraged to forget where she had come from.

After the war ended, the handful of Lidice women who had survived the massacre and the concentration camp began searching for their missing children. A year later – just before she gave evidence at Nuremberg – Marie was reunited with her mother, who was by then dying. As she stood at her mother's bedside, she realised that she couldn't remember a word of her native language.

All of this Marie Doležalová told the judges at Nuremberg. As I read her testimony, I put myself in her place. Perhaps I too had come from a village burned to the ground by Himmler's troops, one of the so-called ‘racially valuable' lucky ones saved from the death camps by the promise of blond hair or blue eyes. But if so, where exactly had I been stolen from? And was there any hope that, like Marie, I might one day meet my real mother before she died?

And then I found the lists. They were tattered grey sheets of foolscap, prepared by Lebensborn staff in 1944; almost sixty years later the type had faded, making them only just legible. Each was divided into four columns. The first column was an alphabetical register of names and, since the adjacent column showed birth dates from the early 1940s, it was clear that this was some kind of register of children. The third column was headed ‘transferred to', and in the final line there was a date against each entry.

There were 473 children identified in these documents. Halfway down one I read the following:

Matko, Erika.

[Born on] 11.11.41.

[Transferred to] Oberst Hermann von Oelhafen, Munich, Gentzstrasse 5.

[On] 3.6.44.

I had found my original name.

It had to be genuine: not only were these official court records but the address shown for Hermann – and the date on which I was handed over to him – was correct.

I sat back, the list in front of me. I was surprised to find that I was not emotional: ever since I had received the letter from the Slovenian government telling me that I could not be Erika Matko, because that person was still living in the Rogaška Slatina area, I had felt lost. Now as I looked at this fading Lebensborn list, I felt my purpose and true identity coming back to me.

Accompanying the lists were two sworn statements by former Lebensborn staff who had been interrogated by investigators for the Nuremberg prosecutors. The first was a woman called Maria-Martha Heinze-Wissede, who had worked in the Lebensborn head office
.
On 9 August 1948, she had been shown the documents and identified the origin of some of the children. Erika Matko was one of them.

From the lists before me, I recognised the following names of Yugoslavian children...

… Erika MATKO

These children, I know only their files a little, since they had already been transferred to ... German families by Lebensborn.

As was clear from the documents, they were called ‘bandit children', and Lebensborn took them over from Volksdeutsche
Mittelstelle [VoMi] ... As far as I remember, the Lebensborn took these children from a Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle camp in the district of Bayreuth.

My heart raced. There it was in black and white: I had been brought from Yugoslavia and passed to Lebensborn by this VoMi organisation.

A quick search revealed VoMi to have been another of the confusing and overlapping bodies answering to Himmler: it was set up before the war, ostensibly to manage the interests of the
Volksdeutsche
– ethnic Germans who lived outside the borders of Nazi Germany. But once Hitler's armies overran Poland, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, VoMi settled half a million German volunteers in the conquered territories, simultaneously shipping out or imprisoning the rightful occupants. It was essentially a precursor to what we now call ethnic cleansing, and the organisation's involvement in my origins did not bode well for the fate of my biological family.

Who were they? There was a clue, a thrilling hint, in Maria-Martha Heinze-Wissede's affidavit. The other Yugoslavian youngsters and I were listed as ‘bandit children'. In Nazi terminology this meant partisan fighters. I felt a surge of pride: our fathers were rebels, they had opposed the Nazi occupiers. How brave they must have been. I doubted that in their position I would have found the courage to fight back against Hitler's armies.

The second witness statement was from a former Lebensborn clerk called Emilie Edelmann. She had joined the organisation in 1939 and worked within it until the very end, rising to a position that gave her responsibility for the care of children being readied for placement with foster families. On 3 April 1948, she too told her American interrogators that children had been snatched from Yugoslavia, and filled in a few of the missing details of my journey to a Lebensborn home. She described these kidnapped children as
Südost-kinder
– VoMi-speak for those taken from the south-eastern territories conquered by Germany.

I re-read everything obsessively, desperate to be certain. It was unequivocal: here in the Nuremberg files was definitive proof that I had been one of at least twenty-five infants who in 1942 and 1943 were kidnapped and transported from Yugoslavia to the Fatherland. I had been taken to a VoMi holding camp at Werdenfels in southern Germany before being shipped on to the Sonnenwiese home at Kohren-Sahlis and then eventually given to the Oelhafen family in Munich.

I had only one question left to answer before I left Nuremberg: how did the trial end – what punishment was meted out to the senior Lebensborn officials in the dock?

Astonishingly, although most of the top RuSHA officials had been convicted and sentenced to lengthy terms in prison, the four Lebensborn defendants had been acquitted of crimes against humanity and war crimes. The three men had been found guilty of membership of the SS – as a woman, Inge Viermetz was excluded from its ranks – but none spent a single additional day behind bars. Despite all the evidence presented to them, the judges had reached the incredible conclusion that Lebensborn had been no more than ‘a welfare organisation'.

I was furious. I had read the evidence and I had listened to the harrowing accounts from my fellow survivors at the meeting in Hadamar. I knew the truth now, and it made me more determined than ever to discover more about how I had originally fallen into Lebensborn's clutches.

Whatever the government of Slovenia thought, I had definitely come from there. I just had to prove it.

‘I would be very, very grateful if you could answer some questions about your childhood … I am not asking out of mere curiosity …'
L
ETTER TO
E
RIKA
M
ATKO
, J
UNE
2003

I
found a large number of people throughout Germany with the surname Matko. I wrote to each address, asking if they knew anything about my background or that of Hermann and Gisela von Oelhafen. It was a succession of shots in the dark but, to my surprise, letters began trickling back: each thanked me for contacting them and wished me well but none of them were able to help with my investigation.

In the meantime, Josef Focks was busy. The ‘Father Finder' was not deterred by the results of my letters to the German Matkos; instead he expanded his geographical search.

Josef Focks is one of the people without whom I would never have found the truth about my past. He was a former army officer who had been seconded to NATO in the 1980s. During a posting to Norway he first encountered the stories of children fathered by German troops and the plight of those who had been born in the Lebensborn programme.
Moved by their pain and the sense of shame that had blighted their lives, he offered to help them track down their families.

From the outset, he ran into the problem that the Lebensborn officials had deliberately concealed many of the fathers' names. Ironically it was the logistical difficulty of genealogical searching in the days before the Internet and online records that led him to find innovative solutions. He made use of local contacts (he found that taxi drivers were good sources of information), dug into obscure archives and the libraries of old newspapers, and even visited cemeteries to examine the names carved into headstones. Gradually he developed a way to unlock the puzzle.

By the time I met him, he had taken on more than a thousand cases, not all of them Lebensborn children, successfully tracing family members in most of them. His investigations had led him across Germany and as far afield as America and Australia, and his office in Bonn was stuffed with innumerable files, each one bulging with paper. All of this he did without charging a penny for his time: he had long since retired from the army and lived on his state pension, helping people like me for nothing more than the reward of easing our pain. I cannot thank him enough.

It was Josef who found the most promising Matkos. He had tapped up one of his contacts, a woman whose mother had been taken from Yugoslavia by the Nazis as slave labour: with her help, he discovered contact details for several Matkos still living in or near Rogaška Slatina. They seemed to be an extended family: some were my age or slightly older, others clearly a generation younger. Most promising of all, one of them was named Erika.

Josef unearthed an address for her and also the telephone number for a Maria Matko, who, he thought, might be a relation. We agreed that he would phone Maria and that I would write to Erika.

I sat down at the computer and thought about what to say. It was not an easy letter to compose: I knew nothing about this woman nor the country in which she lived. In the end, I decided to speak openly about my need to discover the truth about my past. I told myself that
since many of the unrelated Matkos in Germany who I had contacted out of the blue had taken the trouble to reply even though they could not help me, this person bearing my name and who lived in the place I knew I came from might also be moved by my plea for help.

Osnabrück, Germany

16 February, 2003

Dear Mrs Matko,

I am writing to you today about a very personal matter and hope that you can help me. The problem, of course, is that I do not speak Slovenian and I cannot hope that you speak German. But I hope that there is somebody who can help you to translate my letter.

For some years I have been researching my biological parents and during this research I found out very strange things, which have made me very anxious and disturbed, but I know that I must keep going on.

My foster parents picked me up from the Lebensborn home ‘Sonnenwiese'. There I was given two vaccination documents in which my name is shown as Erika Matko, born in St Sauerbrunn. I don't have any other documentation about my early life. I don't know the circumstances which brought me to the home. My foster parents didn't give me any information.

Ten years ago I didn't even know that I was a Lebensborn child. The Red Cross couldn't find out any information about my identity. I asked Dr Georg Lilienthal, who is a researcher about Lebensborn and has published a book about the subject.

He gave me the idea that maybe I'm a member of the group of kidnapped children, and my origins lie in Yugoslavia.

Now in the course of my research I have discovered you. I don't ask from curiosity but I only want to know how this double identity has occurred. Did you ever live in a Lebensborn home or were you lucky enough to spend your whole life in Rogaška Slatina?

I would be very, very grateful if you could answer my questions about your childhood.

Best wishes, Ingrid von Oelhafen

There was nothing more I could say or do. I posted the letter, hoping that something in it would strike a chord with this other Erika Matko.

In the meantime, Josef had made progress. He got in touch with Maria Matko and they had a good conversation via phone with the help of a translator, as he didn't speak Slovenian and she could not understand German. She was apparently my age and had spent her whole life in Rogaška Slatina.