Hitler's Forgotten Children (8 page)

My foster mother's health had worsened as the years had passed and she was now severely disabled. Tragedy had also struck the family. Hubertus, the handsome little boy I had known as a child, had grown up into an attractive gay man: in the mid-1980s he was among the first German men to be diagnosed with the terrifying – and then always fatal – new disease of AIDS. In 1988 it claimed him.

The decision to hire a full-time carer to look after Gisela seemed the best way of securing her future. Gisela was well off. Her practice had provided well for her, and both the von Oelhafens and Andersens had money. But the woman we hired saw an opportunity. Not long after Hubertus's death, she took advantage of Gisela's grief and enfeebled mind and persuaded her to move to Gran Canaria, where, she said, they would benefit from a warmer climate. And so the two of them set up home together, more than 3,000 miles away from any of Gisela's relations. Worse, her companion worked hard to cut us all off from Gisela and to isolate her: none of us was able or allowed to contact her.

Only when Gisela developed dementia was I permitted to visit her. What I found in Gran Canaria disturbed me greatly: it was apparent that Gisela was entirely dependent on a woman whose chief concern was to
extract as much money as possible from her before she died. Something had to be done.

Together with Aunt Eka I petitioned the German Guardianship Court to order that we be allowed to intervene in Gisela's life. At first the court refused to hear our plea, saying I had no claim because I was only Gisela's foster daughter, not her biological child. But unusually for me (I am not, by nature, forceful), I dug my heels in. I said to the judges: ‘I will sit here until you listen to me. I will stay here in this court until you listen to what I have to say.'

Eventually they agreed to hear me. I told the court that Gisela was being controlled by her carer and that she had manipulated the relationship to such an extent that she had been named as one of the main beneficiaries of Gisela's will. I begged them to safeguard her interests. But listening to me was as far as the judges were prepared to go. Ultimately, the court declined to intervene.

It was left to Aunt Eka to work out a private compromise settlement, which provided some measure of protection for Gisela. But the damage had been done: Gisela lived on until 2002, but never again would we be a family.

Her exile in Gran Canaria did have one positive outcome. When Aunt Eka and I finally realised that Gisela would never come back to Hamburg, we set about clearing out her rooms. Which is how I came to find the diary she had kept of my earliest years.

I will remember for ever the moment I laid my hands on it, and the emotion I felt reading its few handwritten pages. I was so very thankful: I had found something about me and my early life – it was the first time I could reach out and touch my past. But alongside the joy there was pain too.

I think, perhaps, I hadn't realised the extent to which I had for nearly forty years blocked off my feelings about the mystery of my childhood. Holding the little volume, the sense of loss and uncertainty was overwhelming. Why had she not given me this diary but
instead kept it hidden? How could she not have realised what it would mean to me?

What made this all the more painful was the knowledge that I had only discovered the book because Gisela had – to all intents and purposes – abandoned me once again. That she was in no state to understand this, and that her carer was deliberately exploiting her frailty, did not change the fact that I could not contact her to ask all the questions which the diary prompted.

Perhaps my overpowering sense of loss and hurt explains why I did not look more closely at the other documents I found in Gisela's room. I glanced at them and saw that they seemed to be legal papers about the process by which Gisela and Hermann had fostered me. But rather than pay them the attention I should have, I put them away and devoted myself to my work. It wasn't until the end of the twentieth century that I was reminded of their existence.

One day in the autumn of 1999, I was at my practice as usual when the phone rang. I assumed the caller was a patient or perhaps a referral for a new client. But the lady on the phone that morning was neither of these things. She first asked whether I was Ingrid von Oelhafen and then explained that she was from the German Red Cross. I was initially puzzled: why would the Red Cross be ringing me? I had no professional connection with the organisation: certainly none of my patients had ever come from there.

Then she asked a question that took me completely by surprise: would I be interested in looking for my birth parents?

I find it hard to describe the feelings that ran through me in that moment. For so long I had put the questions regarding who I was and where I had come from to the back of my mind, telling myself that working with disabled children was more important; in truth, though,
I think I was really avoiding the issue, perhaps for fear of what I might find. And so I was surprised to find that my overriding emotion was one of real excitement: at long last I had the chance to find out about my origins. Perhaps I was now finally ready to face the truth.

I have thought about this a great deal and come to the conclusion that it was age that made the difference. I was fifty-eight when I received that phone call, and looking back now I can see that the older I became, the more I wondered about my personal history. I am not alone in this: it is part of the human condition to revisit the past as the years slip away. There were practical considerations, too. Whenever I had cause to go to the doctor – something that becomes more frequent with advancing years – I was asked about my family medical history, and of course I had to say that I had no idea.

I didn't ask how the Red Cross knew where to find me or how they knew that I had a family mystery to solve. I simply said yes, and hoped for the best. They couldn't give me any concrete information about my past. Instead, the woman told me to contact an academic historian at the university in Mainz.

I owe an immense debt to Georg Lilienthal. When I sat down to write to him, I had no idea who he was – much less how important his role would be in my story
.
I simply knew what the Red Cross had told me: he was the person who could set my feet on the path I would need to follow.

I understood that Dr Lilienthal would be expecting my letter, so I wrote openly and honestly, explaining that I had always wanted to know where I came from but that I had never known how or where to start.

When I posted the letter I was so excited I wanted to get in the car and drive to Mainz the next day. But something told me that I must wait: whatever information this man had, he would surely need time to pull it together. And so I resolved to be patient and use the time to search through the documents I had found in Gisela's room. I felt tantalisingly close to discovering the story of how I came to be fostered by
Gisela and Hermann and it was frustrating to still be in the dark. But I had waited fifty years before embarking on this quest: a few more weeks wouldn't kill me.

I dug out the box of papers. In the years since I had found them I'd never even taken a look at anything other than the diary. Now I began to look closely at the sheaf of fading documents Gisela had kept with it.

The first was a small and slightly dog-eared pink slip. It was a vaccination certificate, dated 19 January 1944 and signed at Kohren-Sahlis, near Leipzig: it showed that Erika Matko, born on 11 November 1941 in a place called St Sauerbrunn, had been inoculated against smallpox.

The date was significant: January 1944 was several months before I had been fostered by Gisela and Hermann. But other than indicating that the signatory was a doctor, nothing else on the form showed where the vaccination had taken place, or at whose request. What organisation had been based at Kohren-Sahlis? And, for that matter, where exactly was St Sauerbrunn? A second certificate recorded further vaccinations. On the reverse side was an official stamp that read:
‘Lebensborn Heim Sonnenwiese Kohren-Sahlis'.

Heim
meant a children's home: that much I knew from my earliest days, and it certainly fitted with Herman and Gisela having fostered me. But what was Lebensborn? I had never heard the word before.

The next document was even more puzzling. Dated 4 August 1944, it appeared to be a kind of contract-cum-receipt for my foster parents.

The family Hermann von Oelhafen, of Gentz Strasse 5, Munich, has on 3 June 1944, taken into their home the ethnic German girl Erika Matkow [sic], born 11 November 1941. Because she is a child of German stock, on the orders of the Reichsführer she is to be brought up in a German family.

There will be no provision for the maintenance of the child from either side: the child herself has no assets or revenue. The foster parents alone shall be responsible for her support.

The certificate had apparently been issued in Steinhöring. This, I knew, was a small village not far away from Munich, but there was no other information about the organisation that had created it. The only clue was the letterhead at the top of the paper, almost obscured by holepunch holes and the passage of time:
‘Der Reichskommissar für die Festigung deutschen Volkstums, Stabshauptamt L'.
I had no idea what this could be: a little research revealed it to be the office of the Reichs Commissioner for Strengthening German Nationhood, a Nazi organisation. What exactly the office did was not immediately clear.

At the bottom of the document was the signature of a Doctor Tesch, who described himself as a Sturmbannführer. Anyone who had grown up in Germany after the war knew that word: it was a paramilitary rank in the Third Reich, equivalent to a major in the regular army but almost exclusively reserved for use by members of the SS. Why would an officer in Heinrich Himmler's reviled Death's Head
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organisation have had anything to do with my foster care? I looked again at the certificate: it said that I had been handed over to a German family ‘on the orders of the Reichsführer'. That was Himmler again. Bafflingly, it looked as though Hitler's second-in-command, the most feared man in Nazi Germany, had played some kind of role in my childhood.

I was desperate to ask Gisela what all this meant – and, indeed, why she had kept these documents from me for so many years. But Gisela was in Gran Canaria and, by this stage, in the last throes of her dementia. I knew I would get no help from her.

A week had now passed since I sent Georg Lilienthal my letter: I wondered if he was away from his office or whether he was for some reason unwilling to share with me what the Red Cross said he knew – or at least suspected – about my history. In the interim, I decided to
begin my own investigations. I wrote to the German state archives (the Bundesarchiv) to ask if they held any documents bearing my name or that of Erika Matko.

I assumed, naively, that the Bundesarchiv would reply quickly: how difficult could it be, in this age of computerised databases, to run a simple check on my names? I was about to discover one of the paradoxes of the new Germany: while the new state was committed to uncovering the terrible sins committed by the rulers of the old East German state, and zealous in rooting out of public life those who had been involved with its secret police, the Stasi
,
it was much less willing to face up to the crimes committed by Hitler's Thousand Year Reich.

In part this was a legacy of the early post-war years. Konrad Adenauer, West Germany's first chancellor, had vehemently opposed much of the Allied powers' work on denazification, and had pushed for the release of those convicted of war crimes at the Nuremberg trials. He had even appointed, as his right-hand man in government, Hans Globke: a politician who had drafted anti-Semitic laws for Hitler in 1938.

From the outset, no one wanted to look too closely at the past, and many years later at the end of the twentieth century, despite its proud position as the driving force of the European Union, Germany still had skeletons in its historical cupboard – skeletons it was neither ready nor willing to rattle.

The Berlin Wall had not been the only barrier separating Germany from itself. If the nation was now reunited, our collective memory was still decidedly patchy. Over the coming months I would discover that anything relating to the mysterious Lebensborn programme seemed to spark repeated bouts of amnesia. There had been very little published about it, and what information was available suggested a story of national shame and a legacy still shrouded in secrecy.

As I waited for Georg Lilienthal and the Bundesarchiv to respond to me, I thought back to the telephone call from the Red Cross. The woman had seemed reluctant to give me any information: had she been
trying to warn me about the problems I would face when she asked whether I really wanted to investigate my past? Perhaps, but however difficult the task might be, I was determined to try. I did not realise then, as I tentatively began my personal quest, that I would also be embarking on a painful journey into Germany's troubled history, as well as that of a country it had once invaded and plundered.