Hitler's Forgotten Children (9 page)

 

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The SS cap badge was a Death's Head (skull and crossbones): because of this and their role in administering the death camps, they were known as SS-Totenkopfverbände – literally, Death's Head units or regiments.

‘The eternal law of nature to keep the race pure is the legacy that the National Socialist movement has bestowed upon the German people for all time.'
N
AZI PROPAGANDA FILM
, 1935

T
here was no such place as St Sauerbrunn.

With little else to go on, I returned to the very first record of my existence: the little pink slip of paper showing that I had been vaccinated against scarlet fever and diphtheria. As it documented my birthplace as St Sauerbrunn, that seemed the most logical place to start. But although I searched through atlases and historic maps of Germany and all the countries Hitler's armies had invaded, there was no town or village with that name.

The closest match was the Austrian spa town of Bad Sauerbrunn, close to the border with Hungary. At the start of 2000, I found the address of the Austrian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and wrote a lengthy letter asking if they could help me locate any record of a family called Matko anywhere in the vicinity of Bad Sauerbrunn.

I was now becoming a little impatient. I had not received a reply – much less any information – from the Bundesarchiv, and I was still
waiting for Georg Lilienthal to deliver the information he had supposedly found about me during his research into Lebensborn.

Frustrated, I began searching for information about this mysterious-sounding organisation. What struck me immediately was how little seemed to have been published. More than fifty years after the end of the war, the terrible history of the Third Reich and its crimes had been analysed and picked over in meticulous detail, and yet a Google search for Lebensborn produced only a few, largely repetitive results.

Ostensibly, the Lebensborn Society (literally translated,
Lebensborn
means Fount, or Source, of Life) was founded in 1935 as some sort of welfare organisation, funded by the Nazi Party, to run maternity homes across Germany; it was set up in response to what was rapidly becoming a demographic crisis for the new Reich. When Hitler came to power in the 1930s, the country's population had been falling for decades. In 1900, the statistics showed an average rate of births per thousand of 35.8; by 1932 that had dropped to 14.7. From the outset, the Nazi regime set out to stop and then reverse the trend. They began with slogans – ‘Restoring the family to its rightful place' was typical – and then introduced financial incentives such as marriage loans, child subsidies and family allowances to encourage large families. A cult of motherhood was also formally established: every year on the birthday of Hitler's own mother, fertile women were awarded the Honour Cross of the German Mother. Those who produced more than four children were given a bronze medal; more than six earned silver; and gold was awarded to those with more than eight.

When this didn't produce results quickly enough, new laws were introduced to ban the advertisement and display of contraceptives and Germany's pioneering birth control clinics were shut down (in the 1920s Germany had been a world leader in developing contraceptive devices such as the IUD). Abortions were criminalised as ‘acts of sabotage against Germany's racial future'.

That phrase, ‘racial future', was my first clue to the reality hiding
behind the seemingly innocuous Lebensborn Society. Although the ostensible aim of the homes was to allow women who might otherwise abort their pregnancy to give birth in safety and in secret – thus helping to boost Germany's population – they weren't open to everyone.

I was, of course, aware of the Nazis' obsession with race: it was the altar on which Hitler and his regime had sacrificed more than six million Jews. What I hadn't encountered was the extraordinary and convoluted web of organisations that had been established to safeguard the ‘purity' of the German race. As I continued my research, I could feel myself being pulled down the rabbit hole of National Socialist madness. At its heart was the sinister figure of Heinrich Himmler.

Himmler had joined the Nazi Party in August 1923, three years after its birth. He was not one of its early fanatics – his membership number was 14,303 – but within six years he had taken charge of its most powerful paramilitary organisation, the Schutzstaffel, more infamously known by its initials: SS.

As Reichsführer-SS, Himmler began creating a parallel, and ultimately much more powerful, organisation to control and monitor the Nazi Party. He had long been interested in the then-fashionable quasi-science of eugenics and became obsessed with the idea of a mystical past in which a Nordic race of pure-blooded warriors had conquered much of Europe. He began reorganising the SS to be the vanguard of a reborn race of Aryan ‘supermen'. Under his direction applicants were vetted for their racial ‘qualities': he described the process as being ‘like a nursery gardener trying to reproduce a good old strain which has been adulterated and debased; we started from the principles of plant selection and then proceeded quite unashamedly to weed out the men whom we did not think we could use for the build up of the SS'.

In 1931, he created a separate department within the SS to ensure his ‘plant selection' ran smoothly: Das Rasse-und-Siedlungshauptamt-SS
,
or RuSHA. A literal translation would be ‘SS Race and Settlement Main Office'; what it meant in practice was an organisation dedicated
to safeguarding the ‘racial purity' of the Schutzstaffel. One of its duties was to oversee the marriages of SS personnel: on Himmler's personal orders, RuSHA only issued a permit to marry after detailed background investigations had proved that both partners had an uninterrupted racial pedigree showing them to have come from pure Aryan blood-stock as far back as 1800.

As I read further, I discovered that the Lebensborn Society had been formed and fostered under RuSHA's banner. In a circular issued on 13 December 1936, Himmler had set out both the lineage and the aims of his new organisation:

The Lebensborn Society is under the direct personal control of the Reichsführer-SS. It is an integral part of the Race and Settlement Head Office and its objects are:

1.   To support racially and genetically valuable large families.

2.   To accommodate and look after racially and genetically valuable expectant mothers who, after careful investigation of their families and those of the fathers of their children by RuSHA, can be expected to give birth to equally valuable children.

3.   To look after those children.

4.   To look after the mothers of those children.

Even to me – a German woman, born during the war, who had lived her whole life in a country trying to come to terms with the legacy of Hitler's twisted vision – this sounded the stuff of madness. In German we have a very expressive word for this sort of fantastic lunacy:
unglaublich
, meaning unbelievable. How could anyone ‘prove' their racial or genetic value – and what in any event did such a bizarre concept mean in practice?

I was not, it emerged, alone in being confused. I found a succession of references to rumours which had grown up about Lebensborn facilities. Some of these dated back to the war years and suggested that ordinary Germans had become worried by stories that these ostensible maternity homes were in fact SS stud farms: places where the cream of Himmler's brigades were introduced to suitable Aryan women in order to breed racially valuable babies for the Reich. The gossip was false but the secrecy that surrounded Lebensborn ensured that the rumours had persisted over the years. There was even an entire genre of Nazi exploitation films and books dedicated to mythologising the programme: one typical example, a movie made in 1961 by a German director and widely available on the Internet, had the English title ‘Ordered to Love' and the screaming subtitle ‘Frauleins Forced into Nazi Breeding!'

I felt ashamed and horrified. I understood that the SS stud farm stories were no more than absurd fantasies (and as often as not, cynical attempts to sell tawdry films and novels), but if this was what the world knew – or thought it knew – about Lebensborn
,
was it any surprise that modern Germany was unwilling to talk openly about it? Perhaps this explained why my requests for information from the Bundesarchiv were still unanswered, two months on. Alone, I had little chance of being able to investigate Lebensborn, much less to uncover its role in my origins. I needed help, but there seemed to be a wall of silence surrounding anything to do with this corner of Nazi history.

In February 2000, my hopes were dashed further. The Austrian government finally replied to my letter about Matko family records in Bad Sauerbrunn: there was no such record and never had been. My journey seemed to be over almost before it had started. If I hadn't come from Austria, where had I been born?

And then, a few days later, a letter arrived from Georg Lilienthal in Mainz. For the first time it contained clues – solid, historical information – about Lebensborn and how it fitted into my own story. He wrote cautiously, hinting once again at painful secrets lying in wait for me.

Dear Frau von Oelhafen,

I would first like to thank you for the trust you have placed in me with your letter because it's all about the question of your identity. Therefore, I am also glad that Ms Fischer of the German Red Cross in her conversation with you was very careful … I have to apologise to you. My response to your letter took a long time. And while you were waiting for a sign from me, you might have come to doubt whether your request was the right thing to do. I can reassure you.

My long silence was partly due to external reasons (too little time to find the documents together and write): but on the other hand I was also aware that the answer would not be easy because I know what it could mean to you. That's why I have been writing my letter on and off since early January. That is what has led me to outline your presumptive fate so soberly and in a seemingly emotionless way. I did not want to influence your feelings with my feelings.

Now for your request. As you write, the fact that you have two names (Erika Matko and Ingrid von Oelhafen) has long been known. I assume that you have therefore always wondered what it's all about. Apparently your foster parents were not completely open with the little they knew about you.

After reading the letter, I could not have told you exactly what my feelings were: there was anxiety and apprehension, but these were also shot through with excitement.

I knew, of course, that neither Hermann nor Gisela had ever told me the truth about my origins. I had, to some extent, convinced myself that if this hadn't been the result of the tensions of post-war life, it must have been because they didn't really know my history. Lilienthal's letter was the first time I had to confront the possibility that my foster parents might have deliberately withheld information.

And then came the revelation I had been waiting for and half-expecting. Lilienthal's research had found the name Erika Matko in some long-forgotten records of the Lebensborn programme. She had been raised in one of its children's homes: a place called Sonnenweise (literally: ‘Sunny Meadow') at Kohren-Sahlis. Since I was – or once had been – Erika Matko, that meant I was a Lebensborn baby. What's more, his investigations had convinced him that Hermann and Gisela had deliberately concealed this information from me.

There was now solid documentary evidence linking me to this bizarre and evidently still-shameful Nazi organisation: one which had been under the direct control of the SS. And yet my overall response was exhilaration rather than shock. It seemed incredible, but it also offered the chance finally to find out more about who I was and where I had come from. And in a way, the revelation also brought me a little peace. Although I did not yet understand the true nature of Lebensborn, I could now let go of one of the worries which I had lived with ever since I discovered that I had been fostered.

If, as my initial research indicated, Lebensborn was a political programme in which the demands of the Nazi regime overrode the feelings of those it ruled, perhaps the reason my real parents had given me up was also political, not (as I had feared) the much more upsetting idea that they simply hadn't wanted to keep me. That realisation brought me some comfort, but also a hint of fear. In some way I had been involved with an organisation which, nearly sixty years later, still evoked fear and loathing. I mentally added the SS to the growing list of Nazi groups I would need to investigate.

Lilienthal's letter contained more surprises. Realising that I knew little about how Lebensborn had operated, he explained how children had arrived at Sonnenweise
.
Some had been born in Lebensborn maternity homes, then brought to Kohren-Sahlis as part of Himmler's programme to increase the population of the Reich. Others, though, had apparently been kidnapped.