The Invisible History of the Human Race (10 page)

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From the early 1930s the daily tensions and demands related to establishing proof of ancestry increased and even began to attract the attention of the foreign press. In 1934 a report stated that the Reich’s minister of posts had directed all of his employees to produce evidence of Aryan descent. Earlier people had to prove they were Aryan only if there was doubt about their racial status. That same year Hitler’s government decreed that only Aryans could hold stalls at the upcoming Leipzig Fair and that all wares had to be German made. There was no restriction, however, on “Jewish attendees or other Non-Aryans”; anyone who wanted to buy German wares was free to do so.

In 1935, in one of many articles about exclusions based on Aryan status, the
New York Times
reported that a young female clerk had been sentenced to four months in jail in Berlin for falsifying her grandfather’s birth certificate, which showed that he was Jewish. The girl had erased “Jewish” and written “Evangelical” because it had become necessary to provide proof of ancestry at her workplace in order to keep her job. Some jobs required the absence of Jewish blood from 1800 on.

Nazi genealogy was not merely a way to bureaucratize the social categories that mattered to anti-Semites; it was an enormous social machine that reinforced, as well as recorded, the racism and eugenic ideals of the Nazis. Tens of millions of people were caught up in the documentary maelstrom. Each day Germans lined up at registrars and before other government representatives to produce documents establishing their ancestry. “Businesses gave away genealogical tables as marketing devices, much as present-day companies give away pens and calendars,” writes Ehrenreich. Accordingly, many benefited from the Reich’s preoccupation with ancestry, not just scientists and genealogists but also the gatekeepers of information, like civil registrars and churches. They saw their status rise and they profited through increased government funding and greater prestige. Genealogical magazines sold well, as did books with titles like
How Do I Find My Ancestors: A Guide to Quick Proof of One’s Aryan Ancestry
.

For genealogists the new power was intoxicating. “For decades, kinship research was science’s Cinderella,” one wrote in 1936. “
While other branches of learning were represented by university chairs, and encouraged by the state, people dismissed us with a pitying laugh. That has now changed thanks to the regime of Adolf Hitler. Today genealogy has tasks of state-level importance to fulfill.”

In 1936 the Reich Federation of German Civil Registrars produced a new family passport, the
Ahnenpass
. Like the
Einheitsfamilienstammbuch
, it was a conveniently pocket-sized version of all of one’s genealogical information, and once officially stamped, it functioned as a legal document. Many millions were produced; private companies created more than twenty competing versions. The Reich was so enthusiastic about the
Ahnenpass
that the military high command and even the Office of the Führer’s Secretary promoted its use. One featured a quote from Hitler on its front page:

There is
only one most holy human right and that right is at the same time the holiest obligation that is to care that the blood remains pure and through the protection of the best of human kind the noble development of this essence to give the possibility of the development of this noble essence.

In practice, many Germans were able to “prove” their Aryan ancestry by virtue of taking an oath. Local administrators certified individuals at their discretion, and the assumption was always that further proof would be provided once the war was over. Yet in the early part of the twentieth century there were many marriages between Jews and Aryans, and they all considered themselves German. Their children, who generally grew up to be Christian, thought of themselves as German too. Who knows what steps the Third Reich might have taken had everyone truly been forced to produce the details of his lineage?

Hundreds of thousands of individuals who were unable to gain approval with just an oath had to deal in some way with the Reich’s Genealogical Authority. Ehrenreich combed through hundreds of wartime letters written by ordinary Germans pleading with the authority for a swift and favorable ruling. “
No one knows my unbelievably heavy sorrow,” wrote a woman whose son wished to marry an Aryan woman. “Please leave me this little ray of hope,” wrote another. “I grasp so desperately at your help.”

The research was a surreal experience for Ehrenreich, whose mother escaped Germany in 1939; his father survived the war but lost his two younger sisters and many other members of his family to the Nazis. From an early age Ehrenreich had been fascinated by the Holocaust:
Why would someone want to kill all the Jews in the world?
The letters that he read were housed in the German Federal Archives, the same site used by Hitler’s personal SS bodyguard during the war. During the day he would come across letters from racial experts who had lived in the neighborhood and at night walk past the houses they had lived in.

By 1935 the Nazi government issued a law that prohibited marriage between the genetically healthy and “unhealthy.” In 1939 Adolf Hitler created the secret T4 program, in which thousands of disabled people, along with the economically unfortunate, “burdensome lives,” and “useless eaters,” were reclassified as “life unworthy of life.” In many ways it served as a pilot for the Nazi death camps.

Initially the program took in only children. Parents were encouraged to send their disabled offspring to special centers for treatment. Once there the children were starved to death or injected with a lethal overdose. As the program grew, people who were already institutionalized because of schizophrenia, epilepsy, dementia, or other disorders were transferred to one of six killing centers by SS soldiers in white coats. There they were led into chambers disguised as showers and gassed to death. Their bodies were burned in specially installed ovens, and relatives were notified of the deaths and sent falsified death certificates. Somehow news of the program became public, and even in Nazi Germany people objected. Eventually a grassroots campaign forced its closure, but it continued in secret. More than two hundred thousand people were killed in the T4 program.

When the war ended, Nazi genealogy and eugenics were finally put on trial. Hitler’s personal physician, Major General Karl Brandt, was apprehended and prosecuted at Nuremberg. He created a program that sent sick, disabled, aged, and “non-German” people to the gas chamber to be killed, murdered people for the sole purpose of harvesting their skulls for medical research, and conducted medical experimentation where victims were sterilized, operated on, poisoned, or exposed to diseases like smallpox or terrible conditions like extremely high altitude. Brandt’s defense included a copy of Madison Grant’s
The Passing of the Great Race.
He specifically drew the court’s attention to the parts of the book where Grant advocated activities that the Nazis ended up carrying out:

Mistaken regard for what are believed to be divine laws and a sentimental belief in the sanctity of human life tend to prevent both the elimination of defective infants and the sterilization of such adults as are themselves of no value to the community. The laws of nature require the obliteration of the unfit and human life is valuable only when it is of use to the community or race.

But Nazi eugenics did not just seek to eliminate the bad; they also sought to facilitate what they saw as the good.

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Gisela Heidenreich’s father died on the Russian front, and while it was not unusual among her school friends to not have a father, her friends had photos of theirs, and they knew their fathers’ names. Heidenreich did not. Again, unlike her friends who were born locally in the small Bavarian town of Bad Tölz, Heidenreich was born in Norway. Her mother told her that in 1943, when she was pregnant, she had to work in a Lebensborn clinic in Oslo, which is where Heidenreich was born. Heidenreich had never heard the word “Lebensborn” before and assumed it was the name of the clinic.

Still, she always felt there was something that she hadn’t been told. “
You know, as a little child, there is something wrong, there is something weird, and you are feeling:
There is something I want to ask. I want to know and the answer is . . . oh, what? No, there is nothing, it’s your imagination
,” she told me.

When she was thirteen a scandalous story made headlines in Germany, and a friend quietly passed her an article about Lebensborn clinics. It claimed they were actually brothels for SS soldiers. Heinrich Himmler had created a breeding program using women who, depending on the story, were either prostitutes or innocent Aryan girls who were raped by soldiers (presumably with good Aryan documentation).
Oh, God
, thought Heidenreich.
Now I know why she never talked about my birth, why she never talked about my father
.

There was no one Heidenreich could ask about it. Her mother was a depressive, difficult woman who rarely laughed and shared little. She never even told Heidenreich about menstruation. “You cannot imagine how this society was. After the catastrophe of the so-called Third Reich, they were more and more withdrawn, even on the topic of sex,” Heidenreich told me. “So I could not ask her, ‘Is it true you were a whore?’ I just had to accept that I was the product of having been bred in this brothel. It was horrible.”

After she turned eighteen, Heidenreich answered the door one day to find a young girl standing there. Her visitor was the same height as Heidenreich, and she looked as if she was the same age. “Hello, Gisela,” the girl said. “I am your sister.” Heidenreich slammed the door shut but a minute later opened it again. Her new sister told her that they shared three other siblings and a father. Not only that, but their father was still alive and, most amazing of all, she said, “Our father is a beautiful father, a wonderful father, and he is very kind and loving.”

It was like a fairy tale: Gisela loved her new siblings and her new father, who told her that he had always wanted to find her. Even her father’s wife—the woman to whom he had been unfaithful—welcomed her and made her feel like a daughter. Heidenreich still lived with her mother, though they rarely discussed the situation. For the most part, when Heidenreich headed out to visit her father, her mother would say, “Say hello to him.” When she was on her way back again, her father would say, “Say hello to her.”

Heidenreich’s father told her that almost twenty years earlier he had had an affair with her mother. It was a love affair, and yet he also told her, “It was an order from Himmler for his SS men to produce children out of the marriage to pass on their precious blood.” Not wanting to give up the happiness she had so longed for, Heidenreich didn’t ask for any other details, nor did she ask her father what he had done in the war. No one ever mentioned it.

In fact the founding principle of the Nazi Lebensborn program was to ensure that no Aryan children were aborted. Abortion was illegal, and doctors who performed the operation were executed. If a woman found herself pregnant outside of marriage, and if she could prove that both she and the father were Aryan dating back to at least 1800, she could give birth to her child in a Lebensborn clinic in secret. If she wished to leave her child with the program, it would be adopted out to an SS family or raised in a Lebensborn home. The clinics were not actually brothels or places of rape, as the lurid coverage from the 1950s had suggested, but rather were deluxe destinations for the wives of SS officers to give birth to their children. SS soldiers paid for the clinics out of their salary.

Still, Himmler’s zeal to create a master race included not just providing sanctuary for unwed mothers but actively encouraging SS soldiers to father more children. Eight thousand Lebensborn children were born in the homes. Heidenreich told me that about half of them were taken home by their mothers, and half were left for adoption. In Nazi-occupied foreign territories, children who looked Aryan were kidnapped and deposited at Lebensborn homes to be raised as Germans. It’s thought that twelve thousand children were born or abducted in Norway. Up to one hundred thousand were taken from Poland, and it may be that overall more than two hundred thousand children were removed from their parents in the Eastern Bloc countries to be Aryanized. Documents show that some parents signed their children away, but this took place in occupied territory so it’s doubtful how voluntary their choice was.

After the war the Lebensborn clinics were investigated by the Nuremberg trials, but it was concluded that they were charitable institutions. Heidenreich’s mother was a witness in the trials. “She lied,” Heidenreich told me. “She testified that the clinics were merely places to help women give birth, but they committed many crimes against humanity,” she recalled. “She always said she had been just a secretary, but that was not true.” Heidenreich’s mother was a senior member of the staff and managed the identity change and dispersal of stolen Norwegian children. “I think she even spoke Norwegian,” Heidenreich said, “but she never confessed.”

The fate of the Lebensborn children was a miserable one. Many were abandoned by their mothers and brought up in orphanages—most of which were terrible places in which to grow up. Gudrun Sarkar, who is now seventy-three years old, was left in a Lebensborn home until she was eight years old and still suffers phobias because of it. The Lebensborn nurses were so particular about how children ate, Sarkar told me, they insisted that children wear a bib when eating and that half of it cover their top and the other half be stiffly lodged under the plate to catch any food. It was such a tense balancing act that Sarkar still has trouble eating or sitting in a dark room. In elementary school Sarkar discovered that she was a Lebensborn child when her teacher asked her where she was born. When she told him it was a Lebensborn clinic, he explained that she was born for Hitler, and she should be ashamed of herself.

Eventually Sarkar was adopted by elderly Germans who remained committed Nazis long after the war ended. They believed it was their duty to raise an Aryan child, but they were not kind to Sarkar. Hitler was good for Germany, they said, but she was born in shameful circumstances. When she was a teenager, Sarkar brought home photos of dying Jews in concentration camps, but her parents said they must be fabricated.