Hitler's Forgotten Children (20 page)

‘To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognised need of the human soul.'
S
IMONE
W
EIL
,
T
HE
N
EED FOR
R
OOTS
, 1949

W
ernigerode lies on the eastern edge of the Harz mountains in the German heartland of Saxony. It is a quiet, picturesque town, in which half-timbered houses flank the Holtemme river and horse-drawn carts still rumble through cobbled streets. It looks and feels like the setting for a fairy tale: the sort of place where the Brothers Grimm might have based their stories.

But Wernigerode has another, altogether less cosy history. On the top of a steep hill just outside the town lie the ruins of Heim Harz, one of the network of Lebensborn homes.

In late summer 2005, I drove to Wernigerode to take part in the creation of a new organisation. Lebensspuren (‘Traces of Life') was the first formal attempt by those of us who had been born or reared under Himmler's Master Race programme to band together: our aim was both to provide much-needed support and to begin the process of bringing Lebensborn into the public gaze, free from the prejudice and shame
that prevented others from understanding what had been done to us in its homes.

It was a long journey. The road stretched more than 260 kilometres through the woods and fields of central Germany: as I drove I had time to reflect on how I had got here. It was more than five years since I had begun the search for my roots. I had learned so much during that time, and yet I still knew relatively little.

In the ten months since I had received the scientific tests that proved who I was, I had made no real progress in discovering how I had been brought into the Lebensborn programme, nor did I fully understand the extent of the experiment itself. In this I was far from alone. The meeting in Hadamar had been a first step for the handful of Lebensborn children to come together and share our stories. Each of us had a little part of the overall jigsaw, but even together we could not complete the full picture.

The title of our new organisation was a deliberate twist on Lebensborn: where that had been, in Himmler's vision and language, the Fount of Life, our association was to be the way for its survivors to explain it. But I was also aware of a possible play on words: that middle syllable, ‘pur', was an acknowledgement of the Nazis' obsession with racial purity which lay at the root of all our problems.

We chose a particular quotation to head our articles of association:

Uprootedness is by far the most dangerous disease to which human society is exposed. Whoever is uprooted, uproots others. Who is rooted himself, doesn't uproot others. To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognised need of the human soul.

It came from the French philosopher and activist, Simone Weil. She had fought fascism in Germany in the early 1930s and later as a volunteer on the Republican side during the Spanish Civil War. In 1943 she wrote a book called
The Need for Roots
, examining the social, cultural and
spiritual malaise undermining western society; the quotation we selected from it perfectly encapsulated the story of our lives.

I liked Guntram Weber the moment I met him at the Lebensspuren meeting. We were staying in the same guesthouse and we shared a common interest in working with young people: Guntram was a creative writing teacher specialising in helping disadvantaged youngsters. He was two years younger than me, but his face bore witness to the pain he had experienced throughout his life. When he stood up to tell his story, his eyes filled with tears as he described his struggle to find the truth about his origins as well as the overwhelming desire to run away from it.

He had grown up in an outwardly normal post-war German family, living with his parents and two siblings – an older sister and a younger brother. But behind closed doors it was a different story.

As a child I remember sensing that I wasn't quite normal. Relatives seemed to treat me awkwardly and it gradually became clear that the man I called Father was actually my stepfather. Of course I wanted to find out who my real father was, but the subject was taboo in our house.

Relatives had been well drilled by my mother to hide the truth behind vague statements. ‘It was the war,' they would say. ‘Things were very confusing. We didn't see much of each other – you will have to ask your mother.'

It wasn't until he was thirteen that Guntram's mother agreed to discuss the issue.

‘Well, Guntram,' she said, ‘You are old enough to know the truth about your father now.' Then she gave me a name, told
me when his birthday was and that she had married him in 1938 on a beautiful sunny day and that they had driven to church in a horse-drawn cart.

During the war he had been a truck driver for the Luftwaffe, far away from the front, who had died driving over a landmine in Yugoslavia. She added that he certainly wasn't involved in killing anyone.

But there were no documents and no photos of this man, and when I pressed her, my mother she said she didn't want to say any more about him because it was too painful.

It was a plausible story. Guntram was a little suspicious, but the climate of German society during the 1950s actively discouraged awkward questions. Many children were told lies about what their parents did in the war and, as I knew from my own experience, it wasn't the ‘done thing' to challenge them.

Curiosity and uncertainty gnawed away at Guntram. Sometimes he thought about confronting his mother about his doubts, but he never managed to do so. The lack of any photos or documents led him to question the story of the non-combatant Luftwaffe driver: instead he began worrying that his father had been a Nazi and that this was the reason for his family's secretive behaviour. He began inspecting his facial features in the mirror and poring over history books in the school library, searching for photos of soldiers who could be his father or for women concentration camp guards who looked like his mother. For one terrible period he even convinced himself that Joseph Goebbels, Reich Minister for Propaganda and one of Hitler's most devoted followers, might be his father. A year or so later he made a disturbing discovery.

My mother had a strongbox in the bottom right-hand corner of her wardrobe. One afternoon when she was out, I decided to look in. I had terrible qualms about doing this; I knew I was
breaking the trust between us and she was my only security in the world. But I felt I had no choice.

Inside the trunk, Guntram found the first clue to his identity: a small silver cup. It bore a profoundly unsettling inscription.

We were a fairly poor family at the time. Like many others, my mother had lost everything during the war, so to find a silver object in the house was extremely unusual. I picked it up carefully and discovered my Christian name on it; my second name, though, was shown as ‘Heinrich'. And then I turned it over and saw the writing on the other side. It read: ‘From your godfather, Heinrich Himmler.'

Guntram desperately wanted to ask his mother about the cup. But, like Gisela with me, she was secretive – and he knew how badly she would react to the revelation that he had been rummaging through her things. It remained an unspoken and unsettling mystery.

In 1966 he first heard the word Lebensborn. His older sister needed her birth certificate in order to get married and was surprised to discover that she didn't have one. When she questioned their mother she was obstructive and told her daughter she didn't know where it was.

An enquiry at her place of birth turned up the unexpected news that Guntram's sister was the illegitimate child of an army officer. Her records were still intact and showed that she had been born in a Lebensborn home. That led to the revelation that Guntram had also been a Lebensborn child. Rather than question his mother further though, he chose instead to get away, and moved to the United States. He stayed there for eight years and had a family of his own, putting aside questions about his past.

But when his partner died in a car crash, he returned to Germany with his son. Before long the uncertainty about his roots began nagging
at him again and finally, in 1982, he decided to confront his mother during a long car journey where, as he put it, ‘she could not escape from me'. He pulled off the road and forced his mother to talk to him.

My mother was angry but she uttered three sentences that I will never forget. First she said: ‘I don't want to talk about that.' Then she tried to stop me digging into my past: ‘People will throw dirt at you,' she told me. Eventually, when she saw that I would not be put off, she made a promise to write the whole story down for me. I believed her and felt better, trusting that she would give me the truth.

Sadly she never did. For Guntram's mother the truth was simply too difficult to speak about: she died two years later, taking her secrets to the grave and leaving Guntram both frustrated and angry. As she had once told him in an unguarded moment: ‘The relationship between mother and child is a power struggle.' Guntram felt he had been powerless in that struggle.

It wasn't until 2001, when he was fifty-eight, that Guntram discovered who his father was – not, as his mother had told him, a young soldier who died honourably, but an SS major-general who oversaw the deaths of tens of thousands of people while stationed in what is now western Poland. He had been convicted of war crimes and sentenced to death by a Polish court in 1949, but had escaped to Argentina, where he died in 1970.

My father was a war criminal. He was a man who allowed himself everything. And the SS enabled him to live that way. I assume my mother fell in love with a powerful military man. He died peacefully and at his funeral his old comrades stood beside his grave and raised their right arms in the Nazi salute. I knew then that a racist is always a racist.

There was a bitter irony to Guntram's description of his life. As a Lebensborn baby, his ‘racially pure' genes were supposed to have ensured that he grew up strong and confident – a future leader of the Master Race. Instead he had suffered for more than sixty years from feelings of low self-esteem, loneliness and uncertainty. The only thing that helped, he told us in Wernigerode, was finding other Lebensborn children.

It has been a huge relief for me, although I haven't been able to shake this feeling of inadequacy. Maybe in ten years it will be gone. It's important that other children in Germany and abroad hear about this group because it could help us all.

I agreed wholeheartedly with Guntram: Lebensspuren needed to be publicly visible so that other men and women who had been through the Lebensborn programme could make contact with us and perhaps find some solace. But in 2005 our group was not ready to do that: we met privately – partly due to the sense of shame still attached to our past.

To some extent Helga Kahrau exemplified the dichotomy we all faced, that of needing support and acceptance while simultaneously struggling with the painful reality of her birth. A tall and forceful woman, with her blond hair dyed a striking red, Helga had been born into the heart of the Nazi regime. During the war her mother, Margarete, had been a secretary in the offices of Hitler's top aide, Martin Bormann, and of Joseph Goebbels. She had memories of growing up in privilege and comfort, surrounded by important-looking men in crisp uniforms.

In the decades that followed the end of the Third Reich, Margarete refused to talk to Helga about the war, much less tell her about the father she had never known. It was only after Margarete's death in 1993 that Helga began to examine her family's past. She was horrified by what she discovered.

Margarete was a fervent Nazi who barely knew Helga's father. He was a German army officer and they met in June 1940 at a party celebrating
Hitler's conquest of France. They had a one-night stand, which left Margarete pregnant. She was a perfect candidate for Himmler's Master Race programme: politically committed, racially pure and expecting an illegitimate child from an equally Aryan German soldier. Nine months later, Helga was born in the main Lebensborn home at Steinhöring, outside Munich.

When Helga was three months old, Margarete left the home and returned to work in Goebbels' Propaganda Ministry. Helga was handed over to foster parents: her new father was a high-ranking Nazi official in the occupied Polish city of Łodz. Here, Helga believed, he helped oversee the gassing of thousands of Jews at the nearby Chelmno concentration camp.

I spent the first four years of my life raised and tutored by the Nazi elite. I was involved, in a fundamental way, with murderers.

At the end of the war, unlike many Lebensborn children, Helga was sent back to Munich to live with Margarete. Here she encountered the irony of Himmler's obsession with Nordic features. Although the city and its surrounding regions were the birthplace of Nazism, most Bavarians are dark-haired: the very racial characteristics which Lebensborn valued ensured that Helga stuck out.