All day. In 1959 Norbert Lebert conducted the first round of interviews, which included Wolf-Rudiger Hess, Martin Bormann junior, Niklas and Norman Frank, Gudrun Himmler, Edda Göring, and the von Schirach brothers. Shy? "Helena" was adopted by a German policeman and his wife. As an illegitimate Lebensborn child, she would inherit nothing. This was not the case, however, for “Aryan” women, and doctors, nurses, and midwives who performed abortions on them exposed themselves to the severest punishment. I want to stop the curse that's been haunting my family ever since, for the sake of myself and that of my own children. Many of those children subsequently experienced intense bullying, and in some cases, extreme mental and physical abuse. Joseph Goebbels was known for his numerous extramarital affairs, and his wife was loyal above all to Hitler. To fill out the HJ Division with enough experienced soldiers and officers, Waffen-SS survivors from the Russian Front, including members of the elite Leibstandarte-SS Adolf Hitler, were brought in. In 2001, his wife encouraged him to travel to Wernigerode and find his real mother. At school in a small Normandy town, meanwhile, he was taunted as the child of a German. All your family.'". "He said he had been in Krakow. Her mother left her a photo album with an account of her stay in Wernigerode. After the war she was repatriated and became a judge in Poland. He only has three photos. Martin Davidson is the commissioning editor for history and business programs at the BBC. How did she know the children's parents were dead, I asked. Is it possible that Anders Behring Breivik is a victim of a similar program that has continued to this day?_, Nazi officers with a "Lebensborn" child during a naming ceremony. For example, at WHW-organized community meals for the needy, Nazi representatives praised the people's newly awakened solidarity and social consciousness. ", And there it was: "You need only look at them. "I expected she would open up her arms to me, and say 'Oh, my son.' There were separate KLV camps for boys and girls. Some children were finally taken to neutral Sweden, placed in foster homes and adopted. There was no final reckoning, be­yond having to forfeit the right to boast about what an important man the Third Reich had made him — at least to those outside the circle of his fellow Kriegskameraden. "Guat Nacht, Vater. "All the time I felt that, you know, there's something wrong somewhere. Four internationally recognized historians on the Third Reich were already there. A Norwegian commission after the war decided that the children should remain in Norway. That is the memory her husband unwittingly tapped into that day on the beach. So I had to glimpse and then I turned my head and cried.". Fifty officers from the Wehrmacht, who were former Hitler Youth leaders, were also reassigned to the division. Altogether, Himmler established more than 20 Lebensborn institutions. The names of babies born in the clinic are kept in old Nazi record books, carefully guarded and classified as secret. Some curtly dismissed me, in blunt and unequivocal language. Some went to children's homes; but Paul Hansen was committed to a mental hospital. Then, as the Third Reich crumbled, he was killed in a Bavarian village on April 25, 1945, resisting an onslaught by U.S. tanks. Somehow, without exchanging a private word and without any more encouragement from me than common courtesy, they appeared to have persuaded themselves that rather than attacking me they needed to get me onto their side. It is estimated that 250,000 children were kidnapped and taken to Germany (“The ‘Lebensborn’ Program.”). Similar facilities will be made available soon to German soldiers' children in other countries, Lilienthal predicted. Even today, there continues to be a resounding silence in Germany about the Lebensborn program - from officials and even mothers who lost their children in occupied countries. East German spies would take on the names and what was known of the pre-adoption identities of the children. Mr. Doma said they bribed a hospital functionary to take the body, but Egyptian authorities found out, and Dr. Heim was instead interred in a common grave, anonymously. Continual changes in the rulings we received over the months were confusing and disturbing, and we were finally convinced that no one in authority understood either the political complexities or the human conflicts that surrounded us and our charges. Helga's mother, she knew, had been a secretary in the offices of both Hitler's top aide, Martin Bormann, and Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels, but other than admitting that fact, Mathilde Kahrau refused to say anything about the war. Now I’m all alone. But this wouldn't be easy. Olaf is one of 2,800 babies born at the Third Reich’s first Nazi breeding clinic in Steinhoering, Germany. And the boys kept getting younger. “Lebensborn” translates to “wellspring of life” or “fountain or life.” The Lebensborn project was one of most secret and terrifying Nazi projects. Beach, bed, bedroom, bathroom. Children were massively affected by World War Two. Before it ended in 1944, Lebensborn produced more than 42,000 babies. She was systematically beaten and bullied; but far worse was to come. I didn't know him but he knew I was a German child. Eichmann Delusion Syndrome. The identities of the mothers were recorded in tightly guarded Lebensborn files, which the SS kept separate from municipal and church ultimately decided to keep their babies, but hundreds,out of shame or financial necessity,turned the children over for adoption by high-ranking SS officials, or abandoned them. "Schlafen's?" Being in this program impacted many of the children later on in their lives. Newsweek International, March 20, 2000 By Joshua Hammer. What tricks was I playing? Olaf Sinner-Schmedermann was born in 1942 at a Lebensborn clinic in Steinhoering near Frankfurt. I was then moved to a boys' home and then another mental institution, where I was finally old enough to sign myself out. Ninety-one of them were considered good enough to be “Germanized” and sent to Germany. Then I went to Denmark to study. 804-408-8981 Jewell Buckelew. Anni-Frid "Frida" Lyngstad ,one of the singers of the former pop cult band ABBA is probably one of the most famous Lebensborn-children. Though Ravensbrück imprisoned mostly women, it also included a children's camp at Uckermark and a separate section for men. Autor: Ricardo Piglia Páginas: 150 ISBN: 8433971603. It was 1958. But the fate of the children resulting from the special breeding program was at times cruel. And one day I'll strike it lucky.". The answer, when it came in the early 1990s, proved that, in a world full of dark family secrets, ours had lost none of its power to appall. 317-883-1996 Hartwig Beideman. But UNRRA teams were directed to appoint child welfare investigating officers and to seek and follow information from all sources. "I was locked up on the first floor of the house, was never allowed to have anyone visit," she said. He shrugged. Unlike the Frank brothers, Gudrun Himmler's love and respect for her father stayed strong throughout both interviews. Rabbi YY Rubinstein - 23 Tammuz 5779 – July 26, 2019. "He froze. With the opening up of the biggest Holocaust archive in the world at the Red Cross Tracing Centre in Bad Arolsen, Germany, Folker finally discovered the truth. 'This is hardly surprising when you've spent your formative years being called a German idiot, a no-good bastard who doesn't deserve to be alive.'. "My little brother and sister and we were, she was shielding us sort of. So I took the habit of keeping quiet about it.". If nothing is in effect by that time, the disposition of the problem may have.. catastrophic results.". IN THE RECENTLY discovered documentation from this period, two things stand out. His mother had married another Wehrmacht soldier and lived in the East German town of Pasewalk. Meeting a NEWSWEEK correspondent at a hotel in downtown Munich, she was visibly nervous, tensing when the word "Lebensborn" was uttered too loudly and insisting on speaking about her life only in the privacy of a secluded booth. A German woman who had four or more was awarded the Mutter-Kreuz, “The Mother’s Cross”. These legendary super race babies of the Nazis, fathered by SS troops, had been hidden, some in mental institutions, in secret lives of shame. The father said he knew I wouldn't understand, but it had been a great honor for the boy, the family: Yes, they could have asked to have him returned home after the death of their daughter; there were provisions for that -- the party cared, he said stubbornly. LKA Baden-Wuerttemberg, via Associated Press. The "fearless, cruel, domineering" youth Hitler had wanted had now come of age and arrived on the battlefield with utter contempt for danger and little regard for their own lives. In this way, their contribution to the ongoing war among the races was placed on an equal footing with that of male soldiers. The first home was in Steinhoering, a town outside of Munich in 1936 (“The ‘Lebensborn’ Program”). I have not solved the question of what was the best solution for these children-and I don't think that anyone can. “I told the Jewish people about my background, and they did not care. "We were the children of monsters," he said, recalling the hatred of Nazis as he grew up in postwar France. I didn't know what that meant.'. It's taken me a long time to be able to say, it's OK, I'm a German child. In a policy formed by Hitler in 1942, German soldiers were encouraged to fraternize with native women, with the understanding that any children they produced would be provided for. Bjorn Lengfelder, a Lebensborn child who is active in the Norwegian survivors' group, said one woman he knows was kept in a children's home as a virtual prisoner for 15 years and sexually abused until she escaped. As head of the S.S. from 1929 to 1945, Himmler had a very powerful and central role in the Holocaust. "At the end of World War II, I was locked away in a mental home," Paul tells me. Important too were reactions to neurological tests, and personal habits: Persistent uncleanliness and, of course, bedwetting, farting, nail-biting, and masturbation-which older boys were told on arrival was forbidden -- were, if repeatedly observed, automatic disqualifications.). Having given birth to illegitimate babies in a fervently Nazi setting, the mothers faced a double stigma in postwar Germany. Diese Seite wurde zuletzt am 20. Their chilling tales, some of which are reproduced here, are just one small step towards that potential resolution. But now as pensioners, the curiosity has returned, and they can look back on their past with more detachment. It has taken until now for them to go before the cameras to talk about their feelings of pain, revulsion and confusion, sometimes mixed with love and regret. "I thought for a while that it could be my surname or something. And she told Alex that the next day they would all be shot. She grudgingly set a time. In some cases the children were still in the same city, and I found them by dialing every listing of the family name in the phone book. I was 23, a child welfare officer with UNRRA (the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration) and wore the UNRRA khaki uniform. Below: Decorated HJ flak helpers are seen during a war rally held amid Germany's declining fortunes. But his life took a terrible turn after the war, he says, because of his German parentage. As a six-year-old, she was thrown into the river by a man from her village, who said he wanted to 'see if the witch would drown or float'. I worked as an au pair in England, and worked and studied in Germany. Agents infiltrated countries Hitler planned to conquer, England, Canada, Belgium, Australia, Holland, Norway, Iceland, Denmark, France, South Africa and the United States. "I had my tubes tied at the age of 30 because I feared I would create another monster. It's the willing agents, the factotums, the managers — like Bruno — who are taken for granted, who function as unthinking givens. Investigators said that they had searched continuously since his disappearance in 1962, checking more than 240 leads and ruling out several people thought to be Dr. Heim. The progeny of a brief affair between a Luftwaffe pilot and a cleaning woman who abandoned her child at birth, Hansen, 57, spent his first three years in relative comfort in a Lebensborn home north of Oslo. To this day I'm still afraid of the dark and have nightmares. A German soldier taking an ideal Aryan child from their mother in Poland. She and her family fled the post-war persecution by moving to Sweden, where her secret was not known. The younger boys were assigned to operate search lights and assist with communications, often riding their bicycles as dispatch riders. Civilized notions of generosity and sympathy for those in need faded. He was a very particular kind of Nazi, but one whose story rarely gets told. Children and their welfare seemed to come lower down the list of priorities – the return of a father, according to some, would be enough to restore classic family virtues to society. Many of the mothers in the program were single, the fathers SS officers.Lebensborn, or spring of life, refers to a series of clinics scattered throughout Germany and neighboring countries, to which pregnant women, most of them single, went to give birth in secret. The Lebensborn homes sprang from a central tenet of Nazi ideology: the idea that no Germanic baby should go unborn. Nearly two million children wereevacuated from their homes at the start of World War Two; children had to endure rationing,gas mask lessons, living with strangers etc. I can see you, you German kid.". He sat across a table from the historical panel and patiently answered hundreds of questions about his father. It bore the SS insignia and the old German sign of life.”. Total War - The 12th SS-Panzer Division Hitlerjugend. Her new 'father' detested Germans and took out his hatred on Gerd. To be the daughter of SS chieftain Heinrich Himmler must be quite different from being the son of Lieutenant Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, the officer who planted the bomb that almost killed Hitler. No good, No good.' While I reminded myself not go read too much into their reactions-for no one in occupied Germany in those days would have readily welcomed an unexpected uniformed stranger-there was no mistaking the adults' particular unease at my arrival. Children already experiencing a stressful situation were put in an even more difficult situation. Even through the ruthless interrogations at the Nuremberg trials, "she vowed herself to him. The group held a convention last month in Caen to exchange stories and listen to historians describe where they fit in. One source suggests that the children were kept for 1 year before being released for adoption. The entry requirements for the Lebensborn clinics were as strict as for the SS itself. Kahrau was shocked. Niklas says: "Thin men were mounted on to a wild donkey by powerful German hands. "I was transferred from the Lebensborn home Goodhaab into an asylum, together with some others. By the spring of 1945, the 1,000-year Reich was in ruins, and with it, Himmler's master-race baby program. There were ten homes in Germany, nine in Norway, two in Austria, one in each Belgium, Holland, France, Luxembourg and Denmark (“The ‘Lebensborn’ Program”).