Thousands of children were transferred to the Lebensborn centers in order to be “Germanized.” Up to 100,000 children may have been stolen from Poland alone. Hans Frank was "condemned at the Nuremberg trials in 1946 and hanged" (Klessmann, 39). Breast milk distribution was just one of the many services offered to “desirable” members of the population. The names of babies born in the clinic are kept in old Nazi record books, carefully guarded and classified as secret. to clear her father' s name" (Lebert, 155). Among his young troops, morale was high. I later learnt that when my mother discovered she was pregnant she tried to get an abortion, but the German authorities wouldn't let her. The war ended with Germany's unconditional surrender on May 7, 1945. Suddenly, she says, "everything clicked." For many Lebensborn children, the revulsion they feel as they learn more about their backgrounds often goes together with a sense of relief at assembling the missing fragments of their lives. . Suddenly one of the three gravediggers hit the top of a wooden coffin with his pick, and Tuma rushed to the edge of the grave. 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. The irony of all this, given what happened to the Jews, is beyond further comment. But Harel said that what led them to Eichmann was the material received from Bauer and captured German documents that gave Eichmann’s physical details. A maternity ward in one of the Nazi-run Lebensborn, 'Yes, they were fanatics,' he says. she said. Paul found himself locked up with children so sick that some were incontinent and incapable of feeding themselves. Our father's life is ours and nobody else's concern. I didn't want a confrontation." Peering over them, she said with smile: "My eyes aren't perfect. This was done without the knowledge of the real persons (whose identities were changed by the Nazis when they were adopted, although they might have discovered their birth identities and pre-adoption histories in adulthood). Find best-selling books, new releases, and classics in every category, from Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird to the latest by Stephen King or the next installment in the Diary of a Wimpy Kid children’s book series. I was born in 1942 in a Lebensborn home, where I stayed until I was adopted aged two. Some mothers worked in homes after giving birth so they could be near their babies. For him to not want to start a family of his own because of the crimes his father committed, shows a true sign of resentment. One of the most disturbing was related to me by Gerd Fleischer. While the evidence has disclosed that thousands upon thousands of children were unquestionably kidnapped by other agencies or organisations and brought into Germany, the evidence has further disclosed that only a small percentage of the total number ever found their way into Lebensborn. Delorme pushed on, however, and three years ago completed his family tree at last: His father, he discovered, was Hans Hoffmann, a baker from Mainz. Michael Kater, a distinguished emeritus professor at York University in Canada, said the Lebensborn program was just one part of a Nazi plan to create a "racially pure" stronghold in Europe. "When we were small, perhaps," the oldest one finally said of that time, so long ago, when he was eight. A number of financial privileges were connected with this honor, including preferential service when shopping. These kidnappings were organized by the SS in order to take children by force who matched the Nazis’ racial criteria (blond hair and blue or green eyes). "I remember, when she shielded me that her blood [was] dripping. A number of official party-sponsored social service organizations, such as the Mother and Child Relief Agency of the National Socialist People's Welfare Organization [NS-Volkswohlfahrt or NSV] or the Reich Mothers' Service of German Women’s Enterprise [Deutsches Frauenwerk or DFW] were supposed to encourage women to have more children and to prepare them for their role as housewives and mothers. The prosecution has failed to prove with the requisite certainty the participation of Lebensborn, and the defendants connected therewith in the kidnapping programme conducted by the Nazis. But she also wanted more details from me, including the amount of her fee. The Perfect NaziBy Martin DavidsonHardcover, 384 pagesPutnam AdultList Price: $26.95. "Once a Hoess, always a Hoess. While the secret lives of Nazis in countries like Argentina and Paraguay captured the popular imagination in books and films like “The Odessa File” and “The Boys From Brazil,” the Heim case casts light on the often overlooked history of their flight to the Middle East. Those who passed were sent to children's homes to be Germanized; many were then placed in Nazi families and raised as Germans. Occupying troops could be brutal as the children at Oradur-sur-Glane and Lidice found out. I worked as an au pair in England, and worked and studied in Germany. Such was the perception at the time. Children between the ages of six and 12 found to be of "racial value" were sent to institutions in Germany to be Germanized. Historian Lars Borgesrud was commissioned by the Norwegian government to research the war children’s stories. (The receipt of a Mother Cross, however, was not tantamount to permanent recognition. By the end of 1939 they still had nothing but an acknowledgment from the authorities to whom they had applied for a baby girl. In 1965, Hansen traveled by train and ferry to see her, and remembers the excitement he felt as he approached her flat. Those children who were evacuated were given a stamped postcard to send from their billet address to inform their parents where they were. The first experimental ‘gas chambers’ were used on German children who were mentally incapacitated. Another source notes 13 homes. What impact this had on the children involved was never overly studied at the time as the government simply wanted to herald evacuation as an overwhelming success. Anne-Lise Fredriksen was walking on the beach one day during a Key West vacation when her husband told her to straighten up so her back wouldn't ache later. And the boys kept getting younger. As well as paying all the costs for the birth, the Lebensborn association gave the mothers substantial child support, including money for clothes, as well as a pram or cot. I'd be glad if they were. However, it was soon realized that this defeat was unlike any other in history. Several hundred of the children were sent off to Germany to be adopted or to be cared for by the families of their fathers. Journalists Stephan and Norman Lebert conducted a series of interviews and uncover the intimate background of these children. Her new 'father' detested Germans and took out his hatred on Gerd. He soon realized he had underestimated the depth of his emotion for the man who abandoned him at the age of four, then taunted him for years from South American hideouts. "Silly question. During those first weeks they'd had German language, history, and geography lessons for several hours, every day. A girl getting her face measured: the Nazis wanted "racially and genetically valuable children. Ms. Heidenreich spent much of the rest of her childhood with her grandmother, because unbeknownst to her, her mother had been arrested to testify in the Nuremberg war crime trials. Aktive Geräusch unterdrückung für immersiven Klang. What had I meant by "children brought into Germany?" " she says. And if the adoptees then tried to trace their birth families, the government would frustrate them in order not to blow the spies' covers. Until the last days of the war, the mothers and the children at maternity homes got the best treatment available, including food, even though many others in the area were starving. They went away and came back a day later. But after the conflict had ended, many of the Norwegians born into the programme suffered. Even through her adulthood, Gudrun stayed faithful to her father. But towards the end of the war, the exiled Norwegian government – which had set up shop in London – started broadcasting ominous warnings to collaborators in Norway. They were often told that their parents abandoned them. From his mother, he got anger and silence. BDM girls were assigned to help care for wounded soldiers in hospitals, to help in kindergartens, and to assist households with large families. Olaf Sinner-Schmedemann went to Paris and danced for three years with the Ballet d’Arcy. But that's what I remembered. she then added. "That's very visible in my head all the time.". Another source estimates 8,000 babies. But in order to create a “super-race,” the SS transformed these nurseries into “meeting places” for “racially pure” German women who wanted to meet and have children with SS officers. On September 1st, 1939, Hitler's armies invaded Poland. "When I told her that I had spent my life in mental institutions, she replied, 'So what? This is a story of survival - the incredible story of how a six-year-old Jewish boy survived the Nazis' final solution and kept how he survived a secret for more than 50 years. Those between the ages of two and six, who would eventually be given to "childless families of good race" for adoption were first sent for a period of observation to a home run by the Lebensborn ("Spring of Life") Society. Among the stories I heard that night, perhaps the most wretched was that of Paul Hansen. Despite such reactions, descendants of Nazis — from high-ranking officials to lowly foot soldiers — are increasingly trying to find out what their families did between 1933 to 1945. The war could only end with the "unconditional surrender" of Germany and its Axis partners, as stated by President Franklin Roosevelt at the Casablanca Conference in January 1943. Some of the mothers gave them up for adoption to SS families. Nei­ther a camp Kommandant nor an architect of the Holocaust, neither a Höss nor an Eichmann, he was nevertheless an enabler of evil, one of its indispensable, and very active, minions. "It was my family. The conviction Thursday in Munich of retired Ohio autoworker John Demjanjuk on charges he was a guard at the Sobibor Nazi death camp drives home how the Holocaust is still very much at the forefront of the German psyche. The entry requirements for the Lebensborn clinics were as strict as for the SS itself. Nach der Entführung des Vaters im Mai 1960 – Ricardo Eichmann war zu diesem Zeitpunkt fünf Jahre alt – zog die Mutter mit ihren Kindern Anfang der sechziger Jahre nach Deutschland zurück. With the "Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service" of April 7, 1933, the Nazi regime had already begun to define and exclude supposed racial enemies. When she was nine, she had the shape of a Nazi symbol brutally scored into her forehead with bent nails. This one is unidentied. This scenario guaranteed I would get some doors slammed in my face. She decided to discuss her parent openly only during the last days of my final German research trip. "I accuse myself of shutting out who my father was. One was Dr. Karl Adolf Brandt, the only son of Hitler's personal physician, executed at the "doctors' trial" after the war.2 Dr. Brandt actually allowed me to stay at his house for two days, with his wife and two of his three adult children. A large number lost their jobs, for as little as having been seen talking to a German, and many were traumatised for life. The program was developed in 1932, a year before Hitler became chancellor. Sitting in the gloomy apartment he shared with his unrepentant Nazi mother until her death in 1976, Olaf said, ”It’s a good thing for the world that the dreams of my mother did not come true.”. Himmler himself took a special interest in the homes, choosing not only the mothers, but also attending to the decor and even paying special attention to children born on his birthday, October 7th. Mr. Weber, a creative writing teacher in Berlin, is still struggling to come to grips with his recently uncovered roots. Guntram Weber, 63, a creative writing teacher from Berlin, knew for decades that his mother was lying about his father. The children would truly believe that they were German and that these homes were the greatest place to be. At the headquarters of the Baden-Württemberg state police in Stuttgart today, small magnets freckle a map of the world, marking the spots where clues or reports of sightings surfaced. I think my mother's family put pressure on her to give me up, so I was born in a Lebensborn home in 1942 and my mother left me there. Gute Nacht, Johann.". But this candor is frowned upon in many European countries. They were attracted by persistent mid-morning rumors that the federal police had discovered the gravesite of the elusive Nazi fugitive, Auschwitz's Dr. Josef Mengele. Himmler believed the Lebensborn program would provide Germany with an extra 600 divisions of crack SS troops by the year 1972. I'm bitter and angry about it but my wife has helped me deal with it. Paul HansenPaul Hansen In his tiny flat on the edge of Oslo, Paul Hansen shows me his family album. I also thought it important to understand how the child knew his parent. Inside a sewing room of the BDM in 1942 as Hitler Youth uniforms are brought in to be mended. (You! Children were then taken by train to one of the reception centers in the Warthegau (now German territory well out of reach of parents), which had been specially installed for Germanization. An equal number were born in homes in Nazi-occupied Norway after the German invasion of 1940, because Himmler admired the Norwegians' "Viking blood," and encouraged procreation between German soldiers and Norwegian women. But when we met it was physically obvious I was his daughter. It was behind the gray stone walls of Mauthausen, in his native Austria, that Dr. Heim committed the atrocities against hundreds of Jews and others that earned him the nickname Dr. Death and his status as the most wanted Nazi war criminal still believed by the Simon Wiesenthal Center to be at large. Nothing had helped, however: Johann had become increasingly defiant, with more moments of the violence he had displayed toward me, and Marie no longer spoke and had reverted to babyhood, wetting her bed and taking food only from a bottle. The main misconception was that the programme involved coercive breeding. Pwllheli, North Wales, was not allocated any evacuees – and 400 turned up. The size of these is suggested by the number of nurses assigned: Heim Taunus 22, Hochland 18, Sonnenwiese 18, Wienerwald 15, Pommern 14, Kurmark 12, Harz 10, Schwarzwald 9, Ardennen 9, Westwald 4, Moselland 3, Friesland 3, Alpenland 1. Heinz became a fighter pilot for the Luftwaffe. Lumbering around the tombstones was a stocky man in his mid-fifties, police chief Romeu Tuma. He must have been suffering from serious pain,” said Mr. Heim, who is tall, like his father, with a long mournful face and speaks softly and carefully. The files were not well organized but they eventually revealed leads to some of the children I wanted to locate. Then you come to another place and you see 20 or 30 people lined up to be hanged," Kurzem remembered. 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. It gave me a feeling of low self-esteem, of loneliness, of uncertainty. We recall the look of houses, of rooms, of landscapes, colors, and we remember faces, voices, movements, temperatures, and feelings, but more often than not it is impossible to put a day, a month, sometimes even a year to these memories. In telling the story of the process of Germanization, I am therefore relying on the nearly identical accounts given to me by five 10- to 12-year-old boys I worked with during a six-week assignment at a special children's center in the early summer of 1946. As an example, the SS nurses tried to persuade the children that they were deliberately abandoned by their parents. He found a tiny apartment and a job in a factory,and began a search for his parents. Julienne Ricardo. Since Hitler was not married, she often stood at his side at official state receptions or party functions. Every day is accounted for . "But the Christianity in these homes did not exist - at least not what we call Christianity. I went around the table holding out my hand to each of them. I have extrapolated where I needed to, joining the gaps in his story as well as the dots, tracking his Nazi career over a quarter of a century, trying to understand what drove each key stage. More than six decades later, with the children in their 60s, the beginning of a change is in the air. . _**STEINHOERING, 2005 – **_Olaf Sinner-Schmedemann is now 63-years-old with white hair. I've dedicated my adult life to helping others, children in particular. Special correspondent Shannon Smiley in Berlin contributed to this report. Her mother married a former resistance fighter - "a Norwegian patriot who hated me", Gerd recalls; and now the beating and bullying was part of home life too. **, Gretl Fegelein survived the war and gave birth to a daughter, Eva Barbara Fegelein, named after her aunt Eva Braun, on May 5, 1945. The notice giving these instructions, which was publicly posted all over the Western-occupied zones, was specific: "Any person who willfully delays or obstructs a Child Welfare Investigating Officer in the exercise of any power...or who fails to give such information or to produce such documents or records as aforesaid, or conceals or prevents any persons from appearing before or being examined by a Child Welfare Investigation Officer, shall upon conviction by a Military Government Court suffer such punishment (other than death) as the Court may determine.". These things torment me. The babies were often adopted by Nazi families, because public hostility to their collaborationist mothers made living in their home countries impossible. Mothers with three and more children under 10 years old got "honorary cards" allowing them to jump shopping queues and get discounts on their rent payments. These luxuries became mere memories the day the heavily armed Poles came in and ordered Brigitte Frank and her five children to get "against the wall" (Lebert, 130), and interrogated them about where Frank was hiding. Alex says all he remembers is wandering alone, cold and hungry in the forest. They tried at first to have all the kids sent to Germany. “She was a Nazi until the day she died,” said Olaf. As of early 1946 our Child Welfare Investigating (or Tracing) Officers had the right of entry to any German institution or home where we believed an "unaccompanied" child resided. Heinrich Himmler created the Lebensborn Eingetragener Verein to offer young, so-called racially pure girls the chance to give birth to a child in secret. 0. He didn't find his parents' grave. “I told the Jewish people about my background, and they did not care. I asked again whether they spoke a lot, and she said that Marie, yes, spoke "like a baby, you know, but Johann..." Again the grandfather interrupted. He shared with me unpublished diaries and letters from his father, written in prison, as well as private wartime photographs of his father with Hitler. His commitment to National Socialism never wavered. They were put in orphanages, some of them were send to lunatic asylums. "Later I found out it was because I was the son of a German soldier. Her own reaction to locating her father has helped her understand why so many Germans lived with the crimes and cruelty of the Nazi regime, she said. I started seeing a psychologist and learnt to explore who I was. Meeting him first at a tiny railway station in Germany’s Black Forest, I caught for just a moment the excitement his Nazi breeders must have felt. SS General Wilhelm Rediess, the commander-in-chief of German police in occupied Norway, had launched Lebensborn there, using German soldiers to impregnate Norwegian girls. 1935 yılının başında Yahudi problemi ile yakından ilgilenmeye başladı Adolf Eichmann was born on March 19 1906, in Solingen, to Adolf Karl Eichmann and Maria Eichmann. Hitler's second in command ... Hermann Goering. Fragile family bases did not fit in with this. It doesn’t take long. Then, she told me that to obtain more information I would have to agree to a fee and give her the right to reject what I wrote. She told me that I would someday be a ruler of the world. "The Nazis — the first generation — were too ashamed to talk about the crimes they committed and covered everything up. 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. They would then spring up, shoot at them and throw grenades, inflicting heavy causalities, then dash away and disappear back into the forest. It was when the little girl, beaming, said, "Danke," and I stroked her face, that the farmer's wife said sharply, "Geht zu Bett" (Go to bed), and the two children shot up to obey. On June 2, 1943, he wrote, "We began here with three and a half million Jews; of those we have only a few labor companies left, all the rest have let us say -emigrated" (Lebert, 129). The months in between are a mystery. Titulo: Estrella distante Autor: Roberto Bolaño Páginas: 160 ISBN: 843391040X. So the only way to survive, climb a tree.". On May 1, 1945, a day after Hitler’s death, American troops marched into Steinhoering. The case has been thrown out in two earlier courts, which ruled that such cases all fell under the statute of limitations. But by that time, well into the second hour of my visit, as far as the farmer and hip wife were concerned the atmosphere had changed. Ricardo once said: "I tend to compare our family history to that of a multi-stage rocket. He had spent decades convinced he was in possession of a great and transcendent truth, and the habit never entirely left him. He had escaped to South America and died peacefully in Argentina in 1970. März 1906 in Solingen; † 1. Von 1977 an studierte Ricardo Eichmann Ur- und Frühgeschichte, Klassische Archäologie und Ägyptologie an der Universität Heidelberg und wurde 1984 mit einer Dissertation mit dem Titel Aspekte prähistorischer Grundrissgestaltung in Vorderasien promoviert. Heidrun, the Goebbels's youngest daughter, was born in 1940. When Gudrun found out that her father had committed suicide, "the fifteen-year-old suffered a psychological and medical breakdown. By 1939, the program had not produced the results Himmler had hoped. Some Nazis, in fact, were charged at Nuremberg with the wartime disappearance of 40,000 identified blond and blue-eyed Polish children, kidnapped for racial experiments. Even though he was not one of the most "powerful of men in the hierarchy of the Third Reich . The soldiers gave me a new name and a new birthday. The building, long abandoned now, was part of a bittersweet homecoming tour for the 40 or so people who turned out for the meeting of an association known as Traces of Life. I could work out, well, what age was this man when all of that Nazi stuff was happening?". His cause had lost, but he was quite prepared to move on and enjoy the compensatory benefits of a postwar German economy. In 2007, Delorme traveled to Mainz to meet his half brother and half sister. All over the city, every able-bodied male was pressed into the desperate final struggle. We knew it was there, but, like the rest of the family, tiptoed round it. Himmler' s pride for his S.S. and devotion to exterminate the "non-Aryan race," is evident from his speech in October of 1943. Now, these once-persecuted children, many of whom are in their sixties, have been brought together by British photographer Lucinda Marland, who travelled to Norway to interview them and take their portraits, with a 1940s 5x4 plate camera, reproduced exclusively here. In the time I was involved with different aspects of the identification of stolen children, I never handled or heard of a single case in which the German foster or adoptive parents had treated the kidnapped child with anything but love. She did not like the idea that I was seeking children of prominent Nazis like Goring, Hess and Doenitz. Being a registered association gives us a better chance to get information from archives and authorities," said Peter Naumann, chairman of Traces of Life. Technical details were left to Heinrich Himmler, one-time schoolteacher and chicken breeder who as head of the Gestapo executed millions. said the grandfather, and repeating it virtually spat out the hated word: "East? Although the judge ruled that they could not find compensation through the courts, he did suggest that it could be a matter for Parliament; and MPs have already shown interest in taking up the matter. I don't want to end up as many of the other children like me have, driven bitter and mad over what befell them. The babies as a baptismal gift was given a Kerzenleuchter, manufactured of by Dachau concentarion camp prisioners. One such clinic sits at the top of a gentle hill in Wernigerode, a remote town near the Harz Mountains. Around 350,000 German soldiers occupied Norway during World War II and coupled, favored by Heinrich Himmler, with Norwegian women. And we had to eat and to go to the toilet in the same room", he says with bitterness. She is now a member of a lebensborn organisation that accuses post-war Norwegian governments of wilful neglect, permitting- and attempting to conceal - a level of abuse that has shocked the nation. The 1961 German film Der Lebensborn purported that young girls were forced to mate in Nazi camps. The crowd hustled to attention. 'Unspoken secrets' Some, like Hoess, have launched an obsessive solitary search. “I saw my father only about a dozen times. The Frank family was accustomed to living the lavish lifestyle of good food,  large homes, and a lot of money. It was the first day of a trial in which the Lebensborn children are suing the Norwegian government. After her book came out, she got letters from people saying, "I'm happy you wrote this because I finally could find my own feelings in this book -- but I don't want anyone to know about my past.". After German troops withdrew from Norway at the end of the Second World War, an official programme of weeding out occupation liaisons began that resulted in the arrest of some 14,000 young women and the detention in military camps of 5,000 girls who were known to have had children with German soldiers. “After the war, many of the Lebensborn children grew up scorned as Nazi progeny and tormented by the dark uncertainties about their past,” explained another survivor from the program (Hammer).