It was now cut back to just six main offices. He found a document dated November 12, 1948, which stated: 'The childless couple Heinecke applied to the Hamburg youth office for adoption of a child. Would a son who never really knew his father find it easier to condemn him than a daughter who knew her father into her middle age? The files were not well organized but they eventually revealed leads to some of the children I wanted to locate. In the Ruhr area of Germany, HJ boys practiced guerilla warfare against invading U.S. troops. "He said he had been in Krakow. How could anyone, even bigots gone mad, believe they could discern "racial values" in young, undeveloped children? This soon resulted in the near destruction of the entire division. 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. "I was transferred from the Lebensborn home Goodhaab into an asylum, together with some others. In 2001, his wife encouraged him to travel to Wernigerode and find his real mother. The problem was resolved by lowering the age of local Hitler Youth leaders to 16 and 17. But the assassination attempt failed. Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/crossing_continents/1691452.stm. The result was the formation of the 12th SS-Panzer Division Hitlerjugend. Other Lebensborn homes were opened for women in occupied territories who were pregnant by German soldiers. They were the blue-eyed blonds born into a sinister SS scheme to further the Aryan race. The truth was, she said, that Johann had taken to the grandfather, who almost immediately started taking him along on his chores. The women had to prove that both they and the father were of Aryan stock back to their grandparents. Others declined to be interviewed but nevertheless provided tantalizing, brief glimpses of their feelings toward their fathers. The babies were regarded as mentally defective and kept for decades in Norwegian mental institutions. Even at this stage some decided at the last moment not to participate. “I never told anyone I was a Lebensborn child because it was nothing to be proud of. His mother, singed by postwar imprisonment as a collaborator, was no help. He rebelled, took dance lessons and became a ballet dancer. He hoped that the court trial would reveal the dark history of Norwegian state ruling. If I'm discovered, I'm gone,'" he explained. In writing it, I have been driven to ask not just what he did, but why. "I look like him for a start — the eyes, the cheekbone, the profile. Obsessed with his experiments to breed 'pure white' chickens while running a poultry farm before World War II, Himmler was intent on doing the same with humans after rising to the very top of the Nazi hierarchy. The others were sent to special children camps (i.e. He was astonished. "If they found out you're Jewish," Kurzem explained. Agents infiltrated countries Hitler planned to conquer, England, Canada, Belgium, Australia, Holland, Norway, Iceland, Denmark, France, South Africa and the United States. Inside a sewing room of the BDM in 1942 as Hitler Youth uniforms are brought in to be mended. It bore the SS insignia and the old German sign of life.”. "What do you want? "Except when they were horrid," one of them said; he remembered getting a beating with a switch on his bare bottom because he and a friend had sung a Polish ditty after lights-out. “When I was 24, I went to Steinhoering and saw my birth document. So now it is up to the grandchildren to lift the curses off their families," said Bode. As the Allies stepped up their bombing campaign, the Nazis began evacuating children from threatened cities into Hitler Youth KLV (Kinderlandverschickung) camps located mainly in the rural regions of East Prussia, the Warthegau section of occupied Poland, Upper Silesia, and Slovakia. All my relatives. For decades, Germany’s birthrate was decreasing. "Die Leut'" (the people), she answered vaguely, then repeated her question. Below: The last reserves--ever younger--learn how to fire anti-tank Panzerfausts to stop the Russians. But after some awkward moments, Delorme said, they welcomed him as a member of the family. "I'm appalled how pupils listen to Nazi history with incredible distance these days. Jean-Jacques Delorme's French mother met his father, a German soldier, during the occupation of Paris. The Frank children want to rid themselves of the name, life, and memory left of their infamous father. "That soldier who gave you bread, he then took you around into the schoolhouse and he said he wanted to see if you're Jewish. Both mother and father needed to pass a “racial purity” test. My first task was locating the children. ', The mystery was - almost - solved. It was one of several phantom armies being commanded by Hitler to save encircled Berlin. Girls also enthusiastically participated, although they were assigned limited duties in keeping with the Nazi viewpoint on the role of females. My own reaction has helped me to understand how people in those days just put the blinders on and ignored the terrible things that were happening.”. His prospective father talked to Himmler while the pair studied the family hens. Zu seinem Vater und dessen Vergangenheit empfindet Ricardo Eichmann keine Verbundenheit, vielmehr hat er eine pazifistische Einstellung entwickelt. Many do not know their origins even now - retreating Nazis destroyed most of the documentation. Since Hitler was not married, she often stood at his side at official state receptions or party functions. And also I always wished to go back to the village and put a flower on my mother's grave.". Davidson pried one more damning admission out of his mother after his grandfather's death: Yes, Langbehn had been a Nazi, but more than that, he had been in the Schutzstaffel or SS. In his 2004 book "Hitler Youth," Dr. Kater said there was even a "Hitler Girls" program which selected bright, attractive young German girls to become the future wives of top Nazis -- "two to each Nazi leader" -- but it never came to fruition. . Other children of once-powerful Nazis speak on the programme — set for worldwide release when it is completed in the summer. "Most grew up knowing they had a secret," Ms. Schmitz-Köster said. These sex slaves, along with volunteer German women, were to form a kingdom populated by 120 million super-Aryans – a final fulfillment of the Nazi pseudoscience of eugencis. Some went to children's homes; but Paul Hansen was committed to a mental hospital. "And when the daylight broke I heard a lot of commotion and noise below. The words 'father was a German' were indictment enough to send children from the previously occupied Scandinavian countries to mental hospitals, where many were tortured and raped. She lost weight, fell sick, and stopped developing" (Lebert, 157). Hitler Youths also assisted in this operation by watching over Polish families as they were evicted from their homes, making sure they took only a few basic possessions. "What we have lived through and the deprivation we felt all our lives push us to make our voices heard," said Gerlina Swillen, a Belgian secondary school teacher and researcher at Vrije University in Brussels. Of all the women who applied, only 40 percent passed the racial purity test and were granted admission to the Lebensborn program. "I'm disappointed and embarrassed on behalf of Norway. Obviously, this is not a selected group, but merely those children who decided to speak on the record. BDM girls were assigned to help care for wounded soldiers in hospitals, to help in kindergartens, and to assist households with large families. This poses the question of what role the trials and justice of Nazi leaders played for their children, and how did this ultimately affect their opinions about their fathers? It was never mentioned.". Others were less fortunate, being beaten and raped. But in Poland, alone, 200,000 blond, blue-eyed children were kidnapped and disappeared in Hitler’s Third Reich. His mother had married another Wehrmacht soldier and lived in the East German town of Pasewalk. In his last public appearance, just ten days before his death, Adolf Hitler ventured out of his Berlin bunker on his 56th birthday into the Chancellery garden to decorate twelve-year-old Hitler Youths with Iron Crosses for their heroism in the defense of Berlin. For decades, that's exactly what has happened. By then going to that town, I was one step closer to the child. Before returning to Norway I spent several years in Mexico, where I fostered two street children. His mother, however, was obsessed with hatred of the Jews. It is obvious that in this mixture of people some very good racial types will appear from time to time.". Zu seinem Vater und dessen Vergangenheit empfindet Ricardo Eichmann k… Furnishings for the homes were supplied from the best of the loot from the homes of Jews who had been sent to Dachau. These two children, the registration papers had told me, had been born in 1940 and were therefore both six years old. Upon the evidence submitted, the defendant Sollmann is found not guilty on counts one and two of the indictment. He had been in a camp. The daughter of Artur Seyss-Inquart, Reich Commissioner for the Netherlands, who was executed at Nuremberg, wrote a series of revealing letters about "[o]ur beloved father . 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. The destruction of thousands of German Lebensborn files by SS troops during the last days of World War II deepened the mystery of the children's real identities. "Exactly," Kurzem replied. Olaf’s mother took her son from the Steinhoering clinic when he was just a few days old and his father was fighting on the Russian front. The first home was in Steinhoering, a town outside of Munich in 1936 (“The ‘Lebensborn’ Program”). Only days later, five thousand miles away in Munich, a tall, good-looking man, recently turned forty, approached the modern office complex of _Bunte _magazine. He was accused of drawing a swastika on the board because he "was the kind of boy who'd draw [one]" (Lebert, 135). His death would be a significant but hitherto unknown milestone in the winding up of the passionate and at times controversial hunt for Nazi war criminals that led to the trial and execution of the Holocaust planner Adolf Eichmann but never managed to catch up with Josef Mengele, the most famous of the Nazi doctors, who died in Brazil in 1979, as forensic tests later proved. Ms. Heidenreich was not told about her background but became suspicious after watching a television documentary about the Lebensborn children. Ms. Gorgass had some contact with her father, a manager for a chemical factory, who had another family. At age 16. "A gift that I can see the sun.". As an example, the SS nurses tried to persuade the children that they were deliberately abandoned by their parents. They also went door to door collecting scrap metals and other needed war materials. Many thousands of their mothers - labelled 'German whores' - were sent to secret prison camps, where they were virtually slave labourers. This is a glorious page of our history" (Ackermann, 105). He had designed a project to promote an "Aryan future" for the Third Reich and turn around a declining birth rate in Germany. There were 14 Lebensborn clinics in Germany and Austria, tucked away in small towns safe from Allied bombing, and nine in Norway where the Nazis had encouraged German soldiers to have children with women of “Viking” blood. But when she realized the war was truly lost she began to resent me and told me I was an embarrassment to her, was a souvenir of the Nazis and would have been better off dead.”. And of this number only in isolated instances did Lebensborn take children who had a living parent. Babies that were born into the program but were premature or crippled were either poisoned or allowed to starve to death. During July and August 1943, some 10,000 recruits arrived at the training camp in Beverloo, Belgium. The crosses were awarded according to the number of children a woman had: bronze (level three) for four to five children, silver (level two) for six to seven children, and gold (level one) for eight or more children. Had they been nice? I told them that I was a child welfare investigator from UNRRA, and that UNRRA was responsible for all individuals who had been brought into Germany from territories forcibly annexed or conquered by the Germans. The Norwegian War Child Association Lebensborn takes its name from one of the most secret Nazi eugenics projects of the war. I found my father's grave and discovered he had actually died in 1974 in a car crash, not in the war as I had been led to believe. By the time I was released I had lost any chance of a proper education and for the next few years I went from one home to another. A half-dozen have since obtained German passports, and more than 20 others have applied, including Delorme. On May 1, 1945, Joseph and Magda Goebbels poisoned their six children in the bunker under the Berlin Reich Chancellery and then committed suicide. Bjorn Drivdal: 'They beat me up at school'. During those first weeks they'd had German language, history, and geography lessons for several hours, every day. Under his rule and assistance, the innocent lives of millions of people were taken. Could hair be turned blond from constant exposure to light rays? I was four years old. As a result, starting on January 26, 1943, anti-aircraft batteries were officially manned solely by Hitler Youth boys. Heidrun, the Goebbels's youngest daughter, was born in 1940. Yes, it was strict, but the [German] boys were nice.". It was no doubt because of Lebensborn's existing facilities, combined with the organization's sterling reputation, that the SS decided in the winter of 1941 to make Lebensborn the executant of the "Germanization" project. After his mother died in 1914, his family moved to Linz, Austria. Recently discovered records and ongoing testimony of Lebensborn children—and some of their parents—shows that some SS men did sire children in Himmler's Lebensborn program. He had been his mother's lover during the occupation of France in World War II. For instance, it could be revoked if a mother ceased to be “worthy”: if she neglected her children, cheated on her husband, or exhibited problematic behavior. ) Children living under occupation must have lived in a manner few can comprehend unless an individual has been through similar situations. 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. I knew the answers could only be found by locating a group of surviving children of prominent Nazi's and then persuading them to talk openly. As the number of surviving Nazi war criminals has dwindled, his father’s case has grown in prominence. How she survived, made a living and put herself through school, she is not sure. They knocked on doors looking for unused rooms in undamaged houses or apartments. What began with Adolf Hitler’s first musings in ‘Mein Kampf” about a ‘higher race … a master people’ finally led to one of Nazi Germany’s darkest secrets – the gassing of its own super babies for failure to meet racial cosmetic standards. A dusty briefcase with rusted buckles, sitting nearly forgotten in storage here in Cairo, hid the truth behind Dr. Heim’s flight to the Middle East. Every possible crime the human race can do was done to innocent kids after 1945 in Norway," he added. I look more like him than his own daughter.". Von 1996 bis 2019 war er Erster Direktor der Orient-Abteilung des Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts in Berlin, im Herbst 2020 folgte ihm Margarete van Ess in der Position nach. We have little information on how the children were dressed at the Lebensborn homes. I later learnt that after the war a government delegation came to the home to decide what to do with the 20 war children, including me, who had been left there. A forensic pathologist leaned into the grave and pulled a decaying skull from the casket. I have, though, been equipped with enough reason to see through the hypocrisy of this absurd theater which was camouflaged as legal proceedings. Those with racial potential were taken to one of three centers in the Warthegau, where further tests were conducted. For as I write I clearly recall that the fields barely showed color and that it was cold and wet the evening I drove to the farm, a large peasant-holding in southern Bavaria. 317-883-9409 Henlee Vipond. In that same month, newly created Wehrertüchtigungslager or WELS (Defense Strengthening Camps) went into operation in Germany providing three weeks of mandatory war training for all boys aged 16 to 18 under the supervision of the Wehrmacht. Somehow I survived, putting myself through school. The case was dismissed; instead, they were offered a £2,000 token. One hurdle I quickly encountered was a cultural one. With the adoption of the so-called Nuremberg Laws (consisting of the "Reich Citizenship Law" and the "Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor"), the importance of providing official proof of ancestry increased dramatically. Gudrun Himmler's reaction to her father's role was completely opposite of the Frank brothers'. "I had to be aware every moment. Until political winds shifted, ex-Nazis were welcomed in Egypt in the years after World War II, helping in particular with military technology. By the end of its first month in battle, 60 percent of the HJ Division was knocked out of action, with 20 percent killed and the rest wounded and missing. Up to 100,000 of these children were from Poland (“The ‘Lebensborn’ Program.”). At school, Gerd was called "German whore". Most frustrating was that people who might have useful information were not willing to help. Adolf Eichmann was kidnapped by Israeli agents in Buenos Aires and flown to Israel, where he was hanged for his crimes in 1962. The accused were therefore acquitted on charges of kidnapping. I had planned to arrive when they would all be there together. They have appealed to the European Court of Human Rights - accusing the Norwegian state of discrimination. I told them that thousands of Eastern European parents were looking for missing children. All your family.'". "They have reached the end of their careers, their children are grown and they have time to think about who they really are," says Georg Lilienthal, a German scholar who in 1985 wrote the first authoritative book about Himmler's racial-engineering program. "I was given food and clothing but nothing else.". Himmler, like Hitler, felt that even though Jews are "identically biological . That they were given to us?". Mahmoud Doma, whose father owned the establishment, said Dr. Heim spoke Arabic, English and French, in addition to German. Over the months the Central Tracing Bureau received tens of thousands of snapshots of babies, toddlers, and older children with descriptions of when and how they had disappeared from their homes or schools. The first thousand-bomber raid occurred in May 1942 against Cologne. Himmler' s pride for his S.S. and devotion to exterminate the "non-Aryan race," is evident from his speech in October of 1943. He was shot down over the Soviet Union and returned from captivity in 1952 to find that his two brothers had killed themselves because of their shame — and the family's fortunes gone. Bruno was never a repentant man. In postwar West Germany, with its economic miracle of the 1950s and 1960s, Nazis were considered a dark, past shadow better forgotten. In many cases the fathers were married members of the SS who had obeyed Himmler’s instruction to spread their Aryan seed even out of wedlock. At first, convinced his "feelings are no different than any child to any parent," Rolf thought he had nothing to say about his father. I went and the first thing she said was ‘There you are. For Lebensborn children born outside Germany, life was even harsher. "They are dead," the younger woman said at once. Others, like Delorme's, were jailed as traitors. Did their guardians hurt them in any way? 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. And slowly, as information, reports, and instructions trickled out to individual teams following high-level UNRRA meetings, the word "Germanization" crept into the vocabulary.
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