Hitler's Forgotten Children (16 page)

For the next eighteen months, as their armies slowly inched to victory, lawyers and politicians from all three countries hammered out a set of innovative legal principles under which leading Nazis could be prosecuted for war crimes and crimes against humanity. When the war ended, the only remaining issue was where to hold the hearings.

Leipzig and Luxembourg were briefly considered and rejected. The Soviet Union favoured Berlin – the ‘capital of the fascist conspirators' – as a suitably symbolic location, but the overwhelming destruction suffered by the city made it impractical. The decision to choose Nuremberg was based on two key factors. Its role in the Nazi propaganda machine made it an appropriate site to dispense exemplary justice but, more importantly, its spacious Palace of Justice had survived the war largely intact – and its buildings included a large prison facility.

The surviving leaders of the Third Reich were brought to the cells beneath the courtroom in November 1945. Hitler himself had cheated justice, committing suicide in the Führerbunker amid the flames and ruins of Berlin. Himmler, too, had taken the coward's way out, swallowing a cyanide capsule while in captivity. But twenty-two others, including Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring and Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess, were brought before the International Military Tribunal and arraigned for the crimes of the Nazi regime. Eleven months later the
judges, one each from France, Britain, America and the Soviet Union, pronounced the verdicts. Twelve of the accused were sentenced to death; seven received prison sentences ranging from ten years to life in prison; and three were acquitted (two trials did not proceed, one defendant having killed himself and another declared unfit for trial). On 16 October 1946, the executions were carried out in a gymnasium attached to the court building.

It was to this forbidding complex that I was heading on a spring morning in 2003. The reason for my journey was not the famous trial itself, but a much less celebrated set of proceedings held in the same building.

Although the Allies had initially planned to hold a lengthy series of joint-power tribunals, the looming Cold War and the freeze in relations between East and West made this impossible. While the main trial was still in progress, the United States took a unilateral decision to mount subsequent hearings for so-called ‘second-tier Nazis' on its own. The result was a series of twelve separate prosecutions, between 1946 and 1949, in which a total of 183 defendants were indicted. Among them were the leaders of Lebensborn
.

Within days of returning home from Hadamar, I wrote to the office that kept records of the Nuremberg tribunals. Given my previous experience of German official archives, I was not expecting much in the way of a response, and so I was pleasantly surprised to receive a letter from the archivists which said that there was an entire box full of relevant documents and asked whether I would like to examine them.

The papers turned out to be from Case 8 of the subsequent prosecutions. This was formally titled
The United States of America vs. Ulrich Greifelt, et al
, but was more usually referred to as the RuSHA trial, since all fourteen defendants had held senior positions in the Rasse-und-Siedlungshauptamt [RuSHA]: the Race and Settlement Main Office Himmler had established to safeguard the ‘racial purity' of the SS and which had then gone on to administer Lebensborn.

I began by examining the official indictment, served on 10 March 1948. It was long and detailed – fourteen closely typed foolscap pages setting out charges under three separate headings: crimes against humanity, war crimes and membership of the SS, which had been declared a criminal organisation. It started with a bleak, uncompromising assertion:

Between September 1939 and April 1945, all the defendants herein committed Crimes Against Humanity … The object of this programme was to strengthen the German nation and the so-called ‘Aryan' race …

The SS Main Race and Settlement Office (RuSHA) was responsible, amongst other things, for racial examinations. These racial examinations were carried out by RuS leaders … or their staff members called racial examiners (Eignungsprüfer) in connection with … [the] kidnapping of children eligible for Germanisation … Lebensborn was responsible, among other things, for the kidnapping of foreign children for the purpose of Germanisation.

It was chilling to read these words. Here, in the cold legal language of a trial, was the essence of the organisation that had cared for me – if that was the right word – in my earliest years. The indictment went on to set out both the motivation for the programme, and the countries in which it had operated.

An extensive plan of kidnapping ‘racially valuable' alien children was instituted. This plan had the two-fold purpose of weakening enemy nations and increasing the population of Germany. It was also used as a method of retaliation and intimidation in occupied countries. During the war years numerous Czech, Polish, Yugoslavian and Norwegian children were
taken from their parents or guardians and classified according to their ‘racial value'.

I made a note of the countries identified in the charges: since the documents I had found in Gisela's papers indicated that I had been brought to the Reich for Germanisation, it seemed likely that I had originally come from Czechoslovakia, Poland, Yugoslavia or even Norway – though I somehow doubted that last was a real possibility. Perhaps there would be more solid clues in the rest of the papers in the Case 8 trial folder.

Before I could get to them, the list of defendants' names caught my eye. Four senior officials of Lebensborn
–
three men and one woman
–
had been in the dock at Nuremberg, their roles and ranks spelled out clearly.

MAX SOLLMAN – Standartenführer (colonel) in the SS; Chief of Lebensborn.

GREGOR EBNER – Oberführer (senior colonel) in the SS. Chief of the main health department of Lebensborn.

INGE VIERMETZ – Deputy chief of main department A of Lebensborn.

It was the fourth name that stopped me in my tracks.

GUNTHER TESCH – Sturmbannführer (major) in the SS; Chief of the main Legal Department of Lebensborn.

I knew that name. Sturmbannführer Tesch had signed the document recording the contract under which I had been handed over to Hermann and Gisela. The man who had arranged my fostering had been indicted at Nuremberg for crimes against humanity.

I turned back to the disconcertingly large box of papers in front of me. The trial had lasted fifty-seven days, examined almost 2,000 exhibits and heard evidence from 116 witnesses for either prosecution or defence: the printed record ran to a staggering 4,780 pages. I began to wonder whether the three days I had planned to spend in Nuremberg would be enough.

The chief prosecutor, an American military lawyer called Telford Taylor, began by laying out the background to the charges. Just as I had learned in Hadamar, from the start Lebensborn's kidnapping and Germanisation programme had been an integral part of the Nazis' plan to eradicate those they regarded as ‘lesser races'.

With the launching of the wars of aggression by the Third Reich, it became possible to put these noxious principles into practice. By the middle of 1940, a very definite plan was being effectuated. This is shown by the top-secret document which Himmler wrote, entitled ‘Reflections on The Treatment of Peoples of Alien Races in the East' …

I had never heard of this document – but then, as Brigadier General Taylor went on to tell the court, it was so secret that Himmler gave instructions that it was not to be copied or shown to anyone beyond a small inner circle of Hitler and the most senior party leaders. After quoting a section in which the Reichsführer pronounced his hope that ‘the concept of Jews will be completely extinguished', Taylor read into the trial record a section of Himmler's blueprint for stealing those deemed pure Aryan children.

The parents of such children of good blood will be given the choice to give away their child – they will then probably produce no more children so that the danger of this sub-human people of the East obtaining a class of leaders, which, since
it would be equal to us, would also be dangerous for us, will disappear …

If we acknowledge such a child as of our blood, the parents will be notified that the child will be sent to a school in Germany and that it will remain permanently in Germany.

Poland was the first country overrun by the Nazis. It became the testing ground for Lebensborn kidnappings. The court was shown a letter, dated 18 June 1941, in which Himmler spelled out his instructions.

I would consider it right if small children of Polish families who show especially good racial characteristics were apprehended and educated by us in special children's institutions and children's homes, which must not be too large.

After half a year the genealogical tree and documents of descent of those children who prove to be acceptable should be procured. After altogether one year it should be considered to give such children as foster children to childless families of good race.

Six months later he issued a new decree detailing how kidnappings were to work in practice, and how the wheat of prospective ‘racially valuable' children was to be separated from the chaff of their parents – many of whom, he recognised, would be active opponents of the Nazi occupation.

Politically heavily incriminated persons will not be included in the resettlement action [the Reichsführer's euphemism for wholesale stealing of children]. Their names are also to be submitted by the Higher SS and police leaders to the competent State Police Main Office for the purpose of transfer to
a concentration camp … In such cases the children are to be separated from their parents …

The Higher SS and police leaders are to pay particular attention that the Germanisation of the children does not suffer as the result of detrimental influence by the parents.

Should such detrimental influence be determined to exist, and should it be impossible to eliminate them through coercive measures by the State Police, accommodations are to be found for the children with families who are politically and ideologically above reproach and ready to take in the children as wards, without reservation and out of love for the good blood present in the children and to treat them as their own children.

Also included in the trial record were Himmler's directives on the fate of individual Polish families who did not meet the Nazi's standards for racial ‘value':

Brunhilde Muszynski is to be taken into protective custody. Her two children, aged four and seven years, are to be sterilised and lodged somewhere with foster parents.

Ingeborg von Avenarius is also to be taken into protective custody. Her children too are to be lodged somewhere with foster parents, after sterilisation.

The court was presented with the transcript of a speech Himmler gave in October 1943, in which he justified these horrific orders:

I consider that in dealing with members of a foreign country, especially some Slav nationality, we must not start from German points of view and we must not endow these people with decent German thoughts and logical conclusions of
which they are not capable, but we must take them as they really are.

Obviously in such a mixture of peoples there will always be some racially good types. Therefore I think that it is our duty to take their children with us, to remove them from their environment, if necessary by robbing or stealing them. Either we win over any good blood that we can use for ourselves, and give it a place in our people, or we destroy this blood.

Thus were the children of Poland – at least the blond, blue-eyed ones who conformed to the Nazis' belief in ‘good Aryan characteristics' – snatched from their families and transported to holding camps. Here trained ‘racial examiners' set up offices to measure, prod and evaluate thousands of youngsters brought to them by the SS. Their assessment was final and unchallengeable. A ruling issued by RuSHA explicitly stated:

The racial sentence once passed … by an expert may not be altered by any office. The judgment of an expert is an expert diagnosis just like that of a physician.

The chosen children were then handed over to Lebensborn
.
In the box of files there were records: closely typed sheaves of paper recording the names of those taken from their families and shipped to the network of Lebensborn homes across Germany. I closed my eyes and imagined the scene: railway stations crowded with thousands of unaccompanied children, stuffed like cattle into trucks and carriages, without anyone to care for them on their journey.

At that point, strangely, a fragment of memory came to me: one I had never remembered before and yet which somehow I felt to be true. I was very little; I was on a train, sitting on the floor with another small child. We were sharing a blanket, each of us trying to pull it from the
other. I lost the battle and, as the train ploughed on through long, dark tunnels, I felt terribly cold. Was it real? Had reading the accounts of what had happened in Poland awakened a recollection that had lain dormant in my subconscious for sixty years?

The more I read in the Nuremberg files, the more uneasy and unsettled I felt. In my mind's eye I saw the trial unfolding, its focus shifting from Poland to a little village in what was then Czechoslovakia.

Marie Doležalová was fifteen when she stood on the witness stand in 1947 and gave evidence about what had happened to her five years earlier. On the morning of 9 June 1942, ten trucks filled with SS and Gestapo troops rolled into Lidice, a farming hamlet near Prague.

Two weeks earlier, Czech partisans had assassinated SS- Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, Himmler's protégé and the man charged with ruling this corner of the Reich's conquered lands. Hitler demanded mass reprisals: the raid on Lidice was specifically ordered because the village was suspected of having links to the men who killed Heydrich.

Armed soldiers jumped out of their vehicles and rounded up Lidice's entire population. Every adult man – 173 of them, including Marie's father – was lined up and shot against the wall of a barn. Their bodies were laid out in seventeen rows in an orchard before the village was burned to the ground.