Free Hitler's Forgotten Children by Ingrid Von Oelhafen

Something had to be done.
    Together with Aunt Eka I petitioned the German Guardianship Court to order that we be allowed to intervene in Gisela’s life. At first the court refused to hear our plea, saying I had no claim because I was only Gisela’s foster daughter, not her biological child. But unusually for me (I am not, by nature, forceful), I dug my heels in. I said to the judges: ‘I will sit here until you listen to me. I will stay here in this court until you listen to what I have to say.’
    Eventually they agreed to hear me. I told the court that Gisela was being controlled by her carer and that she had manipulated the relationship to such an extent that she had been named as one of the main beneficiaries of Gisela’s will. I begged them to safeguard her interests. But listening to me was as far as the judges were prepared to go. Ultimately, the court declined to intervene.
    It was left to Aunt Eka to work out a private compromise settlement, which provided some measure of protection for Gisela. But the damage had been done: Gisela lived on until 2002, but never again would we be a family.
    Her exile in Gran Canaria did have one positive outcome. When Aunt Eka and I finally realised that Gisela would never come back to Hamburg, we set about clearing out her rooms. Which is how I came to find the diary she had kept of my earliest years.
    I will remember for ever the moment I laid my hands on it, and the emotion I felt reading its few handwritten pages. I was so very thankful: I had found something about me and my early life – it was the first time I could reach out and touch my past. But alongside the joy there was pain too.
    I think, perhaps, I hadn’t realised the extent to which I had for nearly forty years blocked off my feelings about the mystery of my childhood. Holding the little volume, the sense of loss and uncertainty was overwhelming. Why had she not given me this diary butinstead kept it hidden? How could she not have realised what it would mean to me?
    What made this all the more painful was the knowledge that I had only discovered the book because Gisela had – to all intents and purposes – abandoned me once again. That she was in no state to understand this, and that her carer was deliberately exploiting her frailty, did not change the fact that I could not contact her to ask all the questions which the diary prompted.
    Perhaps my overpowering sense of loss and hurt explains why I did not look more closely at the other documents I found in Gisela’s room. I glanced at them and saw that they seemed to be legal papers about the process by which Gisela and Hermann had fostered me. But rather than pay them the attention I should have, I put them away and devoted myself to my work. It wasn’t until the end of the twentieth century that I was reminded of their existence.

    One day in the autumn of 1999, I was at my practice as usual when the phone rang. I assumed the caller was a patient or perhaps a referral for a new client. But the lady on the phone that morning was neither of these things. She first asked whether I was Ingrid von Oelhafen and then explained that she was from the German Red Cross. I was initially puzzled: why would the Red Cross be ringing me? I had no professional connection with the organisation: certainly none of my patients had ever come from there.
    Then she asked a question that took me completely by surprise: would I be interested in looking for my birth parents?
    I find it hard to describe the feelings that ran through me in that moment. For so long I had put the questions regarding who I was and where I had come from to the back of my mind, telling myself that working with disabled children was more important; in truth, though,I think I was really avoiding the issue, perhaps for fear of what I might find. And so I was surprised to find that my overriding emotion was one of real excitement: at long last I had the chance to find out about