Free Hitler's Forgotten Children by Ingrid Von Oelhafen Page B

small village not far away from Munich, but there was no other information about the organisation that had created it. The only clue was the letterhead at the top of the paper, almost obscured by holepunch holes and the passage of time:
‘Der Reichskommissar für die Festigung deutschen Volkstums, Stabshauptamt L’.
I had no idea what this could be: a little research revealed it to be the office of the Reichs Commissioner for Strengthening German Nationhood, a Nazi organisation. What exactly the office did was not immediately clear.
    At the bottom of the document was the signature of a Doctor Tesch, who described himself as a Sturmbannführer. Anyone who had grown up in Germany after the war knew that word: it was a paramilitary rank in the Third Reich, equivalent to a major in the regular army but almost exclusively reserved for use by members of the SS. Why would an officer in Heinrich Himmler’s reviled Death’s Head * organisation have had anything to do with my foster care? I looked again at the certificate: it said that I had been handed over to a German family ‘on the orders of the Reichsführer’. That was Himmler again. Bafflingly, it looked as though Hitler’s second-in-command, the most feared man in Nazi Germany, had played some kind of role in my childhood.
    I was desperate to ask Gisela what all this meant – and, indeed, why she had kept these documents from me for so many years. But Gisela was in Gran Canaria and, by this stage, in the last throes of her dementia. I knew I would get no help from her.
    A week had now passed since I sent Georg Lilienthal my letter: I wondered if he was away from his office or whether he was for some reason unwilling to share with me what the Red Cross said he knew – or at least suspected – about my history. In the interim, I decided tobegin my own investigations. I wrote to the German state archives (the Bundesarchiv) to ask if they held any documents bearing my name or that of Erika Matko.
    I assumed, naively, that the Bundesarchiv would reply quickly: how difficult could it be, in this age of computerised databases, to run a simple check on my names? I was about to discover one of the paradoxes of the new Germany: while the new state was committed to uncovering the terrible sins committed by the rulers of the old East German state, and zealous in rooting out of public life those who had been involved with its secret police, the Stasi
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it was much less willing to face up to the crimes committed by Hitler’s Thousand Year Reich.
    In part this was a legacy of the early post-war years. Konrad Adenauer, West Germany’s first chancellor, had vehemently opposed much of the Allied powers’ work on denazification, and had pushed for the release of those convicted of war crimes at the Nuremberg trials. He had even appointed, as his right-hand man in government, Hans Globke: a politician who had drafted anti-Semitic laws for Hitler in 1938.
    From the outset, no one wanted to look too closely at the past, and many years later at the end of the twentieth century, despite its proud position as the driving force of the European Union, Germany still had skeletons in its historical cupboard – skeletons it was neither ready nor willing to rattle.
    The Berlin Wall had not been the only barrier separating Germany from itself. If the nation was now reunited, our collective memory was still decidedly patchy. Over the coming months I would discover that anything relating to the mysterious Lebensborn programme seemed to spark repeated bouts of amnesia. There had been very little published about it, and what information was available suggested a story of national shame and a legacy still shrouded in secrecy.
    As I waited for Georg Lilienthal and the Bundesarchiv to respond to me, I thought back to the telephone call from the Red Cross. The woman had seemed reluctant to give me any information: had she beentrying to warn me about the