The Last Nazis: Children of the Master Race Page #3

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Then she came back with this little baby to her sister and said,

"I brought you an orphan from Norway. Didn't you always want a girl?"

So I was brought up in my very first three years,

I thought my aunt was my mother and my cousins were my brothers.

'After the war,

'Gisela's uncle, the man she thought to be her father,

'was freed by the Allies and returned home.'

I was about three, three and a half.

The boys, who were some years older, said, "Papa is coming!"

So Gissie also said, "My papa is coming back!"

Then this guy said, "What is this SS bastard doing here in my family?"

This was the shock of my small life.

That I was a "SS bastard". I didn't know the word, of course.

Then he said, "This is not my child." And I was lost.

'When Gisela's real mother came forward,

'she was told yet another story about her daughter's origins.'

They told me my father died in Russia,

which was normal for my generation.

I didn't have a picture from him. This was also...

Other children whose fathers had been killed in the war,

they had pictures, she didn't have.

She said she was his fiancee.

She hadn't had time before he had to go to the war. And of course.

If he had come back, then of course they would have married.

I stopped asking because I felt this is a wound in my mother.

GUNTRAM:
After the war, the adults were obviously trying to stay out of politics.

They refused to talk about the past. They did not praise Hitler.

They did not praise national socialism,

but they defended many of the things that happened.

But as the years passed and orphans of the war came of age,

'countless stories emerged about the Nazi era.

'Gisela learned about Lebensborn from an article in the German press.

'It described the homes as anonymous breeding farms.'

GISELA:
Oh, my God! My father was a stud who had to produce children.

My mother was a whore?

This is how I found out I was a Lebensborn child.

They wrote it like this. This was horrible!

I had to survive believing I was the result of...

some...stud and whore.

And I didn't want to ask her.

She also read this article in a newspaper.

She never said one word to it.

I said, "If she doesn't talk, maybe it's true, maybe it's not."

In these times, I really thought about suicide.

'Eventually, her mother admitted the truth,

'that her daughter was the product of a casual liaison with a married SS officer.

'But Gisela's doubts persisted.'

What did they want?

Did they want me as a child?

Or just did they want somebody

as an ideological person for the system?

'After Folker Heinecke had been kidnapped from the Ukraine

'and put into the Lebensborn programme,

'he was adopted by a wealthy shipping family from Hamburg.

'He had a privileged upbringing with his adoptive parents,

'until a chance encounter changed his world.'

'Like all parents who adopted a Lebensborn child,

'Folker's mother and father maintained their vow of silence.

'They brought him up as the heir to the family shipping business.'

'As the Lebensborn children grew up in the '50s and '60s,

'an optimistic Germany began to emerge from the rubble of war.'

GISELA:
It was when rock'n'roll started.

I was a passionate rock'n'roll dancer.

I think that lots of my...yeah, "vulneration" and my angriness.

I could dance.

Perhaps this saved me for a while.

'While Gisela immersed herself in this new world,

'Guntram Weber, who knew that his father had been close to Himmler,

'continued to be dogged by questions about his past.'

How would I have acted in a society that was akin to one in the '30s and '40s in Germany.

What wouldIhave done?

I posed that question to myself again and again. What wouldIhave done?

In hindsight, you can tell yourself, "OK, I would have killed Hitler."

But would you have done it under those circumstances?

I wish I could tell myself

that I would have rebelled against the system.

I'm not sure I would have.

'As the years went by,

'the Lebensborn children uncovered more of their parents' secrets.

'Gisela discovered that her mother, Emmy, had been a keen operative,

'working between Poland and Munich.

'So crucial was her role, she had been called to testify at Nuremberg

'about the organisation's kidnapping of children.'

I read all her files.

Of course, she...she...

..spoke very, very clever, like they all did.

Of course, she went to Poland to get some orphan children from there.

They were all claimed as being orphans. You never know where they came from.

Children who were saved and brought into special homes

where they had to forget their original language,

they had to learn German,

and then Lebensborn organised the foster parents or adopted parents.

'It was only after his parents died

'that Folker felt able to explore his past.

'He discovered that he had been used as a case study of child abduction

'at the Nuremberg trials.'

I really confronted her with her own words from Nuremberg.

Then she "remembered" something. But still she said...

I said, "You must have asked yourself why you went to Poland

"and you got some children you had to bring to Germany.

"Where did they come from?"

"Well, they were orphans."

I said, "You can't imagine this. I know they were robbed."

"We don't know anything!

"I didn't know then and I don't know today.

"They were orphans."

Point.

And I said, "Well, you must have known that...

"You must have seen that those children you got from there

"were only blond and blue-eyed children."

Then she said, "Well,

"we didn't take everything."

That's what she really said.

And this was like, I... I broke...

I collapsed crying

because all of a sudden, in this sentence, I heard everything.

When she said, "Of course, we did not take everything."

The whole issue is a question of identity.

All of us, we don't have a real identity.

And we lost it the more we knew.

Everybody says they've always had the feeling

like the ground is shivering.

You never feel like you stand...

What we in psychology say, you need grounding

to be a person in this world.

We didn't get a grounding in the first years.

Then we found something is wrong. Then the historical context.

So it gets worse and worse.

'Guntram Weber's mother died before he could discover the truth about his past.

'Over time, the legacy of lies

'combined with the fractured sense of his father's role in Nazi Germany

'resulted in a near breakdown.'

I did not know...

..where to turn.

I did not have an idea of what to do.

I think, deep down, I was afraid of knowing.

Of knowing about the dark secrets,

which I assumed were there.

At the same time...

..I realised that I had to do something.

'Over the past six years,

'in a bid to shed more light on his Lebensborn past,

'Guntram has been trying to form a complete picture of the man he never met, but has shaped his life -

'his father, SS General Ludolf von Alvensleben.'

I want...

to find some way of...

taking control of my own situation.

Yeah. They refused that.

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