The Last Nazis: Children of the Master Race Page #4

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My mother refused it when she refused me information about my father,

about my early months.

And I want it. I want some control over my own life.

'Guntram's journey to Poland is his attempt to come face-to-face

'with the atrocities his father committed against the Polish people

'during and after the German invasion of 1939.

'At the museum in Bydgoszcz, Guntram discovers letters

'from soldiers describing their involvement in "ethnic cleansing".'

It's called document number 27.

It must be from 1939.

It's for Kreisleiter Kampe,

who was in charge of this area.

"We want to add...

"that the high...moral...power of resistance

"we have found among Polish people

"arises...

"among other things, arises from the fact

"that...

"..when they are being...liquidated

"that when they are being liquidated

"they mostly show...

"a fearless, courageous...behaviour."

I can't. Can't stand this.

I don't know, there's no word about humans.

Or...

They're just being praised for their courage.

This is beyond my... my scale of comprehension.

This...this father of mine,

he ordered those things.

He ordered those executions.

'In the massacres of 1939,

'around 60,000 people, the elite of Polish society,

'were culled to pave the way for the Lebensborn generation.

'Lebensborn was about giving birth to a master race.

'Its mirror image, the death camps and genocide of the Jewish race

'and millions of others who would be exterminated.

GISELA:
I think I will never get

something like understanding, or whatever.

It's just horror.

It's just horror, and the horror goes on.

In those nights, I don't sleep. I still have nightmares.

In my consciousness,

it's always I am the other part of those people who had to die.

It's no wonder you feel guilty

if you're a part of this other side.

And it doesn't help too much to know it's not your fault.

Many people say, "Why do you feel guilty?

"It was not you. It was your parents."

Still, they were my parents.

And I can only say that I think it's very important

that we don't go into the same habit like our parents,

into the silence and not talking about it.

'Gisela's mother continued to maintain her silence.

'She talked little about what she had done,

'refusing to confront her past.'

She was 89, almost 90.

She was sick. No specific. She was old and she didn't want to live any more.

"I want to die. Why can't I die?"

She had horror nightmares. She told me some of her nightmares.

I said, "Mama, there must be something you are carrying with you.

"Why don't you tell me?"

I really said it in my very soft manner.

I said, "I think there is something burdening your soul

"and perhaps you can deliver it if you..."

She said, "No. There is nothing."

'Guntram Weber's parents both died

'before he could learn the truth of his origins.

'So his journey to Poland is to confront

'not his father, but his father's crimes.

'Among those massacred on his father's orders

'Was school headmaster Zygmunt Polakowski.

'His 91-year-old daughter Jadwiga still lives in Bydgoszcz.'

Dziendobry.Dziendobry.

Dziendobry.

Dziendobry, Pani Polakowska.

Dziendobry. Dziendobry.Dziendobry.

Do you speak a little bit English?

A little. Only a little.

Only a little.

I want to say something

on my own.

I am sorry.

Thank you. Thank you.

Enter, please.Thankyou.

This is my father.

I saw his photo.

Isawhisphoto. This is my father killed.

On order of your father.Iknow.

Yeah.Iknow.

How old were you?

Very young. 20 years.

20 years.

And all my life happy.

Happy life.

It was crushed.Yeah.Yeah.

Crushed.

GISELA:
Guilty.

This is really the one word is you feel guilty

if you know that you were taken into this horror scene

from the very beginning of your life.

It goes on. What is in my genes when my father was a Nazi criminal?

It's a whole human issue with shadows in everybody.

And which circumstances do allow people

to live more like their shadows?

'In recent years, Gisela has shared her experience as a creation of the Third Reich

'by giving talks to the German public in an attempt to confront them with the truth.'

I managed,

almost, not quite, but managed to transfer my feeling of guilt and shame

into the responsibility to talk about it,

and especially with young people.

'For Gisela's mother, it was only on her death bed

'that she betrayed any recognition that the truth needed to be told.'

I really spent the last nights with her in the hospital.

She died in my arms.

It was not easy.

In former times, I almost had a personal resistance.

I didn't want to be touched from her.

In the end, I could stroke her and, well...

She said one of the... And this I had also respect.

One of her last sentences in the night before she died...

She woke up. Before, I couldn't understand her, and then she said,

"It is good you brought the truth on the table.

"It's good we made the peace between us."

And these were her last sentences

so it was kind of, "Good. It's OK. Mama."

I at least was lucky to talk to my mother,

which many of other Lebensborn children could not.

I got at least some answers.

'Death Valley lies just beyond the outskirts of Bydgoszcz.

'It is a permanent memorial to those murdered on the orders

'of Guntram Weber's father, Ludolf von Alvensleben.

'Jadwiga Polakowska has asked to be taken there,

'to tell Guntram about the day she made a terrible discovery,

'six years after the Germans arrested her father.'

Ja. It went straight to my heart.

And...But it is true. It is true.

SPEAKS IN POLISH

INTERPRETER:
I didn't lie in my story.

I told you the way it was.Yeah.

It's not YOUR fault.

You have only trouble. And me, too.

Pojednanie, tylko pojednanie.

'Following the Third Reich's defeat,

'the Lebensborn experiment ended in failure, consigned to history,

'as the Nazis' perversion of science and medicine.

'These children's destiny was to be part of a master race

'that would rule for 1,000 years.

'But they did not grow up the blond-haired, blue-eyed puppets that Himmler had envisaged.'

GISELA:
Our parents have been brainwashed enough.

After the war they could say, "We couldn't change it."

But for us, it was yeah, we didn't get a brainwashed gene somehow!

It was like we really got just the opposite.

We got the kind of...of guilt.

Of all the former Lebensborn kids I know, there is nobody

who says, "Well, wasn't it good? Look at me!

"I'm a very good-looking Aryan type! Wasn't it somehow also good?"

I don't know anybody.

'Folker Heinecke's Germanisation programme he was forced through

'failed to erase his pre-Lebensborn past.

'He has never given up his dream

'that his true blood relations are alive - somewhere.'

'Like Gisela and Folker, Guntram Weber has rejected

'all that Lebensborn stood for.

'He is now using his experiences in Poland

'to atone for the crimes of his father,

'establishing writing workshops to help enable the people of Bydgoszcz

'come to terms with the wounds inflicted by the Nazis.'

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