My uncle breeds dogs, so he trained me as if I were a dog. My aunt recently said to me, I won’t leave you anything when I die, because you are an S.S. bastard. I am sixty-three.
For fifty years they were putting us down. For fifty years what happened to us had been a taboo. Nothing was said about us until 1990. We didn’t exist. But our dossiers are still open. In them crouch ruined lives. We, the children of Lebensborn, are already old. Many of us will never learn who we are. We started searching too late. They doused me with scalding water at the orphanage. This is how filthy German children are washed, they said. A teacher abused me sexually. A priest said, I recommend sterilization.
I changed orphanages twenty times. They locked me in a pantry because I “stank”. They scrubbed me with ammonia; the older boys raped me; the teacher pretended not to see what was happening. They force-fed us swill until we vomited, and then made us eat the vomit. The Ministry of Defence and the C.I.A. took some of us for experimentation with L.S.D. Four of the children died, six killed themselves. One boy was raped by nine men, and afterwards all nine of them urinated on him “to wash away the S.S. disgrace”. For sixty years they called us Tyskerbarna, German bastards. We sued the Norwegian government. Then the Norwegian government apologized in 2001 to the “German bastards”. We have barristers helping us obtain compensation, which, I hear, will be $3,000.
At all Lebensborn homes the files with information about the mothers and their children were closely guarded under lock and password, and this information is not entered into the municipal or Church records. But something somewhere fell flat. Despite Himmler’s generosity, only about 8,000 babies were born throughout the war as part of the initial Lebensborn project. New solutions had to be devised.
Apart from the German children born there, children collected by Himmler’s activists from orphanages throughout the Third Reich are also placed in Lebensborn homes where they are trained, brainwashed, fed with Nazi stories about the greatness of the German nation, about the need to bow down to Adolf the god, and once they are prepared, shaped, turned into marionettes, they are sent to ideologically acceptable adoptive families. Decades after the war had ended these children still did not know what happened to them, what Himmler’s officials did, especially the children in what was then East Germany, who also had no inkling that their parents were not their parents. There were many such children, thousands. Some learned only forty years later about Hitler’s and Himmler’s top secret pro-Aryan Kinder-swindle, while some do not know even to this day, because the Communist authorities held this little truth, meaningless to them, this piddling episode of historical reality, in such secrecy. The secret archives with information about the birth of the Lebensborn children, with information about those put up for adoption, the files listing the changed names, are shunted during the war from one centre to another, and after the war many of these files are destroyed, some intentionally, some not. When the Allies start milling around Germany in the spring of 1945, the staff burn records and abandon most of the Lebensborn homes in panic. And so it is that the identities of thousands and thousands of people disappear forever in flames, which still does not mean that these people did not exist and that they don’t have other interesting, alternative, replaceable identities, as do I. At the end of the war, registers surface in Steinhöring with detailed information on 2,000 children stolen, adopted, displaced in orphanages, while the Federal Archive in Berlin makes public in 1999 that they have come upon a set of files with information about an additional 7,000 children, which profoundly disturbs the lives of some of these former children, who decide to dig through the files and through their genes. In the information at Steinhöring there is no mention of me.
Files found in Heidelberg and information preserved (and hidden) in the former East Germany are also in Berlin, and the only ones with access to this archive, once they have overcome the numerous bureaucratic hurdles, are those who hope to find a lost piece of themselves among the boxes on shelves resembling the shelves in Bad Arolsen.
I was in Ludwigsburg, near Stuttgart. At a former women’s prison in Ludwigsburg is the Central Office of the State Justice Administrations for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes (Zentrale Stelle der Landesjustizverwaltungen zur Aufklärung von N.S. Verbrechen). The Office opened in 1958 and to date they have investigated more than 7,000 cases with more than 100,000 suspects. Ludwigsburg is a picturesque little town on the outskirts of Stuttgart. The Dukes of Württemberg used to spend time in Ludwigsburg. Schiller was born there; in the house where he was born there is now a restaurant, one of the Wienerwald chain, and right next to the Wienerwald restaurant they sell McDonald’s hamburgers. The Duke of Württembergs financial adviser, a Jew named Süs, was hanged there in the eighteenth century, and at the entrance to the Duke’s palace stands a plaque which says, This castle shows its bright and cheery face. Its lively, liberal atmosphere is visible even today, as long as one is prepared to visit the other parts of Ludwigsburg, and not just its palaces and parks. Next to the Central Office is a seventeenth-century fortress which housed a prison until 1990; the oldest prison in Germany, now in the fortress, is a museum of crime.
I was at the museum in Ludwigsburg, Ian Buruma told me. The boy who brought me in smiled and enumerated the museums treasures, Buruma said. This is a guillotine that was in use until the late 1940s, the boy said, these are thumbscrews, here, these are the uniforms, ropes and belts they used to hang prisoners, here are the renovated death cells, here, the boy said, is the executioner’s axe, Buruma said, then he showed me lively copper etchings with torture scenes, and the menu for Sus the Jew’s last meal, Buruma said. Sus the Jew was given bouillon, stewed veal, beans and white bread. Then Buruma told me of a taxi driver who had brought him to the Central Office for Investigating Nazi Crimes, when Buruma was looking for something or someone there. He told me how the taxi driver first claimed he didn’t know where the Office was. No clue, the taxi driver said, and went on to say, that office should be scrapped; it’s high time for us to forget those old tales about the Nazis, that is exactly what the taxi driver said, those old tales, as if there aren’t more important things to be doing, as if the Communists weren’t every bit as bad, the taxi driver said, and so on and so forth, repeated the taxi driver, said Buruma.
The Office in Ludwigsburg is the brain, a paper memory, a bureaucratic memory of the Nazi past. In the Central Office, as in Bad Arolsen, lost lives huddle in steel cabinets. At the Ludwigsburg Central Office, filed tidily in alphabetical order, are more than 1,400,000 testimonies of witnesses and victims, various dossiers, Gestapo documents, archival court transcripts, not just from Germany but from everywhere — Poland, the former Soviet Union, France, Romania, Hungary and the Netherlands (Buruma is from the Netherlands), and so forth, as the taxi driver would say. Lord, it’s as if all of Germany is crisscrossed with hidden, underground waterways, subterranean conduits of lamentation, woe and oblivion, the inexhaustible Acheron, the Cocytus and the Lethe.