I was at the Berlin Federal Archive — the largest Nazi archive there is, with more than 50 million pages registered, including the originals of the personnel files of members of the National Socialist Party and S.S. officials — and there I stumbled upon a little clue that took me further. Later, when I established that my genetic father might have been S.S.-Untersturmführer Kurt Franz, I went back to the Berlin Archive and leafed through his past, which was a source of incredible distress to me, in fact, of physical revulsion, though I kept telling myself I had no tie to this man, which was not, of course, true. In Kurt Franz’s dossier there were photographs, especially from Treblinka, showing Kurt Franz riding, or in white sports shorts, running through a lovely, dense forest, Aryan and sexy, all the more nauseating. The Berlin Federal Archive, like the International Tracing Service in Bad Arolsen, is in a dense forest. But unlike Bad Arolsen, which is completely hidden, the Berlin Archive is not far from downtown Berlin, though both buildings — the main building in Bad Arolsen and the one in Grunewald on the outskirts of Berlin — used to belong to the Gestapo, which can be quietly chilling for the visitor.
Aud Rigmor Harzendorf from Kohren-Sahlis told me that they never spoke of the past in East Germany before 1989, and I told her that in West Germany they didn’t speak of it either, nor did they in Austria, though, of course, they talked a lot about the more distant past, they spoke of several distant pasts, the more distant the pasts were, the greater the detail in which they spoke of them, but there was very little talk, only quiet and secretive talk, about the recent past, on the basis of which one might conclude that the recent past was quite a dirty past. Then I learned that in East Germany there was a major secret scam perpetrated with the names of the Lebensborn children, which was why the whole story had been unknown there until recently. The Stasi needed new names for its spies, so they stole the original identities of the Lebensborn children who had been given up for adoption, meaning their real names, and if these children decided to poke around the archives later, they would come upon a whole heap of alarming political and police hurdles. My adoptive mother told me I have no parents, that I was left with no parents. You were left without both parents, my adoptive mother said, Aud told us. And that is why they gave you to me, said my adoptive mother, whom I loved as if she were my own, and that is absolutely all she said, said Aud, but we lived five hundred metres from the former Lebensborn home in Koren-Sahlis, and I had no idea what kind of a home it was, what went on there, I didn’t know I was born inside. Today there is a children’s nursery school in the building, it is very cheery, but I still don’t know who gave birth to me or what her name was, Aud told me when I met her at a gathering of other children who are searching for themselves, frantically, and who are no longer children, of course, some have children of their own, grown children, some even have grandchildren, like me, for example. I am sixty-two and I will have to tell my children, my grandchildren, everything I have discovered in the course of my eight years of searching, which will confuse them, because everything I have come across since 1998, when my mother Martha Traube told me You are not Hans Traube as she was dying, until today, 3 July, 2006, all of this sounds incredible, and I will have to speak with them about it, and they will have to drag this shit around with them for years, decades, like a punishment, a curse, and they will forever be wondering What is hidden in my genes? and I will tell them and I’ll say it over and over: Your genes contain the genes of a member of the S.S. and a war criminal and the genes of a Jewish woman. I will have to tell them, and they will have to find a way of dealing with it. History, history which we Germans (and Austrians) have repeatedly mucked up, as Grass says, is a clogged toilet. We flush and flush, but the shit keeps coming up.
Then Aud showed me this photograph, which her adopted mother had been hiding for fifty years, a picture from the Lebensborn home at Kohren-Sahlis, and in it is Aud, of course, and then Aud told me, Look, that’s us, Hitler’s children.
There were various ways of bringing children to the Lebensborn homes. Other than the German children, there were children who had been stolen from the occupied countries of the Reich. Little Poles were the largest number to stay at the Lebensborn homes, about 250,000 little Poles, but there were children stolen from Ukraine (about 50,000), the Baltic countries (about 50,000) and Yugoslavia (600 children are known to have been taken from Slovenia alone). There were many children from different places, much like the little fair-skinned, blue-eyed German children of pure German blood. Even French children weren’t spared, and Norwegian children. Today only 50,000 of these children know of their origins and who their parents were or are.
Himmler adored Lebensborn homes, over which special Lebensborn banners flew, in which they used special Lebensborn dishes and special Lebensborn cutlery on which there was a special Lebensborn stamp (today the cutlery goes for a lot of money at auction). The bedding and tablecloths and towels had Lebensborn monograms, and the staff wore a special Lebensborn pin on their chest, so that everyone would know.
Every single object at the Lebensborn homes was marked with little runes resembling a hissing stroke of lightning: S.S. Himmler loved making the rounds of “his homes”, so that he could be sure the Germanization of the right sort of children was progressing at a desired pace, and sometimes he would be present at the ceremonial rite of pseudo-Christian baptism under the Nazi flag, during which the newborn would be given candlesticks made by camp inmates from Dachau.
Himmler’s favourite child, Gudrun, her father’s “Puppi”, who grieves even today for her fanatically Catholic and equally fanatically racist father, had the opportunity to ascertain personally how creative the Dachau prisoners were when, at the age of twelve, she wrote in her diary after a visit to the camp in 1941: Today we visited Dachau S.S. concentration camp. We saw everything there was to be seen. We saw the tended gardens, we saw orchards, we saw beautiful paintings made by the prisoners. And after all that, we had a lot to eat… it was wonderful.
During a baptism, an altar would be draped with a cloth embroidered with a swastika, the baby would be laid on a pillow in front of the altar, and then a Nazi would read excerpts from Mein Kampf, then Haydn’s Variations on the German National Anthem would reverberate throughout the room, a uniformed S.S. man would bless the (male) child by holding an S.S. “honour dagger” to its brow, a second S.S. officer would give a brief speech, the child would be given a name, and they all would sing.
Himmler gave the children born on his birthday (7 October) special gifts. I think it entirely right that we are taking little children from Polish families, writes Himmler in 1941. We are placing these children in special homes and schooling them, writes Himmler, because these are children with particularly robust racial characteristics. I order that after six months every child who has proved to be acceptable be furnished with a new family tree with valid accompanying documents, orders Himmler, and that after one year of observance, those children be given for adoption to racially authenticated parents with no children. Because among so many people there will obviously be some persons of high racial quality, writes Himmler. Hence our task is to remove these children from their environments, if necessary by violence and theft, because, Himmler writes, either we will keep all the good blood for ourselves… or we will destroy that blood.