If Hitler were alive, Olaf said, he would be pleased. I was one of the 2,800 babies born at Steinhöring, he said, at the Hitler-Himmler fertility clinic, at the breeding ground of Nazi Aryans, he said. I haven’t told anyone about this, Olaf said at the meeting. At school they didn’t teach us about Lebensborn. It was never mentioned. When I turned five my mother told me I was special, Olaf said. You are absolutely exceptional, she said. You are Hitler’s boy, and as Hitler’s boy you were born at a special clinic, my mother told me, Olaf said. I worked at the hospital, she said. I asked for a job at the hospital so I could serve the Third Reich, my mother told me, Olaf said. I was a member of the Nazi Party. I was an aide to a very powerful man and I always wore the party badge on my chest, my mother said, and to this day I am a believer, and I will remain a Nazi until the day I die, my mother said. She died in 1976, Olaf said. And my father stayed a fervent Nazi to his death, Olaf said. They were both attractive, my mother and my father, but they didn’t live together. I saw my father only a dozen times. The Nazis had guards around the hospital, my mother said, because the local people of Steinhöring threw stones at the women from the centre and called them whores, she said. But we were serving Germany and Hitler, she told me, Olaf said. My mother hit me whenever I cried. Stand up straight! she shouted. Straighten up! You are a soldier of the homeland! One day you will rule the world! she said. The more she loved Nazism, the more I despised it. It’s a lucky thing that her dreams did not come true, Olaf said. When she realized Hitler was gone and there was no new Hitler in the offing any time soon, my mother came to despise me, she rejected me. It would be better if you’d never been born! she shouted, Olaf said. Then I joined the ballet, Olaf said. Then I became a homosexual, he said, but my mother said, If Hitler were alive, you would have ended up under the gas showers. I danced for three years in Paris, Olaf said. We toured Europe, he said, then I went to Israel. There I explained to people what had happened to me. They said, Don’t worry, it’s OK. My mother hates Jews, I said to the Jews in Israel. And my father hates Jews, I told them. When he came back from the Russian front, my father hid, changed his name, changed his identity, and he never worked, he just drank and took drugs. He died at the age of sixty-three, homeless, Olaf said. The last time I saw my father he was lying drunk on the pavement, he said. Many Lebensborn children live today in Canada, England, America, Australia, Norway, Sweden. They are everywhere, Olaf said, and we correspond, now that we’re old. Now that our parents are dead it is too late to disown them, or spit in their faces, Olaf said.
Counting on the high fertility of the German woman, Himmler opens centres all over Germany, and when he decides there are enough there, he proceeds to Norway, where the women are also blue-eyed and blonde and where so many pure-blood German soldiers are stationed. They adapt hotels and villas, castles and ski resorts, some of them donated, many taken from Jews. Medical and administrative personnel are first checked, then hired. The food is good, the rooms are light and decorated with German symbols, the air is pure, the natural surroundings are beautiful and the care is first-rate. The war is going on somewhere far off and — for these select children — it is inaudible. Himmler spares no expense in equipping the Lebensborn homes, he takes as much as he needs, dipping chiefly into funds from confiscated Jewish property.
So from December 1935 to April 1945 it is lively at Heim Hochland in Steinhöring. There are 50 beds for mothers and 109 beds for children in Heim-Hochland. The building, previously the property of the Catholic Church, had been used as a hostel for retired priests. Himmler gives the Church 55,000 Reichsmarks for the building, and then invests another 540,000 in it so that the facility can house his dreams. Then, in 1937, Heim Harz is furnished in Wernigerode with 41 beds for mothers and 48 beds for children. That same year Heim Kurmak is set up in Klosterheide—23 beds for mothers, 86 for children. From 1938 to February 1945 Heim Pommern is built in Bad Polzin (today in Poland) with 60 beds for mothers and 75 beds for children. Only 217 babies are born at Heim Friesland near Bremen with its 34 beds for mothers and 45 beds for children. Heim Friesland ceases to operate in January 1941, because at the time a small allied bomb attack begins on Bremen and the surrounding areas. So the children and mothers are sent to other homes, and the head nurse comes to Norway to set up the Norwegian Lebensborn homes in which the S.S. will accommodate the sons of the homeland. Not four years later these sons become nullius filii, needed by no-one, forgotten. Heim Friesland was the most luxurious within the Lebensborn organization, having previously belonged to the Lahusens, a wealthy family, industrial magnates from Bremen and the surrounding area, but the Lahusen family declared bankruptcy before the war and sold their property, and Himmler immediately nabbed the estate for his project of the sweeping Germanization of select European peoples.
From 1939 to March 1945, Kinderheim Taunus was up and running in Wiesbaden with 44 children’s beds; Kriegsmütterheim opened at Stettin in 1940, followed by Kinderheim Sonnenwiese in 1942 in Kohren-Sahlis near Leipzig, with 170 children’s beds, where the “aunties” took the children out for walks each day to make them strong and fit for adoption, for a better life, stable, planned and set, for a life full of the love that had been stolen from them, from which they were stolen. Heim Schwarzwald opens in 1942 in Nordrach near Baden, and a little later Kinderheim Franken I and Kinderheim Franken II are adapted at Schalkhausen near Ansbach, and then the S.S. confiscates the villa belonging to the Mann family in Munich, on Poschinger Strasse, and houses newly obtained children there.
In Austria at Pernitz-Muggendorf, today a suburb of Vienna, Wienerwald House opens in 1938 with 49 beds for mothers and 83 beds for children, and in 1943 “my” house, Alpenland, opens at Schloss Oberweis near Gmunden, where they change my identity and hand me over to Martha and Jürgen, having done a superficial screening, sloppy and hasty. By then the S.S. are in a big rush, because the house is about to shut down, because Himmler will soon be biting into his cyanide capsule, because cinders are all that is left of his magnificent dream of cloning a super race, a superman of a new race. In Austria there is another Kinderheim at Neulengbach near St Polten, about which I have no information. I might have ended up in Luxembourg at Heim Moselland in Bofferding, because mainly stolen children are accommodated at Moselland. After all that searching I finally ascertain that I, too, was stolen from the Adriatisches Küstenland, not saved after my parents were killed, as Martha Traube told me on her deathbed. Isabella Fischer (Rosenzweig by marriage) tells me in 1999 that there were about a hundred, roughly one hundred high-level S.S. officials milling around the Adriatisches Küstenland, so go to the Berlin archive and search through their dossiers. By digging through all the local and central Church and city archives of Germany, Austria, Italy, Slovenia and Croatia, I discover precisely 1,532 male children with the name Antonio born in the Adriatisches Küstenland in the second half of 1944.