Hitler's Forgotten Children
by Ingrid Von Oelhafen and Tim Tate C 2016
A True Story of the Lebensborn Program and
One Woman's Search for Her Real Identity
Publisher is Caliber Rundon - Berkely Penguin House
What if knew in your gut that something was very wrong about your adoption? Something so secret that you were not told that you were adopted until you were in adulthood and then given no clues. Your mother was a cold, distant, and uncommunicative woman. You grew up without love. As your curiosity gets to you, you do what you know how to do to find out the truth, and because you were raised a German, you start out figuring that your birth parents must have been German too.
All of these things could have been true if you were born during Hitler's Lebensborn program, during a time and a place when being accepted into the SS and your rank had much to do with your genealogy chart. A common soldier had to prove his Aryan or Nordic heritage back to 1800, officers to the mid 1700's. To be considered fit you had to prove that you had no Jewish, Slavic, or other heritage that might label you a Mongrel. A man had to also be over 5'6 tall and prove his physical superiority. Then he, and such German women, were encouraged to reproduce. SS men were expected to marry and have families, but suddenly the government was promising that children born illegitimate with the proper background would not suffer for it financially. Four German grandparents was good proof and so you would receive an "Aryan Certificate" or a "Greater Aryan Certificate." By 1939 it was considered sacred to copulate to conceive children with the right physical and mental characteristics such as blue eyes and light hair. Hitler wrote that if they could just get rid of 700,000 to 800,000 of the weakest people and have one million children a year, Germany would be a strong nation. Forced sterilization and euthanasia were popular methods to get rid of the weakest. At least 320,000 people had been sterilized by the beginning of World War II.
Ingrid Von Oelhafen learned the details of the Lebensborn program as she searched for her heritage. She had a terrible time accepting that she could be part of such a breeding program. As it turned out she was part of the program, but a different part. It took much of her adult life, off and on, to find some documented evidence of who she was, to figure out the puzzle. Unmoved and conspiratorial bureaucrats, silent relatives with fuzzy memories, the International Red Cross, support group members, and finally DNA figure in her story.
Maria Dolezalova's story was an example. In Maria's case about 200 women from her village were transported to Rovensbruck concentration camp where 184 of their children were snatched to be examined by RuSHA. 103 children failed, 74 were handed over for immediate extermination by gas on a rigged truck, and only 7 including Maria were transferred to be raised as German by Germans.
Now there is a point in this book where I was incredibly frustrated for and with Ingrid and all the other people involved in this search. As soon as she learned that she was born Erica Matko on November 11, 1941 in Saint Sauerbrunn, genealogy myopia set in, no one used maps or other information akin to a village finder or index of old and new names for towns and villages, and so this all became a block that could have been more easily broken. Her birth surname isn't German and the town wasn't in Germany and she needed to think about looking in countries were a Slavic surname was more common.
She had suffered and had to stop searching at times, but eventually she had the PARISH RECORDS for OLD YOGOSLAVIA including the birthdates of her parents and the name of the Village they lived in, Rogtaska Slatina. But woops! There was another living Erica Matko, so maybe this was wrong. DNA testing gave her the answers she needed. Indeed, she was the Erica Matko born of this couple and snatched from them. She found she had a living brother in 2000. Success finally!
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