Translated material
Hitler's children
They, true Aryans, had to populate Europe and manage it
Solemn ceremony: SS officer gives the name of the Lebensborne baby. (Photo: Bundesarchiv)
From early childhood, Helga Karau did not leave that something was wrong with her. Helga was born in Nazi Germany at the very beginning of the Second World War, and about the first years of her life, she remained vague memories - an exquisite atmosphere, important persons in stitched uniforms, life in contentment and comfort. As far as Helge was known, her mother performed the duties of a secretary in two chancellers: adviser to Hitler Martin Bormann and chef of the propaganda of Joseph Goebbels. Matilda Karau no longer told her daughter about that time. Only after her death in 1993, Helga began to study the family past. What she managed to find out was horrified.
Her parents were barely familiar. Helga’s mother, a convinced Nazis, and her future father, an officer of the Wehrmacht, met in Berlin in June 1940 at a celebration on the occasion of victory over France. They spent only one night together, and after nine months Matilda made a child in the maternity hospital of Lebensborn (translated from German "Source of Life") near Munich. The SS Henry Himmler created such houses in the territory of occupied Europe to care for unmarried pregnant women, whose racial signs - blond hair, blue eyes, purity of blood - corresponded to the Nazi ideal of a true Aryan. Having been born, Helga was reckoned with the chosen ones of the Fuhrer, the generation of racial pure children, who was intended to inhabit the territory of the German empire - the millennial Reich, which ruling over the conquered Europe.
When Helga was six months, her mother returned to Berlin to the service station - to the Goebbels office, and left the child in the care of a senior Gestapo employee. The first years of his life, Helgs took place in Poland occupied by the Nazis, in a German military town near Lodz. Here, under the leadership of her adoptive father in a nearby concentration camp of Chelmno, thousands of Jews were destroyed in gas chambers.
At the end of the war, Helga was transported to the bombed Munich, and there she first was in the care of her mother. Now that she is trying to collect together fragments of the life of those years, she is tormented by remorse. “Until four years, representatives of the Nazi elite raised me and raised me,” Helga recalls. “I lived with the killers.” 
Helga Karau only after the death of her mother Matilda in 1993 found out that at birth she was ranked to the chosen ones of the Fuhrer, the generation of racial pure people.
Helge Karau and thousands of middle -aged Europeans have to experience the consequences of one of the most dangerous social experiments - an experiment to create a “higher race”. Over the 12 years of the existence of the Third Reich, about ten thousand babies were born in the maternity hospitals of Lebensborn in Germany, about the same - in the occupied Norway after the Germans invaded there in 1940: Himmler appreciated the "blood of the Vikings" and encouraged the connection of German soldiers with Norwegians. But the houses of Lebensborn were in France, and in Belgium, and in Luxembourg. After the war, many Lebensborn children were forced to live with the labels of "Nazi fostering" and be in the unknown regarding their origin.
Those who tried to find out anything often encountered a decisive unwillingness of compatriots to remember their Nazi past. Real or foster parents of these children do not want to talk about the Lebensborn program, and German media did not raise the topic of Himmler's racial experiments for several decades. In addition, thousands of archival records relating to the Lebensborn program were destroyed in the last days of the war by the SS troops, which complicates the exact establishment of the personalities of children and their parents. Nevertheless, the secret of some of the twenty thousand Lebensborn children may be clarified.
In December last year, German journalists discovered about a thousand lost Lebensborn affairs in the state archive of Berlin, and in Norway there are two organizations that help those who were born during the war in the Norwegian houses of Lebensborn to find their real parents.
The idea of Lebensborn’s houses dates back to one of the main postulates of Nazi ideology: if a German child was conceived, he should be born. In 1933, the new regime forbade Aryan women abortion and introduced the death penalty for doctors who violated the ban. In August 1936, Himmler discovered in Steinchering, in the vicinity of Munich, the first maternity hospital of Lebensborn, providing Aryan women with the opportunity to secretly make their illegitimate children secretly from everyone. Parts of the SS founded nine such houses on the territory of Germany, re -engaging hotels, villas, mountain chalets and schools, and ten in Norway. The names of mothers were entered into strictly secret dossiers, which the SS stored separately from records made in ordinary municipal and church registration books. The names of the fathers were sometimes not indicated at all. Some women ultimately left children at home, but hundreds of others out of a sense of shame or because of the need to give them to adoption of high-ranking SS men or simply threw them.
Himmler did not disdain any means to achieve his crazy goal - multiplying representatives of the Higher German race. The SS services organized abductions of the Aryan type in Poland and in other occupied territories and through the entire third Reich brought them to the centers of Lebensborn, where they were "numb" and then transferred to the adoptive parents from among the members of the Nazi party. The Lebensborn administration got rid of children with congenital defects: sometimes they were sent to clinics for hopelessly sick, where babies were killed with poison or hunger.
The Wehrmacht command called on ordinary soldiers who served in Norway, to fertilize as many Norwegian women as possible, and many Norwegies willingly agreed to bear future Aryans. Himmler offered to the SS men who had succeeded in the production of children. The head of the SS personally entered all the economic trifles in the life of maternity hospitals in Norway and Germany, made inspection trips and even developed a special protein diet for Levensborn children.
By the spring of 1945, the millennial Reich collapsed, and with it the Gimmler plan for increasing the highest race. The end of the Nazi regime was to have serious consequences for thousands of young children, now abandoned to the mercy of fate. In the spring of 1945, as the Allied troops moved in Germany, the SS men hastily covered one maternity hospital after another, taking hundreds of children along with their secret folders to the main house in Steinchering. In early May, the American units entered there. According to one version, the attack aircraft managed to decompose a huge bonfire before the flight, in which they burned all the documents. Another version claims that the Americans cut off the path to the mountains to the mountains, during the battle the paper were thrown into the Izar River. One way or another, the opportunity to establish the identity of children was lost forever.
Even more bitter was to be the fate of children in Norway. There, the SS men did not manage to destroy Lebensborn documents, and after the surrender of the Third Reich on May 8, 1945, thousands of women and their children collapsed the anger of their liberated compatriots. They were insulted and beaten, school teachers, classmates and neighbors called them "Nazi pigs." The police sent 14 thousand women who entered into contact with German soldiers, to the interned camps. The head of the largest psychiatric hospital in Norway said that those who had relations with German soldiers had “mental deviations” and 80 percent of their offspring should be mentally retarded.
Paul Hansen lived with this label most of his life. He became the fruit of the fleet of the Luftwaffe pilot and a local cleaning lady who abandoned the child immediately after his birth. Hansen, who is now 57, spent the first three years of his life in relative well -being in Lebensborn's house north of Oslo. Everything, according to him, changed after the end of the war - because of his German origin. Hansen was transferred to the assembly point for Lebensborn Refusal children. The boy, suffering from epilepsy, was transferred to this center for adoption. In addition to him, there were another 20 Lebensborne children there, but the center could not find foster families for them.
Officials of the Ministry of Social Affairs announced that German gingerbread children suffer from mental retardation, and distributed them to psychiatric clinics. Hansen remembers how he was insulted and beaten by the guards, remembers the nights spent in the molested chambers, under the crazy cries of comrades in misfortune. “I told them: I'm not crazy, let me out of here,” he says. “But no one listened to me.” Hansen came out of the clinic only at 22 years old.
He found a tiny apartment and work at the factory and began to look for his parents. Lebensborn documents in the Norwegian archives were not available, but with the help of the Norwegian Bureau of the Army of Salvation, Hansen managed to find out that his father had died in Germany in 1952. His mother married another Wehrmacht soldier and lived in East Germany in the town of Pasevalk. In 1965, he went to meet her, rode by train and ferry and remembers how worried, approaching her house. But the reunion did not take place. “I hoped that she would reveal her arms to me and say:“ Son! ”But she didn’t care about me,” Hansen recalls. “When I said that I had my life in a crazy house, she replied:“ So what? You are not alone! "Hansen left and did not go to his mother anymore.
In recent years, they brought Hansen a small fraction of comfort. He married, but his marriage did not last long: after many years spent in clinics, it was difficult for him to live with anyone. And yet, now his life has become more or less tolerant: as he himself says, this is because an increasing number of immigrants from Norwegian houses Lebensborn decide to openly talk about their past, sharing memories of the experienced with the same as they. Hansen admits that he gained "new brothers and sisters" thanks to his membership in the group of psychological support. After recently the Lebensborne archives were declassified, many children of the war managed to find out the truth about their origin. In February of this year, Hansen and six more immigrants from Lebensborn’s houses had a lawsuit against the state, demanding multimillion -dollar compensation for decades of cruelty. On New Year's Eve, the Prime Minister of Norwegia Hel Magne Buntevik seemed to admit the responsibility of his government and first publicly apologized for "oppression and lawlessness" that were happening against the children of the war.
But Helga Karau’s anxiety has not ended yet. Living with her mother in the post -war Munich, she was often interested in her origin. "I was large, fair -haired, what is called the Aryan type, and was very different from the southern Germans. Therefore, everyone asked me where I came from," Helga recalls. "I did not know that to answer them." Mother hid the truth from her, saying only that her father was a military man and died during the Second World War.
And once in the evening in the mid-70s, she saw on television a German documentary about the Lebensborn program and about the orphanage in Steinchering, which took care of the SS. Suddenly "everything fell into place," Helga recalls. And yet she did not dare to ask her mother about anything: "I was afraid. And I did not want to quarrel with her." However, after the death of Matilda Karau in 1993, Helga went to the town of Pullla near Munich, where her adoptive parents once lived and where the headquarters of the German intelligence service is now located. Here she got acquainted with the Nazi archives, from which she learned the truth about her adoptive father and about the crimes that he committed, implementing the "final solution of the Jewish question."
Helga did not get out of the libraries, getting to know a few studies about the Lebensborn program. The last pieces of puzzles were discovered in 1994, on her birthday. She was called a man who introduced himself to her real father.
For Helga, this was a shock. “I asked him:“ Why are you calling me in 53 years? ”He was already over 80, he was sick with cancer, and he said that recently he was increasingly thinking about his daughter, who was born during the war. The next day they met.“ He was very sweet, ”Helga recalls,“ I loved him at first look. ”
Father told Helge about the night of love with her mother, about his military service in occupied Paris and a career of real estate trader after the war. “He became a millionaire,” says Helga. When her father got worse, she looked after him around the clock and hoped to inherit at least part of his condition. But when my father died in 1996, Helga received a letter from a law office, notifying that she was left. The illegitimate child of Lebensborne had no right to inherit. “Everything that fell to me is debts,” says Helga.
In the past four years, at least some outlet for her had conversations with a psychologist's friend dedicated to Helga’s childhood. She visited several times the place where she was born - the first house of Lebensborn in Steinchering. But to this day, Helga Karas can not reconcile with his past. Unlike Norway, in Germany there are no support groups for immigrants from Lebensborn, and German society has no desire to discuss this problem. Helga is still afraid that she can be considered Nazi only because she, in her own words, "grew next to the killers." During a conversation with the Newsouke correspondent, in one of the hotels in the center of Munich, she was noticeably nervous, freezing every time the word “Lebensborn” sounded too loud, and insisted that the conversation about her past only in an inaccessible booth for prying ears and eyes. “I am still ashamed that I am from Lebensborn,” she admits. This shame is a bitter heritage, which was obtained from the Nazis to those who, in their opinion, had to rule the world.
Paul Hansen, the son of a military pilot and a Norwegian woman, was brought up in the Lebensborne orphanage near Oslo. After the war, he was recognized as mentally retarded and placed in special