Her parents barely knew one another. An ardent Nazi, her mother met Helga’s father, a German Army officer, in Berlin at a party celebrating Hitler’s conquest of France in June 1940. They had a one-night stand, and nine months later Mathilde gave birth in a Lebensborn–or Source of Life–home outside Munich. The home was one of several set up throughout Occupied Europe by Heinrich Himmler’s dreaded SS to care for unmarried pregnant women whose racial characteristics–blond hair, blue eyes, no Jewish ancestry–fit the Nazis’ Aryan ideal. At birth, Helga was anointed as one of the fuhrer’s elect, part of a generation of “racially pure” children who would populate the German empire as it ruled a conquered Europe for the life of the 1,000-year Reich. Later her mother dispatched Helga to the foster care of a high-ranking Nazi secret-police man. She grew up in a Nazi enclave outside the city of Lodz in occupied Poland while her foster father helped oversee the gassing of thousands of Jews at the nearby Chelmno concentration camp. “I spent the first four years raised and tutored by the Nazi elite,” she says. “I was involved, in a fundamental way, with murderers.”
Kahrau and thousands of other middle-aged Europeans are struggling with the consequences of one of Nazism’s most troubling social experiments: the creation of a “master race.” After the war, many of the Lebensborn children grew up scorned as Nazi progeny and tormented by dark uncertainties about their origins. Those who tried to get answers were often stymied by Germans long reluctant to confront their Nazi past. Their natural or foster parents often kept mum about the Lebensborn program; the German media didn’t report on Himmler’s racial experiments for decades. The destruction of thousands of German Lebensborn files by SS troops during the last days of World War II deepened the mystery of the children’s real identities. But recently some of the 20,000 Lebensborn children have been getting answers. Last December German TV reporters uncovered 1,000 long-unnoticed Lebensborn files at the German government archive in Berlin, and two Norwegian Lebensborn organizations are now helping many local war children trace their parents.
The Lebensborn program sprang directly from the Nazis’ obsession with racial inequality. Germans were encouraged to have many children. In 1933 the newly installed Nazi dictatorship made it illegal for Aryan women to have abortions. Himmler’s SS subsequently built 20 Lebensborn homes in Germany and other Europe-an countries, where Aryan women could discreetly deliver their illegitimate babies. To guarantee secrecy, the identities of the mothers and their mates–often SS officers–were recorded in tightly guarded files kept separate from municipal birth records. Some mothers kept their babies. But hundreds, out of shame or financial necessity, turned their children over for adoption or abandoned them. Himmler’s thugs also kidnapped Aryan-looking children from Poland and other occupied lands. Brought to Lebensborn centers, they were raised as Germans and turned over to Nazi foster parents.
The fate of the children was cruelest in Norway. The Nazis admired the Norwegians’ Viking blood, and when Germany invaded in 1940, Wehrmacht commanders exhorted their troops in Norway to father as many children as possible with Norwegian women. Thousands of women obliged them. After the war, the Lebensborn babies and their mothers faced the wrath of their liberated countrymen. Many women and their kids were harassed, beaten and called “Nazi swine” by teachers, schoolmates and neighbors. Hundreds of children were herded into institutions. Police sent some 14,000 women and girls who had slept with Wehrmacht soldiers to internment camps. The head of Norway’s largest mental hospital stated that women who had mated with German soldiers were “mental defectives” and concluded that 80 percent of their progeny must be retarded.
Paul Hansen bore that label for decades. The progeny of a brief affair between a Luftwaffe pilot and a cleaning woman who abandoned her child at birth, Hansen, 57, spent his first three years in relative comfort in a Lebensborn home north of Oslo. But his life took a terrible turn after the war, he says, because of his German parentage. Hansen was moved to a collection center for unclaimed Lebensborn children. An epileptic, he was passed over for adoption and was thrown together with 20 other Lebensborn children at this center who could not find homes. Ministry of Social Affairs officials then classified these half-German children as retarded and shipped them to mental institutions. Hansen recalls days of being insulted and beaten by guards, and remembers nights spent in feces-splattered dormitories, listening to the psychotic screams of other inmates. “I told them, ‘I’m not insane, let me out’,” he says. “But nobody listened.” Hansen didn’t get his freedom until he was 22.
He found a tiny apartment and a job in a factory–and began a search for his parents. The Norwegian Lebensborn files were off-limits, but through the help of the Salvation Army in Norway, he learned that his father had died in Germany in 1952. He tracked his mother to the East German town of Pasewalk. In 1965 he traveled there, but the reunion was a deep disappointment. “I expected she would open up her arms to me and say, ‘Oh, my son.’ But she didn’t care,” he remembers. “When I told her that I had spent my life in mental institutions, she replied, ‘So what? You weren’t the only one’.” He never went back.
In recent years, Hansen has found a measure of peace. What has made life endurable, he says, is the growing willingness of Norwegian Lebensborn children to go public and confide in one another about their experiences. Hansen says he’s found “new brothers and sisters” through his membership in a support group; the recent declassification of the Lebensborn files has allowed many war children to discover their parentage. Last month Hansen and six other Lebensborn offspring sued the government for millions of dollars in damages for decades of brutal treatment. On New Year’s Eve, Norway’s prime minister seemed to acknowledge his government’s responsibility by apologizing publicly for the first time for “the harassment and injustice done” to the war children.
Helga Kahrau has never found such peace. Reunited with her mother in Munich after the war, she often wondered about her origins. Her mother concealed the truth, saying only that her soldier-father had been killed during World War II. Helga’s search for her roots began in the mid-1970s, when she happened to watch a German television documentary about the Lebensborn program. Suddenly, she says, “everything clicked.” Still, she feared asking her tight-lipped mother about family history: “I didn’t want a confrontation.” But when Mathilde Kahrau died, Helga traveled to Pullach, near Munich, the onetime home of her foster parents and the current site of the postwar German intelligence headquarters. There she uncovered Nazi files that provided detailed information about her foster father and his crimes committed in the service of the “final solution.” She spent hours in libraries, digging up the little scholarship that existed about the Lebensborn. The last pieces fell into place on her birthday in March 1994, when she received a phone call from a man who identified himself as her real father.
Kahrau was shocked. “I said, ‘Why are you calling me after 53 years?’ " In his 80s and stricken with cancer, he explained that his thoughts had recently turned to the daughter he had fathered during the war. They met the next day. “He was charming,” she says. “It was love at first sight.” He told Helga about the night of passion with her mother, about his military duty in occupied Paris–and his postwar real-estate career. “He had become a millionaire,” Kahrau says. As her father’s health worsened, she nursed him round the clock, expecting to receive some share of his estate. Yet when he died in 1996, Kahrau, as an illegitimate child, inherited nothing.
In the four years since then, Kahrau has found some solace talking with a psychologist friend about her upbringing. She has visited her birthplace, the original Lebensborn home in Steinhoring, near Munich, several times. But Kahrau hasn’t yet come to terms with her identity. Unlike Norway, Germany has no support groups for Lebensborn children, nor has she found a willingness to confront the issue in German society. Kahrau still worries that people will assume she’s a Nazi because “I grew up on the side of the murderers,” she says. Meeting a NEWSWEEK correspondent at a hotel in downtown Munich, she was visibly nervous, tensing when the word “Lebensborn” was uttered too loudly and insisting on speaking about her life only in the privacy of a secluded booth. “Being a Lebensborn child is still a source of shame,” she admits. That shame is the Nazis’ bitter legacy to those whom they once thought would inherit the earth.
