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    Hitler's Forgotten Children: My Life Inside the Lebensborn
    Unavailable
    Hitler's Forgotten Children: My Life Inside the Lebensborn
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    Hitler's Forgotten Children: My Life Inside the Lebensborn
    Ebook271 pages4 hours

    Hitler's Forgotten Children: My Life Inside the Lebensborn

    By Ingrid von Oelhafen and Tim Tate

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    A powerful first-person account from a child of the Lebensborn: the Nazis’ program to create an Aryan master race 

    In 1942 Erika, a baby girl from Sauerbrunn in Yugoslavia, was taken for a "medical" examination by the Nazi occupiers. Declared an "Aryan," she was removed from her mother and held in a children’s home; her true identity erased, she became Ingrid von Oelhafen. The Lebensborn program was the brainchild of Himmler: an extraordinary plan to create an Aryan master race. Later, as Ingrid began to uncover her true identity, the full scale of the scheme became clear—including the kidnapping of half a million babies like her, and the deliberate murder of children born into the program who were deemed "substandard." Her research took her to little-known records of the Nuremberg Trials, and, ultimately, to Yugoslavia, where an extraordinary discovery revealed the full truth behind her story: the Nazis had substituted "Ingrid" with another child, who had been raised as "Erika" by her family. Written with insight and compassion, this is a powerful meditation on the personal legacy of Hitler’s vision, of Germany’s brutal past, and of a divided Europe that for many years struggled to come to terms with its own history.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherElliott & Thompson
    Release dateMay 7, 2015
    ISBN9781783961214
    Unavailable
    Hitler's Forgotten Children: My Life Inside the Lebensborn
    Author

    Ingrid von Oelhafen

    INGRID VON OELHAFEN (ERIKA MATKO) is a retired physical therapist living in Osnabruck, Germany. For more than twenty years she has been investigating her own extraordinary story and that of Lebensborn. TIM TATE is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and the bestselling author of non-fiction books, including Slave Girl. His films have been honoured by Amnesty International, the Royal Television Society, UNESCO and the International Documentary Association.  

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    Reviews for Hitler's Forgotten Children

    3.5/5

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    • 3/5
      Being the memoirs of a woman who was seized into the Lebensborn program of the Nazi SS and brought from her native land to live as a sort of foster child in Germany. The Lebensborn program, among many other things, took children who met Nazi standards of racial purity from countries which they conquered and assigned them to German families, usually with SS connections. As a personal memoir of a genealogical search to discover her birth name and family, country of origin, path to Germany, and her foster parents' connection with the program, this is pretty interesting. When she attempts to broaden out into historical context, however, disaster strikes. The number of historical errors herein is truly appalling; she has, inter alia, Nazis changing the name of the city of Danzig, which had been called Danzig from time immemorial--it was the Poles who changed it to Gdansk when it was transferred to them. And I'm sure that Franklin Roosevelt would be surprised to learn that he attended the Potsdam Conference, since he had been dead for four months. Her account of Yugoslav partisan activity during the war is misleading at best. Fact checker, please. As far as her search for her roots goes, it is quite interesting, especially when she stays with her own story. She digresses a lot into other people's stories, though, especially after she joins a group for fellow Lebensborn children, which causes her narration to lose energy and continuity, and which, together with some rather abstract musings about humans and their need for identity, make the book's ending more than a little draggy.
    • 5/5
      Hitler’s Forgotten Children Anyone who has seen Les Mis knows the Jean Valjean song ‘Who Am I?’ and it is a question we all ask ourselves at some point in our own lives, but when you come from a Central Eastern European country it sometimes can take you down paths you did not know exist. Coming from a Polish family that suffered at the hands of Nazi and Soviet alike and brought up with the horrors of what both did to the people from the Polish Baltic down to Yugoslavia in the south, the Jew and Slav were victims, some more than others.Like most Eastern European families, those who have had to live in a country other than that of their forefathers since 1945 for various reasons, where were brought up on the rumours and knowledge of the Russians committed crimes at Katyn (which they still try and deny) and that the Nazis stole babies away from their mothers across Eastern Europe but never really understood why.Hitler’s Forgotten Children is Ingrid von Oelhafen version of that age old question of who am I? Even more so when she discovered that she was an unwitting part of the Lebensborn programme created by Himmler and that the Nazis had done everything they could to destroy her true identity. This is her journey in to finding who she really was as well as an examination of Lebensborn a much forgotten Nazi pogrom to create more ‘Aryan’ children that had been born to people who were ‘substandard’.To those who think they know much about what happened during the Second World War tend not to know much about Lebensborn, and this is part memoir, part history lesson. This is an important book that will guide you through what was and still is a hideous pogrom whose children are still coming to terms with it today.Lebensborn is the name of the pogrom that Himmler created for children that were born to Slavic women but were ‘blonde haired and blue eyed’ clearly a freak of nature and had to be taken from them and placed with good ‘Aryan’ families in Germany. Lebensborn shows the obsession that the Nazis had with blood lines and racial purity and this book covers all aspects of this terrible history.What we learn from this book is the Ingrid felt dislocated from her German family and how she was dumped in a children’s home after the escape from the Soviet zones in Germany after the war. Her and her ‘brother’ dumped there by her good German ‘mother’. It is only after the end of the cold war and the end of the divided Germany did the facts start to be revealed and that Ingrid found that she was a Lebensborn child. From there started a painful but important journey and how shocking it is when you see the bureaucracy and the state secrecy that stopped her discovering the truth about herself.Hitler’s Forgotten Children is part memoir part history lesson that many who think they know about the Nazis will be shocked at. One has to remember that these babies were stolen during the war and are in the 70s now and some are coming to terms and some just cannot come to terms with their status. They are still unwitting victims today and reading Ingrid von Oelhafen’s account you will find a well written well researched and knowledgeable account, written with compassion.This is a one of a number of dark periods of European history and this is still going on today as Europe has still come to terms with the effects of war and being divided. Think how hard it must be to know that most of your life has been a lie and the one you should have had was stolen from you in the aid of ‘racial purity’.