Hitler's Forgotten Children: The Shocking True Story of the Nazi Kidnapping Conspiracy
By Ingrid von Oelhafen and Tim Tate
4/5
()
Currently unavailable
Currently unavailable
About this ebook
The Lebensborn programme was the brainchild of Himmler: an extraordinary plan to create an Aryan master race, leaving behind thousands of displaced victims in the wake of the Nazi regime.
In Hitler’s Forgotten Children Ingrid von Oelhafen shares her incredible story as a child of the Lebensborn: a lonely childhood with a distant foster family; her painstaking and difficult search for answers in post-war Germany; and finally being reunited with her biological family – with one last shocking truth to be discovered.
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.
Related to Hitler's Forgotten Children
Related ebooks
Auschwitz Escape: The Klara Wizel Story Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Transcending Darkness: A Girl’s Journey Out of the Holocaust Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Last Jews in Berlin Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Diary of Mary Berg: Growing Up in the Warsaw Ghetto - 75th Anniversary Edition Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWhat They Didn't Burn: Uncovering My Father's Holocaust Secrets Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Bitter Freedom: Memoir of a Holocaust Survivor Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Auschwitz: The Nazi Solution Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Auschwitz: True Tales From a Grotesque Land Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Klaus Barbie: The Butcher of Lyons Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Holocaust: The Nazis' Wartime Jewish Atrocities Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Yellow Star: The Moving Narrative Of A Boy Who Survived Auschwitz And Buchenwald [Illustrated Edition] Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Sophie Scholl and the White Rose Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5In Broad Daylight: The Secret Procedures behind the Holocaust by Bullets Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I Shall Live: Surviving the Holocaust Against All Odds Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Time's Witnesses: Women's Voices from the Holocaust Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsPrague Winter: A Personal Story of Remembrance and War, 1937-1948 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Wallenberg: The Incredible True Story of the Man Who Saved the Jews of Budapest Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsNazi Concentration Camp Commandants, 1933–1945 Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Innocents Condemned to Death: Chronicles of Survival Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Useful Enemies: America's Open-Door Policy for Nazi War Criminals Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter: From the Battle for Moscow to Hitler's Bunker Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Gazebo Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Nuremberg Trials Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHolocaust Journey: Travelling in Search of the Past Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Two Sisters: A Journey of Survival Through Auschwitz Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSurviving the Angel of Death: The True Story of a Mengele Twin in Auschwitz Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Our Crime Was Being Jewish: Hundreds of Holocaust Survivors Tell Their Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Secret Holocaust Diaries: The Untold Story of Nonna Bannister Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
History For You
100 Things You're Not Supposed to Know: Secrets, Conspiracies, Cover Ups, and Absurdities Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Summary of The War of Art: by Steven Pressfield | Includes Analysis Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Great Reset: And the War for the World Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Becoming Cliterate: Why Orgasm Equality Matters--And How to Get It Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The ZERO Percent: Secrets of the United States, the Power of Trust, Nationality, Banking and ZERO TAXES! Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Richest Man in Babylon: The most inspiring book on wealth ever written Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Ultralearning: Master Hard Skills, Outsmart the Competition, and Accelerate Your Career Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Wise as Fu*k: Simple Truths to Guide You Through the Sh*tstorms of Life Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Whore Stories: A Revealing History of the World's Oldest Profession Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Secret History of the World Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Lessons of History Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5100 Amazing Facts About the Negro with Complete Proof Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Unveiled: How the West Empowers Radical Muslims Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Great Awakening: Defeating the Globalists and Launching the Next Great Renaissance Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Anglo-Saxons: A History of the Beginnings of England: 400 – 1066 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Reviews for Hitler's Forgotten Children
4 ratings2 reviews
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Being 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.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Hitler’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’.