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About the author and blogger ...

Anne Goodwin’s drive to understand what makes people tick led to a career in clinical psychology. That same curiosity now powers her fiction.
A prize-winning short-story writer, she has published three novels and a short story collection with small independent press, Inspired Quill. Her debut novel, Sugar and Snails, was shortlisted for the 2016 Polari First Book Prize.
Away from her desk, Anne guides book-loving walkers through the Derbyshire landscape that inspired Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre.
Subscribers to her newsletter can download a free e-book of award-winning short stories.

TELL ME MORE

Hitler’s Forgotten Children by Ingrid von Oelhafen & Tim Tate

2/5/2017

7 Comments

 
Picture
We believe in the God of all things

And in the mission of our German blood

Which grows ever young from German soil.

We believe in the race, carrier of the blood,

And in the Führer, chosen for us by God.


The last time Annecdotal took a peek at the craziness of the Nazi project was with
a fictional account of Mengele’s perverted twin studies. Today we’re visiting related territory with a memoir and social history of the Lebensborn programme, both literally and metaphorically Himmler’s baby.
It’s taken Ingrid von Oelhafen over seventy years, including fifteen years of dogged and frustrating research, to unravel the secrets of her origins. Born in the former Yugoslavia, she was removed from her parents as an infant and transferred to a German orphanage. Along with another child, she was taken in by a German couple who were living separately at the time. When the war ended, the wife and children found themselves in the Soviet occupied zone but managed to make the journey to West Germany before the descent of the Iron Curtain.

At this point, Ingrid was placed in another orphanage, desperately yearning for the only mother she knew. When she left, it was to lodge with her father. Eventually, Gisela took her back but, while ensuring she had an education, she was always distant. Despite these
insecure beginnings, and her foster mother’s refusal to tell her the truth about her background, Ingrid grew to forge a successful career as a physiotherapist for disabled children.

When she came to research her own past, the original secrecy around the Lebensborn programme was compounded by language barriers and half a century of political of upheaval and reorganisation in Eastern Europe. However, she was eventually able to meet members of her biological family in Slovenia, and with other Lebensborn survivors.

Himmler’s pet project is a deadly warning against mixing dodgy science with ideology. Convinced of the superiority of the Aryan “race” thought to be transmitted from generation to generation by the supposed purity of the blood, and concerned about the diminution of this genetic pool through loss of life in the war, he developed a method of assessment of racial purity and a system to support those deemed to possess it. Members of the SS were given incentives to procreate and, at a time when motherhood outside marriage was stigmatised, pregnant women of the “right” background were welcomed into specialist nursing homes, whether married or not.

When the numbers were still deemed insufficient, children with the desired characteristics were kidnapped from the occupied territories as was Ingrid’s lot.
Deluded as this appears to us now, we should beware of being complacent about the pseudoscience of race. In non-fascist Britain, over twenty years after the end of the Second World War, Enoch Powell made his infamous
Rivers of Blood speech and, although less strongly rooted in concepts of race, children were shipped to its outposts of Empire often without their parents’ knowledge or consent. (And the social worker who uncovered this atrocity only thirty years ago is a personal hero of my character, Janice, in my current WIP, and hopefully my third novel-in-progress, currently known as High Hopes.) A less extreme version of the same phenomenon is our use of the term “mixed race” as if we don’t all have a mixed biological heritage and the excitement that surrounds new discoveries of an association between some aspect of behaviour and genetics.

One of the tragedies of the Lebensborn project’s assumptions of biological determinism is the neglect of environmental factors’ impact on child development. If only Himmler had read
Lorenz, whose research on imprinting in ducklings influenced Bowlby’s later work on attachment. Instead, the (p188):

regimen was intended to produce strong and ruthless future leaders for the Master Race. But children need love, not unyielding discipline … the rules frequently produced the opposite effect to Himmler’s objective.

Separated from her birth parents while still an infant; inducted into a corrupt, and later discredited, cult; fostered by emotionally neglectful parents; a personal history buried in obfuscation: any one of these developmental wounds would have been difficult to cope with, so it’s to the author’s credit that she’s arrived at some kind of resolution to all four. One of
my difficulties with memoir is my discomfort in standing apart from the author’s harrowing story. But, as a reader, I’d have liked more psychological context (for instance of the crucial role of attachment) and, as a concerned citizen, I’d have liked for the author and her fellow survivors to have had the opportunity for therapy to help unravel how those various psychological insults have impacted on their lives. In particular, I wondered about the yearning for connection with their biological origins as the key to their “true” identity. So I was surprised, moved and heartened by her conclusion (p225):

For years I had allowed my life to be overshadowed by the search for something that could not be found. There is for all of us, I believe, a gap between what we want and what we can have, and regret flourishes in that space. I spent too long trapped in a disappointing No Man’s Land between dreams and reality. I lost sight of the fundamental truth that we are not defined by the facts of our birth but rather by the choices we make throughout our life.


Finally, I wonder if you’d previously heard of Lebensborn? I ask because, although the author positions it as a secret history, I’m sure I’d read about it or heard something about it on the radio many years ago (and definitely prior to the Internet). It could be that I’d come across a distorted version of the story. (The author refers to myths about baby farms and women lost forced into pregnancy.) So I’d be interested to know how much this account is news to you.

Thanks Elliott and Thompson, a small press specialising in non-fiction, for my review copy.

Thanks for reading. I'd love to know what you think. If you've enjoyed this post, you might like to sign up via the sidebar for regular email updates and/or my quarterly Newsletter.
7 Comments
Charli Mills
4/5/2017 04:59:11 am

So, the Hub is a Mauser historian. That's his passion, the creation and use of this Czechoslovakian rifle. He knows every conflict or war it's been used in and thus knows much about the Germans and WWII. Without giving him any context, I asked if he knew what the Lebensborn program was. And he did. Right away he answered that it was a "breeding" program to further the Aryan race. The Hub knew about it from reading soldiers' accounts. Evidently they were frequently recruited to perform and produce offspring on the front lines when suitable women were found. Yikes! Perhaps from the author's perspective and research the program was yet secret, but not among the surviving soldiers involved. You might have heard of it from a different avenue of information. Whew. I'd like to think such thoughts are behind us in this modern era but my belief in humanity's progress has suffered many blows in the past year. It can serve as a warning, yet those who already see themselves in a superior light, are already blind. Disgusting, actually. It's important they not be in power. I plan on getting this book for the Hub to round out his own historical insights. He'll make interesting connections, I'm sure. Great review, Anne!

Reply
Annecdotist
4/5/2017 10:58:27 am

Thanks for adding that perspective, Charli. Interesting to learn there are accounts from soldiers who took part as what your Hub reports tallies with my own memory of learning about it which is slightly at odds with the author’s own research. She suggests that, while “suitable” married men were incentivised to have more children, and single women who became pregnant were supported, the pressure to breed didn’t go quite that far. I’d be interested in what your husband makes of the book should he read it. Yes, it’s dreadful to contemplate that we might be heading back towards those kind of times.

Reply
Charli Mills
7/5/2017 07:36:37 am

We downloaded it on Audible so we can listen to it together. And yes, it is dreadful to considering how society is behaving these days. Retro is fun for clothes or interior design but not for populism and misogynistic government control.

Annecdotist
8/5/2017 05:46:58 pm

That’s neat, Charli, and hope it works for you both.
And well said regarding Retro – it’s so painful watching/being part of a culture that’s failing to learn from its own past experience. Somehow we hope for better than that. One ray of hope is that the French didn’t elect a National Front president – yet!

Charli Mills
8/5/2017 06:01:19 pm

France has given us hope!

Norah Colvin link
4/5/2017 12:02:00 pm

Another non-fiction, Anne. It's a fascinating, if terrible, piece of history of which (I must admit my ignorance) I wasn't aware. When I saw the title I immediately thought of Jackie French's novel for teens called "Hitler's Daughter" but they really have little in common. It sounds interesting.

Reply
Annecdotist
4/5/2017 05:40:34 pm

I think most people hadn’t come across this piece of history, just as I hadn’t come across the novel you mention, although it does remind me of other stories, both true and fictional about people coming to terms with – or failing to – being the offspring of prominent Nazis.

Reply



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