A review of ‘Hitler’s forgotten children’ by Ingrid von Oelhafen
Every once in a while you think you have heard the most grotesque and bizarre extremes of Hitler’s National Socialist madness and then another revelation comes along. Reading Ingrid von Oelhafen’s book was just such a moment. To be honest, it was not a book I would usually pick up. Any book bearing the Swastika on a Baptist minister’s desk takes some explaining! However, I was invited to review it, and I am glad that I did.
The Lebensborn programme was an ugly scheme to sire generations of ‘pure’ Aryans to ensure the onward march of the thousand year Reich. Some children were born to unmarried mothers and fathered by SS officers. The children were then raised within the programme. Others, like Ingrid, were snatched from the arms of their mothers in the occupied territories and taken away to be placed with ‘proper’ Nazi families. Ingrid, like so many others, only discovered much later on that she was not the girl she was brought up to be.
So what is this book, then? Is it a history book, an autobiography or a tract on the evils of extremism? It is certainly not the latter, and it has elements of the former. Above all, this is a book about identity. All through its pages, the desire to know ‘who I am’ beats like a distant drum for Ingrid. She can neither ignore it nor rest from its insistent call. In the end, though, identity proves to be something of a ‘will-o-the-wisp’ vanishing almost as soon as it is caught. Is the author of this book really Yugoslavian, but turned into a German, or is she really a German whose origins happen to be Yugoslavian? You will have to read the book to find out – but the answer is as complex and intricate as many of the loose threads which still hang from the Second World War.
Two of the most remarkable features of this book are its human warmth and its absence of rancour. The author has every right to bitterness and self-pity after the treatment she received, but she yields to neither. Towards the end of the book she writes ‘I knew I had to learn not just to understand but to forgive’. It is my belief that she has done both.