Hitler's Forgotten Children by Ingrid Von Oelhafen Read Free Book Online Page B

never call her that. But she was noticeably cold – emotionally and physically – towards me. This was in stark contrast to her other relationships. Professionally, she was an extremely successful physiotherapist: her patients clearly loved her, and she returned their affection.
    With her own relatives, too, she was warm: to her mother and her sister (Aunt Eka, to whom I increasingly turned for love and understanding), and to her son. Hubertus was eight years younger than me; a very handsome boy, who – unlike me at his age – could speak well and fluently. It might have been easy not to like him: he was, after all, Gisela’s natural child, and had been living in the house in Hamburg before I was allowed to go there. But although I resented the fact that Gisela seemed able to show love to almost anyone but me, I had come to care very much for Hubertus and we had a strong bond between us.
    But this was a rare glimpse of light. Teenage years are always difficult, especially, I think, for girls. Those crucial years between thirteen and fifteen are generally a time of uncertainty and insecurity, and a time when it is all too easy to be critical of adults. But in Germany in 1956, that biological confusion was exacerbated by national crisis.
    The Nazis and the war had broken the previously close bonds of German family life just as surely as the bombs and tanks had destroyed the country’s houses, bridges and railways. In addition to creating a huge population of orphans, Hitler’s desperate last-ditch battles had blurred the lines between childhood and adult life by throwing young boys into the doomed fighting.
    In the immediate post-war years, an army of international psychologists and social workers was drafted in to address the problems for Germany’s next generation. The men and women of the United Nations Refugee Relief Organisation (UNRRA) and its successor, the International Refugee Organisation (IRO), recognised that many teenagers in the late 1940s and early 1950s were growing up without the emotional security they needed – both individually and as part of an emerging new nation. An internal IRO memorandum in May 1949 highlighted the crisis in stark terms:
‘
The lost identity of individual children is
the
social problem of the day …’
    And so, while the American Secretary of State, George Marshall, put in place a vast economic aid plan to rebuild Germany’s shattered infrastructure and economy (and the rest of Europe), UNRRA and IRO set to work on what they termed a ‘psychological Marshall Plan’ for its children.
    First they had to identify us. Along with the posters, radio announcements instructed those fostering children from other countries to report to their local youth administration office.
    How did this affect us? I could not have told you then what Gisela did: it would be decades before I learned that she met with the investigatorswithout telling me. But when I came face to face with my photo on the poster, I had conflicting emotions.
    Of course, I wondered who my real parents were. Perhaps my father had been – like Hermann – an officer in the Wehrmacht
,
who went away to war, leaving me with a mother who either didn’t want me, or could not cope alone with a baby. Those were my rational thoughts. But behind them were the sharp pangs of fear and hope. Hope that my biological mother would see the posters and suddenly turn up to say that she now wanted me. Fear, because if she ever did I was worried what sort of person this woman would turn out to be. Perhaps she would be worse than Gisela; maybe she wouldn’t even like me?
    But these were only flickering emotions and in the end I found it was easier to snuff them out than to dwell on them. Even though I wasn’t happy and I knew that the von Oelhafens and the Andersens were not my blood relatives, I clung to the belief that in some way I belonged to them.
    Does it sound odd that the