Ingrid von Oelhafen - Hitlers Stolen Children: The Shocking True Story of the Nazi Kidnapping Conspiracy

B LOOD.

Blood runs through this story. The blood of young men spilled on the battlefields of war; the blood of civiliansold and young, women and menthat ran in the gutters of cities, towns, and villages across Europe; the blood of millions destroyed in the pogroms and death camps of the Holocaust.

But blood, too, as an idea. The Nazi beliefabsurd and obscene as this seems todayin good blood, precious ichor to be sought out, preserved, and expanded. And with it, the inevitable counterpart: bad blood, to be identified and then ruthlessly eradicated.

I am a childa German childof a war based on and steeped in blood. I was born in 1941 in the depths of the Second World War: I grew up in its wakeand under the shadow of its brutal and even more prolonged progeny, the Cold War.

My history is the history of millions of men and women like me. We are the victims of Hitlers obsession with blood, as well as the beneficiaries of the postwar economic miracle that transformed our devastated and pariah nation into the powerhouse of modern Europe.

Our story is that of a generation raised in the shadow of bloody infamy, but one that found a way to struggle toward honesty and decency.

But my own story is also that of a much more secret past: a history still cloaked in silence and shrouded in shame. It is a warning of what happens when blood is worshiped as the vital essence that determines human worth, andby extensionused as the justification for the most terrible crimes man has inflicted upon man.

For I am a child of Lebensborn.

Lebensborn is an ancient German word, twisted and distorted by the word-smelters of National Socialism into a uniquely disturbing shape amid the vast and bizarre vocabulary of Hitlers Reich. What did it mean in the mad lexicon of Nazism? What does it mean today? To find the answersto uncover my own storyhas taken me on a long and painful journey: a physical journey, to be sure, which has led me across the map of modern Europe. An historical expedition, too: one that has required an often uncomfortable return to the Germany of more than seventy years ago, and into the troubled stories of those countries overrun by Hitlers armies.

But the search for who I am, and who I have been, has also forced me to make a psychological voyage into everything I have known and grown up with: a fundamental questioning of who I am, and what it means to be German.

I will not pretend that this is an easy story: it will notcannotalways be easy to read. But asifyou do, please keep in mind that neither has it been an easy story to live.

I am not, by nature, overtly emotional. The expression of emotionsuch a commonplace in twenty-first-century societydoes not come effortlessly to me. I have, I think, spent my life attempting to suppress my inner self, to subordinate my feelings to the circumstances in which I have grown up, as well as to the needs of others.

But this is a story that, I believe strongly, needs to be heard. More, much more, it needs to be understood. It is not unique, if by that we mean that there are others who have endured much of what has shaped my life and times. But, perhaps in defiance of the strict definition, there are, in life, gradations of uniqueness: and so, while I share a common thread with thousands of others who passed through the vile and perverse experiment of Lebensborn, to the best of my knowledge no one else shares the particular twists of fate, history, and geography that have defined my seventy-four years on earth.

L EBENSBORN . T HE WORD runs through my life like the blood coursing through my body; a mysterious and powerful river, its route and progress obscure to the naked eye. To see it, to understand it, demands much more than a superficial examination: to find its sourceand thus the roots of this storyrequires a deep and intrusive investigation into the most hidden places.

And we must start in a town and a country that no longer exist.