Racial selection of stolen children was stringent, entailing medical examinations and tests: they measured the head, its size and shape, the limbs, their length and girth, the structure of the female’s pubis, the coordination of movement, the intelligence, the shape of the nose, fingernails, mouth, eyes, all of it was regulated and explicit. Top-category children went off to famous, wealthy S.S. families; second-category children qualified to receive social and financial aid; the less valuable children were sent to orphanages. It was known exactly what perfect German babies should look like.
Photographs of perfect German babies began cropping up everywhere. They were used in advertisements and on propaganda posters, on food labels, in school textbooks. Thanks to Himmler’s obsession with the need to produce as many perfect Aryan children as possible, competitions for the most beautiful, perfect Baby of the Month, Year and Nazi Eternity were regularly announced, just like similar ghastly competitions the world over today, filling the pages of cheap newspapers with their ads. It so happened in 1935 that the title of Most Beautiful Aryan Baby of Berlin was won by Hessy Levinsons, whose parents had brought her to a prominent Berlin photographer to have her picture taken. Several months later, this photograph of Hessy Levinsons appeared on the front page of the magazine Sonne ins Haus. Jacob and Pauline Levinsons, who were both famous opera singers, originally from Latvia, froze when they saw the front page. They went to the photographer to ask how it had happened, and the photographer confessed he had known Hessy was a little Jewish girl, but he had deliberately submitted her photograph in order to prove that the racist Nazi theory of blood and soil was plain nonsense, confirmed by the fact that Hessy had been chosen in fierce competition with pure-bred German babies. The picture was printed on postcards. Hessy was sent out as a birthday greeting to travel all over Germany, and perhaps beyond as well. In 1939 the Levinsons decided to flee the Third Reich, first to France, then over the ocean to Cuba, and finally on to New York.
Nazi family pasts are hard to expunge. Now, as the next generation is already ageing and on its way out, Nazi family stories are winging their way into the homes of the third generation and wreaking havoc there. Compared to me, Sam Thacker is a mere kid at thirty, living in England. Pasts are free-thinking, pasts like to roam, pasts traverse borders, glittering gaily, pasts are bold travellers, sliding through their own molehill-like labyrinths. Recently, among mislaid, discarded family documents, Sam Thacker’s mother comes upon several undeveloped rolls of film, which her father, Sam’s grandfather, a member of an elite unit of the Waffen-S.S., the Leibstandarte S.S. Adolf Hitler, and decorated with the Iron Cross for his merits, brought back from the front at some point. In these pictures life is so lovely and so ordinary. In special combat gear the young S.S. men tour the sites of Paris, they swim, attend football matches, visit the military cemetery at Verdun, sit in bistros in the company of three lively French women; nothing inhumane, nothing monstrous on the faces of the young men who are serving their leader and their homeland. But Sam Thacker is disturbed. Photographs testify. The Nazis cultivated a special weakness for the amateur photographer snapping shots with expensive photographic equipment. Photographs, of course, can be burned, but that doesn’t often happen. When photographs are burned, crumbs of memory remain from which sprout fear and shame, the sins of the fathers and grandfathers are difficult to eradicate. The children of these fathers and grandfathers are still tiptoeing through their own minefields today. And once they step into the field of anger and condemnation, once they cross it, a heavy cloak of pain settles upon them. And small, though dangerous, geysers of the past continue to erupt unexpectedly under their noses, until these descendants, and they are many, these descendants of big and little Nazis rub their family excrement deep into the pores of their own bodies, after which they will at last be able to rinse themselves clean. History, an ornate lady who does not die easily, dresses again and again in new costumes, but keeps telling the same story. History as Dracula, History as the Vampire, the vampiric fate of history, History the Bloodsucker, that great mistress of humanity.
Whenever the quota of children at homes and orphanages got low, the Nazis kidnapped children from streets, playgrounds, parks; they tore children from their mothers’ arms, which is what happened with me. A week before I left for Gorizia on Monday, 26 June, 2006 I received a letter from the International Red Cross, or rather from the I.T.S. (International Tracing Service) in Bad Arolsen, in which that organization — or rather a Mrs Helga Mathias — informs me that they have found a copy in Bad Arolsen of a baptism certificate which matches one sent to them on 2 February, 1946, with a black-and-white photograph of a three-month-old infant by a Haya Tedeschi of Gorizia, asking for their help in finding her son Antonio Tedeschi, born 31 October, 1944, in Görz, then part of the Adriatisches Küstenland. The baptism certificate, writes Mrs Mathias, says that the father of child Antonio Tedeschi is S.S.-Untersturmführer Kurt Franz, born on 17 January, 1914, in Düsseldorf, where he died in 1998. Helga Mathias adds that they compared the photograph, which I, Hans Traube, born in Salzburg on 1 October, 1944, sent them on 23 January, 1999. We compared the picture on which you are, as you say, about eight months old, writes Helga Mathias, with the picture of the three-month-old infant sent to us by Mrs Haya Tedeschi of Gorizia, writes Helga Mathias, and we ascertained that the similarity is striking. In a displaced box, among the rare documents preserved about the secret Lebensborn project, Mrs Mathias writes further, we found a letter from Father Carlo Baubela of Görz, now Gorizia, who baptized the child and then handed over to an unknown party a copy of the document about the birth of Mrs Haya Tedeschi's son, being Antonio Tedeschi, who could be you. With the letter from Carlo Baubela, writes Helga Mathias, we found an official order from the Central Office of Reich Security, signed by Reichsführer-S.S. and Minister Heinrich Himmler, who was in charge of that ministry at the time, an order to send the male child of Aryan descent with the temporary name of Antonio Tedeschi to the Alpenland Lebensborn home, to Schloss Oberweis near the town of Gmunden, region of Traunsee, in Austria. Since the registers with documentation of almost all the Lebensborn homes throughout the Third Reich were destroyed just before Germany surrendered, writes Helga Mathias, we are unlikely to find any information pertaining to Schloss Oberweis. I had a week to learn the details of the life of S.S.-Untersturmführer Kurt Franz, though he was already in my private archive, among the officials who were stationed then, between 1943 and 1945, in the Adriatisches Küstenland.