Hitler's stolen children : the shocking true story of the Nazi kidnapping conspiracy

"Hitler's Stolen Children is a powerful, first-person account of being at the heart of one of the Nazi's cruelest and most obscene experiments--the Lebensborn program to create a new Aryan master race. In 1942, when she was nine months old, Erika Matko was stolen from her family in St. Sauerbrunn in what was then Yugoslavia and transported to Germany to be 'Germanized.' She was chosen because, unlike her older brother and sister, she was blond and blue eyed, and had passed a medical racial examination that classed her as Aryan. Lebensborn then farmed her out to politically vetted German foster parents. Renamed Ingrid von Oelhafen, she grew up believing she was German. Then, one day, friends of her foster family revealed the truth about her origins. This was the beginning of a life-long quest to discover the truth about her birth and the Lebensborn program. It was a journey that would take her across Germany, uncovering the terrible secrets of Lebensborn--including the kidnapping of up to half a million babies like her and the deliberate murder of those deemed "sub-standard"--And back to the village where she was born. But here she would be faced with something even more painful: a woman who for more than seventy years had been using her name--and living her life."-- Publisher's website A powerful first-person account from a child of the Lebensborn: the Nazis' program to create an Aryan master race. In 1942 Erika, a baby girl from Sauerbrunn in Yugoslavia, was taken for a "medical" examination by the Nazi occupiers. Declared an "Aryan," she was removed from her mother and held in a children's home; her true identity erased, she became Ingrid von Oelhafen. The Lebensborn program was the brainchild of Himmler: an extraordinary plan to create an Aryan master race. Later, as Ingrid began to uncover her true identity, the full scale of the scheme became clear - including the kidnapping of half a million babies like her, and the deliberate murder of children born into the program who were deemed "substandard." Her research took her to little-known records of the Nuremberg Trials, and, ultimately, to Yugoslavia, where an extraordinary discovery revealed the full truth behind her story: the Nazis had substituted "Ingrid" with another child, who had been raised as "Erika" by her family. Written with insight and compassion, this is a powerful meditation on the personal legacy of Hitler's vision, of Germany's brutal past, and of a divided Europe that for many years struggled to come to terms with its own history Created by Heinrich Himmler, the Lebensborn program abducted as many as half a million children from across Europe. Through a process called Germanization, they were to become the next generation of the Aryan master race in the second phase of the Final Solution. In the summer of 1942, parents across Nazi-occupied Yugoslavia were required to submit their children to medical checks designed to assess racial purity. One such child, Erika Matko, was nine months old when Nazi doctors declared her fit to be a 'Child of Hitler.' Taken to Germany and placed with politically vetted foster parents, Erika was renamed Ingrid von Oelhafen. Many years later, Ingrid began to uncover the truth of her identity. Though the Nazis destroyed many Lebensborn records, Ingrid unearthed rare documents, including Nuremberg trial testimony about her own abduction. Following the evidence back to her place of birth, Ingrid discovered an even more shocking secret: a woman named Erika Matko, who as an infant had been given to Ingrid's mother as a replacement child. Hitler's Forgotten Children is both a harrowing personal memoir and a devastating investigation into the awful crimes and monstrous scope of the Lebensborn program