THE FAMILY PORTRAIT, an excerpt

In anticipation of my book’s upcoming publication from Vine Leaves Press, the following excerpt is part of an essay published in STORIES THAT NEED TO BE TOLD, an anthology from TulipTree Press. As we get closer to the book’s publication date in early 2026, I’ll be able to offer giveaways and free e-books. I’ll share my journey along the way. Please share my blog site with your friends and family who have an interest in historical narratives, especially WWII, as well as geneaology, family secrets, and self discovery. Contact me with any questions or comments; I would love to hear from you!

Here we go…

There they are, six fatherless children and the spouse-less mother, all dressed up. The photo was probably taken in 1948, in a photographer’s studio. The younger girls stand in a row and look solemnly at the camera. The oldest sits in a ladderback chair and holds the youngest boy on her lap. The mother, Katharina, sits in an upholstered chair off to the side. She wears a black high-necked dress, and a simple long chain as adornment. Her hands are folded in her lap. Her weary and worldly eyes are a contrast to the innocent anticipation in her wedding photo, the husband she lovingly leaned into now many years dead. The photo is the only one of the family taken together. I have it because my mother inherited it. She is the oldest, the dark-haired sixteen-year old who holds the only boy, a two-year old.

Flashback to a warm July evening in 2013. A group of us were in a small café enjoying Gemutlichkeit, that wonderful German tradition of eating, drinking, and laughing for no good reason. I was with my German cousin Michael. We were on a road trip through Germany, Austria, Italy and Switzerland, and had stopped in the small Bavarian town where my maternal family hails from and where my aunt still lives. Her oldest son, Thomas, joined us. As we chatted over dessert, my Aunt Sieglinde, a rare glass of wine in hand, cleared her throat. And changed our family history forever. 

“I found my father.”

Silence. Collectively we all stared, looked down confused, before looking back up at lovely blue-eyed, blonde-haired Sieglinde. What was she saying? Her father had been a German lance-corporal who died on the front in 1944. Maybe she meant she found out where his grave was? He was buried in France and the family had never learned where, exactly.

“Felix was not my father. In fact, he was the father of only the first three girls.”

 A delicate sip of wine.

“I was a baby made for Hitler.”

We shifted in our seats, glanced at one another. Now what? Sieglinde’s face told us she had said too much. The setting was wrong, the mood had turned. Thomas looked shell-shocked. I can’t remember what happened next. The evening turned surreal. It wasn’t long before Sieglinde bade us a brisk goodnight, plucked up her purse and stepped through the door onto the cobblestone streets for the short walk home. The clinking of silverware from other tables suddenly sounded out of place.

My scrambled thoughts tried to make sense out of her words, even as they ricocheted around in my brain. A baby for Hitler? I knew my maternal grandmother and Sieglinde’s mother— Oma Katharina—as the loving woman who took me in as an infant while my single mother travelled the world as part of a dance troupe to send money home to a still war-torn country. Not as someone who was involved in a Nazi eugenics program.

Thomas turned to Michael and me. “Well, now I need to talk to my mother and see if we can get the rest of this story.”

He nodded good night and followed his mother home. It would be another three years before she agreed.

 Michael and I left the café in silence, absorbing the impact on our family. All the genetics we will never know. And why did Sieglinde feel the need to bring her long-held secret into the open now? As we walked to our hotel, Michael and I kept glancing at each other. Finally, he stopped and held out both hands. And pointed to mine, so I held them out. Both sets, short and and graceless. We had often joked about our stubby fingers, blaming genetics.

“See, we are definitely related,” Michael grinned. And we stood in the street, guffawing our discomfort away.

July, 2016

As Michael and I plan our trip to Munich to hear Sieglinde’s story, we take the afternoon to research Lebensborn  and decide if there was any validity to “the Nazi baby-making program.” We open our respective laptops and type the word into our search engines. Up pop multiple pages related to the subject. We find articles with scary titles: Lebensborn: Secret Nazi Breeding Program; The Woman Who Gave Birth for Hitler; Himmler’s Children. There is even an interactive video game that allows players to “raise” a Lebensborn child. Called My Child Lebensborn, a player can take the role of a parent who has adopted a child from a program participant and agreed to raise it in the proper German way. But amidst the hype we also find verifiable information, mostly from the Nuremberg Trials after the war.

Michael looks shell-shocked. I’m nauseated. Our aunt has been living with this secret for forty-six years. Now my cousins and I have to come to some kind of reckoning. Some kind of acceptance. I jot down notes and compile the facts that I consider essential and viable. 

Lebensborn e.V. (Lebensborn Eingetragener Verein) became an official, registered organization on December 12, 1935. Translation: fount of life. (A fount can be a spring, a source. It can also be the vessel which gives forth something, in this case children.) Germany’s birth rate had been in a steep decline for decades. WWI had taken its toll on young available men. The economy was in tatters, inflation was out of control and food was scarce. Abortions were estimated to have reached 800,000 in the inter-war years before 1935. Motherhood seemed to be the least of people’s concerns. But Hitler needed soldiers.

Heinrich Luitpold Himmler provided a solution. One of the most powerful men in the Nazi party, he created the program to help Hitler reach a goal of 120 million pure Aryan citizens for the Third Reich. His plan involved the soldiers in his elite military unit known as the Shutzstaffel, or SS. All had been vetted for “purity of blood” i.e. no Jewish ancestors, and were typically tall, strong, and fit,with blonde hair and blue eyes. 

Initially, programs of Lebensborn simply encouraged SS families to have more children, using incentives such as money and recognition. A gold Mother’s Cross was awarded to families with eight children or more, to be proudly displayed in a window for all to see. Over time, the program expanded. SS officers were encouraged to couple with young women, in or out of wedlock, who fit the Aryan ideal of blonde hair, blue eyes. They had to be free of genetic disorders, and be able to prove a clean bloodline. By 1939, SS participation in Lebensborn was mandatory, a quiet but undisputable order given along with deployment.

Himmler stated “Should we succeed in establishing this Nordic race, and from this seedbed produce a race of 200 million, then the world will belong to us”.

Munich

Michael, Thomas, and I settle ourselves around Thomas’ kitchen table, fortified with food and drink for what we know will be an emotional night. My aunt sits down, a sheaf of paperwork in her hands. Her notes: father’s name and address, his daughter’s name. A confirmation letter from the Red Cross who had helped her in her search, as they had helped so many other children with questions about their lost families. All written in the shorthand Sieglinde learned as a young woman and still uses to write her journals. Her usually animated face looks drawn and apprehensive. She’s had to dwell in the past to put together the words she will tell us.