Spiegel Online, Germany
Jan 3 2007
Children of the Enemy
By Mary Wiltenburg and Marc Widmann
In the decade after World War II, more than 100,000 babies were born
to unwed German mothers and Allied soldier fathers. Most of the men
left Europe without ever meeting their children. Now, many
"occupation babies" are scrambling to find their fathers before it’s
too late.
The Internet ad sounds hopeless. Seeking: A dark-haired American GI
who was stationed in Schweinfurt, Germany, in February 1952. First
name, Charles. Last name, unknown. The ad goes on to say that if
anyone knows Charles, or if they have any other relevant information,
they should contact his son.
In the thrill of a postwar dance hall, Charles met a 22-year-old
Bavarian named Hanna. The pair went on four or five dates, then
Charles was shipped to Korea. Later that year, Hanna gave birth to a
son and named him Herbert.
Today, Herbert Hack is 54 years old. By day, he drives a taxi through
the streets of Berlin. By night, he is consumed with painstaking
paperwork: The hunt for Charles.
In his modest home, photos cover the kitchen table, showing American
GIs in Frankfurt in the early 1950s. A few bored faces, circled in
blue, remind Hack of himself as a young man. But all have the wrong
names, so the search continues.
Hack’s story is a common one here. According to the Federal
Statistics Office, at least 66,700 children were born to Allied
soldiers and West German women in the decade after World War II. In
the former East Germany, at least that number are thought to have
been fathered by Soviet troops. The true figures are probably much
greater. Faced with the double stigma of illegitimacy and
"fraternizing with the enemy," many mothers hid their children’s
paternity.
And few fathers stayed around to meet the kids they sired in former
enemy territory. Shipped on to Korea, or home to Texas or Arkansas,
they left behind young, often destitute women, who were cursed as
"sluts" and "Ami-lovers" ("Ami" is German slang for American) — and
babies, who were branded as "bastards."
Now, as they near retirement age, these sons and daughters are
scrambling to find their American, French, British, Belgian, and
Soviet fathers. "A lot of people are now searching," says Heinrich
Rehberg, head of research for the German Red Cross. "We get requests
almost daily."
These occupation babies face plenty of obstacles: decades-old shame
and secrets, dead-end paper trails, and their own despair. Still,
many persevere. Rehberg isn’t surprised that hundreds are now
grappling with their painful pasts. "Many started to search in their
youth, but hit a wall," so they focused on the future, on jobs and
families, he says. "Now, with everything else in order, they’re
beginning in earnest." And time is running out if they hope to find
their parents alive.
Pursuing a gut need
At first, Erich Hones’s mother lied to him. His father was a soldier,
she said, killed in the war. But the dates didn’t add up, and as he
grew older, he came to doubt her story. Then, when he was 21, she
gave him a scrap of paper she had stored away in 1946. On it was an
address in Florida. Hones sent a letter, but got no reply.
Not until 2000, when his own children were grown and Hones was
seriously ill, did he take up the search again. As he lay in bed,
"physically just about gone," the question plagued him: What if his
father were still alive? "It was a gut need," he says, "I had to look
for him."
The health inspector bought a modem, and scoured the Internet. He
went to the city archive in Fritzlar and studied the battle plans of
Americans troops from the spring of 1945 — orders his father must
have followed. But he was soon limited by his English. An online
search service seemed like the best option.
On the Web, the father-finding business is booming. Agencies with
names like "Searching For You" and "Wiedersehen macht Freude"
("Reunion Brings Joy") are springing up left and right, all reporting
increasing demand.
The field includes some dubious entrepreneurs, many of whom require
handsome sums before beginning a search. "They’re making a killing,"
says Rehberg, explaining that some dishonest firms fuel false hopes
to keep their clients paying.
This February, Herbert Hack sent all the information about his father
to a search agency in Frankfurt am Main that boasted "experience and
expertise." It offered Hack a bargain: 560 euros ($740) to find his
dad.
Four months later, he got an e-mail. "We have discovered that you are
the descendant of Charles G. Amos," it said. The soldier had been
killed in the Korean war. Hack asked the agency for a photo. A short
time later, he received a shot of a gravestone with a barely
distinguishable face on it. This, a letter claimed, "could be your
father’s brother."
Hack paid the bill. Soon after, he learned from a US military archive
that, at the time of his conception, his supposed father wasn’t even
stationed in Schweinfurt. "It was a total scam," he says.
Even without such disappointments, searches can be demoralizing to
undertake alone. Children of unwed soldiers get little support from
the German Foreign Office or the embassies of former occupation
powers. And some overseas military archives are legally inaccessible
to them because of their illegitimacy.
In a French archive in Colmar, several thousand paternity files of
French occupation troops are shelved by the names of their offspring.
It’s a gold mine for people seeking their roots — if they can wait.
Under French law, the files are sealed until they turn 60.
The majority of American military records are stored at the National
Personnel Records Center in St. Louis, Missouri. There, thanks to a
1990 court ruling, an archivist dedicates half of every week to "war
babes" cases. Niels Zussblatt gets 800 requests a year, 70 percent of
them from Europe.
Some he can answer only with a letter of apology. In 1973, a fire
destroyed between 16 and 18 million files, many of them from the
postwar period. "I’ll still pull files and find them charred around
the edges," says Dr. Zussblatt.
Searching for the Big Bang
The descendants of Red Army soldiers have perhaps the hardest time,
as Cora Anselmi knows only too well. In her apartment in the
south-western German town of Bad Rappenau, she has filled a file
cabinet with her grandfather’s paper trail. A friend translated
communications with Russian Federation military archives, she says,
"but all they said was, they don’t know anything either."
The 32-year-old childcare worker wants to fulfill the wishes of her
own father, who died of a heart attack two years ago. When she read
his diaries, she was shocked to learn how badly he had longed to know
his father. "It weighed on him his whole life," says Anselmi.
The most important ally in Anselmi’s search lives 10 miles (16
kilometers) away. After decades of silence, her grandmother, Ruth
Reich, is glad to reminisce openly about Andrei Yessayan, her one
great love.
The pair met at a New Year’s ball in Leipzig in 1945. All night, the
Soviet officer stood in the doorway and watched the young German
dance. "Naturally he walked me home," says Reich. "He took a look at
our house and said he would come back tomorrow."
He did — and kept coming back. Nearly every evening, he brought food
for the hungry family. Soon, the sheltered German had fallen in love
with the proud, impeccably dressed Armenian. "It was the Big Bang,"
Reich reminisces, "I can’t describe it any other way."
When their son came into the world, the soldier held him in his arms
and crooned: "My little boy." Reich didn’t care what the neighbors
said behind their backs. In the street, someone spat on her coat. She
brushed it off and kept walking.
But when their son was a year old, Yessayan disappeared. His landlady
told Reich he had been taken to a Soviet military hospital for lung
treatments. Reich never heard from him again. Nor did she stop
missing him. "I still wish that the door would open and he’d be
standing there," the 80-year-old says.
No legal recourse
Mothers like Reich had little hope of locating their children’s
fathers. The Allied military leadership fiercely protected its
soldiers from paternity claims and child support payments, whether
their relationships had been love, rape, or a common trade — sex for
food. Many commanders sent home soldiers whose girlfriends turned up
pregnant. Others sped up the transfers of men who applied for
permission to marry their German sweethearts.
Women had no legal recourse. West German civil law required fathers
to pay child support, but German courts had limited jurisdiction over
occupation troops. In 1950, the Allied High Commission for Germany
forbade any "proceedings to establish paternity or liability for
maintenance of children" of foreign soldiers. The ban lasted five
years, but even later courts had little success holding soldier
fathers to account.
Some of their children are still fighting legal battles. Franz
Anthöfer has taken his case the farthest — to his father’s grave,
and inside it. In 1996, he won permission from a US judge to have the
body of former soldier and West Virginia mayor Louis G. Craig exhumed
and its DNA tested. The results matched those of the retired Bonn
pilot with 99 percent certainty.
But this October, the 55-year-old Anthöfer lost a legal fight to
become his father’s son. He was too late, the judge ruled; under US
law, paternity claims must be filed before a child turns 21. Anthöfer
hopes to appeal the decision to the West Virginia Supreme Court.
Such recognition, he says, could help mitigate the pain of his
childhood. In the orphanage where he spent time as a boy, other kids
called him "Ami-bastard." Caregivers beat him with a whisk broom.
"There were the good orphans, who had lost their parents in the war,"
he says, "and then there was me, who would always be bad."
Disowned
Anthöfer wasn’t the only soldier’s son in the orphanages of the young
Federal Republic. West German politicians worried vocally about a
minority growing there "for whom our social climate is not suitable,"
as a CDU-member put it in a 1952 Bundestag debate: Mixed-race
children, often of African-American GI fathers.
Called "Negermischlinge" ("Negro half-breeds") by neighbors and
social welfare agencies, these children faced all the prejudices
their white counterparts did, and more. They were nearly three times
as likely to be given up for adoption, and rarely found German
adoptive families. Their mothers were ostracized, and in some cases
fired from their jobs and disowned by their families. Few of these
women could hope to marry their children’s fathers; until 1948, the
American Army was legally segregated, and interracial marriage was
forbidden.
Mabel Grammer, wife of a US officer stationed in Mannheim, decided to
do something about the plight of these "brown babies." The childless
couple took in 12 children themselves, and drew on social and
professional contacts to pair some 500 others with African-American
adoptive families in the States.
Daniel Cardwell is one of them. Born in Marburg in 1950, he was
adopted at age three by a black Army couple who took in a total of
five Afro-German toddlers. In the family’s Washington, DC, home, the
children were forbidden to speak German. "I had to say my food in
English before I could eat it," Cardwell says. They were also
discouraged from asking questions about their pasts. It wasn’t until
college that Cardwell began looking for answers.
After 30 years, countless false starts, six trips to Europe, and
$200,000, the medical entrepreneur has learned this much: In 1950, a
20-year-old Polish-German named Hedwiga gave birth to a son, Daniel,
and left him in a children’s home. Three years later, he was
transferred to the orphanage from which Grammer was coordinating
adoptions. Hedwiga then emigrated to the United States — looking for
his father, Cardwell believes, or perhaps for her son. She found
neither, but in 1962 she married. Twenty years later she was found
shot in her bedroom; her death was ruled a suicide.
This March, Cardwell surprised her brother Edmund on his rural
Wisconsin doorstep. Together the two men visited Hedwiga’s grave. In
May, Cardwell and his youngest son traveled to Europe to meet a
welcoming host of family, including his mother’s sister. The newfound
relatives now e-mail each other regularly, and are planning future
visits. Today, says Cardwell’s wife, the father of three is a man
much more at peace — but now the question is: "OK, but where is
Dad?"
Last fall, after five years of intensive research with the help of
nonprofit GI Trace, Erich Hones got a letter in the mail from the St.
Louis archive. It lay on the table for half a day before the Hessen
gathered the courage to open it.
In the envelope was his father’s last military paystub. A note at the
top read: "DIED: 20 Nov 2001." Hones regrets the lost chance to know,
and to forgive, his father. "I would’ve grabbed him and hugged him,"
he says.
But this fall, Hones got a call from a GI Trace volunteer in Berlin,
who asked if he was sitting down. "I’ve found your half-brother," she
said. "He’d like to have contact with you."
Hones sat for two hours, thoughts racing. Then he started drafting a
letter.
For the past few months, he has been exchanging letters and pictures
with a Florida man named Ricky. His daughter translates for him. The
contact is fresh, Hones says, but "warm, and heartfelt." In photos of
his father, he sees himself at 18.
He signs his letters with an English phrase that’s new to him: "Your
brother, Erich."
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