Healing intergenerational trauma and epigenetics—the children of the Third Reich
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How did Katrine Clay first discover Renata’s story and why did she pursue it?
A killing in the night. Where's Simone? Twenty years later, police still haven't solved the case, and I want to know why. Did you kill Simo
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Today it's the story of the intersection of the lives of three different people. Three people who were trying to find a way forward. Out of the silences And hidden fears. Of their parents' dark pasts. It's a story that started years ago in the early nineties when historian and author Katrine Clay was working at the BBC. She was making a documentary. About one of those people, a woman named Renata. Renata had been born in Germany. nineteen forty one, during World War Two. And then she grew up in the post war years as the sole child of a single mother. When Renata had asked her mother about her missing father, She was told that her father had been an important general in the Wehrmacht, the German army, who'd been caught and imprisoned by the Russians.
The story wasn't true. Renata's father was a Nazi war criminal. Of the highest rank. And he was dead. And Renata had been conceived, she discovered, as part of a scheme. To produce Aryan children. The German fatherland. Katrine and Renata in this documentary traveled through Germany and Eastern Europe to find the truth about Renata's father, and the home that she'd been born into. Along the way Renata was brought face to face to meet the children of Holocaust survivors. Katrine Clay's book is called Children of the Third Reich. Three pasts, three futures. Hello, Katrine. Hello. How did you come across Renata's story to begin with?
Yes. Everything starts there. It was a weekend and we were in our house in South London and the children were out playing. We were reading the newspapers and my husband said Goodness, look at this and he showed me a colour supplement article. of a group of people, a therapy group, I suppose you could call it, in Wuppertal University in Germany. which was for the children of Nazi war criminals. And I thought, my God, how utterly extraordinary because you know, for years and years after the war the Germans didn't want to talk about the war, let alone the Holocaust. But here they were now, and it's the beginning of the nineties, things are changing, and there is this group. And one of them was actually the son of Martin Bormann, who was Hitler's kind of right hand man.
So y these are big Nazi war criminals and these are the children trying to come to terms with what they've inherited, if you want to put it that way.
When you approached her to make a documentary, what did she say to you?
I had to find her first, obviously. That wasn't easy because she had a different name in this article, but when I did find her, and I did say to her, could we make this documentary? She took quite a while to decide, talked about it a lot with her partner, Adie, and then decided yes, and what she told me was the reason she did it was quite simple really. She knew that everything they'd try to find out about her father, her unknown father, Hadn't really worked. But the BBC, with all its clout behind it, would probably manage it. So they said yes, and in fact of course we did. We found out the whole lot. Together with her and Aidie, her partner, we found it all out.
Renata was conceived in Nazi Germany in nineteen forty one in a project that was known as the Labensbourne project in the Labensbourne home. Can you explain what the Labensborn project was?
Yes. I mean Leibensborn means fount of life. And it was it was an SS setup. Your general German public didn't really know about it. There were Lebensborn homes all across Germany. It was Heinrich Himmler's pet subject, and he set them up in order to breed the The perfect Aryan for the thousand year German Reich. In other words, racial purity.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
How did Katrine Clay first discover Renata’s story and why did she pursue it?
0:00–8:18
2
What was the truth about Renata’s father and the Nazi “Lebensborn” program?
8:18–17:49
3
How did the Lebensborn scheme aim to create an “Aryan” race and what did daily life look like in those homes?
17:49–27:56
4
Why did the children of Nazi war criminals grow up in silence and how did that affect them?
27:56–40:56
5
What was the therapy group at Wuppertal University and who attended it?
40:56–48:24
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from Conversations
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