Hitler's Forgotten Children Read Free

as explosions ripped up the railway network, preventing what food was harvested from being distributed, there was little or nothing to buy with the now-useless marks.
    Nor did Germany’s new masters appear to have a coherent idea of what to do with it. Between July and August 1945, the Allied leaders – Churchill (and, later, Attlee), Truman and Stalin – met at Potsdam to plan the future. Unlike the end of the First World War, when Germany was defeated and subjected to severe punishment and reparations but not wiped from the geographical and political map, the decision was takenthat the country would cease to exist once the war ended. In its place would be four separate ‘Occupation Zones’, each owned and ruled by one of the war’s victors, according to its own principles and plans.
    Yet beyond that there had been little concerted thinking about what, practically, would be done with the former German state once Hitler had been defeated. France had favoured breaking the Reich into a series of small independent states while America had considered returning Germany to a pre-industrialised nation focused and dependent on farming. Washington would come to relent, to accept that requiring tens of millions of Germans to live as medieval peasants was unworkable as well as undesirable. But the Allies failed to contemplate how their separate occupations would function, or to address the monumental problem of feeding both a conquered people – a population swelled by more than ten million refugees from the east – and the massive armies imposing the peace.
    There was simply not enough food – and without a functioning transport system, what little there was couldn’t be moved to the places where it was most needed. Worse, there was a widespread feeling among the occupying armies that the Germans were long overdue a taste of their own medicine: had the Nazi rampage across Europe not deliberately starved villages, cities, entire nations to the point of death?
    This, then, was Hitler’s true legacy: a nation starving to death; a population reduced to a desperate struggle for survival, subsisting at best on half the calories needed to sustain life. A country not simply beaten and half-destroyed but wiped completely out of existence.
    I was three and a half when peace came. A small, quiet and archetypally blonde German child, I lived in Bandekow, a tiny hamlet in the rural heart of the Mecklenburg region, with my mother, grandmother and younger brother Dietmar. Our home was a big farmhouse, half-timbered and characteristic of the region, set in acres of forest. We were, I think, typical both of a particular class of pre-war Germans and, by contrast, of the post-war country at large. On both sides our familywas old, well established and, notwithstanding the wrecked economy, well off.
    My mother, Gisela, was the daughter of a shipping line magnate from Hamburg. The Andersens belonged to the old Hanseatic class – the patrician and prestigious ruling elite which had made its money and its name from trade since Hamburg was declared a free city by the 1815 Congress of Vienna.
    Our house in Bandekow had been in my mother’s family for generations: it belonged to my great uncle, but had almost certainly been used as a country retreat in the years before 1945. Certainly, the Andersens kept their main residence in Hamburg itself and my grandfather remained there, with my grandmother dividing her time between the two homes.
    Gisela was one of four Andersen children. Her brother had been killed, serving in the Wehrmacht in the last days of the war; her eldest sister was estranged – the result of some unspoken act of dishonesty that tarnished the otherwise respectable family name – but her remaining sibling, my Aunt Ingrid (known universally as Erika, or ‘Eka’), was a constant companion in my childhood. At the end of the war, Gisela was thirty-one. She was young, bright – in