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By Nick Bryant

BBC News, Melbourne

When the shooting stopped I

had no idea where to go so

I went to live in the forests,

because I couldn't go back.

I was the only one left

Alex Kurzem came to Australia in 1949 carrying just a small brown briefcase, but weighed down by some harrowing psychological and emotional baggage.

Tucked away in his briefcase were the secrets of his past - fragments of his life that he kept hidden for decades.

In 1997, after raising a family in Melbourne with his Australian bride, he finally revealed himself. He told how, at the age of five, he had been adopted by the SS and became a Nazi mascot.

His personal history, one of the most remarkable stories to emerge from World War II, was published recently in a book entitled The Mascot.

"They gave me a uniform, a little gun and little pistol," Alex told the BBC.

"They gave me little jobs to do - to polish shoes, carry water or light a fire. But my main job was to entertain the soldiers. To make them feel a bit happier."

Painful memories

In newsreels, he was paraded as 'the Reich's youngest Nazi' and he witnessed some unspeakable atrocities.

But his SS masters never discovered the most essential detail about his life: their little Nazi mascot was Jewish.

"They didn't know that I was a Jewish boy who had escaped a Nazi death squad. They thought I was a Russian orphan."

His story starts where his childhood memories begin - in a village in Belarus on 20 October 1941, the day it was invaded by the German army.

"I remember the German army invading the village, lining up all the men in the city square and shooting them. My mother told me that my father had been killed, and that we would all be killed."

"I didn't want to die, so in the middle of the night I tried to escape. I went to kiss my mother goodbye, and ran up into the hill overlooking the village until the morning came."

That was the day his family was massacred - his mother, his brother, his sister.

"I was very traumatised. I remember biting my hand so I couldn't cry out loud, because if I did they would have seen me hiding in the forest. I can't remember exactly what happened. I think I must have passed out a few times. It was terrible."

False identity

Alex was forced to keep his

Jewish identity hidden

"When the shooting stopped I had no idea where to go so I went to live in the forests, because I couldn't go back. I was the only one left. I must have been five or six."

"I went into the forest but no-one wanted me. I knocked on peoples' doors and they gave me bits of bread but they told me to move on. Nobody took me in."

He survived by scavenging clothes from the bodies of dead soldiers.

After about nine months in the forest, a local man handed him over to the Latvian police brigade, which later became incorporated in the Nazi SS.

That very day, people were being lined up for execution, and Alex thought he, too, was about to die.

"There was a soldier near me and I said, 'Before you kill me, can you give me a bit of bread?' He looked at me, and took me around the back of the school. He examined me and saw that I was Jewish. "No good, no good," he said. 'Look I don't want to kill, but I can't leave you here because you will perish.

"'I'll take you with me, give you a new name and tell the other soldiers that you are a Russian orphan.'"

Joining the circus

To this day, Alex Kurzem has no idea why Sergeant Jekabs Kulis took pity on him. Whatever his motives, it certainly helped that Alex had Aryan looks. And together, they kept the secret.

"Every moment I had to remind myself not to let my guard down, because if ever anyone found out, I was dead. I was scared of the Russians shooting me and the Germans discovering I was Jewish. I had no-one to turn to."

Alex Kurzem kept the secret

from his wife and family

for decades

Young Alex saw action on the Russian front, and was even used by the SS to lure Jewish people to their deaths.

Outside the cattle trains which carried victims to the concentration camps, he handed out chocolate bars to tempt them in.

Then, in 1944, with the Nazis facing almost certain defeat, the commander of the SS unit sent him to live with a Latvian family.

Five years later, he managed to reach Australia. For a time, he worked in a circus and eventually became a television repair man in Melbourne.

All the time, he kept his past life to himself, not even telling his Australian wife, Patricia.

"When I left Europe I said 'forget about your past. You are going to a new country and a new life. Switch off and don't even think about it.'

"I managed to do it. I told people I lost my parents in the war, but I didn't go into detail. I kept the secret and never told anyone."

It was not until 1997 that he finally told his family, and along with his son, Mark, set about discovering more about his past life.

After visiting the village where he was born, they found out his real name was Ilya Galperin, and even uncovered a film in a Latvian archive of Alex in full SS regalia.

Between 1935 and 1945, around 10,000 German children and an estimated 9,000 Norwegian children with "Aryan" characteristics of blond hair and blue eyes were born into a Nazi-run programme called "Lebensborn" or "Fountain of Life".

It was part of the Nazis' plan to create a "master race". Sixty years later, many are still living with the psychological scars, as the BBC Radio 4 documentary "Fountain of Life", discovered.

Lebensborn homes

"My uncle always called me an 'SS bastard' and I did not understand why," says Gisela Heidenreich from Munich.

"I always remember feeling that there was something wrong with me. I felt guilty, but no one would explain that I was a Lebensborn child."

Gisela Heidenreich was born out of an affair with an SS commander. Her mother also worked as a secretary for Lebensborn.

Heinrich Himmler, leader of Hitler's SS encouraged affairs between SS soldiers and "Aryan" women, to increase the stock of "racially valuable" Germans in response to falling birth rates.

At a time in Germany when illegitimate children were a social taboo, Himmler formed 10 Lebensborn homes in Germany and nine in occupied Norway, to provide comfortable and safe accommodation for the unmarried pregnant women.

Many Lebensborn homes were set up in houses confiscated from Jewish families by the Nazis or in former homes for the elderly or mentally handicapped.

While some mothers kept their babies others left them in the care of Lebensborn, while a "good" German family was found to adopt the child.

Gisela has twice been back to the former Lebensborn home where her mother worked. I joined her on her second visit to Steinhoering. An hour form Munich, Steinhoering sits in rolling fields with the snow-capped peaks of the Alps in the distance. At Steinhoering, her mother played a key role signing babies off for "adoption".

'Victim of Hitler'

The former home's gates, with the Nazis SS symbol clearly visible, are still propped up against a stable. The gates, along with a Nazi statue of an "Aryan" mother breastfeeding her baby, are a reminder of the home's dark past.

Gisela is touched though to find that the home is now a centre for the disabled.

"It is so moving to see these happy children playing on swings," she says. "They would not have lived during the Third Reich, because of Hitler's crazy racial policy."

Gisela says she has found evidence in Lebensborn records to suggest that disabled children born into the programme were killed or sent to concentration camps.

Maria Dorr, another Lebensborn child - her mother Norwegian and father a soldier in the German Army - now lives outside Frankfurt in Germany. Maria considers herself to be a victim of Hitler.

As a baby she was transported from Norway to the Koren Salis Lebensborn home near Leipzig, before being adopted by a German family.

Holding back tears, Maria relays the moment she realised she was adopted.

"I was a schoolgirl when a woman came up to me and told me I was not German. So I started to secretly look through my adopted mother's things, but it was not until I was an adult that I found my Lebensborn file and discovered the real truth.

"I can't help feeling like a Lebensborn child. I feel damaged and the disturbance it has caused me has damaged my life."

'No Nazi'

In a small flat half an hour from Leipzig, Maria Heinich looks proudly through her photo album which dates back to 1942, when she worked as a secretary at Koren Salis Lebensborn home.

Maria Heinich does not remember Maria Dorr, but she has kept in touch with some of the other Lebensborn children she met at the home.

Looking at me with her steely eyes, Maria is adamant that although she worked at the home she was not a Nazi.

"I was young then, I did not think it was alright what we did, but I really enjoyed my work there. I really did not have anything to do with it proper, I was just a little secretary, I did not have any connection to the Lebensborn headquarters in Munich."

Gisela Heidenreich explains that many women who worked for Lebensborn, including her own mother, face difficulties in accepting the role, however small they played, in supporting Hitler's racial policy.

The BBC also discovered that in 1943 Heinrich Himmler ordered children meeting racial "qualification" to be abducted from homes and streets in conquered east European countries. Those stolen children were taken to Lebensborn homes to be "Germanised" before adoption.

Reunions

In 1945, Gitta Sereny joined the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. It was her job to find and transport stolen children back to their homeland.

"I took several truckloads of children back to Poland. It was so touching to see their parents on the platforms when the train arrived. Many of them had said goodbye to babies but they never failed to recognise their children."

However, Ingrid Von Oelhalfen, who was eight months old when she was stolen from Slovenia and taken to Germany, was not returned after the war.

Tears stream down her face as she explains the devastating effect Lebensborn has had on her life. "I have never been loved," she says.

* * * * * * *

Who were the "Lebensborn children"?

Kidnapping of a Polish child

"Lebensborn means "spring of life". The "Lebensborn" project was one of most secret and terrifying Nazi projects. Heinrich Himmler created The "Lebensborn" on December 12th, 1935. The goal of this society ("Registered Society Lebensborn - Lebensborn Eingetragener Verein") was to offer to young girls "racially pure" the possibility to give birth to a child in secret. The child was then given to the SS organization which took in charge his "education" and adoption.

In the beginning, the "Lebensborn" were SS nurseries. But in order to create a "super-race", the SS transformed these nurseries in "meeting places" for "racially pure" German women who wanted to meet and make children with SS officers. The children born in the Lebensborn were taken in charge by the SS and it is important to know that most of them were also victims of this race policy....

From 1939, one of the most horrible side of the Lebensborn policy was the kidnapping of children "racially goods" in the eastern occupied countries. These kidnappings were organized by the SS in order to take by force children who matched the Nazi's racial criteria (blond hair, blue eyes, etc....). Thousands of children were transferred to the "Lebensborn" centers in order to be "Germanized". In these centers, everything was done to force the children to reject and forget their birth parents. As an example, the SS nurses tried to persuade the children that they were deliberately abandoned by their parents. The children who refused the Nazi education were often beaten. Most of them were finally transferred to concentration camps (most of the time Kalish in Poland) and exterminated. The others were adopted by SS families.

In 1942, in reprisals of the assassination of the SS governor Heydrich in Prague, a SS unit exterminated the entire male population of a small village called Lidice. During this "operation", some SS made a selection of the children. 91 of them were considered as good enough to be "Germanized" and sent to Germany. The others were sent to special children camps (i.e. Dzierzazna & Litzmannstadti) and later to the extermination canters.

It is nearly impossible to know how much children were kidnapped in the eastern occupied countries. In 1946, it was estimated that more than 250,000 were kidnapped and sent by force to Germany. Only 25,000 were retrieved after the war and sent back to their family. It is known that several German families refused to give back the children they had received from the Lebensborn centers. In some cases, the children themselves refused to come back in their original family: they were victims of the Nazi propaganda and believed that they were pure Germans. It is also known that thousand of children not "good enough" to be Germanized were simply exterminated.

Source: The Forgotten Camps

[Al Saqr]

C'est vraiment étonnant... et peu connu !