The legacy of forced adoptions
22 August 2010
The legacy of forced adoptions
German families torn apart by forced adoptions during the cold war are
still looking for answers – and their lost relatives
Marten Rolff
Sunday 22 August 2010 20.30 BST
Katrin Behr was separated from her mother as a child. Photograph:
Christian Jungeblodt for the Guardian
It took exactly four minutes to steal Andreas Laake's baby son – that
was the length of the court hearing that swept away his paternity
rights. Some 26 years later Laake can still recall every detail of the
trial: his aching wrists cuffed behind his back; the musty smell of
the courtroom; the steely voice of the young female judge. Then there
were the vague words of the social worker who said that after his
attempted escape from the German Democratic Republic: "we do not
believe Mr Laake has the ability to bring up his son for the purpose
of socialism".
Laake was not even allowed to defend himself. All he said in court
were four words: "I do not agree." Several weeks later his son Marco
was adopted by people who were considered, in ideological terms, much
more reliable parents. "Since then, I've spent half a lifetime
searching for him," says Laake.
It took a matter of minutes for Katrin Behr to be separated from her
family too. It was a cold winter morning in 1972 when three men in
long, dark coats knocked on the door to arrest her mother. Behr was
four-and-a-half years old at the time, and can still remember the
panic in her mother's voice as she urged her daughter to get dressed
quickly. But Katrin Behr was left behind. The last words she heard
were, "Be brave. I'll be back tonight," before her mother was spirited
off to a socialist boot camp. It would be 19 years until they saw each
other again. After short stopovers in various foster homes, Behr was
adopted by a strict woman, a secretary of the Socialist party. She
tried to adapt as best she could. "I did what I was told," Behr says.
"As a little girl I really thought that that was the best way to avoid
trouble."
Stealing children was one way the German Democratic Republic muzzled
its people – Behr and Laake belong to an estimated 1,000 families torn
apart by the socialist authorities. Forced adoptions were a tool that
the regime "could impose on virtually anyone who was considered
suspicious", Behr says; all it took to be judged a bad parent was to
infringe on vague "socialist guidelines". In Behr's case, her mother,
a single parent, was arrested after she had lost her job and decided
to stay at home to care for her children – a major transgression in
the eyes of a state that believed in compulsory labour.
In her new family, Behr always felt "like a second-class daughter",
she says, "a Cinderella who had to clean the house and care for my
younger adoptive brother while my adoptive mother was at work". She
was told repeatedly that she had been put up for adoption because her
natural mother did not love her. "I desperately tried to cling to a
positive image of her," Behr says, "but any abandoned child would
start to doubt that love after 19 years." She was granted limited
access to her adoption file following reunification, and learned that
her mother had never had a chance to get her daughter back. She also
found out that her mother had spent several years in prison. Still, it
took Behr a whole year to get in touch with her. "I hesitated," she
says, "because I was afraid that the negative comments about her would
be proved right."
When Behr finally met her natural mother, she says she was obsessed
with the idea that everyone in her extended family would get along:
she therefore arranged for her natural and adoptive mother to meet.
This was a disaster. Behr had to separate the women when they
literally went for each other's throat: "You stole my child, you
communist bitch!" Behr's natural mother shouted. Today Behr is only in
touch very occasionally with both women.
Three years ago, Behr set up a support group for the victims of forced
adoptions, and since then the 43-year-old has been contacted by
hundreds of people still searching for their children, parents or
siblings. The 20th anniversary of reunification this October has
prompted a flood of interest: a number of films on the topic have come
out in Germany, and have been greeted with huge surprise by the public
– they have also prompted victims to talk about their cases publicly
for the first time. Like Laake, most of them feel betrayed twice over.
The GDR destroyed their families, and the reunified German state did
nothing to redress the injustice.
Walking through the dismal Leipzig suburbs feels like being
transported back 20 years: there are potholes, weeds growing through
the tarmac, dozens of uniform grey apartment blocks. Laake, a slim,
frail man of 50, lives in a ground-floor flat in one of these blocks.
Over the years, he has tried everything to find his son. He has posted
notices on the internet. He has sent letters to politicians. He has
recruited lawyers and private investigators. And he has continually
been reminded that, while times and political systems change, his
situation has not.
He is eager to tell his story, he says, despite the intimidation he
has experienced. Laake and his family have been attacked by a man in
the street; his car has been damaged twice; someone broke into his
cellar; the only photo of his son as a baby has disappeared. But Laake
says he is not afraid. "I am certainly not going to be paranoid. Not
after all these years."
Laake's career as an "enemy of the socialist state" was never
political. It started as a harmless teenage rebellion. He refused to
join the youth organisation of the Socialist party, and at school in
the 1970s he often wore a faux stetson and a black denim suit he'd
made himself. This provocatively "western" outfit made him a target
for his teachers' criticism. "But my mother always supported me," says
Laake. "Our family agreed on the importance of personal freedom. As
long as I can remember I wanted to get out of East Germany."
Early marriages were common in the GDR and so, at 19, Laake proposed
to his childhood friend, Ilona, who came to share his dream of life on
the other side of the iron curtain. Three years into their marriage,
when she was expecting a baby, they decided to flee. Their idea was to
cross the Baltic sea overnight in an inflatable rubber boat. It was
hazardous: the beach became a prohibited zone after dusk, closely
monitored by military police. "But when you are on the run, you stop
thinking," says Laake. "You are in a sort of survival mode. It's all
about: get on the water. Cower down in the dinghy so you're not shot.
Then paddle for your life." They did not even make it to the water.
"You can't describe the pressure you feel when there are five
Kalashnikovs pointing at you."
Andreas Laake is still searching for his son, who was adopted as a
baby. Photograph: Eva-Helen Thoele
As an ex-prisoner and attempted refugee, Laake is officially
acknowledged as a victim of political injustice, and he has even been
granted a small monthly pension by the German government. But as a
betrayed father, there are no documents proving his case. The GDR
authorities effectively covered their tracks. Laake never received any
official papers about his trial and because of data privacy laws his
son's adoption file is closed to him for 50 years. The only person who
has limited access to the file – other than the case officers – is
Marco himself. And there's no way of knowing if he's ever even been
told that he's adopted.
With no access to the details of his case, Laake has had to commit
everything he can to memory. The words of the security agent who beat
him during questioning. The document he signed to spare his pregnant
wife imprisonment, confessing that he alone was responsible for the
escape. The Hannibal-Lecter-style cage they built inside a cell,
where, for several weeks – as a special punishment – he was kept in
solitary confinement. He was in prison for six-and-a-half years
altogether.
Marco was born and put up for adoption while Laake was under arrest;
his wife had buckled under the massive pressure to give their child
up. "She was only 21 years old, she was afraid, they threatened to
make her life hell, they mentally broke her." Laake knows that she had
no real chance to prevent the forced adoption, but the couple
nevertheless fell out over the loss, and are now divorced. "In the end
I simply couldn't forgive her," he says.
While telling his story Laake shows me a number of photographs of
Marco: in a rowing boat, aged eight, and as a teenager at a party.
They were given to him just a few months ago, as a result of his
persistent campaign, by a social worker who is apparently in contact
with Marco's adoptive family. She also read out a short letter,
supposedly from Marco, now 26, who said that he has a good life and
does not wish to get to know his natural father. Laake was not allowed
to see the letter himself, for reasons of data protection. "His
language sounded clumsy and strangely impersonal," he says. "As if
someone had desperately tried to put himself into Marco's position and
then made the whole thing up."
Laake knows that "there is no law that could turn around my
situation". When the reunification treaty was signed in 1990 the new
German state had not distinguished between legal and illegal
adoptions, so every case today is dealt with according to the old West
German law, which prohibits natural parents from finding out about
children they voluntarily gave up. The builders of the new German
state 20 years ago either forgot to classify "adoptions against the
will of the parents" as a violation of human rights or, as the
historian and GDR expert Uwe Hillmer suggests, they simply were not
interested. "Even members of the Kohl government admitted internally:
forget about the past," says Hillmer. Many of the Socialist
administration's files were destroyed during the last days of the GDR,
and a former officer of the Stasi, the East German security service,
once told Hillmer: "You haven't got the slightest idea about the real
extent of injustice, and you will never find out what really
happened."
That Stasi officer might well be right, but reading through Behr's
victim support website gives some sense of the scale of what went on.
Behr has collected more than 300 cases of alleged forced adoption so
far, and she is trying to help more than 200 people to find family
members. There are 93 unsettled cases regarding the deaths of newborn
babies: Behr has documented the stories of mothers who were still
lying in the delivery room when they were told that their babies had
died – but swear they heard their child crying. They were not allowed
to see their baby's corpse. One mother visited the grave of her twin
daughters for more than 25 years before seeing two young women tell
the story of their adoption on TV. They were her daughters. It's
unclear why this cruel practice took place; most of the people
involved in the forced adoptions have refused to talk. Hillmer says
there are suspicions that Socialist party officials who could not have
children "ordered" newborns from cooperative gynaecologists, although
this has only been proved in one case so far.
Behr's objective is to make the victims' voices heard. She gives
lectures across Germany about forced adoption. "Many victims find
themselves in the humiliating position that no one even believes them,
and the strangeness of their cases doesn't make it any easier," she
says. Most of them suffer from depression, and some question their own
memories, as Behr has herself. The separation from her natural mother
destroyed her self-esteem and she suspects she will never fully
recover.
Laake refuses to accept that the data protection law is the only
reason he is prevented from contacting Marco; he suspects that Marco's
adoptive parents don't want their son to know the circumstances of his
adoption. "If they told him," he says, "it could destroy their
family." He keeps turning questions over in his mind: what if Marco's
clumsy letter was written by someone else? What if old Stasi networks
are still operating in Leipzig? What if Marco's adoptive parents are
former party officials trying to hide their past?
Behr is helping Laake with his investigation, and worries about his
safety. Until recently, she didn't believe the rumours about Stasi
networks being operational, but "looking at Laake's case with all its
dodgy incidents made me change my mind", she says. After Laake was
attacked in the street, police advised him to search for a new flat
for his own safety.
There is another reason that Behr is concerned about Laake. She says
that many victims of forced adoption build up high hopes that things
will change for the better once they find their natural family. "They
focus on a happy ending that is never going to happen." Behr has
helped more than 100 people to find their lost family members so far,
but most cases end like her own: there is an initial sense of relief,
followed by disappointment that the parent or child in question has
become a complete stranger.
Laake knows that there may be no happy ending for him, that the
problem of East Germany's lost children "is probably not solvable".
Nevertheless he will carry on searching for Marco. He has started to
call the adoption office twice a week, and he is also planning a
sit-down strike outside the office, "with a sign around my neck: give
me back my son!" He says he doesn't expect anything from contact with
Marco. "I could even understand if he didn't wish to meet me." But he
wants to hear that for himself. Laake is tired of all the threats and
delays. "All I want is certainty. That's the minimum a father can
expect."
German families torn apart by forced adoptions during the cold war are
still looking for answers – and their lost relatives
Marten Rolff
Sunday 22 August 2010 20.30 BST
Katrin Behr was separated from her mother as a child. Photograph:
Christian Jungeblodt for the Guardian
It took exactly four minutes to steal Andreas Laake's baby son – that
was the length of the court hearing that swept away his paternity
rights. Some 26 years later Laake can still recall every detail of the
trial: his aching wrists cuffed behind his back; the musty smell of
the courtroom; the steely voice of the young female judge. Then there
were the vague words of the social worker who said that after his
attempted escape from the German Democratic Republic: "we do not
believe Mr Laake has the ability to bring up his son for the purpose
of socialism".
Laake was not even allowed to defend himself. All he said in court
were four words: "I do not agree." Several weeks later his son Marco
was adopted by people who were considered, in ideological terms, much
more reliable parents. "Since then, I've spent half a lifetime
searching for him," says Laake.
It took a matter of minutes for Katrin Behr to be separated from her
family too. It was a cold winter morning in 1972 when three men in
long, dark coats knocked on the door to arrest her mother. Behr was
four-and-a-half years old at the time, and can still remember the
panic in her mother's voice as she urged her daughter to get dressed
quickly. But Katrin Behr was left behind. The last words she heard
were, "Be brave. I'll be back tonight," before her mother was spirited
off to a socialist boot camp. It would be 19 years until they saw each
other again. After short stopovers in various foster homes, Behr was
adopted by a strict woman, a secretary of the Socialist party. She
tried to adapt as best she could. "I did what I was told," Behr says.
"As a little girl I really thought that that was the best way to avoid
trouble."
Stealing children was one way the German Democratic Republic muzzled
its people – Behr and Laake belong to an estimated 1,000 families torn
apart by the socialist authorities. Forced adoptions were a tool that
the regime "could impose on virtually anyone who was considered
suspicious", Behr says; all it took to be judged a bad parent was to
infringe on vague "socialist guidelines". In Behr's case, her mother,
a single parent, was arrested after she had lost her job and decided
to stay at home to care for her children – a major transgression in
the eyes of a state that believed in compulsory labour.
In her new family, Behr always felt "like a second-class daughter",
she says, "a Cinderella who had to clean the house and care for my
younger adoptive brother while my adoptive mother was at work". She
was told repeatedly that she had been put up for adoption because her
natural mother did not love her. "I desperately tried to cling to a
positive image of her," Behr says, "but any abandoned child would
start to doubt that love after 19 years." She was granted limited
access to her adoption file following reunification, and learned that
her mother had never had a chance to get her daughter back. She also
found out that her mother had spent several years in prison. Still, it
took Behr a whole year to get in touch with her. "I hesitated," she
says, "because I was afraid that the negative comments about her would
be proved right."
When Behr finally met her natural mother, she says she was obsessed
with the idea that everyone in her extended family would get along:
she therefore arranged for her natural and adoptive mother to meet.
This was a disaster. Behr had to separate the women when they
literally went for each other's throat: "You stole my child, you
communist bitch!" Behr's natural mother shouted. Today Behr is only in
touch very occasionally with both women.
Three years ago, Behr set up a support group for the victims of forced
adoptions, and since then the 43-year-old has been contacted by
hundreds of people still searching for their children, parents or
siblings. The 20th anniversary of reunification this October has
prompted a flood of interest: a number of films on the topic have come
out in Germany, and have been greeted with huge surprise by the public
– they have also prompted victims to talk about their cases publicly
for the first time. Like Laake, most of them feel betrayed twice over.
The GDR destroyed their families, and the reunified German state did
nothing to redress the injustice.
Walking through the dismal Leipzig suburbs feels like being
transported back 20 years: there are potholes, weeds growing through
the tarmac, dozens of uniform grey apartment blocks. Laake, a slim,
frail man of 50, lives in a ground-floor flat in one of these blocks.
Over the years, he has tried everything to find his son. He has posted
notices on the internet. He has sent letters to politicians. He has
recruited lawyers and private investigators. And he has continually
been reminded that, while times and political systems change, his
situation has not.
He is eager to tell his story, he says, despite the intimidation he
has experienced. Laake and his family have been attacked by a man in
the street; his car has been damaged twice; someone broke into his
cellar; the only photo of his son as a baby has disappeared. But Laake
says he is not afraid. "I am certainly not going to be paranoid. Not
after all these years."
Laake's career as an "enemy of the socialist state" was never
political. It started as a harmless teenage rebellion. He refused to
join the youth organisation of the Socialist party, and at school in
the 1970s he often wore a faux stetson and a black denim suit he'd
made himself. This provocatively "western" outfit made him a target
for his teachers' criticism. "But my mother always supported me," says
Laake. "Our family agreed on the importance of personal freedom. As
long as I can remember I wanted to get out of East Germany."
Early marriages were common in the GDR and so, at 19, Laake proposed
to his childhood friend, Ilona, who came to share his dream of life on
the other side of the iron curtain. Three years into their marriage,
when she was expecting a baby, they decided to flee. Their idea was to
cross the Baltic sea overnight in an inflatable rubber boat. It was
hazardous: the beach became a prohibited zone after dusk, closely
monitored by military police. "But when you are on the run, you stop
thinking," says Laake. "You are in a sort of survival mode. It's all
about: get on the water. Cower down in the dinghy so you're not shot.
Then paddle for your life." They did not even make it to the water.
"You can't describe the pressure you feel when there are five
Kalashnikovs pointing at you."
Andreas Laake is still searching for his son, who was adopted as a
baby. Photograph: Eva-Helen Thoele
As an ex-prisoner and attempted refugee, Laake is officially
acknowledged as a victim of political injustice, and he has even been
granted a small monthly pension by the German government. But as a
betrayed father, there are no documents proving his case. The GDR
authorities effectively covered their tracks. Laake never received any
official papers about his trial and because of data privacy laws his
son's adoption file is closed to him for 50 years. The only person who
has limited access to the file – other than the case officers – is
Marco himself. And there's no way of knowing if he's ever even been
told that he's adopted.
With no access to the details of his case, Laake has had to commit
everything he can to memory. The words of the security agent who beat
him during questioning. The document he signed to spare his pregnant
wife imprisonment, confessing that he alone was responsible for the
escape. The Hannibal-Lecter-style cage they built inside a cell,
where, for several weeks – as a special punishment – he was kept in
solitary confinement. He was in prison for six-and-a-half years
altogether.
Marco was born and put up for adoption while Laake was under arrest;
his wife had buckled under the massive pressure to give their child
up. "She was only 21 years old, she was afraid, they threatened to
make her life hell, they mentally broke her." Laake knows that she had
no real chance to prevent the forced adoption, but the couple
nevertheless fell out over the loss, and are now divorced. "In the end
I simply couldn't forgive her," he says.
While telling his story Laake shows me a number of photographs of
Marco: in a rowing boat, aged eight, and as a teenager at a party.
They were given to him just a few months ago, as a result of his
persistent campaign, by a social worker who is apparently in contact
with Marco's adoptive family. She also read out a short letter,
supposedly from Marco, now 26, who said that he has a good life and
does not wish to get to know his natural father. Laake was not allowed
to see the letter himself, for reasons of data protection. "His
language sounded clumsy and strangely impersonal," he says. "As if
someone had desperately tried to put himself into Marco's position and
then made the whole thing up."
Laake knows that "there is no law that could turn around my
situation". When the reunification treaty was signed in 1990 the new
German state had not distinguished between legal and illegal
adoptions, so every case today is dealt with according to the old West
German law, which prohibits natural parents from finding out about
children they voluntarily gave up. The builders of the new German
state 20 years ago either forgot to classify "adoptions against the
will of the parents" as a violation of human rights or, as the
historian and GDR expert Uwe Hillmer suggests, they simply were not
interested. "Even members of the Kohl government admitted internally:
forget about the past," says Hillmer. Many of the Socialist
administration's files were destroyed during the last days of the GDR,
and a former officer of the Stasi, the East German security service,
once told Hillmer: "You haven't got the slightest idea about the real
extent of injustice, and you will never find out what really
happened."
That Stasi officer might well be right, but reading through Behr's
victim support website gives some sense of the scale of what went on.
Behr has collected more than 300 cases of alleged forced adoption so
far, and she is trying to help more than 200 people to find family
members. There are 93 unsettled cases regarding the deaths of newborn
babies: Behr has documented the stories of mothers who were still
lying in the delivery room when they were told that their babies had
died – but swear they heard their child crying. They were not allowed
to see their baby's corpse. One mother visited the grave of her twin
daughters for more than 25 years before seeing two young women tell
the story of their adoption on TV. They were her daughters. It's
unclear why this cruel practice took place; most of the people
involved in the forced adoptions have refused to talk. Hillmer says
there are suspicions that Socialist party officials who could not have
children "ordered" newborns from cooperative gynaecologists, although
this has only been proved in one case so far.
Behr's objective is to make the victims' voices heard. She gives
lectures across Germany about forced adoption. "Many victims find
themselves in the humiliating position that no one even believes them,
and the strangeness of their cases doesn't make it any easier," she
says. Most of them suffer from depression, and some question their own
memories, as Behr has herself. The separation from her natural mother
destroyed her self-esteem and she suspects she will never fully
recover.
Laake refuses to accept that the data protection law is the only
reason he is prevented from contacting Marco; he suspects that Marco's
adoptive parents don't want their son to know the circumstances of his
adoption. "If they told him," he says, "it could destroy their
family." He keeps turning questions over in his mind: what if Marco's
clumsy letter was written by someone else? What if old Stasi networks
are still operating in Leipzig? What if Marco's adoptive parents are
former party officials trying to hide their past?
Behr is helping Laake with his investigation, and worries about his
safety. Until recently, she didn't believe the rumours about Stasi
networks being operational, but "looking at Laake's case with all its
dodgy incidents made me change my mind", she says. After Laake was
attacked in the street, police advised him to search for a new flat
for his own safety.
There is another reason that Behr is concerned about Laake. She says
that many victims of forced adoption build up high hopes that things
will change for the better once they find their natural family. "They
focus on a happy ending that is never going to happen." Behr has
helped more than 100 people to find their lost family members so far,
but most cases end like her own: there is an initial sense of relief,
followed by disappointment that the parent or child in question has
become a complete stranger.
Laake knows that there may be no happy ending for him, that the
problem of East Germany's lost children "is probably not solvable".
Nevertheless he will carry on searching for Marco. He has started to
call the adoption office twice a week, and he is also planning a
sit-down strike outside the office, "with a sign around my neck: give
me back my son!" He says he doesn't expect anything from contact with
Marco. "I could even understand if he didn't wish to meet me." But he
wants to hear that for himself. Laake is tired of all the threats and
delays. "All I want is certainty. That's the minimum a father can
expect."