The Wehrmacht General, the Three Sisters, and the Secret Adoption Network Europe Tried to Erase

For most of my life, I believed war was something that happened on maps, in newspapers, and in speeches made by men in uniforms. I learned the truth much earlier than I should have—when I was ten years old—when I discovered that a woman’s body could become a contested territory, claimed not by armies, but by silence, paperwork, and power.

My name was Maïs du Roc.

I was born in 1924, in Saint-Rémi-sur-Loir, a village so small it rarely appeared in administrative registries, let alone military intelligence files. We lived between vineyards and wheat fields, in a France that still believed distance could protect it. My father repaired clocks. My mother baked bread. Time moved slowly, predictably, safely.

My sisters were my entire world.

Aurore, nineteen, wanted to become a schoolteacher.
Séverine, older and quieter, embroidered wedding dresses she never wore.

We did not speak of politics. We did not speak of Germany. We believed the war would pass us by.

It did not.

Arrest Without Charges, Deportation Without Records

In June 1942, German occupation forces arrived at our door before sunrise. There were no accusations, no legal notices, no explanation. Just orders.

My mother fell to her knees. My father was pushed against the wall. We were classified, without discussion, as “labor resources”—a bureaucratic phrase that stripped us of personhood in a single stroke.

We were loaded into a truck with other young women. No destination. No documentation we could see. No rights we could invoke.

This was not a death camp. That distinction would later be used to minimize what happened.

It was something more difficult to prosecute.

A Camp Outside the Law

The camp was administered not by faceless guards, but by a single authority figure:
Oberst Friedrich von Steiner, a high-ranking Wehrmacht officer.

He was not violent in public. He did not shout. He governed through administrative discretion—deciding work assignments, housing, food rations, medical access, and something referred to only as “special selection.”

The camp operated in a legal gray zone:

·       not registered as an extermination facility

·       not governed by civilian courts

·       not inspected by neutral observers

What happened there was later dismissed as “isolated misconduct.”

That dismissal would follow us for decades.

Three Sisters, Three Pregnancies, Zero Accountability

First, Séverine was selected.
Then Aurore.
Then me.

I will not describe the acts themselves. History does not require explicit detail to understand coercion, abuse of power, and systematic violation.

By winter, all three of us were pregnant.

Three sisters.
Three pregnancies.
One commanding officer.

When the pregnancies became visible, the response was administrative, not moral.

We were informed:

·       the children would be registered as war orphans

·       they would be removed immediately after birth

·       they would be placed with German families through undisclosed channels

·       we would return to labor as soon as medically possible

No consent forms.
No appeals process.
No legal recourse.

Birth as a Transaction, Not a Human Event

Séverine gave birth in April 1943.
Her daughter was taken before she could hold her.

Séverine died weeks later. The official cause was typhus. No investigation followed.

Aurore gave birth in May. She held her son for a few hours. That was all.

I gave birth in June, to a boy.
They removed him the next day.

The paperwork classified the process as “child transfer.”

Disappearance of the Perpetrator, Erasure of the Victims

As Allied forces advanced, von Steiner vanished.

No arrest record.
No tribunal appearance.
No extradition request.

The files associated with the camp were declared incomplete or destroyed.

After the war, France rebuilt. Germany rebuilt. Europe moved forward.

Women like us were administrative inconveniences—living reminders of unresolved crimes.

Post-War Silence and Legal Abandonment

I returned home. My mother had died. My father did not recognize me.

There was no psychological support. No compensation program. No legal framework for mothers whose children had been forcibly transferred across borders under military authority.

International law had no category for us yet.

So I became invisible.

The Letter That Reopened the Case

In 1953, I received a letter from Munich. One sentence. No signature.

It led me to a former nurse who had preserved fragments of camp documentation—illegal copies of transfer registers that were supposed to be destroyed.

There, in ink that had outlived the regime that wrote it, was my name.

And below it:
my son’s birth date
his transfer date
the name of a foster family

This was not a miracle.

It was evidence.

A Twenty-Year Search Through Closed Archives

What followed was nearly two decades of legal dead ends:

·       destroyed adoption records

·       sealed military archives

·       uncooperative ministries

·       lawyers who explained that my case was “unique” and therefore unsolvable

Forced wartime adoptions existed in a legal vacuum.
No restitution laws applied retroactively.
No court wanted jurisdiction.

Finding My Son—and Losing Him Again

I found him in Austria.

He was alive.
He had a family.
He had been told his mother died in the war.

When I told him the truth, he did not reject me out of cruelty—but out of psychological survival. His identity had been built on a lie reinforced by the state.

We met. We spoke. We tried.

But some separations cannot be repaired by truth alone.

Why This Story Still Matters

My son died in 2005.
I gave my testimony in 2010.
I died in 2015.

No official apology ever came.
No reparations were granted.
No registry was completed.

The children born in camps like ours were never fully counted.
Their mothers were never officially acknowledged.

But history is not only written by courts.

It is written by testimony.

The Unfinished Legal and Moral Reckoning

What happened to us raises questions that remain unresolved:

·       forced wartime adoption legality

·       crimes committed outside extermination camps

·       responsibility of commanding officers

·       state complicity through silence

·       intergenerational trauma and restitution

These are not just historical issues.

They are ongoing legal and ethical failures.

Why Remembering Is an Act of Resistance

Silence protected perpetrators.
Forgetting protected institutions.

Memory is the only remaining form of justice.

This is not just my story.
It is the story of thousands of women whose names were erased because their existence complicated victory narratives.

If this story unsettled you, it should.

Because wars do not end when treaties are signed.
They end only when truth is acknowledged.

And that reckoning is still overdue.