70 Years after WWII, German 'War Kids' Look for Soldier Dads

When Paul Schmitz was a little boy, he never understood why kids in his German village taunted him as a "Yank" and beat him up. He was a teenager by the time he found out: His father was an American soldier his mother had a romance with in the final days of World War II.

Schmitz was born about five months after Victory in Europe Day, when the Allied forces defeated Nazi Germany 70 years ago Friday. It would be the start of a life as an outsider, burdened by fear, discrimination and loneliness.

He is one of at least 250,000 children of German mothers who got pregnant by Allied soldiers from the United States, Great Britain, France or the Soviet Union as the Third Reich crumbled.

Now many of those children have embarked on quests to find their fathers.

"I was a child of shame, a child of the enemy, even though it was the Americans who liberated us," says Schmitz, a shy 69-year-old with a friendly round face. "All my life I had a yearning for my father, but until recently I was too afraid to actively search for him."

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