
 
 A handout picture provided by the International Tracing Service (ITS) on 12 August 2015 shows the 91-year-old Italian woman, holding an illustrated book with photos of the family of her daughter Margot Bachmann in her hands in Novellara, Italy, 08 August 2015. (International Tracing Service ITS/dpa) 
 
 “Dear Mum, my name is Margot Bachmann and I am your daughter, born on Oct 25 1944 in Heidelberg. All my life I asked my family about you, without being given any answers. I want to come and find you so that I can hug you once again. I’m immensely happy to be able to finally know you.” 
 
 The above is an excerpt, published in the Telegraph and verified by The Washington Post, from a letter German citizen Margot Bachmann sent to her Italian mother. Last weekend, Bachmann and her 91-year old mother, who did not want to be named, were finally reunited in the Italian village of Novellara – 71 years after being separated. 
 
 "What we observed last weekend, comes close to a miracle," Friederike Scharlau, representative of International Tracing Service, said in a news release. The organization, in collaboration with the initiative Restoring Family Links which is led by the International Committee of the Red Cross, had helped Bachmann and her mother be reunited. 
 
 "Nowadays, it is extraordinarily rare that parents and children reconnect who were separated by the Nazi regime. Many Nazi-survivors have died by now," Scharlau said. Often, the organization is only able to connect relatives with cousins or siblings of subsequent generations. 
 
 Bachmann was born in Heidelberg in Germany, where her mother had moved to during the Second World War to work in a factory where she was forced to live in a labor camp. A German soldier impregnated her when she was 20, and she was pressured to hand over the baby to authorities after her parental custody was revoked. 
 
 Margot Bachmann was temporarily raised in a children's home, until the German soldier's family adopted her shortly after the end of World War II. Post-war chaos divided the Italian mother and her daughter even further. In the belief that her daughter had been killed, the woman later returned to Italy. 
 
 She did not know that her daughter -- raised under the name Margot Bachmann -- was still alive. Bachmann says her German father prohibited her from searching for her biological mother throughout his life. Although Bachmann's father wanted to make her believe that her mother had died, she had doubts early on. "Already as a child I had the feeling that this wasn't true," she said. 
 
 Last year, her father died and Bachmann decided to defy his wishes. "I wanted to know who my mother was, whether we were similar; and I wanted to find photos or some information. I didn't dare to hope that I would ever be able to hug her. Now, I am overtly happy that she is doing well and that we were able to get to know each other," Bachmann was quoted as saying by the International Tracing Service. 
 
 On her original birth certificate, Bachmann found the full name of her mother and asked the International Tracing Service to search for information about her, using a database of about 30 million documents. 
 
 "We were lucky because in all these years, the mother had not moved away from her home town," Laura Bastianetto, a spokesperson for the Italian Red Cross which accompanied the reunion last weekend, told La Repubblica. "We were able to trace her fairly quickly. We hope that the mother, who believed she had lost her daughter forever, can now make up for lost time. She doesn't know when, but she is sure to come back as soon as possible," Bastianetto said. 
 
 "A bottle of sparkling wine, the excitement of the reunification and an exchange of gifts and family pictures filled the time," the Italian Red Cross spokesperson described the reunion to The Washington Post in an email. 
 
 Looking at her daughter, the mother said: "I thought you were dead, otherwise I would have searched for you," according to Bastianetto. 
 
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 The Italian woman, who is now 91, moved to Germany voluntarily during the war to work in a factory in Heidelberg and there fell in love with a soldier. 
 
 She became pregnant and in October 1944 gave birth to a baby girl, but the child was soon taken away from her by the soldier’s family. 
 
 After the war the Italian woman returned to her home village of Novellara in the northern region of Emilia Romagna, believing that the baby had probably died of illness or had been killed in an Allied bombardment during the last, desperate days of the war. 
 
 But unknown to her, the infant had been adopted by the soldier’s parents, who raised her as Margot Bachmann. 
 
 As she grew up, the little girl was told that her birth mother was Italian but that the family had no idea of her whereabouts, and was forbidden from searching for her. 
 
 Mrs Bachmann, now aged 70, always wondered what became of her mother, and last year, when her father died, decided to redouble efforts to track her down. 
 
 Encouraged by her own daughter, who was curious about the family saga, she managed to find her mother with the help of the Italian Red Cross and the International Tracing Service, a centre based in Germany which works on reuniting families torn apart by the war. 
 
 With the help of the Red Cross, the ITS discovered that Mrs Bachmann's mother was still alive and living in Novellara. 
 
 After more than seven decades, the two had an emotional encounter at the weekend, crying and toasting their reunion with a bottle of sparkling wine. 
 
 “I started out doing some research, hoping to know a bit more about my mother,” said Mrs Bachmann. “But I would never have imagined that I would be able to embrace her once again. I’m so happy to have found her still alive, despite her advanced age. 
 
 "My father had forbidden me from looking for her, and I began to do so only after his death.” 
 
 Before their encounter, Mrs Bachmann sent her mother a letter. “Dear Mum, my name is Margot Bachmann and I am your daughter, born on Oct 25 1944 in Heidelberg. All my life I asked my family about you, without being given any answers. I want to come and find you so that I can hug you once again. I’m immensely happy to be able to finally know you.” 
 
 Their story has raised uncomfortable questions about the extent of the collaboration between Italians and their Nazi occupiers, reviving memories of women having their heads shaved after being accused of sleeping with the enemy at the end of the war. 
 
 Her mother has refused to be identified, mindful of the lingering resentment towards Italian women who had romantic liaisons with German troops. 
 
 “I can understand her position,” said Elena Carletti, the mayor of Novellara. “In this village, people have not forgotten [the war]. Even my generation knows the names of those who, during the war, were for or against the Germans. These stories still weigh heavily on many families. This encounter between a mother and daughter reminds us of a complicated chapter of history.” 
 
 One local, Dilva Daoli, now aged 94, said she could remember seeing local women who had fraternised with the Germans being abused and spat at after the village was liberated by Italian partisans and Allied troops. 
 
 “The partisans cut off all the hair of the girls who had danced, dined and then spent the night with the Germans and the Fascists,” she told La Repubblica newspaper. “Those poor girls understood nothing.” 
 
 Laura Bastianetto, of the Italian Red Cross, described the reunion after so many years as “a small miracle”. 
 
 "It is rare for a mother and daughter to find each other after 71 years. We were lucky because in all these years, the mother had not moved away from her home town. We were able to trace her fairly quickly. We hope that the mother, who believed she had lost her daughter forever, can now make up for lost time.”
– One of the countless millions of family bonds severed by the chaos and horror of World War II has been made whole again after 71 years. Margot Bachmann's Italian mother was living in a forced-labor camp in Germany in 1944 when she was impregnated by a German soldier she had fallen in love with, the Washington Post reports. Nazi authorities took the baby away from her (perhaps as soon as a month after the child's birth) and placed the girl in a children's home. When the war ended, the woman, identified only as Gianna, returned to Italy, believing the child had been killed. She wasn't. The two were reunited last weekend by the International Tracing Service organization, which says in what is "close to a miracle" it was able to locate the 91-year-old mother in her home village in northern Italy. Bachmann was raised by the soldier and his family, who told her that her birth mother was Italian but ordered her not to try to find out more and gave the impression that she was dead, the Telegraph reports. Bachmann's own daughters encouraged her to search after her father's death and they were able to track down her birth certificate. "All my life I asked my family about you, without being given any answers. I want to come and find you so that I can hug you once again," she wrote to her, per the Telegraph. A Red Cross spokeswoman tells the Post that when they finally met, "a bottle of sparkling wine, the excitement of the reunification, and an exchange of gifts and family pictures filled the time." (A Facebook photo reunited this mother and son after 15 years.)