The Lebensborn Program - Gândurile Adei

A few years ago I saw the movie “Spring of Life” and I confess that I was very impressed. I didn’t know anything about the Lebensborn children at that time. The movie piqued my interest and I wanted to learn more about the Lebensborn program. The epic of knowledge that followed led me to the discovery of some surprising historical facts. Furthermore, I want to share this knowledge with you.

The goal of the program

The Lebensborn project was a Nazi breeding and infanticide program. “Lebensborn” translates in old German to wellspring of life or fountain of life. The program was founded on December 12, 1935 by the SS (the Nazi Party’s most feared paramilitary unit) leader Heinrich Himmler and was aimed at increasing birth rates of Aryan children in the Third Reich. For decades, Germany’s birthrate was decreasing. Himmler’s goal was to reverse the decline and increase the Germanic / Nordic population of Germany to 200 million.

The purpose of the society Lebensborn Eingetragener Verein (as Lebensborn Society was registered) was to offer to young girls who were deemed “racially pure” and “healthy” based on Nazi racial hygiene and health ideology the possibility to give birth to a child in secret. Both mother and father needed to pass a racial purity test. Blond hair and blue eyes were preferred, and non-Jewish family lineage had to be traced back at least three generations.

Initially the program served as a welfare institution for wives of SS officers; the organization ran facilities – primarily maternity homes – where women could give birth or get help with family matters. The program also accepted unmarried women who were either pregnant or had already given birth and were in need of aid, provided that both the woman and the father of the child were classified as racially valuable. Of all the women who applied, only 40 percent passed the racial purity test and were granted admission to the Lebensborn program. The majority of mothers were unmarried: 57.6 percent until 1939 and about 70 percent by 1940.

The women admitted in the program were allowed to give birth secretly away from home without social stigma. In case the mothers wanted to give up the children, the program also had orphanages and an adoption service. When dealing with non-SS members, parents and children were usually examined by SS doctors before admission. The Lebensborn Program had its own registry office system to keep the identities of the biological parents a secret and most of these documents were burned at the end of the Second World War.

Scherl: BDM- Mädchen bei einer Gymnastikvorführung 7525-41

Figure 1: a) The image of a young girl, with Nordic features, being measured to determine whether she qualifies for the Lebensborn program. Source: SPIEGEL TV; b) A gymnastics demonstration of the German League of Girls (Bund Deutscher Mädel). Source: Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-2000-0110-500 / CC-BY-SA 3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0 DE, via Wikimedia Commons.

The Lebensborn homes

The implementation of the program meant establishing a network of 26 maternity homes in German territory where women could live comfortably as they received prenatal care, delivered their babies, and recovered from labor. In the beginning, the Lebensborn homes were primarily SS maternity homes and nurseries. But in order to create a “super-race”, the SS transformed these homes into “meeting places” for racially pure German women who wanted to meet and have children with SS officers. The children born in the Lebensborn nurseries were then taken by the SS.

The first Lebensborn home was opened in 1936 in Steinhöring, a tiny village not far from Munich. Ultimately, there were ten Lebensborn homes established in Germany, nine in Norway, two in Austria, and one each in Belgium, Holland, France, Luxembourg and Denmark. The Lebensborn homes were typically established on the grounds of private country estates and were designed to be pleasant spaces. Furnishings for the homes were supplied from the best of the loot from the homes of Jews who had been sent to concentration camps. Because the program sought out women eager to avoid the public scandal of an unmarried pregnancy, the homes prioritized anonymity and staff discretion. Himmler himself took a special interest in the homes, choosing not only the mothers, but also attending to the decor and even paying special attention to children born on his birthday, October 7th.

Figure 2: a) The first Lebensborn home in Steinhöring, Bavaria, Germany; b) a Norwegian Lebensborn home.

The fathers

SS Officers needed state consent to marry and this consent depended on the officer’s prospective wife meeting the strict Lebensborn standards. Besides this rule, SS officers and other high-ranking Nazis with demonstrable Aryan pedigree were encouraged to sow their seed beyond marriages to create a blue-eyed and blonde-haired master race to perpetuate Adolf Hitler’s Germany.

Thus, in 1936, an ordinance was issued advising every SS member that he should father at least four children. Many of the fathers of Lebensborn children were married members of the SS with their own families, who had obeyed Himmler’s order to spread their Aryan seed, even out of wedlock. Due to the secrecy of the program, the identities of the fathers were not recorded on birth certificates.

By 1939, the Lebensborn program had not produced the results Himmler had hoped for. He issued a direct order to all SS and police to father as many children as possible to compensate for war casualties. The order created controversy. Many Germans felt the acceptance of unwed mothers encouraged immorality. Eventually Himmler backpedaled, but he never condemned illegitimacy outright. Himmler himself had two illegitimate children.

The mothers

At the beginning of the program, to be granted admission, a woman had to have blonde hair and blue eyes, no trace of any genetic disorders and she had to demonstrate her Aryan ancestry, as far back as her grandparents. She also had to prove the identity of the father, who also had to have the proper racial characteristics.

Later on, to compensate for war casualties, the Lebensborn program was expanded to welcome non-German mothers. In a policy formed by Hitler in 1942, German soldiers were encouraged to fraternize with native women, with the understanding that any children they produced would be provided for. Racially fit women, most often the girlfriends or one-night stands of SS officers, were invited to Lebensborn homes to have their child in privacy and safety.

For instance, the Nazis believed that women from Norway were perfect for their program, as most were fair-haired with blue eyes. It is estimated that about 50,000 Norwegian women had affairs with German soldiers.

The children

The Lebensborn children were conceived out of love, by mistake or through naivety. There were certainly women who conceived on ideological grounds, but for many the choice was a pragmatic one: the promise of support and secrecy from prying eyes in a conservative society.

Mothers would slip off to the Lebensborn homes to give birth discreetly. There, they enjoyed the best medical facilities and ration-busting supplies of food while their children suffered a harsh welcome to the world, modeled on the Spartan practice of exposure greatly admired by Hitler. A Lebensborn child later learned how the babies were welcomed to the world: they were separated from their mothers as soon as they were born and kept away from the mothers for the first 24 hours of their life. Then, the babies would be given back to their mothers for only 20 minutes every four hours and, during that time, the mothers were strongly discouraged from talking to or caressing the babies.

Children would spend their earliest months or years at the homes in what amounted to being the Third Reich’s crèche, receiving an SS education and/or awaiting adoption by SS families if their single mothers did not want them. As the war progressed, they were joined by Aryan-looking Eastern European or Soviet children forcibly sent back from the front to be “Germanised”. As one mother told once to her son in an unguarded moment: “the relationship between mother and child was a power struggle”. The sad truth is that, for the SS, a child’s will existed only to be broken.

About 8,000 Lebensborn children were born in Germany. They were baptized in ritualistic ceremonies involving a SS dagger and their parents (adoptive or otherwise) promising the child’s loyalty to the Nazi cause. Those children who were left by their single mothers in Lebensborn homes were taken care of by doctors and nurses who were employed by the SS. Many were eventually given to rich Nazi families to be raised as their own. In Norway, between 1940 and 1945, approximately 8,000 to 10,000 Lebensborn babies were born and about half of those were born in Lebensborn institutions. The Nazi Party automatically considered these children German.

Figure 3: a), c) and d) Lebensborn children abducted or born in the program; b) Christening of a Lebensborn child. Source: Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-1969-062A-58 / CC-BY-SA 3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0 DE, via Wikimedia Commons.

The doctors

Doctors were a vital part of the Lebensborn program. It is believed that Medical Director Gregor Ebner went to school with and was a close friend of Himmler’s. At the Steinhöring home, he not only supervised the births of 3,000 Lebensborn babies, but also carried out reproduction experiments on many women. Ebner was captured near the end of the Second World War and was tried for crimes against humanity, war crimes and other crimes. When he died in 1974, he still held firm to his Nazi beliefs.

Hundreds of doctors and nurses at Lebensborn homes were there not only to care for the children, but to also indoctrinate them as Nazis. They also helped determine whether a child was German enough to be adopted or sent to his or her death in a concentration camp.

The kidnappings

One of the most horrible sides of the Lebensborn policy was the kidnapping of thousands of children racially good after 1939 and many of these children were from Eastern Europe and Soviet Union. Some of these children were orphans, but it is well documented that many were stolen from their parents’ arms. Any children who looked Aryan enough (blonde hair and blue or green eyes) were abducted and those who had virtually no Jewish traits were Germanised.

It is estimated that over 400,000 children were abducted in this portion of the Lebensborn program. About half of the victims, roughly 200,000 children, were kidnapped from Poland. Other significant sources included today’s Belarus, from which about 30,000 children were abducted; the rest of the USSR furnished another 20,000; and roughly 10,000 were taken from Western and Southeastern Europe. On July 25, 1942, Himmler instructed the SS to send children from Slovenia to Germany. 600 children between the ages of 6 and 12 were given to Lebensborn officials. In his book, Give a Child to the Fuehrer – the Lebensborn Organization, German historian Volker Koop says he found a list of these Slovenian children in a federal archive along with notes from SS Captain George Roedel who marked next to each child’s name “parents shot”.

Thousands of kidnapped children were transferred to the Lebensborn centers in order to be Germanised. In these centers, everything was done to force the children to reject and forget their birth parents. They were told that their parents were dead or had abandoned them and they were given new identities, including new names, birth certificates and even fake lineage and were then sent to Germany to live in institutions or with German families. The children who refused the Nazi education were often beaten. Most of them were finally transferred to concentration camps (often to Kalish in Poland) and exterminated. The others were adopted by SS families.

Figure 4: Nazi occupants kidnapping children from Poland.

The fate of Norwegian mothers and children after the war

In Norway, the women who fraternized with German soldiers, therefore participating, knowingly or unknowingly, in the Lebensborn program, were thought of as “German Whores” by other Norwegians and were disciplined with treatments like publicly having their heads shaved, once the war ended. Many thousands of these women were sent to Norwegian “concentration camps”, where they were virtually slave labourers. Their children, known as the Tyskerbarnas or German children, were taken away from them and sent to special government-run homes, where they were raised as virtual prisoners. The majority of these children never saw their mothers again.

The postwar hatred towards the offspring of German soldiers was so great that government psychologists commissioned to report on the children and their mothers concluded that women who had fraternized with Germans were “of limited talent and asocial psychopaths, some of them seriously backward”. The verdict “father was a German” was indictment enough to send children to mental hospitals, where many were tortured and raped. They were deemed to be dangerous because of their “Nazi genes” and capable of forming a fascist fifth column. There is evidence that drug trials were carried out on Tyskerbarnas and their mothers. Witnesses and documents indicate that the Norwegian military and Oslo University, perhaps at the behest of CIA, conducted experiments on them using LSD, mescaline, and other drugs.

Quisling’s government was desperate to be rid of the problem and attempted to send the Tyskerbarnas as far afield as Brazil and Australia. Sweden was praised for taking several hundred and thus relieving Norway of an embarrassing “problem”. Around 250 were sent “back” to Germany. Of those children who ended up scattered around 128 Norwegian children’s homes, many are social misfits. Few have received proper education or been employed. They were released from their virtual prisons as bewildered adults only in the early 1960s into a world of which they had little or no experience. According with one of their lawyers, Randi Hagen Spydevold, “most have had problems forming relationships or being able to relate to the real world, which is hardly surprising when you’ve spent your formative years being called a German idiot, a no-good bastard who doesn’t deserve to be alive”.

The most famous Lebensborn baby is Anni-Frid Synni Lyngstad, born on November 15, 1945, best known as one of the founding members and lead singers of the Swedish pop band ABBA. She was born not long after the end of the Second World War and the German occupation of Norway in a small village in northern Norway, to a Norwegian mother, Synni Lyngstad, and a German father, Alfred Haase, who was a sergeant in the Wehrmacht.

Haase had returned to Germany when his unit was evacuated and had known nothing about Anni-Frid for more than three decades. After Anni-Frid’s birth, both her mother and grandmother were branded as collaborationist traitors – “horizontal collaboration” – and ostracized. As a result of the ostracism and dim prospects in Norway, Anni-Frid’s mother and grandmother were forced to emigrate to Sweden, where the future pop star’s mother died of kidney failure, aged 21 years, leaving Anni-Frid to be raised solely by her grandmother.

Figure 5: Anni-Frid Lyngstad.

Final thoughts

Beginning in the early 1900s, Germany’s birthrate was in decline. Due to tough economic times, and a shortage of marriage-age men, particularly after Germany’s defeat on November 11, 1918 in the First World War, the use of and women seeking abortions became common practices. By 1935, the Lebensborn program was a method for the Nazi’s to reverse the birthrate decline and, at the same time, to create a superior Aryan master race. The Lebensborn program was not successful and the wave of pain and misery it produced has been felt not only by the survivors and their families, but also by the society as a whole.

Even if this is an uncomfortable subject to talk about, I consider that we need to educate ourselves about these historical taboos in order to help us identify dangerous patterns in society and recognize early on when history might be perilously close to repeating itself.