Lebensborn

The Lebensborn e.V. (e.V. stands for eingetragener Verein or registered association), meaning "fount of life", was founded on 12 December 1935,[1] to counteract falling birth rates in Germany, and to promote Nazi eugenics.[2] Located in Munich, the organization was partly an office within the Schutzstaffel (SS) responsible for certain family welfare programs, and partly a society for Nazi leaders.

On 13 September 1936, Heinrich Himmler wrote the following to members of the SS:

The organisation "Lebensborn e.V." serves the SS leaders in the selection and adoption of qualified children. The organisation "Lebensborn e.V." is under my personal direction, is part of the Race and Settlement Central Bureau of the SS, and has the following obligations:

1. Support racially, biologically and hereditarily valuable families with many children.
2. Placement and care of racially, biologically and hereditarily valuable pregnant women, who, after thorough examination of their and the progenitor's families by the Race and Settlement Central Bureau of the SS, can be expected to produce equally valuable children.
3. Care for the children.
4. Care for the children's mothers.

It is the honorable duty of all leaders of the central bureau to become members of the organisation "Lebensborn e.V.". The application for admission must be filed prior to 23 September 1936.[3]

In 1939, membership stood at 8,000, of which 3,500 were SS leaders.[4] The Lebensborn office was part of SS Rasse und Siedlungshauptamt (SS Race and Settlement Main Office) until 1938, when it was transferred to Hauptamt Persönlicher Stab Reichsführer-SS (Personal Staff of the Reichführer-SS), i.e. directly overseen by Himmler. Leaders of Lebensborn e. V. were SS-Standartenführer Max Sollmann and SS-Oberführer Dr. Gregor Ebner.

Christening of a Lebensborn child, c. 1935–1936, Rhenish Hesse region

Initially the programme 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 programme 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". About 60% of the mothers were unmarried. The program allowed them 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.[5] When dealing with non-SS members, parents and children were usually examined by SS doctors before admission.

The first Lebensborn home (known as "Heim Hochland") opened in 1936, in Steinhöring, a tiny village not far from Munich. The first home outside of Germany opened in Norway in 1941. Many of these facilities were established in confiscated houses and former nursing homes owned by Jews.[2] Leaders of the League of German Girls were instructed to recruit young women with the potential to become good breeding partners for SS officers.[6]

While Lebensborn e. V. established facilities in several occupied countries, its activities were concentrated around Germany, Norway and occupied northeastern Europe, mainly Poland. The main focus in occupied Norway was aiding children born to Norwegian women and fathered by German soldiers. In northeastern Europe the organisation, in addition to services provided to SS members, engaged in the transfer of children, mostly orphans, to families in Germany.

Lebensborn e. V. had or planned to have facilities in the following countries (some were merely field offices):

• Germany: 10
• Austria: 3
• Poland (General Government – the occupied Polish territory and annexed lands of Poland): 6 (8 if Stettin and Bad Polzin are included.)[7]
• Norway: 9
• Denmark: 2
• France: 1 (February 1944 – August 1944) – in Lamorlaye
• Belgium: 1 (March 1943 – September 1944) – in Wégimont, in the municipality of Soumagne
• Netherlands: 1
• Luxembourg: 1

About 8,000 children were born in Lebensborn homes in Germany, and between 8,000 and 12,000 children in Norway.[8] Elsewhere the total number of births was much lower.[8] For more information about Lebensborn in Norway, see war children.

In Norway the Lebensborn organisation handled approximately 250 adoptions. In most of these cases the mothers had agreed to the adoption, but not all were informed that their children would be sent to Germany for adoption. The Norwegian government recovered only 170 of these children after the war.

Kidnapping of Polish children during the Nazi-German resettlement operation in Zamość county

Polish children in Nazi-German labour camp in Dzierżązna near Zgierz

In 1939, the Nazis started to kidnap children from foreign countries – mainly from Yugoslavia and Poland, but also including Russia, Ukraine, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Estonia, Latvia, and Norway[9] – for the Lebensborn program. They started to do this because "It is our duty to take [the children] with us to remove them from their environment ... either we win over any good blood that we can use for ourselves and give it a place in our people or we destroy this blood," Himmler reportedly said.[10]

The Nazis would seize children in full view of the parents. The kidnapped children were administered several tests and were categorised into three groups:

• those considered desirable to be included into the German population,
• those who were acceptable, and
• the unwanted.

The children classified as unwanted were taken to concentration camps to work or were killed. The children from the other groups, if between the ages of 2 and 6, were placed with families in the programme to be brought up by them in a kind of foster child status. Children of ages 6 to 12 were placed in German boarding schools. The schools assigned the children new German names and taught them to be proud to be part of Germany. They forced the children to forget their birth parents and erased any records of their ancestry. Those who resisted Germanisation were beaten and, if a child continued to rebel, he or she would be sent to a concentration camp.[11]

In the final stages of the war, the files of all children kidnapped for the programme were destroyed. As a result, researchers have found it nearly impossible to learn how many children were taken. The Polish government has claimed that 10,000 children were kidnapped, and less than 15% were returned to their biological parents.[10] Other estimates include numbers as high as 200,000, although according to Dirk Moses a more likely number is around 20,000.[12]

Max Sollmann before his trial at Nuremberg

After the war, the branch of the Lebensborn organisation operating in north-eastern Europe was accused of kidnapping children deemed "racially valuable" in order to resettle them with German families. However, of approximately 10,000 foreign-born children located after the war in the American-controlled area of Germany, in the trial of the leaders of the Lebensborn organisation (United States of America v. Ulrich Greifelt, et al.), the court found that 340 had been handled by Lebensborn e. V. The accused were acquitted on charges of kidnapping.

The court found ample evidence of an existing programme of the kidnapping or forced movement of children in north-eastern Europe, but concluded that these activities were carried out by individuals who were not members of Lebensborn. Exactly how many children were moved by Lebensborn or other organisations remains unknown due to the destruction of archives by SS members prior to fleeing the advancing Allied forces.

From the trial's transcript:[13]

The prosecution has failed to prove with the requisite certainty the participation of Lebensborn, and the defendants connected there with in the kidnapping programme conducted by the Nazis. While the evidence has disclosed that thousands upon thousands of children were unquestionably kidnapped by other agencies or organisations and brought into Germany, the evidence has further disclosed that only a small percentage of the total number ever found their way into Lebensborn. And of this number only in isolated instances did Lebensborn take children who had a living parent. The majority of those children in any way connected with Lebensborn were orphans of ethnic Germans. Upon the evidence submitted, the defendant Sollmann is found not guilty on counts one and two of the indictment.

After Germany's surrender, the press reported on the unusually good weight and health of the "super babies". They spent time outdoors in sunlight and received two baths a day. Everything that came into contact with the babies was disinfected first. Nurses ensured that the children ate everything given to them.[14] Until the last days of the war, the mothers and the children at maternity homes got the best treatment available, including food, although others in the area were starving. Once the war ended, local communities often took revenge on the women, beating them, cutting off their hair, and running them out of the community. Many Lebensborn children were born to unwed mothers. After the war, Lebensborn survivors were often subjected to ostracization.

Himmler's effort to secure a "racially pure" Greater Germany, sloppy journalism on the subject, as well as Nazi ideology retained by some, led to persistent false assumptions about the programme. The main misconception was that the programme involved coercive breeding. The first stories reporting that Lebensborn was a coercive breeding programme can be found in the German magazine Revue, which ran a series on the subject in the 1950s.

The programme did intend to promote the growth of Aryan populations, through encouraging relationships between German soldiers and Nordic women in occupied countries. Access to Lebensborn was restricted in accordance with the Nordicist eugenic and racial policies of Nazism, which could be referred to as supervised selective breeding. Recently discovered records and ongoing testimony of Lebensborn children – and some of their parents – shows that some SS men did sire children in Himmler's Lebensborn program.[15] This was widely rumored within Germany during the period of the programme.[16]

• Clay, Catrine; Leapman, Michael. (1995). Master race: the Lebensborn experiment in Nazi Germany. Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton, ISBN 0340589787. (German version: Herrenmenschen – Das Lebensborn-Experiment der Nazis. Publisher: Heyne-TB, 1997)
• "Children of World War II: the Hidden Enemy Legacy." Ed. Kjersti Ericsson and Eva Simonsen. New York: Berg Publishers, 2005.
• Marc Hillel and Clarissa Henry. Of Pure Blood. 1976. ISBN 007028895X (French version: Au nom de la race. Publisher: Fayard)
• von Oelhafen, Ingrid; Tate, Tim. (2016) Hitler's Forgotten Children: A True Story of the Lebensborn Program and One Woman's Search for Her Real Identity. New York: Penguin Random House. ISBN 978-0425283325
• Trials of War Criminals – Before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals Under Control Council Law No. 10. Vol. 5: United States v. Ulrich Greifelt, et al. (Case 8: 'RuSHA Case'). Publisher: US Government Printing Office, District of Columbia, 1950.
• Thompson, Larry V. Lebensborn and the Eugenics Policy of the Reichsführer-SS. Central European History 4 (1971): 54–77.
• Wältermann, Dieter. The Functions and Activities of the Lebensborn Organization Within the SS, the Nazi Regime, and Nazi Ideology. The Honors Journal II (1985: 5–23).

• Marc Hillel, Au nom de la race, Éditions Fayard, 1975. ISBN 225301592X.
• Nancy Huston, Lignes de faille, Éd. Actes Sud, 2006. ISBN 2742762590.
• Nancy Huston, Fault Lines, Atlantic Books, ISBN 978-1843548522, 2007.
• Katherine Maroger, Les racines du silence, Éditions Anne Carrière, 2008. ISBN 978-2843375057.
• Boris Thiolay: Lebensborn. La fabrique des enfants parfaits. Enqête sur ces Francais nés dans les maternités SS. (Titel aus dem Französischen übersetzt: Lebensborn. Die Fabrik der perfekten Kinder). Éditions Flammarion, Paris, 2012.

• Dorothee Schmitz-Köster: Deutsche Mutter bist du bereit – Alltag im Lebensborn. Publisher: Aufbau-Verlag, 2002.
• Gisela Heidenreich: Das endlose Jahr. Die langsame Entdeckung der eigenen Biographie – ein Lebensbornschicksal. Published: 2002.
• Georg Lilienthal: Der Lebensborn e. V. – Ein Instrument nationalsozialistischer Rassenpolitik. Publisher: Fischer, 1993 (possibly republished in 2003).
• Kare Olsen: Vater: Deutscher. – Das Schicksal der Norwegischen Lebensbornkinder und ihrer Mütter von 1940 bis heute. 2002. (the authoritative resource on Lebensborn in Norway and available in Norwegian: Krigens barn: De norske krigsbarna og deres mødre. Published: Aschehoug 1998. ISBN 8203290906).
• Jörg Albrecht: Rohstoff für Übermenschen. Published: Artikel in Zeit-Punkte 3/2001 zum Thema Biomedizin, pp. 16–18.
• Benz, W.; Graml, H.; Weiß, H.(1997): Enzyklopädie des Nationalsozialismus. Published: Digitale Bibliothek, CD-ROM, Band 25, Directmedia GmbH, Berlin.

• Kåre Olsen: "Vater: Deutscher." Das Schicksal der norwegischen Lebensbornkinder und ihrer Mütter von 1940 bis heute. Campus, Frankfurt 2002, ISBN 3593370026