Lebensborn e.V. (literally: "Fount of Life")
was an SS-initiated, state-supported, registered
association in Nazi Germany with the goal
of raising the birth rate of "Aryan" children
of persons classified as "racially pure and
healthy" based on Nazi racial hygiene and
health ideology.
Lebensborn provided welfare to its mostly
unmarried mothers, encouraged anonymous births
by unmarried women at their maternity homes,
and mediated adoption of these children by
likewise "racially pure and healthy" parents,
particularly SS members and their families.
The Cross of Honour of the German Mother was
given to the women who bore the most Aryan
children.
Abortion was legalised by the Nazis for disabled
children.
Initially set up in Germany in 1935, Lebensborn
expanded into several occupied European countries
with Germanic populations during the Second
World War.
It included the selection of "racially worthy"
orphans for adoption and care for children
born from Aryan women who had been in relationships
with SS members.
It originally excluded children born from
unions between common soldiers and foreign
women, because there was no proof of racial
purity on both sides.
During the war, many children were kidnapped
from their parents and judged by "aryan" criteria
for their suitability to be raised in Lebensborn
homes, and fostering by German families.
At the Nuremberg Trials, much direct evidence
was found of the kidnapping of children by
Nazi Germany, across Greater Germany during
the period 1939-45.
== Background ==
The Lebensborn e.
V. (e.V. stands for eingetragener Verein or
registered association), meaning "fount of
life", was founded on 12 December 1935, to
counteract falling birth rates in Germany,
and to promote Nazi eugenics.
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.
In 1939, membership stood at 8,000, of which
3,500 were SS leaders.
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.
== Implementation ==
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.
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.
Leaders of the League of German Girls were
instructed to recruit young women with the
potential to become good breeding partners
for SS officers.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.)
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: 1About 8,000 children were born
in Lebensborn homes in Germany, and between
8,000 and 12,000 children in Norway.
Elsewhere the total number of births was much
lower.
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 all but
80 of these children after the war.
== Germanisation ==
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 – 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.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.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.
Other estimates include numbers as high as
200,000, although according to Dirk Moses
a more likely number is around 20,000.
== Post-war trial ==
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:
The prosecution has failed to prove with the
requisite certainty the participation of Lebensborn,
and the defendants connected therewith 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.
== Post-war ==
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.
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 and sloppy journalism on the
subject in the early years after the war led
to 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 1961 German film Der Lebensborn purported
that young girls were forced to mate with
Nazi men in their camps.
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.
This was widely rumored within Germany during
the period of the programme.
== Self-help groups and aftermath ==
Help, recognition, and justice for Lebensborn
survivors have been varied.
In Norway, children born to Norwegian mothers
by Nazi fathers were allegedly often bullied,
raped and abused after the war, and placed
in mental institutions.
The Norwegian government attempted to deport
Lebensborn to Germany, Brazil, and Australia
but did not succeed.
A group of survivors attempted to fight the
Norwegian government into admitting complicity.
In 2008, their case before the European Court
of Human Rights was dismissed, but they were
each offered a £8,000 token from the Norwegian
government.In November 2006, in the German
town of Wernigerode, an open meeting took
place among several Lebensborn children, with
the intention of dispelling myths and encouraging
those affected to investigate their origins.Sweden
took in several hundred Lebensborn children
from Norway after the war.
A famous survivor is Anni-Frid Lyngstad, a
member of the music group ABBA.
Her father was a sergeant in the Wehrmacht,
and her mother was Norwegian; to escape persecution
after the war, her grandmother took Anni-Frid
to Sweden.Other countries that had Lebensborn
clinics include France, Belgium, the Netherlands,
Poland and Luxembourg.
General documents on Lebensborn activities
are administered by International Tracing
Service and by German Federal Archives.
The association Verein kriegskind.de is among
those that published search efforts (Suchbitten)
to identify Lebensborn children.
== See also ==
European sexuality leading up to and during
World War II
Lidice
War children
RuSHA Trial
Desaparecidos – Children of the Desaparecidos
in Argentina were taken by the military junta
in the Dirty War and placed with junta supporters
for adoption and raising.
Eugenics
Breeding back
