The registered partnership "Lebensborn" is mentioned in history as an educational boarding school for racially pure youth, as an elite brothel for the brave SS men. The initiator of this SS institution was Reichsfuehrer Heinrich Himmler.
“We are all the Fuehrer's fiancés here,” said a young woman in the uniform of the Union of German Girls. The frame was filled by the brave guys in the SS uniform, the girls giggled in shame. The head of the boarding house spoke from the rostrum about his duty to the descendants.
This is a scene from the movie Lebensborn by Berlin producer Arthur Brauner. The film was to become a "sensation for the 1960/61 season," and its screening was to remove the greatest taboos of post-war society: SS and sex. Brauner wanted to show the Germans the real unnaturalness in Himmler's imaginary union of women in labor, the registered Lebensborn partnership, with crude dialogues and an examination of German flesh. However, the film caused a scandal. His demonstrations took place under the protection of the police. A hail of protests and denunciations rained down. The Berlin producer fell victim to a legend that still circulates in society today. It was about an "elite brothel" for the SS, about "breeding farms for the Nordic younger generation", about pimping under the control of the state. Reichsfuehrer SS Heinrich Himmler himself was to blame for such erroneous assessments,who has classified his favorite project. Before the fall of the Third Reich, hardly any outsider could get acquainted with Himmler's dubious partnership.
At the same time, the origins of the "Closed Partnership" were not at all sensational. In 1935, at the initiative of SS chief Heinrich Himmler, ten SS members founded the Lebensborn Private Partnership with the seat of the board in the confiscated Munich house of Thomas Mann. Formally an independent partnership, Himmler's creation was part of the SS apparatus from the very beginning and thus was under its direct control. The purpose of the partnership was, according to its charter, "to support large families, valuable in racial and hereditary biological terms." But it was, in fact, not about the National Socialist measures to support the family.
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“When I organized Lebensborn,” Himmler confided in his personal physician and massage therapist Felix Kersten, “I proceeded from the premise that, first of all, an urgent need should be satisfied in order to enable racially high-grade women giving birth out of wedlock to give birth free of charge and in the last weeks before the birth of a child, in a harmonious atmosphere, calmly devote oneself to the upcoming great event."
The seemingly charitable organization was in reality a turning point and a main link in the National Socialist racial ideology. Robert Kempner, the chief prosecutor of the Allies in Nuremberg, even saw in the Lebensborn organization "perhaps the main grain of the entire Nazi movement."
At its peak, the Himmler partnership had nine boarding houses in Germany and dozens in the annexed and occupied countries. Everywhere there was talk of an increase in the number of births. For Himmler, this was the theme of his life. At the age of 26, without a wife and children, after reading a book called "Nations, their death and emergence," he wrote in his diary:
Should have changed. Sixteen years later, in 1942, an attentive observer drew attention to “the number of pregnant women and even more to the dignity with which they stick out a full belly. Women wear belly as a party badge. The whole of Germany has turned into a solid meat-packing plant. " An impressive eyewitness was Viktor Klemperer, who eked out a miserable existence in the Dresden "Jewish home".
The National Socialists have written a new fertility cult on their banner. “A people who have a lot of children has the right to be a great power and rule the world,” Himmler taught the SS Gruppenführer in peacetime.
Himmler was simply obsessed with the mission of providing the "master race" with as many recruits as possible. A good example was to be set by the members of the SS as the "strike force of the blood idea." Himmler called upon his soldiers to fulfill their "national duty" at every opportunity. The Reichsführer dealt with stubborn bachelors personally.
“Dear Arnold,” Himmler admonished one SS Hauptsturmführer in writing, “as far as I know, you are the only son of your parents. In my opinion, you must finally marry and make sure that the Arnold family does not die out. I am waiting for an answer to this letter. The report on the execution did not take long.
The National Socialist Targeting said yes to the German future - and thus yes to the child.
Childless marriages were unacceptable for the SS chief. For those SS men who could not boast of at least four children, Himmler's membership was a must.
“The issue of the number of children is not a private matter of everyone,” said Himmler’s worldview credo, “but a duty to our ancestors and our people. However, creating good marriages is pointless if numerous offspring do not come out of them."
In the secluded boarding houses of the Lebensborn organization, imposing buildings outside the city, the family policy of the SS, as Himmler understood it, was implemented. What was practiced here as small scale trial experiments was conceived as a model of society for an era after the expected "final victory."
Above all, for the SS chief, this meant making every effort to prevent abortions, which he estimated at 800,000 annually.
In the case of women going for an abortion, it was, as he believed, mostly unmarried. Therefore, in Himmler's Lebensborn boarding houses, unmarried pregnant women had to have the opportunity to give birth to a child incognito, away from their place of residence. With the care of the so-called "brown" sisters, unmarried mothers spent most of their pregnancies and the postpartum period under the protection of boarding houses. The offspring were registered in the registry offices belonging to the organization, without notifying the state authorities. This was a social and political innovation in an era when working women were immediately fired at the first sign of pregnancy. Himmler, once a Catholic believer, rejected the traditional boycott of unmarried mothers by society and the church. He wanted children, legally or illegitimate, all he cared about wasso that the mother was "good blood." “I rejoice in every child, no matter how he was born,” admitted the chief of the black SS order.
However, at the Lebensborn boarding houses there was more than a secret birth. The condition for admission to one of the maternity and orphanages was "racially pure" pedigrees of both parents, which were supposed to date back to 1800. The father of the child, usually a member of the SS, whose identity was hidden from society, had to prove to the Lebensborn administration his unequivocally "Aryan" origin. Admission to Lebensborn meant total bureaucratic and ideological control. The “racial manifestation” and “worldview orientation” of unmarried mothers were assessed even after they were discharged and without their knowledge. The administrations of the boarding houses had to comprehensively assess women in the so-called "RF questionnaires", which, like secret documents, went directly to the Reichsfuehrer (hence the name). It began with “willingness to breastfeed” and “ability to breastfeed” and ended with character studies. The goal was to test how fit Himmler's charges were for the planned "renaissance of Nordic traits" in the future.
Lebensborn is an SS institution that supports only those mothers and children who match the selection,”wrote one of the competent SS doctors shortly before the end of the war. If the product of this "Aryan selection" did not meet the high expectations of Himmler's organization, that is, the newborn had defects or even deformities, he was immediately transferred from the protection of boarding houses to public shelters and thus sent to the euthanasia program. At that time, children for the most part died in a short time. Thus, helping unmarried mothers became selection from a "racial" point of view, at the other end of which was selection for extermination.
Shrouded in mystery, the aura of the boarding houses "Lsbensborn" soon gave rise to rumors
In the Third Reich, whispered rumors of alleged "help with conception" were already circulating. In July 1944, it really came to an official inquiry in the SS of a certain Lisa-Maria K., whether there really were "so-called fertilization boarding houses." Apparently at the "Fraulein K." there was such a need, because she asked for an address. The SS leadership reacted nervously, and its chief ordered an investigation into the spread of the rumor. There were interrogations and secret inquiries. Himmler publicly dismissed any talk of the Lebensborn boarding houses as "breeding farms or breeding centers" (his own words) and, as a habit, he constantly repeated the same phrases about "honor and dignity of the family" that lie at the center of SS policy in family relationship. But in secret he took the first stepswhich would ultimately result in precisely such a program of breeding a "master race" from which he publicly rejected.
On May 8, 1942, Himmler wrote from the Fuehrer headquarters to his aide-de-camp, SS Gruppenfuehrer Paul: “Dear Paul, I gave top secret to SS Standartenfuehrer Solman (chairman of the Lebensborn Association) the task of planning and expanding the main branch (of the Lebensborn program in Munich). the view of about 400,000 women already existing today, who, due to the war and those who died in it, cannot find husbands. The building must be appropriate and representative in accordance with the noble thoughts and honor of unmarried mothers. The happiness of motherhood for the good of the fatherland, without husbands and with the help of the Lebensborn organization - then it really could be the “breeding farms” about which the legend speaks and which Arthur Brauner awakened to life in his film.
An ambitious project stuck in the turmoil of war
Not a single case of "controlled breeding" has been documented. Employees of the Lebensborn program always gave a negative answer to the relevant inquiries, referring to the fact that “such a delicate and difficult question” is decided only by interested parties and does not correspond to the charter goals of the partnership.
Moreover, such a step would be quite inherent in the system:
In the midst of the war, however, peace on the family front was the highest demand. Nothing was supposed to undermine the morale of the troops. After his experiment with the "copulation order", Himmler was careful: in 1939, two months after the outbreak of the war, in a secret order, he demanded that his soldiers take care of numerous offspring, "even if this went beyond the probably necessary bourgeois laws and customs … even outside of marriage. " The reaction was reversed. The SS chief had to cancel the copulation order. Such "delicate problems", as Goebbels put it, in the case of an order for artificial "fertilization assistance", should have been postponed for now.
“After the end of the war, we will have enough time,” he wrote in his diary. Himmler will know that the minister of propaganda is at the same time with him on this issue. How far, in the event of a "final victory" for the Germans, would eventually go to the creation of semi-state "human factories" with the aim of "improving the German people" remains speculative. The further course of the war thwarted the implementation of ambitious plans.
The real crimes of the Lebensborn organization were carried out in the territories occupied by the Germans under cover of night.
“The SS men came with a shepherd dog. She looked like a wolf to me then. Pole Aloyziy Tvardetsky was not even four years old when he, the only child, was kidnapped from his mother on the instructions of the Reichsfuehrer SS. His blond hair and clear blue eyes were the cause of his misery. His mother had to dress him in the middle of the night and take him to the nearest train station, where other mothers were already waiting with their children. "There they snatched me out of her hands and put me on the train."
For the children thus deported, there was ONE in common: they fit the templates of the National Socialist racial doctrine. They looked like the German occupiers imagined the Nordic people: tall, blonde hair, blue eyes, a suitable skull shape. While their mothers were doing forced labor, young children in the orphanages of the occupation authorities were measured and cataloged. "Foreign" chosen ones were intended for the German Reich.
“I really intend to steal German blood all over the world,” Himmler declared back in 1938 to the commanders of the SS regiment.
"All the good blood in the world, all the German blood that is not on the German side may one day be our ruin."
From the very beginning, the enterprising Lebensborn company was closely involved in the widely planned deportation action. A Lebensborn plenipotentiary coordinated the transportation of the selected children on site.
Mothers were falsely assured that their children were being taken to the Reich to improve nutrition, but no one believed in the "treatment" of these starving sons and daughters of "subhumans". The path of the "racially valuable" children went through the Polish transfer camp Kalisz to one of the Lebensborn boarding houses. There they made Aloysius a real member of the Hitler Youth from the Pole: “The process of Germanization began here rather quickly. I really felt like a German boy, of course, I honored Hitler. " Lebensborn's Munich headquarters, with its expertise in keeping child records secret, helped in the Germanization of Eastern European names. Thus, Aloizy Tvardetsky turned into Alfred Hartman, whom the partnership handed over to a childless family on the Rhine, loyal to the regime, for the purpose of subsequent adoption. Only twelve years later, Aloiziy was able to see his own mother.
More than 350 cases of "numbness" in "Lebensborn" of "foreign" children from Eastern and Southern Europe have been documented. Among them is also a group of children from Lidice, who, being classified as "good race", were sorted out before the destruction of the entire village and were to be transferred to German families through "Lebensborn". To this were added more than 200 Norwegian children, conceived by German soldiers with Norwegian women "of particular value in terms of appearance and heredity", who brought "racially valuable hereditary material" to the Reich. The true number of deported and "Germanized" children, apparently, will never be able to establish. Fellowship employees burned the original documents as US troops approached the main Hochland building near Munich and left the children to fend for themselves.who, before the end of the war, were evacuated there from all boarding houses. These people all their lives carried the burden of the unknown of their origin.
Lebensborn's management sat in the dock in Nuremberg. However, neither the partnership's role in "racial selection" nor its active assistance in the large-scale kidnapping of children in the German-occupied territories was condemned. The Allied judges saw in the partnership, first of all, an innocent charitable organization, namely, boarding houses for mothers and children who, in their area of responsibility, did “everything in their power” for foreign children.
“We were not engaged in professional pandering. There was nothing like that in Asbensborn. Lebensborn employees before the Allied Tribunal in Nuremberg.