None of the structures of Nazi Germany were so shrouded in a veil of secrecy as Lebensborn. The number of myths born around him pushes even the legendary Ahnenerbe into the background. What was this project really? A human cultivation laboratory? Or an ordinary SS brothel?
The idea of the Lebensborn program goes back to a number of the main tenets of the Nazi ideology - if a German child was conceived, it must be born. The birth of powerless and sick people is unnatural and must be corrected. The "precious blood" of the Aryans should never be mixed with the "inferior" representatives. Lebensborn was not an eugenic organization in which fair-haired and blue-eyed women and men made children to the Fuehrer. Nor was she a charity caring for single mothers and their offspring. "Lebensborn" can be described as an SS institution, an instrument of Hitler's racial politics, focused on the creation of a "new master race", as well as the destruction of subhumans.
The organization, whose name is translated from German as "source of life", was created long before the Second World War, on December 12, 1935, and the project was led by none other than SS Reichsfuehrer Heinrich Himmler. "Lebensborn" was a continuation of the "Mutter und Kind" - "Mother and Child" project, started in 1934. The official goal of the society was to combat the increased number of abortions, the annual number of which in the territory of pre-war Germany reached a catastrophic figure of six hundred thousand. The sharp drop in the birth rate seriously worried the "great minds of the nation", because the country was preparing for bloody conquests and the redistribution of the whole world. And who will fight for their country when women do not give birth to soldiers? Then the grandiose plan for the revival and purification of the Aryan race by creating special detention centers ripened in the Reichsfuehrer's head,in which women could give birth and leave babies in the care of the state. At the beginning of the war, about eighty million people lived in Germany, and by the end of the war Hitler planned to increase the population to one hundred and twenty million. Nobody was interested in the moral side of the issue, because the “great” goal justified any means to achieve it.
In an effort to increase fertility, Nazi racial theorists also wanted to introduce polygamy. Himmler, creating Lebensborn, emphasized the position of the first wife, having coined the term "domina" for this. The second wife, in his opinion, could be received by a knight of the Golden or Knight's Cross, as the highest award. However, later Himmler proposed to reward the second wife of the Knights of the Iron Cross of the first degree and the owners of the gold / silver buckle for hand-to-hand combat.
The main slogan of the project, calling on young women in Germany to participate in the program to increase the birth rate, was the phrase: "Give a child to the Fuhrer!" From now on it was not considered shameful to conceive a child out of wedlock, especially if his father was a thoroughbred Aryan soldier of the Wehrmacht. The future representative of the "nation of masters" underwent a symbolic rite of baptism, during which the mother, on behalf of the baby, swore allegiance to Nazi ideology. In his book "My Struggle", Adolf Hitler summarized the essence of the program, which was supposed to "give the world offspring, which is a likeness of God, and not a cross between a man and a monkey."
All young women of the Third Reich, especially members of the Union of German Girls, were constantly indoctrinated, pointing out their high destiny and duty to the country. The woman in labor was sent to one of the twelve special maternity hospitals with a high level of medical care, and after the birth of the child, he automatically became the property of the nation. Either the mother herself could raise the baby, while the state paid her an allowance, or she signed the appropriate papers and the newborn was transferred to the Lebensborn orphanage, from where he could later be assigned to be raised in a proven German family, where the ideas of the “new order” were instilled in him about the future dominance of the Aryan race in Europe.
A small "nuance" when accepting a child in an orphanage was only that both parents of the baby had to submit special certificates about the true racial purity of the future citizen of the "great nation", the absence of chronic and genetic diseases, as well as convictions in his ancestors. Also, to help the workers of the program, a special "Bureau of Race and Overpopulation" was created, which could by its decision prohibit communication between people whose ancestors suffered from any hereditary diseases. In addition, the employees of the bureau carried out thorough checks of the genealogical lines of people who were going to marry in order to identify unwanted impurities of Jewish blood. And every SS officer before marriage was obliged to provide a special certificate, indicating that his bride and her ancestors, who lived up to 1750, were purebred Ario-Germans!After the “racial” assessment, each woman was assigned to one of three groups: conforming to the norms, having the average European indicators, and racially inferior. About fifty-six percent of women who submitted their applications to Lebensborn were refused for various reasons.
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Each mother participating in the project was given a brooch with the "Leben" runes, symbolizing life, and "Sieg", which was the symbol of the SS, under whose leadership the organization was.
After birth, babies who were children of SS officers, according to tradition, received as a gift a silver spoon and a cup, which were made in a special factory near Munich. And women who gave birth to four or more children were awarded a mother's cross and a silver candlestick with an engraving stating that it "is only a link in an endless chain of generations."
In 1938, the Lebensborn organization, which had grown to nine departments, was incorporated into the Personal Headquarters of the Reichsfuehrer SS. Oberführer Gregor Ebner and Standartenführer Max Solmann were appointed as its leaders. Soon, the Reich found its own human resources insufficient, and from 1941 the Lebensborn program entered a new stage, the purpose of which was to "Germanize the Slavic peoples." For this, in Yugoslavia, the Czech Republic, Poland, and from the middle of 1943 and in the USSR, SS officers were ordered to confiscate children who had blonde hair and blue eyes. The terrible facts of the kidnapping of babies right on the street are confirmed by numerous eyewitnesses of the events. There are cases when children were taken away at the age of only a few days from birth. Thus, growing up, the children not only did not know anything about their real parents,but also what nation they really belong to.
Human reproduction has reached a huge scale in Norway, since the Scandinavians have always been considered the closest in blood to the Aryan race. And since the four hundred thousandth army of the Germans occupied the territory of Norway for a long six years, only according to official data, from 1940 to 1945, twelve thousand babies were born in Norway under the Lebensborn project. Denmark also fell into the racial plans of the Nazis. The Wehrmacht command reported that from September 1941 to September 1942, seven hundred cases of the birth of children from the German military were recorded in this country. But the real figure was much higher. The Belgian branch of Lebensborn opened in the spring of 1943. However, the establishment was so unpopular that the SS was forced to provide it with armed guards. And after thathow one of the few German kids was strangled at the branch, all the local nurses were tortured. In France, by the end of 1943, the number of German illegitimate children reached eighty-five thousand. The figures are unfounded, however, the SS leadership opened a branch of the organization here too.
A record number of "nurseries" for the future successors of the Aryan nation was opened in Norway - nine, in Poland there were only three, in Denmark - two, and in France, the Netherlands and Luxembourg - one institution each.
The meat grinder on the Eastern Front was not like the "champagne campaign". With the Soviet Union, in accordance with Keitel's order, which demanded "to use any means even against women and children," the Germans waged a war of complete extermination. Therefore, according to declassified data, there were no official Lebensborn shelters on the territory of our country. However, this does not refute the numerous facts of theft of infants and schoolchildren in the German-occupied Soviet territories. A shocking interview with Max Solman, one of Lebensborn's chiefs, confirmed that the number of children stolen during the war years, according to various estimates, could be from five to fifty thousand. SS officers gave preference to children under the age of three, because they quickly forgot their native language and where they came from. Soviet children were placed not only in orphanages, but also given up for education in trustworthy German families. So, the project, under the guise of saving the lives of innocent babies, gradually turned into a factory for the production and cultivation of future members of the "ideal and purebred Nordic race", which were planned to populate the territories of nearby Czech Republic, Poland and the Soviet Union after their occupation.
If the parents from whom the child was taken away tried to resist, they were shot without hesitation. The kids were collected in special detention centers and carefully examined. Those who met all the parameters were sent to Germany, and the rest had to go to the gas chamber. Often the prey of the SS were kids living with their parents in partisan detachments. The circumstances of the removal of the children of partisans after the defeat in 1942 of the underground partisan cell in Slovenia are known. All babies under the age of five were recognized as belonging to the "master race" and sent for "adaptation" to the Lebensborn shelters. The Germans shot adults and older children right on the spot.
Maria Dolezhalova-Shupikova, who was only ten years old at the time of her abduction in 1942, recalls that she and other children were taken directly from school in the Czech village of Lidice, located near Prague. In total, twenty-three kids were taken from the village, and the rest were either shot or sent to concentration camps. On June 10, their village was practically wiped off the face of the earth. It was the revenge of the fascists for the fact that the SS Obergruppenführer Heydrich was eliminated by the partisans living in the village. Maria still wonders why the Nazis left her alive. Unlike the rest of the children, who had a purely Aryan appearance, she stood out for her taller height and brown hair. First, the children were sent to one of the Lebensborn nurseries. Living conditions there were simply awful. Everyone slept right on the ground in the open air,clothes quickly turned into rags, children were seized by lice, and the food was only a terrible-tasting gruel. The smallest of them was only two weeks old. Maria met children from Yugoslavia and Poland in this place, but there was no one from the USSR. However, she had heard many stories about the Russians being sent to a special shelter located near Krakow. After a short stay in this "Lebensborn" shelter, Maria was handed over to be raised in a childless German family. New documents were issued for the girl with a completely different name - Ingeborg Schiller, and over the next three years she completely forgot her native language, because she was forbidden to speak Czech. Every word spoken in her native tongue was followed by a severe punishment, accompanied by teachings about what a great honor she had to belong to the race of masters, and how proud she should be. However, the girl could not forget where she was from.
Heinz Wierst, a renowned professor and historian from Dresden, has been studying the problem of child abduction for a long time. He came to the conclusion that the first "experiments" of the Nazis with the abduction of Soviet babies that met the requirements of the Third Reich began in the spring of 1942. In accordance with the project of the chief "expert on the eastern lands" Erhard Wetzel, working for the Fuhrer, it was supposed to Germanize a quarter of the population of Russia. In this regard, the abduction of children in the USSR has become truly massive. After receiving the appropriate order from the founder of "Lebensborn" Himmler, according to the data found by Wetzel, in August and September 1943 alone, ten thousand of our children were sent to the orphanages of the organization.
“Potential Aryans” were most often searched for in the northern regions of Russia, Pskov and Novgorod regions. A large number of them were exported from the Bryansk and Smolensk regions, as well as from the Crimea, which the German leadership planned to turn into one large settlement of the Lebensborn pupils in the future. Upon admission to the Lebensborn orphanage, Slavic children were subjected to a special procedure for assigning an ancient Germanic name. It is also known about the abductions of women of "Aryan appearance". The Nazis prepared for these matters in advance and especially carefully. For example, even before the entry of German troops into Kharkov, special agents of the fascists already had information about where young women who were suitable for the reproduction of the "great nation" lived. Immediately after the capture of the area, special teams drove around all the addresses indicated in the list and took out the girls,placing them at the disposal of SS units working for the Lebensborn program. One can only guess about their terrible fate.
In the Czech town of Lidice, you can find a monument to the children who died in 1942, the participants of the Lebensborn program. Of one hundred and five children for adaptation, the Germans selected only seventeen people. The rest were killed.
According to the plans of the Fuehrer, the Lebensborn kids were to become the basis of a new race, having received the material support and care of the German elite. Supervised by representatives of the order of the SS, they were to be promoted to leading positions, which would create a whole network of influential pro-German-minded people capable of controlling the territories of European countries and regions of the USSR. One of the most terrible pages of history is to turn the children of countries that fought Nazis into staunch supporters of the Reich. It is very fortunate that these plans were destroyed along with the fall of Nazi Germany.
Initially, creating a program for the revival of the nation, Himmler planned to reach the figure of one hundred thousand lives of German babies saved from abortions. However, scientists tend to argue that the real numbers are near the twenty thousand children mark. Be that as it may, the true state of affairs will remain a mystery. In the spring of 1945, the SS, pressed by the Allied troops, hastily closed the maternity hospitals, taking the children and secret files to the main house in the German suburb of Steinhöring near Munich. On April 28, 1945, when the Americans were literally on the doorstep, the project archive with all the data was burned by its employees. Other sources claim that all the papers were thrown into the Isar River. In any case, all the information about the children given up to German families has simply disappeared. Most of them have never learned and will never learn the story of their birth and their real parents.
The most severe ordeals befell those who at the end of the war were in the Lebensborn shelters in Norway. The Nazis did not manage to destroy all the documents there, and after the surrender of Germany, the anger of compatriots fell upon the participants in the program. The Norwegian leadership only encouraged such an attitude towards the “reluctant Aryans”. Children, who were born through the intercourse of German officers and Norwegian women, were subjected not only to persecution and abuse, many of them, together with their mothers, had to go through a real hell. About eight thousand "German bastards", as they were called in their homeland, were exiled to Australia. Those who remained in the country lived in an atmosphere of constant fear, they were threatened and humiliated, and the authorities were officially accused of mental retardation. The women were either sent to concentration camps or performed the most humiliating and hard work. The result of this policy was the mass suicide of the Lebensborn victims who simply could not withstand the moral pressure. Many of these children started using drugs and became criminals.
The soloist of the Swedish group ABBA is Frida Lingstad, a Lebensborn child. Her father is German captain Alfred Hase, and her mother is Norwegian. After the country's liberation from German occupation, 17-year-old Sini Lingstad fled to neighboring Sweden, where anti-German sentiment was not so strong. When Frida found out about her father, she embarked on an independent search and found him. But the meeting, to put it mildly, was very cold. She never tried to communicate with him again.
At the Nuremberg Trials, members of the Himmler Children's Factories were charged with three charges: crimes against humanity, plundering of the occupied territories and belonging to the SS. After a five-month investigation, examination of documents and interrogation of witnesses, the American tribunal issued a final verdict on March 10, 1948. According to it, the head of Lebensborn, Max Solman, together with his closest associates, were acquitted on the first two counts and convicted on the third count.
The Lightning Houses, named for the symbolism of the Lebensborn project, have ground many lives and souls of children. After the end of the war, only a quarter of the kids from Eastern Europe, taken from their parents and passed through SS incubators, returned home. The fate of the rest remained unknown, including almost all Soviet children. In modern Germany, a special organization "Lebenspuren" has been opened, the purpose of which is to help those who have learned the truth about their birth or are trying to find real biological relatives outside the country. Many historians and researchers are also trying to lift part of the veil hiding information about where the thousands of innocent babies and children stolen from their true parents all over Europe have gone.
The worst thing in everything that happened is that the experience of the Third Reich did not go unnoticed. It gets continued over and over again. Europe is dying out and the worst of all is in the European North. Right-wing extremists from Germany and Scandinavia are experiencing real panic about this. The eugenic ideas of the "great ancestors" do not give them rest, as well as the desire to see themselves as rulers of the world and rulers of human destinies. In 2004, Jürgen Reiger, a 45-year-old ultra-right-wing lawyer from Hamburg, decided to continue the terrible experiment.
To raise children of the pure Aryan race, he acquired an estate of six hundred and fifty hectares in central Sweden. The money for the purchase was taken from the fund of the SS man Wilhelm Teiten, who became rich in the post-war years on stock market speculation. Lonely "Nazis" and young couples who have passed ideological and racial selection, flock here from all over Europe. The first results of the work of the "Nazi stable" will be known very soon.
Author: Igor Sulimov