Lebensborn ("Source of Life", in German) was one of several programs initiated by Nazi leader Heinrich Himmler to secure the racial heredity of the Third Reich. Following the end of the Second World War it has become a widespread notion that this particular program intended to secretly establish houses where the Nazi regime would methodically breed, through copulation, racially pure humans to create a strong race of Aryans.

Background

The Lebensborn e.V. (eingetragener Verein) organization was founded on December 12, 1935. Located in Munich, the organization was partly an office within the Schutzstaffel (SS) and responsible for certain family welfare programs, and partly a society for Nazi leaders. The purpose of the program was to provide incentives to encouraged Germans, especially SS members, to have more children.

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

The organization "Lebensborn e.V." serves the SS leaders in the selection and adoption of qualified children. The organization "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) aid for racially and biologically-hereditarily valuable families
• (2) the accommodation of racially and biologically-hereditarily valuable mothers in appropriate homes, etc.
• (3) care of the children of such families
• (4) care of the mothers

It is the honorable duty of all leaders of the central bureau to become members of the organization "Lebensborn e.V.". The application for admission must be filed prior to 23/9/1936.

The Lebensborn office was part of SS Rasse und Siedlungshauptamt (SS Office of Race and Settlement) until 1938, when it was transferred to Hauptamt Persönlicher Stab Reichsführer-SS (Personal Staff of the Reich Leader SS), ie. directly overseen by Himmler. Leaders of Lebensborn e.V. were SS-Standartenführer Max Sollmann and SS-Oberführer Dr. Gregor Ebner.

Implementation

In the beginning the program served as a welfare institution for wives of SS officers; the organization ran facilities where these women could give birth or get help with family matters. Furthermore, the program 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 racially valuable. Parents and children were examined by SS doctors before admittance. Later such facilities also served as temporary homes, orphanages and as an adoption service.

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.

While Lebensborn e.V. established facilities in several occupied countries, activities were concentrated around Germany, Norway and the occupied North-Eastern Europe, mainly Poland. The main focus in occupied Norway was aiding children born by German soldiers and Norwegian mothers; in North-Eastern Europe the organization, in addition to services provided to SS members, engaged in the relocation of children, mostly orphans, to families in Germany.

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

• Germany: 11
• North-Eastern occupied Europe: 3
• Norway: 10 (or as many as 15)
• Denmark: 2
• France: 1 (February, 1944 - August, 1944)
• Belgium: 1 (from March 1943)
• The Netherlands: 1
• Luxembourg: 1

For more information about Lebensborn and consequences of the program in Norway, please see War children.

Post-war trial

After the war the branch of the Lebensborn organization 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 in the American-controlled area of Germany after the war, the Court in the trial against the leaders of the organization (United States of America v. Ulrich Greifelt, et. al.), found that only 340 had been handled by Lebensborn e.V. The accused were acquitted on charges of kidnapping. Exactly how many children who were relocated by the organization remains unclear due to SS members destroying archives before fleeing advancing Allied forces.

This should not be interpreted as doubt about the existence of a kidnapping/forced relocation program of children in North-Eastern Europe. On the contrary, the Court found ample evidence of this. Rather it indicates that such kidnappings were carried out by other than members of Lebensborn. Taken from the trial transcript:

The prosecution has failed to prove with the requisite certainty the participation of Lebensborn, and the defendants connected therewith in the kidnapping program conducted by the Nazis. While the evidence has disclosed that thousands upon thousands of children were unquestionably kidnapped by other agencies or organizations 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.

As a matter of fact, it is quite clear from the evidence that Lebensborn sought to avoid taking into its homes, children who had family ties; and Lebensborn went to the extent of making extensive investigations where the records were inadequate, to establish the identity of a child and whether it had family ties. When it was discovered that the child had a living parent, Lebensborn did not proceed with an adoption, as in the case of orphans, but simply allowed the child to be placed in a German home after an investigation of the German family for the purpose of determining the good character of the family and the suitability of the family to care for and raise the child.

Lebensborn made no practice of selecting and examining foreign children. In all instances where foreign children were handed over to Lebensborn by other organizations after a selection and examination, the children were given the best of care and never ill-treated in any manner.

It is quite clear from the evidence that of the numerous organizations operating in Germany who were connected with foreign children brought into Germany, Lebensborn was the one organization which did everything in its power to adequately provide for the children and protect the legal interests of the children placed in its care.

Upon the evidence submitted, the defendant Sollmann is found not guilty on counts one and two of the indictment.

In Norway the Lebensborn organization handled approximately 250 adoptions. In most of these cases the mothers had agreed to the adoption, though not all were informed that their child would be sent to Germany. The Norwegian government brought back all but 80 of these children after the war. The Norwegian Lebensborn records are intact, the majority stored at the The National Archival Services of Norway.

Post-war sensationalism

Himmler's extensive effort to secure a racially pure Greater Germany, the classification of Lebensborn as one of Himmler's race programs and sloppy journalism on the subject in the early years after the war, seems to have forever marked Lebensborn as one of the frontiers of Himmler's race battle. In particular, the allegation of an attempt to create a master race through supervised breeding have stuck with Lebensborn and have reached a wider audience over the years.

The first stories of Lebensborn involvement in the master race plan can be found in the German magazine Revue, who ran a series on the subject in the 1950s. On January 13, 1961, the German movie Der Lebensborn (also known as Ordered to Love (US) and Fountain of Life (International)), produced by Artur Brauner, was released, later to gain worldwide circulation. The movie purported young girls forced to mate in Nazi camps. In the decades to follow the subject has been revisited both by film makers and in printed press frequently. Examples:

How the Evil Began, and How It Spread, Newsweek - March 20, 2000
The Lebensborn program wasn't a sudden decision by Hitler and his cronies. It was part of a much larger Nazi policy on racial purity that evolved over many years ...

Nazi records found for breeding scheme, The Dallas Morning News - November 26, 1999
Thousands of Germans who were born as a result of one of the Nazis' efforts to create an Aryan "master race" have at last been given hope of tracing their parents - 54 years after the scheme was hurriedly abandoned at the end of the second world war.

CBS Drama Explores Nazis' Plan For A `Master Race, The Seattle Times - October 19, 1986
Of all the many terrible aspects of the Nazi regime, one of the least familiar was the party's plan to create a Master Race through lebensborn. This was a program intended to mate the most Aryan of German girls with the most Aryan of S.S. members.

Recent movies: Lebensborn (US, 1997), Pramen zivota (Czech, 2000) - also known as Spring of Life (US, 2000)

Kidnapping children from occupied countries

Approximately 50,000 to 200,000 Polish children were kidnapped, transported in cramped cattle wagons without food or water often for a couple of days. Polish conductors tried to give food and water to transported children, but this was rarely possible due to German guards, who in rare cases agreed but only after taking heavy bribes. Those who after examination were deemed "aryan" enough were then sent, with falsified birth certificates, to selected families. These families were often given a false backstory about the children whom they were adopting, e.g. they were adopting children of soldiers killed in battle. Most of those children never returned to their original families, and their descendants are usually not aware of their national origins. The children found not to be sufficiently "aryan" were sent to concentration camps for extermination.

See also

• War children
• RuSHA Trial
• Nazi eugenics

Books

• Catrine Clay & Michael Leapman: Master race: the Lebensborn experiment in Nazi Germany. Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton, 1995. ISBN 0340589787. (German version: Herrenmenschen - Das Lebensborn-Experiment der Nazis. Publisher: Heyne-TB, 1997)
• Marc Hillel and Clarissa Henry: Of Pure Blood. Published 1976. ISBN 007028895X (French version: Au nom de la race. Publisher: Fayard)
• 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. Published 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, S. 16-18.
• Benz, W.; Graml, H.; Weiß, H.(1997): Enzyklopädie des Nationalsozialismus. Published: Digitale Bibliothek, CD-Rom, Band 25, Directmedia GmbH, Berlin.
• 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.

External links

• A short description of the Lebensborn programme
• Article about the Lebensborn on shoa.de (in German)
• Explaining The Holocaust to German High School Students - Few paragraphs in the text are about Lebensborn policies in occupied countries.
• An interview and description of the crime by one of the victims kidnapped in Poland by Germans (in Polish).
• "The RuSHA Case"

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