Lebensborn
Lebensborn (
Source of Life, in German) was a child
welfare and relocation program initiated by
Nazi leader
Heinrich Himmler to secure the racial heredity of the
Third Reich. After the
Second World War it was widely reported that the objective of the program was to establish housings where the Nazi regime would breed, through copulation, racially pure humans to create a strong race of
Aryans. In reality, evidence of such plans has never been found.
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 encourage Germans, especially SS members, to have more children.
On September 13, 1936, Himmler wrote the following to members of SS [
1]:
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.
Initially 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, see
War children.
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.
The Court did find ample evidence of an existing kidnapping/forced relocation program of children in North-Eastern Europe, but indicated that these activites were carried out by other than members of Lebensborn. Exactly how many children who were relocated by Lebensborn or other organizations remains unknown due to SS members destroying archives before fleeing advancing Allied forces. From the trial's transcript: [
2]
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.
Himmler's 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 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 a 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. [
3] In the decades to follow the subject has been revisited both by film makers and in printed press. Examples:
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.
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.
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 ...
Recent movies: Lebensborn (US, 1997), Pramen zivota (Czech, 2000; also known as Spring of Life (US, 2000))
*
War children*
RuSHA Trial*
Nazi eugenics* 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.
*
Trial of Ulrich Greifelt and others Law Reports of the Trials of War Criminals, United Nations War Crimes Commission, London 1949 (copy at
University of the West of England website)
*
"The Lebensborn" Jewish Virtual Library's description of the Lebensborn program
