What is Wrong With Our World?-Lebensborn

photorandy2023

2 years ago

I started this current series to discuss what is wrong with our country and what we need to do to fix it. I have since expanded this series to not only include the United States but the rest of the world as well. While I have discussed some of the topics that I will be including in this series, they have been included in other articles. In this series I will concentrate on a single topic. This will also mean that some of the articles may be slightly shorter than my readers have grown accustomed to, however they will still be written with the same attention to detail. This series will have no set number of articles and will continue to grow as I come across additional subjects.

During World War II, Nazi birthing centres for foreign workers, known in German as Ausländerkinder-Pflegestätte (literally “foreign children nurseries”), Ostarbeiterkinderpflegestätten (“eastern worker children nurseries”), or Säuglingsheim (“baby home”) were German institutions used as stations for abandoned infants, Nazi Party facilities established in the heartland of Nazi Germany for the so-called ‘troublesome’ babies according to Himmler‘s decree, the offspring born to foreign women and girls servicing the German war economy, including Polish and Eastern European female forced labour. The babies and children, most of them resulting from rape at the place of enslavement, were abducted en masse between 1943 and 1945. At some locations, up to 90 percent of infants died a torturous death due to calculated neglect.

Nazi policy

Among the Polish and Soviet female forced labour (German: Zivil– und Ostarbeiter) unintended pregnancies were common due to rampant sexual abuse by their overseers. A staggering 80 percent of rapes resulting in unwanted births occurred on the farms where the Polish girls worked. The SS suspected the victims of “cheating their way out of work” by conceiving. Notably, the babies born inside concentration camps were not released into the communities. For example, of the 3,000 babies born at Auschwitz, some 2,500 newborns were drowned in a barrel at the maternity ward by the German female overseers. Meanwhile, by the spring of 1942 the arrival of trains with the girls from Poland turned into slave markets in German towns and villages, as in Braunschweig among other locations, where the young women were beaten, starved, and prohibited from speaking to each other.

Medical checkup before departure to unknown German slave markets; already pregnant foreigners were not allowed entry into Germany.

Preoccupied with their new babies, foreign labourers could no longer work for the benefit of the Nazis.

Abortion in Germany was illegal as far as German women were concerned, thus the law had to be altered. On 11 March 1943, the Reichsführer-SS signed a decree allowing for abortions “requested” by the young Zivil- und Ostarbeiter. Pregnant slave workers, who were forced to abort by the Germans, had to sign printed requests before surgery and were threatened with prison time and death by starvation. Abortions were enforced after determining whether the probable father was a German or otherwise Germanic in origin. Children were either born in, or brought into any one of the estimated 400 Ausländerkind-Pflegestätte homes as “parentless”. When “racially valuable”, they were removed for Germanisation. In the event a foreign female worker was considered to be of Germanic blood, such as Norwegian, her child was kept alive, but this was rare.

The mortality of the Zivil- und Ostarbeiter babies was very high on average, exceeding 50 percent regardless of circumstances. It is estimated that between 1943 and 1945 some 100,000 infants of slave labourers from Poland and the Soviet Union were killed by forced abortion or by calculated neglect after birth in Germany. By other estimates, up to 200,000 children might have died. A German general and NSDAP government official, Erich Hilgenfeldt, while inspecting some of those locations was troubled by what he saw. He reported that the children were dying in an unnecessarily slow, tortuous process lasting for months, due to inadequate food rations:

I consider the manner, in which this matter is treated at present, as impossible. There is only one way or another. Either we have no desire to keep these children alive – therefore we should not allow them to slowly starve to death and [at the same time] swindle so many litres of valuable milk from the general food supply. Or [presumably] we intend to raise these children in order to utilize them later on, as labor. In this case they must be fed in such a manner that they will be usable as workers.

— Erich Hilgenfeldt

At the Waltrop-Holthausen birth and abortion camp, 1,273 infants were purposely left to die in the so-called baby-hut and then simply checked off as stillborn. Historians believe that it was Himmler himself who intentionally gave these “assembly stations”, a pompous name of the nursing homes for the non-German children, while all along planning their mass murder known euphemistically as “the special treatment” (Sonderbehandlung). The immediate reason for the local Gestapo to insist on setting up so many of these institutions was that pregnant German women absolutely refused to enter the facilities where the Ostarbeiter women were taken. According to the last decree of Reichsführer-SS in this matter, signed on 27 July 1943, foreign mothers who were unable to get back to work after giving birth were to be exterminated along with their babies.

The killing wards for the Zivil- und Ostarbeiter children, including their intentionally misdiagnosed mothers (usually as being “mentally ill”), were established at the Bavarian state hospital at Kaufbeuren and its branch at Irsee. They continued to function as euthanasia centres for 33 days after the end of the war until discovery by American troops on 29 May 1945.

“Lebensborn” translates to “wellspring of life” or “fountain or life.” The Lebensborn project was one of most secret and terrifying Nazi projects. Heinrich Himmler founded the Lebensborn project on December 12, 1935, the same year the Nuremberg Laws outlawed intermarriage with Jews and others who were deemed inferior. For decades, Germany’s birthrate was decreasing. Himmler’s goal was to reverse the decline and increase the Germanic/Nordic population of Germany to 120 million. Himmler encouraged SS and Wermacht officers to have children with Aryan women. He believed Lebensborn children would grow up to lead a Nazi-Aryan nation.

The purpose of this society (Registered Society Lebensborn – Lebensborn Eingetragener Verein) was to offer to young girls who were deemed “racially pure” the possibility to give birth to a child in secret. The child was then given to the SS organization which took charge in the child’s education and adoption. Both mother and father needed to pass a “racial purity” test. Blond hair and blue eyes were preferred, and family lineage had to be traced back at least three generations. Of all the women who applied, only 40 percent passed the racial purity test and were granted admission to the Lebensborn program. The majority of mothers were unmarried, 57.6 percent until 1939, and about 70 percent by 1940.

In the beginning, the Lebensborn were taken to SS nurseries. But in order to create a “super-race,” the SS transformed these nurseries into “meeting places” for “racially pure” German women who wanted to meet and have children with SS officers. The children born in the Lebensborn nurseries were then taken by the SS. Lebensborn provided support for expectant mothers, wed or unwed, by providing a home and the means to have their children in safety and comfort.

The first Lebensborn home was opened in 1936 in Steinhoering, a tiny village not far from Munich. Furnishings for the homes were supplied from the best of the loot from the homes of Jews who had been sent to Dachau. Ultimately, there were 10 Lebensborn homes established in Germany, nine in Norway, two in Austria, and one each in Belgium, Holland, France, Luxembourg and Denmark. Himmler himself took a special interest in the homes, choosing not only the mothers, but also attending to the decor and even paying special attention to children born on his birthday, October 7th.

By 1939, the program had not produced the results Himmler had hoped. He issued a direct order to all SS and police to father as many children as possible to compensate for war casualties. The order created controversy. Many Germans felt the acceptance of unwed mothers encouraged immorality. Eventually Himmler backpedaled, but he never condemned illegitimacy outright. Himmler himself had two illegitimate children.

Lebensborn soon expanded to welcome non-German mothers. In a policy formed by Hitler in 1942, German soldiers were encouraged to fraternize with native women, with the understanding that any children they produced would be provided for. Racially fit women, most often the girlfriends or one-night stands of SS officers, were invited to Lebensborn homes to have their child in privacy and safety.

Ultimately, one of the most horrible sides of the Lebensborn policy was the kidnapping of children “racially good” in the eastern occupied countries after 1939. Some of these children were was orphans, but it is well documented that many were stolen from their parents’ arms. These kidnappings were organized by the SS in order to take children by force who matched the Nazis’ racial criteria (blond hair and blue or green eyes). Thousands of children were transferred to the Lebensborn centers in order to be “Germanized.” Up to 100,000 children may have been stolen from Poland alone. In these centers, everything was done to force the children to reject and forget their birth parents. As an example, the SS nurses tried to persuade the children that they were deliberately abandoned by their parents. The children who refused the Nazi education were often beaten. Most of them were finally transferred to concentration camps (most of the time to Kalish in Poland) and exterminated. The others were adopted by SS families.

In 1942, in reprisals of the assassination of the SS governor Reinhard Heydrich in Prague, a SS unit exterminated the entire male population of a small village called Lidice. During this operation, some SS made a selection of the children. Ninety-one of them were considered good enough to be “Germanized” and sent to Germany. The others were sent to special children camps (i.e. Dzierzazna & Litzmannstadti) and later to the extermination centers.

As the allies advanced, children in the various Lebensborn homes were withdrawn to interior homes. On May 1, 1945, a day after Hitler’s death, American troops marched into Steinhoering. They found 300 children, aged six months to six years. Most of the mothers and staff had fled. The British and Russians also found children at Lebensborn homes near Bremen and Leipsig. The majority of these children were either put up for adoption or sent back to their birth families. Some of the children kidnapped in other countries who were living with families throughout Germany were repatriated to their native countries. Unfortunately, many were too Germanic to fit in.

It is nearly impossible to know how many children were kidnapped in the eastern occupied countries. In 1946, it was estimated that more than 250,000 were kidnapped and sent by force to Germany. Only 25,000 were retrieved after the war and sent back to their families. It is known that several German families refused to give back the children they had received from the Lebensborn centers. In some cases, the children themselves refused to come back to their original family – they were victims of the Nazi propaganda and believed that they were pure Germans. It is also known that thousands of children were not deemed “good enough” to be Germanized were simply exterminated. During the ten years of the program’s existence, at least 7,500 children were born in Germany and 10,000 in Norway.

When most of us think of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, we rightly recall the Holocaust and the millions of mostly Jews sacrificed to the Third Reich’s perverse fantasy of an Aryan super race.

But there were other, less-familiar atrocities that took place, one of which involved not death camps but birthing farms where young women and teenage girls were impregnated to produce blond, blue-eyed babies for SS families to adopt.

Though many were not volunteers, especially as World War II went on, most of the early would-be mothers were willing participants in the program to make babies for Hitler.

At the time of Hitler’s rise, Germany’s population had been declining for several years. Hitler wanted to increase the Germanic/Nordic population of the country to 120 million with “racially pure” offspring and put Heinrich Himmler, the Holocaust’s chief architect, in charge of the nation’s population-growth machinery.

Thus, the “Lebensborn” program — meaning wellspring or fountain of life — was created in 1935, the same year the Nuremberg laws made it illegalfor those of “German blood” to marry Jews. Basically, the program provided luxurious accommodations for unwed, pregnant women.

Part of the program’s attraction was that unwed pregnant girls could give birth in secret. In 1939, about 58 percent of the mothers-to-be who applied to the program were unwed, according to the American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise; by 1940, that number had swelled to 70 percent. Often, the homes were converted estates decorated by Himmler himself, using the highest quality loot confiscated from Jewish homes after their owners had been killed or sent to camps.

Girls who were already pregnant or willing to be impregnated by SS officers had to prove their Aryan lineage going back three generations and pass inspections that included measuring the size of their heads and the length of their teeth. Once accepted, they were pampered by nurses and staff who served them delicacies at mealtimes and provided a recreational diet rich in Nazi propaganda.

I confess that all of this was new to me as I read a preview copy of a historical novel, released Tuesday, called “Cradles of the Reich,” by Jennifer Coburn. In the novel, Coburn takes readers on a tour of pre-WWII Germany, where we witness the pogrom against the Jews through three female characters who eventually find their way to the same Lebensborn home by disparate routes.

Hilde is an enthusiastic Nazi eager to bear a child by a Nazi officer; Irma is let down by her fiance and becomes a nurse in the home; and, Gundi, in love with a Jewish boy, lands in the home because she is pregnant, blond and beautiful. Little do they know.

Though thousands of babies were created and farmed — Himmler wasn’t satisfied with the pace of procreation and began stealing babies and children from occupied countries.

An estimated 250,000 babies were kidnapped, 100,000 of them from Poland, where Germans could draw from a large population of blond, blue-eyed children. During a decade of the program, up to 7,500 babies were born in Germany’s 10 homes. Another 10,000 were born in Norway, which had nine Nazi nurseries. Austria had two homes, and several other countries had one each, including Belgium, Holland, France, Luxembourg and Denmark.

It’s possible you know a Lebensborn baby without knowing it, as most of the records were destroyed or hidden until relatively recently. One of those “babies,” 77-year-old John Gundersen of California, contacted Coburn when he learned of her book. In a phone interview, Gundersen told me, “All I ever knew growing up was that my blood father was a Nazi and my mother was a 16-year-old Norwegian girl.”

Gundersen said he became interested in learning more about his origins in 2010 when the History Channel ran a story about the Lebensborn children. He was actually born four months after the war ended and was adopted from an orphanage at 2 by a Danish couple, who had immigrated to the United States. Eventually, he found his birth certificate and learned the names of his biological parents. His own name at birth had been Magne Reidar Olsen, but a new name and certificate were issued upon his adoption. (He provided me with copies of both certificates.)

What does Gundersen think about all of this?

“It’s interesting,” he said. “Do I find it insulting or scary? No, I find it interesting. … When people complain about their parents or how they happened to be born, I say, well, at least you had that. I didn’t. A woman lined up to have me for the reich and for no other reason. I have to thank my adoptive parents, who are my family. … I’m living the dream.”

The contents of that dream — from tales of surfing to Vietnam to other exploits that he is more than happy to recount — might fill another book. Suffice to say, not all of Hitler’s progeny got so lucky.

Resources

en.wikipedia.org, “Nazi birthing centres for foreign workers.” By Wikipedia Editors; jewishvirtuallibrary.org, ” “The Nazi Party: The ‘Lebensborn’ Program (1935-1945).” washingtonpost.com, “A new novel tells the story of Nazi birthing farms.” By Kathleen Parker;

Nazi policy

Share this: