Though Lebensborn initially focused on encouraging Germans to have more children, the program's directors eventually resorted to kidnapping "biologically valuable" foreign children with Aryan features.
Bundesarchiv, Bild/Wikimedia CommonsA baptism performed under a swastika.
Amid all the cruel policies put forward by Nazi Germany, the Lebensborn program is perhaps the least remembered today. It had one mission: to breed a “master race” of Aryan children.
At first, the Lebensborn program pursued its goal by encouraging Germans to have as many children as possible. It offered women — especially unmarried women tempted by abortion — discreet maternity centers where they could give birth. And it encouraged men to have large families, even if that meant having children outside of their marriages.
But at the dawn of World War II, the Lebensborn program took a sinister turn. Because not enough German babies were being born, and because many young German men were dying on the battlefield, the program went in a new direction. Starting in 1939, it began to kidnap foreign children.
A Program To Create ‘Racially And Genetically Valuable Families’
Bundesarchiv, Bild/Wikimedia CommonsInside a Lebensborn nursery in Germany.
Lebensborn (meaning “spring of life”) began in 1935, just a few years after the Nazi’s rise to power in Germany. The Nazis wanted to create a “master race” of Aryan citizens. But to do so, they needed babies, and the Lebensborn program grew out of concerns about Germany’s birthrate.
These concerns were twofold. Some two million German soldiers had died during World War I, meaning that there was a dearth of marriage-age men. Meanwhile, Der Spiegel reports that the abortion rate in Germany had risen as high as 800,000 a year. The Nazis wanted Germans to have more children — Aryan children — which is where Lebensborn came in.
The program sought to create “racially and genetically valuable families with many children.” It encouraged SS men to have large families, and discouraged women from seeking abortions. And it soon began to spread.
The Lebensborn Program Spreads Across Germany
To encourage the birth of Aryan children, Lebensborn clinics were opened across Germany where women — 60 percent of whom were unwed mothers — could give birth. According to The New York Times, pregnant women would only be accepted to the clinic if they had Aryan features, no genetic disorders, and information about the identity of the father.
Bundesarchiv, Bild/Wikimedia CommonsA caretaker dotes on Lebensborn children.
Often tucked into into the grounds of private estates, Lebensborn clinics were designed to be comfortable and discreet. They offered pregnant women financial support, prenatal care, a place to give birth to their babies away from prying eyes, and access to adoption services.
Meanwhile, Lebensborn also encouraged men to have large families. According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, SS leader Heinrich Himmler — who oversaw many details of the program — believed that SS men were the country’s biological and racist elite, and so he encouraged them to have as many children as possible.
Not only did Himmler encourage SS men to have large families with their wives, but he also urged them to have children outside of marriage.
Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone/Getty ImagesGerman women carrying children of the Lebensborn program.
Ultimately, between 6,000 and 8,000 children were born through Lebensborn. But to Himmler and the Nazis, these were disappointing numbers. Himmler had estimated that 100,000 “biologically valuable” German women sought abortions each year, so he expected the number of children produced by Lebensborn to be much higher. At the same time, Himmler began to worry about the loss of “racially valuable” German men expected to die on the battlefields of World War II.
And so the Lebensborn program expanded — to kidnapping.
How Thousands Of Foreign Children Were Kidnapped And ‘Germanized’
As World War II expanded in scope, so did Lebensborn. According to the Jewish Virtual Library, German soldiers were encouraged to “fraternize” with foreign women — that is, women who met Nazi racial standards. If the women became pregnant, they were invited to Lebensborn clinics to give birth. In Norway alone, some 12,00 Lebensborn babies were born.
National Archives of Norway/FlickrThe first Lebensborn clinic in Norway just a few weeks after its opening in September of 1941.
But Lebensborn took an even darker turn in 1939, as the Nazis marched across Europe. It began kidnapping foreign children with Aryan features.
Some of the children were orphans who the Nazis plucked out of orphanages and brought back to Germany. But others had living families, and they were torn away from their parents by force.
From that point on, the children were forcibly Germanized. Often told that they’d been given up by their parents, the kidnapped children were indoctrinated into Nazi Germany and then placed into German families.
Public DomainThe kidnapping of Polish children. Circa 1942-1943.
If they resisted, they were beaten. If they continued to resist, they were sent to concentration camps, where untold numbers perished.
Indeed, it’s unknown how many children were kidnapped from Nazi-occupied countries under the Lebensborn program. The Jewish Virtual Library estimates that some 100,000 children may have been taken from Poland alone. It’s possible that more than double than that were taken in total, most of whom never made it back to their families.
The Painful Legacy Of The Lebensborn Program
In 1945, Nazi Germany was defeated. The Lebensborn program was disbanded, and many of its records were destroyed. But it left behind a painful, lingering legacy.
Public DomainA group of Slovenian children who had been kidnapped under Lebensborn.
Babies born in the early days of the Lebensborn program, primarily to unwed mothers, often grew up without knowing the true identity of their fathers. Guntram Weber, a creative writing teacher in Berlin, grew up believing that his father was a truck driver for the Luftwaffe who had never fired a weapon, and died when he drove over a landmine.
As an adult, he learned that his father was actual an SS major-general who had been convicted of war crimes and sentenced to death — but managed to escape to South America. Weber also found out that his godfather had been Heinrich Himmler.
Public DomainHeinrich Himmler, one of the architects of the Lebensborn program, died by suicide at the end of World War II.
“From one day to the next I knew my father was a war criminal,” Weber told Der Spiegel. “I assume my mother fell in love with a powerful military man. And he obviously couldn’t resist any woman. It gave me a feeling of low self-esteem, of loneliness, of uncertainty.”
Meanwhile, many of the kidnapped children never made it home. Some were sent to concentration camps, where they were killed. Others were so thoroughly Germanized that they wanted to stay with their adopted families. And many no longer had a home to go back to, or didn’t remember their family well enough to find them.
Today, the Lebensborn program stands as a cruel relic of Nazi Germany’s obsession with “racial purity.” Meant to create life, it instead sowed confusion and pain across generations. Babies born in Lebensborn clinics must grapple with the legacy of their origins today, while many children kidnapped by the Nazis lost their connection to their families forever.
After learning about the Nazis’ Lebensborn program, discover the story of the Battle of Berlin, the Soviet assault on the German capital that brought down Nazi Germany at the end of World War II. Or go inside the remarkable story of the the Ovitz family, the Jewish family that included seven dwarfs which managed to survive the Holocaust.
