Catherine Hokin writes about the Nazi Lebensborn programme, the background to her latest novel. What did it involve? And how did the Third Reich plan to make room for the ‘master race’ babies they envisaged being born?
“The living space of the Nazis has become the dying space of Europe.”
When Karl Frank – an Austrian anti-fascist who wrote under the pseudonym Paul Hagen – wrote this statement in 1943, in Will Germany Crack? A Factual Report on Germany from Within, he was referring to what he called the “mass plunder” of Europe by the Nazi war machine. Countries occupied and resources stripped bare; citizens corralled into slave labour; ‘undesirable’ populations eradicated.
This was a template rolled out from France to eastern Europe and at its heart lay two policies which were key to the Third Reich’s ambitions: Lebensraum or living space, and Lebensborn, or the fountain of life.
The first is probably one of the few German words we all remember from school. The meaning of the second is less clear, due in part to the pulp novels and B movies which have clouded it.
Both policies were, however – as I explore in my new novel The German Child – parts of the same whole: a systematic drive for expansion based round a racially-based programme of social engineering designed to redraw the face of Europe.
The myth of the Lebensborn programme as an Aryan stud farm – matching square jawed SS men with blond, blue-eyed fräuleins to create the genetic material for the Thousand Year Reich – first gained traction in the late 50s and early 60s through movies such as Ordered to Love with its strapline, Fräuleins Forced into Sensual Slavery! It’s a myth which persists in some quarters to this day, including a ridiculous plot line in the latest series of the BBC’s World on Fire.
In reality, and as outlined in the initiative’s brochure, the women the programme sought to recruit were already pregnant but often unmarried. Single motherhood was a social stigma at the time and one the Nazis needed to debunk if they were going to counteract Germany’s declining ‘racially valuable’ birth rate.
The programme’s first public outing was based around a cult of motherhood, providing financial support to encourage SS men to have large families and offering pregnant ‘German-blooded’ women high standards of medical care in Lebensborn mother and baby homes, irrespective of their marital status.
There were 26 of these facilities across Germany and occupied Europe and at least 17,000 children were born in them, to very well-cared-for mothers. Which all sounds very cosy and was, of course, anything but.
Lebensborn wasn’t about breeding farms, but it was about securing the ‘right’ genetic future for the Reich. Encouraging a higher birth rate went hand in hand with closing down birth control clinics and criminalising abortion. And – under the guidance of the programme’s architect, Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler – it also went hand in hand with removing the ‘wrong’ genetic material.
The roots of the Lebensborn programme ran far deeper than encouraging Aryan couples to produce more offspring. It was part of the wider obsession with ‘blood-purity’ and eugenics which the Nazis – under the direction of Himmler’s SS Race and Settlement Main Office – used to classify society into Aryan and non-Aryan, specifically Jewish members, and to underpin the laws which enabled their compulsory sterilisation and killing programmes.
Everyone the Reich deemed to be ‘valueless’ had to be removed, starting with the sterilisation laws and the Aktion T4 murder houses and extending into the gas chambers of the Holocaust. The space the new Germany needed for its master race had first to be cleared.
The clearance side of the programme was horribly successful; the birth rate initiative was less so. Women who gave birth in Lebensborn homes, or had the prescribed four or more children, had done their duty and answered the rallying call of Schenkt dem Führer ein Kind (Give a child to the Führer).
Unfortunately, the numbers they produced could never match the numbers needed to replace the men killed on the battlefield, a problem Himmler was aware of as early as 1939. “Every war involves a tremendous loss of the best blood… far more severe is the absence of the children who were never born to the living during the war, or to the dead after it.” (Quoted in Hitler’s Forgotten Children, Ingrid von Hoelhafen).
His Lebensborn programme therefore needed another strand: the kidnapping of children with ‘Aryan’ features from Germany’s occupied territories.
The story of the Lebensborn homes has come to us surrounded by prurient myth-making. The story of the kidnappings remains shrouded in secrecy. The exact number of children taken by the SS, and the women known as the Brown Sisters who worked for them, is unknown. The best estimate is 250,000, with 80 per cent of that number coming from occupied Poland.
Children as young as two with so-called Nordic features were taken from schools, concentration camps, orphanages and their parents, and subjected to a barrage of physical tests which matched them against 62 Aryan characteristics.
The ones who passed were sent to Germany, often via a Lebensborn home, to be ‘Germanised’ and adopted. The ones who didn’t – the majority – were murdered. Only about 15 per cent of those taken ever found their way home.
The Lebensborn programme left both a hole and a long shadow. A quarter of a million children were either killed or disappeared behind new names and new identities which were woven too tightly to unpick after the war’s end.
For too many of the thousands of children born in the homes, life has been a constant battle to find answers and overcome prejudice. In Norway in particular, where there were ten Lebensborn homes, the “children of shame” have faced a long struggle for respect and rehabilitation.
As author and Lebensborn child Ingrid von Hoelhafen puts it: “Blood runs through this story.” And it is running again – reports continue to come out of Ukraine about Ukrainian children being sent to Russian ‘re-education camps’ and rumours of forced adoptions. It’s hard to argue when President Zelenskyy refers to this loss as a genocide.
The German Child by Catherine Hokin is published on 24 January, 2024.
Catherine has written several features about the Second World War background to her novels, including:
Language and the Nazi propaganda machine
The legacy of the village of Lidice
The Minister for Illusion: Goebbels and the German film industry
Concentration camps and the politics of memory
The ‘hidden’ Nazis of Argentina
An appearance of serenity: the French fashion industry in WWII
Features on similar topics include:
Building better humans? Eugenics and history by Louise Fein
Finding the spark: one author’s inspiration for a second novel by Gill Thompson
Some reasons why history gets lost by VB Grey
Images:
- Verein Lebensborn, a child’s baptism ceremony in 1936: Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-1969-062A-56 via Wikimedia (CC-BY-SA 3.0)
- Verein Lebensborn, another photo of a child’s baptism ceremony, 1936: Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-1981-075-01 via Wikimedia (CC-BY-SA 3.0)
- Heim ‘Mutter und Kind’, a Lebensborn mother and baby home, 1944: Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-2003-0049 via Wikimedia (CC-BY-SA 3.0)
- Die Nürnberger Gesetze, 1935, chart describing the Nuremberg Laws of 15 September 1935 and the respective regulation of 14 November 1935: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection via Wikimedia (public domain)
- The head of the Reich Women’s Leadership Department for the Reich Mothers’ Service, Mrs Lienhardt, visits the first Lebensborn mother and birthcare home in Norway, Hurdal Verk, in September 1941: Arkivverket (National Archives of Norway) Riksarkivet, Lebensborn boks 108, RAFA2182U108_12 via Flickr (No known copyright restrictions)
