Lebensborn

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Lebensborn (Fount of Life, in German) was a Nazi organization set up by SS leader Heinrich Himmler, which provided maternity homes and financial assistance to the wives of SS members and to unmarried mothers, and which also ran orphanages and relocation programmes for children. Initially set up in Germany in 1935, Lebensborn expanded into occupied countries in western and northern Europe during the Second World War. In line with the racial and eugenic policies of Nazi Germany, the Lebensborn programme was restricted to individuals who were deemed to be "biologically fit" and "racially pure" "Aryans", and to SS members. In occupied countries, thousands of women facing social ostracism because they were in relationships with German soldiers and had become pregnant, had few alternatives other than applying for help with Lebensborn.

After World War II it was falsely reported that Lebenborn was a breeding programme. This was not true because individuals were not forced to have sex with selected partners.^[1] However, the programme did aim to promote the growth of "superior" Aryan populations through providing excellent health care and by restricting access to the program with medical selections that applied eugenic and "race" criteria. Although Lebensborn did process the adoptions by German families of a small number of children who had been kidnapped in eastern Europe, it was not involved in the kidnapping of thousands of Polish children who were subjected to "Germanisation" by sending them to re-education camps and fostering them out to German families. This project, also directed by Himmler, was carried out by other segments of the Nazi bureaucracy.

Contents 1 Background 2 Implementation 3 Post-war trial 4 Post-war sensationalism 5 Open meeting 6 See also 7 Books 8 References 9 External links

[edit] Background

The Lebensborn e. V. (eingetragener Verein, "registered association") was founded on December 12, 1935, in part as a response to declining birth rates in Germany, in order to promote the policies of Nazi eugenics. 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^[2]:

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.

In 1939, membership stood at 8,000 , of which 3,500 were SS leaders with mandatory membership. ^[3] 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.

[edit] Implementation

Initially the program served as a welfare institution for wives of SS officers; the organization ran facilities, primarily maternity homes, where 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. Later such facilities also served as temporary homes, orphanages and as an adoption service. When dealing with non-SS members, parents and children were usually examined by SS doctors before admittance.

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 women; 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: 10
• Austria: 3
• North-Eastern occupied Europe (Poland): 3
• Norway: 9 (or as many as 15)
• Denmark: 2
• France: 1 (February, 1944 - August, 1944)
• Belgium: 1 (March, 1943 - September, 1944)
• The Netherlands: 1
• Luxembourg: 1

About 8,000 children were born in Lebensborn homes in Germany, and another 8,000 in Norway. Elsewhere the total number of births was much lower. For more information about Lebensborn in Norway, see War children.

[edit] 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, in the trial of the leaders of the Lebensborn organization (United States of America v. Ulrich Greifelt, et al.), the Court found that only 340 had been handled by Lebensborn e. V. The accused were therefore 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 activities were carried out by individuals who were not members of Lebensborn. Exactly how many children were relocated by Lebensborn or other organizations remains unknown due to the destruction of archives by SS members prior to fleeing the advancing Allied forces. From the trial's transcript^[4]:

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.

[edit] Post-war sensationalism

Himmler's effort to secure a racially pure Greater Germany, the fact that Lebensborn was one of Himmler's race programs and sloppy journalism on the subject in the early years after the war lead to false assumptions about the programme. The main misconception was that the programme involved supervised or even coercive selective breeding. This was not the case. Yet the program did aim to promote the growth of Aryan populations, though encouraging relationships between German soldiers and "Nordic" women in occupied countries, and access to Lebensborn was restricted in line with the eugenic and racial policies of Nazism, which could logically be referred to... as supervised and/or coercive selective breeding. Until the last days of the war, the mothers and the children at maternity homes got the best treatment available, including food, even though many others in the area were starving. Because of this, once the war ended many townspeople turned on the women, beating them, cutting off their hair, and running them out of the community.

The first stories reporting that Lebensborn was a coercive breeding program can be found in the German magazine Revue, which 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 that young girls were forced to mate in Nazi camps.^[5] In 1986, a CBS drama series made the less exaggerated but nonetheless incorrect claim that Lebensborn involved supervised selective mating:

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.

[edit] Open meeting

In November of 2006 an open meeting took place between several Lebensborn children, with the intent of dispelling myths and encouraging those affected to investigate their origins.^[6]

[edit] See also

• War children
• RuSHA Trial
• Nazi eugenics

[edit] Books

• Catrine Clay & Michael Leapman: Master race: the Lebensborn experiment in Nazi Germany. Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton, 1995. ISBN 0-340-58978-7. (German version: Herrenmenschen - Das Lebensborn-Experiment der Nazis. Publisher: Heyne-TB, 1997)
• "Children of World War II: the Hidden Enemy Legacy." Ed. Kjersti Ericsson and Eva Simonsen. New York: Berg Publishers, 2005.
• Marc Hillel and Clarissa Henry: Of Pure Blood. Published 1976. ISBN 0-07-028895-X (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 82-03-29090-6)
• 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.
• Thompson, Larry V. Lebensborn and the Eugenics Policy of the Reichsführer-SS. Central European History 4 (1971): 54-77.
• Wältermann, Dieter. The Functions and Activities of the Lebensborn Organization Within the SS, the Nazi Regime, and Nazi Ideology. The Honors Journal II (1985: 5-23).
• Huston, Nancy, Lignes de faille, Actes Sud, ISBN 2-7609-2606-4, 2006

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• 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