In conducting general research for a project that I’m working on, I’ve stumbled upon yet another horrifying bit of NAZI history that I had no idea about. (damn high school and college education!)
It concerns the Lebensborn Project, and I’ve read conflicting reports. Nearly half of the internet sites say that it was a NAZI breeding ground, a house where predetermined men and girls of “ideal race qualities” were brought and encouraged to “breed” to replace the fallen soldiers in the war.
The other half say that that story is a total myth, and that they were really orphanages for kidnapped children that soldiers stole from Polish and Jewish families if they felt they were “good enough” to be “reassigned” to German families.
there are only two good books on the subject, and when I search for them, they’re out of print.
Either way, the whole thing sounds like a fascinatingly terrifying “project” and I’d like to know the truth. Myth or fact on either point. Does anyone know?
jarbaby
I think this one of the less horrifying things that Nazis did, but yes, it is true. German women volunteered for this ‘honor’, but I’m not sure how this was done. Knowing Germans I’m sure they found a way to remove intimacy from the procedure. I believe that some “undesirables” were forced to do this but I am not sure. This is all inline with eugenics theory of the time.
I think Death camps, massive repression, violence and war are far more horrifying.
Bearing in mind that “the winners write the history books”…
Yeah, a quick Google search turns up two diametrically opposing viewpoints. The Holocaust survivors say one thing, the Neo-Nazis say another. I think you’ll have to do more serious digging in regular history books, not just depend on books that were written specifically about “lebensborn”. Check the back flyleaf to see if the book in question was written by a reputable historian, who doesn’t look like he has an axe to grind. It’s also a good tipoff that you’ll be getting a fairly unbiased viewpoint, if he’s written serious 400-page history books on other subjects, like Napoleon or medieval taxation. That shows he knows how to do good research.
If all he’s written are 250-page glossy pop culture presentations aimed at the New York Times best-seller list, I doubt whether you’ll get anything useful.
If he’s a freelance columnist, like for Rolling Stone or Atlantic Monthly, and this is his first book, it’s a good bet that it’s a personal project (“my grandfather died in Auschwitz…”), and it’s not likely to be unbiased.
Of course, if all of his other books are all pro-Nazi or anti-Nazi, and if he’s on the staff of some pro-Nazi or anti-Nazi journal or newspaper, you probably won’t be getting an unbiased viewpoint. Duh. :rolleyes:
BTW, the EB very helpfully pointed out, at the end of my fruitless search,
The way I understood it, the Lebensborn project was more like your first description - an attempt and breeding pure Germans. But I’ve had limited exposure to the subject.
If it helps, there was an excellent documentary on the subject on A&E (I think) about a year ago. It included interviews with Lebensborn children…some of them had suffered because of the knowledge of their conception. Very sad. I’ll see if I can find mention of it on the web.
Well John, in all fairness to ME, I never said which was more horrifying, I simply added this to the list of horryifing things. But thanks for the info.
Duck, it’s definitely clear that I’ll have to do more digging…although in the past I’ve found that in researching WWII, I quickly wish I hadn’t even begun.
Lebensborn was a program initiated and run by the SS during the Nazi era. It was an outgrowth of a general belief within the higher echelons of Himmler’s SS – in fact, mainly a belief of Himmler himself – in the principles of selective breeding, if you will, for the purpose of perpetuating and cleansing the so-called German race. While it’s true that the SS officially encouraged many versions of this philosophy, most were unsuccessful, even within the ranks of the SS itself. For example, despite official encouragement from Himmler’s office to individual SS members to have lots of good little Nazi children, the birth rate within the SS lagged slightly behind that of the general German population.
While I have read some of the more sensationalist anecdotes you refer to, most legitimate historians have found that Lebensborn functioned more as a home for young women “in trouble,” as a place for them to give birth in seclusion. This was a time when unwed mothers still bore a nasty stigma in Western societies. No breeding by patriotic Nazis, no Nazi “baby factory,” nothing like that.
Anyhow the jist of this program was having women who passed aryan race ‘standards’ have babies with men who met the same ‘standards’. They were given a home and support for bearing these children. (possibly 18,000 kids)
The second site mentions polish children that were kidnapped because they fit the description. This was probably done because the the program (see above paragraph) was fairly contiversal in that it encouraged unwed mothers, was not popular, and largely failed in it’s stated goals. (This sounds like Jerry Falwell.)
BTW Jarbaby: Sorry. Anything to do with Nazi’s pisses me off.
john, this is precisely why I find it such an odd program.
No problem. They piss me off, too. BUT, I do like history, and I was watching a documentary on TLC about the Hitler Youth programs where they brought this up and brushed over it like the facts were common knowledge to everyone. I just looked at my husband and said, “WHAT IS THAT?”
A while ago I saw something on a Lebensborn project in Denmark. (Possibly another country) The piece was about surviving Lebensborn children currently still living in Denmark. The mother’s of the children took off (or were possibly killed) after the because of their Nazi sympathies. The children were either adopted or raised in orphanages. The children were constantly reminded of and treated poorly because of their parentage. It was really pretty sad.
In every occupied country, the children of German soldiers had a hard time of it after the war. Many were actually released to the Lebensborn program during the war itself, and eventually adopted into Good German Families. Some of those who stayed with their mothers were abandoned because of the shame after the war. I can’t find any evidence that any mothers were outright killed, but many were treated horribly. A popular punishment was to shave the woman’s head: since wigs were completely unavailable, she’d be stuck with a visible sign of her shame for months.
One such child grew up to be someone you may have heard of: Anni-Frid Lyngstad, one of the women in ABBA. Her mother died very young, and the abuse she suffered from her neighbors almost certainly played a role. Lyngstad was just a tiny girl when she lost her mother; her grandmother took her to Sweden, which had been neutral during the war, hoping things would be better for her granddaughter there.
The saddest part of all of this is that the mothers were not necessarily Nazi sympathizers. They were often simply young, scared, and horny; they thought they were in love. The same things could be said for many of the fathers, who were often draftees in low positions, far from home and lonely. Politics didn’t play a role. But in the atmosphere that existed in most countries after the war, the distinction was, understandably enough, forgotten.
Not quite, John. The babies were for the most part conceived outside the Lebensborn program and would probably have been conceived had no such program existed. Yes, there were ‘standards’ applied to both mother and father, but this took place when mom was ALREADY pregnant and looking for a place to hang her hat.
I did see parts of the A&E special, and I’m still wondering what could be the source of the so-called “shame” those people feel. Perhaps just being accidentally associated with an organization connected to the SS? The notion that the father you never knew was an SS man?
