The document that Heinrich Himmler held in his hands that day in 1935 was not a policy paper but a blueprint for a population. Germany was bleeding men on the Western Front, and the Reichsführer-SS had concluded that the only way to win the war was to out-birth the enemy. The order he prepared and approved was called Lebensborn, and it turned the most intimate act of human life into a state-administered assembly line for Aryan children. Almost nothing was known about the program until the early 1980s.
The only relatively clear mention of it in the immediate aftermath of the war was an article in Life Magazine, published in the summer of 1945, which reported on the so-called “Miracle Children of Lebensborn. ” But the article’s openly hostile tone meant that it was recognized, as one would expect, more as propaganda than as a unique historical record. Adding to the obscurity was the fact that, just before Germany’s surrender, the Nazis destroyed most of the documents relating to the Lebensborn project. The program was simply forgotten under the avalanche of facts about Nazi atrocities revealed in the post-war trials.
It was not until 1975 that the public became interested in the so-called breeding program, an interest spurred by published photographs and the comments of professional researchers on them. What those photographs revealed was a network of maternity homes where the most healthy, pure-blooded Aryan girls in the country were brought together with the most thoroughbred representatives of the Aryan race—not to fall in love, but to conceive. The reason for the program’s origin was a demographic crisis of Hitler’s own making. Germany was in dire need of constant renewal of its human resources.
After the start of the war, the male population was naturally dying and being injured on the fronts, so Germany needed to maintain a high birth rate. With all the horrors of the Nazi regime, the propaganda of large families and their state support was built at a very high level. A woman who gave birth to at least four children was awarded the Silver Parental Cross, which conferred very extensive privileges. She could enter any store or institution without waiting in line.
When buying food, mothers of large families were required to be provided with the best and freshest products. They received financial support from the state, free travel, and many other benefits. Yet even such unprecedented measures to support motherhood did not yield the results Berlin needed. Himmler himself, in one of his speeches, spelled out the stakes: “The value of all blood and the size of our population—we are dying out.
We are here to lay the foundation for the next generation, to create history. ”
These very foundations became the Lebensborn program. But before its official adoption, Himmler again began to actively criticize the Catholic Church for condemning polygamy. On the contrary, the SS chief strongly supported the thesis that pure-blooded Aryans not only could but should have extramarital relationships so that Germany would receive more and more new citizens.
If these citizens—even illegitimate—had pure-blooded Aryans as parents, then the state was ready to have a hand in their upbringing as well. It was perhaps despair over the difficult demographic situation that led Himmler personally to order, and it was not a request but an order, that all SS officers have sexual relations with Aryan women at every opportunity. The implementation of the program was entrusted to an organization of the same name, created in 1935. Its essence was simple: the most healthy, pure-blooded Aryan girls were selected throughout the country, and the so-called Lebensborn houses became the places where these girls could meet with the most thoroughbred representatives of the Aryan race.
Moreover, such meetings could be held either by young people in love, brides, and even wives—or by order. In other words, any German girl who passed a medical commission, the so-called selection for purity of blood, could become a patient of a Lebensborn maternity hospital. There she would become pregnant and then give birth. All patients of the maternity hospitals received first-class medical care for those times, along with food, living conditions, and even ideological indoctrination.
The model institution, the most important in the network of maternity hospitals, was located in the village of Steinhöring. German women who were carrying children conceived by a German also often stayed in such hospitals. All patients, at their request, received complete confidentiality. This concerned first of all mothers of illegitimate children, as well as those who came to the Lebesborn house to become pregnant and give birth voluntarily.
Each baby born under the program was carefully examined for the absence of pathologies and for belonging to the Aryan race. As a rule, illegitimate children or children born by order soon found new families. They were sent there with new documents and never found out who their real parents were. In Germany, the Lebensborn program operated 17 maternity homes and six infant homes.
For the German women who came to give birth by order, there were even relatively democratic rules. They could choose the man with whom they were going to conceive a child. No less surprising was the fact that such women were proud of their role, believing that in this way they were helping their native Germany. Himmler himself, in one of his speeches, said: “With every child she gives birth to, she fights for the nation.
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The program was an attempt to raise so-called super children. Their fathers were only specially selected men: taller than 180 centimeters, or 70 inches, always fair-haired and blue-eyed. Almost the same requirements were applied to the mothers. Both were checked against genealogical records going back to the 1750s, to rule out even potential kinship.
After the candidates were selected and agreed upon, the inseminator got down to business. The first three nights he visited one girl, the next three nights another. On Sundays, the inseminator had a day off. The visits continued until the onset of conception.
The conditions offered to women in labor were so good that by 1938, at least 8,000 babies had been born in the special maternity hospitals. Any German family could also hand over a newborn to a maternity hospital, having previously provided all the necessary documents about the health and racial purity of the child. With the outbreak of World War II, Lebensborn branches were also opened in the occupied countries. Three maternity hospitals were opened in Poland, one in France, and also one each in the Netherlands and Luxembourg, and ten in Norway.
This was due to the fact that there was a catastrophic shortage of pure German women. Therefore, in the occupied countries, healthy, fair-haired, and blue-eyed girls were also given the opportunity to contribute to the strengthening of the Reich. It is telling that in this case, Hitler’s propaganda was silent about the purity of Aryan blood, coming up with the excuse that in the occupied countries these were so-called “forgotten cousins of Aryanism. ”
The babies born under the program, before leaving the maternity hospital, underwent a rather specific rite of baptism, one more similar to Celtic or even Satanic rituals.
The baptism itself took place under the Nazi flag, a portrait of the Führer, and a burning torch. The person conducting the ceremony held a special SS dagger over the child and said the following so-called prayer: “We accept you into our community as part of the body. You will grow up under our protection and bring honor to your name, pride to your brotherhood, and enduring glory to your race. ” After such a procedure, it was believed that the baby forever became a faithful servant of the Reich.
The total number of children born under the Lebensborn program is impossible to establish with certainty. As mentioned earlier, most of the documents—including even the procedure for feeding babies—were destroyed as the troops of the Anti-Hitler Coalition approached. Some researchers claimed that at least 9,200 children were born in total, but only pre-war data on 8,000 births was available. Information survives only for Norway.
According to some sources, at least 20,000 children were born in Norway from German fathers, 85,000 in France, and about 700 in Denmark. It is quite difficult to determine which of them were born as part of the Lebensborn program. What is known is that only before the war, and only in Norway, at least 12,000 such babies were born. After the war, the fate of the children born under the Lebensborn program remained largely unknown.
In Norway, the chief psychiatrists declared that a woman who had slept with the Nazis and given birth to children from them should be considered insane. Accordingly, they first tried to deport the children to Germany. After that failed, they were either distributed to other families or simply sent to asylums. It was not until the 1980s that the Prime Minister of Norway apologized to the surviving children and their mothers.
By then, one of the most famous babies of the Lebensborn program had already found her way in the world. Anni-Frid Lyngstad, whose Norwegian mother had given birth to her as part of the program after a relationship with a German officer named Alfred Haase, fled the persecution that followed the liberation of Norway and settled in Sweden. There she became one of the vocalists of ABBA, one of the most popular groups in the world—a child the Reich had claimed for its own, raised instead on the other side of the sea.
