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Here’s What to Know About Lebensborn, the Nazi Human Selective Breeding and Child Abduction Program

Khalid Elhassan August 24, 2018 28 min

Things from the days of the eugenics craze. Slideshare

2. Eugenics, the Pseudoscience Behind the Lebensborn Program

In addition to stark racism, the Lebensborn program drew intellectually upon eugenics, a pseudoscience founded in the 19th century, that applied the principles of selective animal breeding to humans. It advocated for lower rates of reproduction or the sterilization of people with undesirable traits (negative eugenics), and higher rates of reproduction for those with desirable traits (positive eugenics).

By the early 20th century, a popular eugenics movement had emerged in Britain, and from there spread to much of Europe and across the Atlantic to Canada and the United States. For a time, the US became the world’s leading practitioner of eugenics, with most states adopting negative eugenics laws for the forced sterilization of those deemed unfit to reproduce.

Then the Nazis came along, and after taking power in 1933, they eclipsed everybody with the their own brand of eugenics, in which they were not content to merely sterilize those deemed unfit to reproduce. Instead, they went ahead and murdered such people by the hundreds of thousands in a program of involuntary euthanasia, known as Aktion T4.

Seen in hindsight, Aktion T4 was a practice run in which experience was gained, and some of the kinks were worked out, for greater horrors to come. The Third Reich simply took the pseudoscience of eugenics to its logical conclusion, and in so doing produced both the positive eugenics of the Lebensborn program, and the negative eugenics of the Holocaust.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.