4. Lebensborn Program Operations
After WWII began and German armies brought much of Europe under Nazi control, the program was expanded to the occupied countries, in order to help breed the “Master Race” with local “racially valuable” women. Eventually, the program had facilities in Germany, Austria, Poland, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxemburg, and France.
The program’s homes were set up in former facilities for the elderly or disabled, or in houses confiscated from Jewish families, with the first Lebensborn home set up in Steinhoering, a village about an hour from Munich. There, the mothers recuperated after giving birth. Some of them kept the children, while others left them in the care of the program, until a “good” German family was found to adopt them.
The program enabled unmarried pregnant women – provided they and the man who had impregnated them were “racially valuable” – to avoid the social stigma of illegitimacy by giving birth anonymously. Roughly 60 percent of Lebensborn mothers were unmarried, and if they chose not to keep the child, the program ran children’s homes where the kids were cared for until adopted.
At least they were adopted if they were healthy and hale. Even before the Holocaust, the Nazis had launched an extermination program, Aktion T4, that engaged in the involuntary euthanasia of the disabled and undesirable. It would eventually claim about 300,000 lives. Lebensborn children with disabilities were prime candidates for euthanasia – they were literally born in the clutches of the SS.
Many of the newborns were baptized in bizarre SS occult ceremonies, not with a priest holding a pitcher of holy water over the infant’s head, but with an SS official holding a dagger. Instead of reading from a prayer book, the SS man would read from Mien Kampf, and instead of vowing to be good Christians, the children, through their SS interlocutors, swore lifelong allegiance to Hitler and the tenets of Nazism.
The program had kept a detailed registry of the participants, their offspring, and their fates and placements, but most records were burnt or destroyed during the chaos surrounding the war’s end. Between that and the refusal of many Lebensborn mothers to tell their children about the program, the truth surrounding the parentage of many children has been difficult to find.
