14. The Troubled Lives of Nazi-Bred Children
The Lebensborn association had planned to breed a racial elite for Hitler’s Thousand Year Reich. However, the Reich lasted only twelve years before going down to defeat and ruin, reduced to rubble by Allied bombers and rampaging armies from east and west. The German Lebensborn children grew up in the war’s aftermath, many of them cowed by shame and uncertainty.
Whether they had been kept by their mothers or adopted by “good” German families, the lucky Lebensborn children were those who grew up unaware of their origins. Children known to have been products of the Lebensborn had a rough time of it, not least because their mothers were widely scorned as “SS whores”. They also grew up with not only the social stigma of illegitimate birth, which was a big deal back then, but also the fact that their very existence was an uncomfortable reminder of a dark past best forgotten.
