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A Lebensborn birth house

Lebensborn (Fount of Life, in German) was a child welfare and relocation program initiated by Nazi leader Heinrich Himmler to aid the racial heredity of the Third Reich. The program was implemented in Germany and certain parts of occupied Europe. National Socialism redirects here. ... Image File history File links Nazi_Swastika. ... The Nazi Party, officially known as the National Socialist German Workers Party (German: , or NSDAP), was a political party in Germany between 1920 and 1945. ... The seal of SA The   or SA (German for Storm Division, usually translated as stormtroops or stormtroopers), functioned as a paramilitary organization of the NSDAP — the German Nazi party. ... The double-Sig Rune SS insignia. ... The Hitler Youth (German: Hitler-Jugend, abbreviated HJ) was a paramilitary organization of the Nazi Party that existed from 1922 to 1945. ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ... 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National Socialist Bloc (in Swedish: Nationalsocialistiska Blocket), a Swedish national socialist political party formed in the end of 1933 by the merger of Nationalsocialistiska Samlingspartiet, Nationalsocialistiska Förbundet and local nazi units connected to the advocate Sven Hallström in UmeÃ¥. Later Svensk Nationalsocialistisk Samling merged into NSB. The leader... The National Socialist League was a short lived political movement in the United Kingdom immediately before the Second World War. ... Nazi eugenics pertains to Nazi Germanys nazism and race social policies that placed the improvement of the race through eugenics at the centre of their concerns and targeted those humans they identified as Life Unworthy of Life, including but not limited to: criminal, degenerate, dissident, feeble-minded, homosexual, idle... The Aryan race is a concept in European culture that was influential in the period of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. ... Karl Brandt at the Doctors Trial The Doctors Trial (or, officially, United States of America v. ... German Blood Certificate A German Blood Certificate (Genehmigung) was a document provided to Mischlinge (those with partial Jewish heritage) during the Second World War that allowed exemption from Germanys racial laws. ... Life unworthy of life (in German: Lebensunwertes Leben) was a Nazi term for those human beings who, by reason of their racial or genetic background, the Nazis believed had no right to life and should be murdered. ... Mischling is a term coined during the Third Reich era in Germany to denote persons deemed to have partial Jewish ancestry. ... Nazi human experimentation was medical experimentation on large numbers of people by the German Nazi regime in its concentration camps during World War II, // Two Nazi doctors at the Dachau concentration camp preside over a cold water immersion experiment on a prisoner. ... Nazis claimed to scientifically measure a strict hierarchy among races; at the top was the Aryan race (minus the Slavs, who were seen as below Aryan), then lesser races. ... A Nazi illustration of the Nordic master race. ... The Süddeutsche Zeitung announces The Verdict in Nuremberg. ... The Racial Policy of Nazi Germany refers to the policies and laws implemented by Nazi Germany, asserting the superiority of the Aryan race, and including measures aimed primarily against Jews. ... It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with miscegenation. ... The Reich Citizenship Law was formed in Germany during World War II while Adolf Hitler was dictator. ... Scientific racism is racist propaganda disguised as science. ... This poster reads: 60,000 Reichsmark is what this person suffering from hereditary defects costs the community during his lifetime. ... The factual accuracy of this article is disputed. ... 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Nazi Party (NSDAP) leaders and officials Contents: Top - 0–9 A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A Gunter dAlquen Ludolf von Alvensleben Max Amann Benno von Arent Heinz Auerswald... This is a list of persons who self-identify as fascists or adherents to a variant of fascism or related ideology (e. ... Adolf Hitlers Mein Kampf. ... List of Adolf Hitler speeches is an attempt to aggregate all of Adolf Hitlers speeches. ... Between 1925 and 1945, the German SS grew from a mere 8 members to over a quarter of a million Waffen-SS members and well over a million members of the Allgemeine-SS. The following list of SS personnel indicates a few of the SS members who were the most... This is a list of Second world war era Nazis that are still alive and presumed/considered war criminals. ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ... Image File history File links Lebensborn-image. ... Image File history File links Lebensborn-image. ... A natural spring on Mackinac Island in Michigan. ... This does not cite its references or sources. ... National Socialism redirects here. ...   (October 7, 1900 – May 23, 1945) was the commander of the German Schutzstaffel (SS) and one of the most powerful men in Nazi Germany. ... Nazi Germany, or the Third Reich, commonly refers to Germany in the years 1933–1945, when it was under the firm control of the totalitarian and fascist ideology of the Nazi Party, with the Führer Adolf Hitler as dictator. ...

After World War II it was widely reported that the objective of the program was to establish housings where the Nazi regime would breed, through copulation, racially pure humans to create a strong race of Aryans. ^{[citation needed]} In reality, evidence of such plans or activities has never been found. Combatants Allied Powers: United Kingdom France Soviet Union United States Republic of China and others Axis Powers: Germany Italy Japan and others Commanders Winston Churchill Charles de Gaulle Joseph Stalin Franklin Roosevelt Chiang Kai-Shek Adolf Hitler Benito Mussolini Hideki Tojo Casualties Military dead: 17,000,000 Civilian dead: 33... Aryan () is an English language word derived from the Sanskrit and Iranian terms ārya-, the extended form aryāna-, ari- and/or arya- (Sanskrit: आर्य, Persian: آریا). Beyond its use as the ethnic self-designation of the Proto-Indo-Iranians, the meaning noble/spiritual has been attached to it in Sanskrit and...

Background

The Lebensborn e.V. (eingetragener Verein) organization was founded on December 12, 1935, in part as a response to declining birth rates in Germany. Located in Munich, the organization was partly an office within the Schutzstaffel (SS) and responsible for certain family welfare programs, and partly a society for Nazi leaders. The purpose of the program was to provide incentives to encourage Germans, especially SS members, to have more children. Eingetragener Verein or e. ... The double-Sig Rune SS insignia. ...

On September 13, 1936, Himmler wrote the following to members of SS [1]:

The organization "Lebensborn e.V." serves the SS leaders in the selection and adoption of qualified children. The organization "Lebensborn e.V." is under my personal direction, is part of the race and settlement central bureau of the SS, and has the following obligations:

(1) aid for racially and biologically-hereditarily valuable families

(2) the accommodation of racially and biologically-hereditarily valuable mothers in appropriate homes, etc.

(3) care of the children of such families

(4) care of the mothers

It is the honorable duty of all leaders of the central bureau to become members of the organization "Lebensborn e.V.". The application for admission must be filed prior to 23/9/1936.

In 1939, membership stood at 8.000, of which 3.500 were SS leaders with mandatory membership [2]. The Lebensborn office was part of SS Rasse und Siedlungshauptamt (SS Office of Race and Settlement) until 1938, when it was transferred to Hauptamt Persönlicher Stab Reichsführer-SS (Personal Staff of the Reich Leader SS), ie. directly overseen by Himmler. Leaders of Lebensborn e.V. were SS-Standartenführer Max Sollmann and SS-Oberführer Dr. Gregor Ebner.

Implementation

Initially the program served as a welfare institution for wives of SS officers; the organization ran facilities, primarily maternity homes, where women could give birth or get help with family matters. Furthermore, the program accepted unmarried women who were either pregnant or had already given birth and were in need of aid, provided that both the woman and the father of the child were racially valuable. Later such facilities also served as temporary homes, orphanages and as an adoption service. When dealing with non-SS members, parents and children were usually examined by SS doctors before admittance.

The first Lebensborn home (known as Heim Hochland) opened in 1936 in Steinhöring, a tiny village not far from Munich. The first home outside of Germany opened in Norway in 1941.

While Lebensborn e.V. established facilities in several occupied countries, activities were concentrated around Germany, Norway and the occupied North-Eastern Europe, mainly Poland. The main focus in occupied Norway was aiding children born by German soldiers and Norwegian women; in North-Eastern Europe the organization, in addition to services provided to SS members, engaged in the relocation of children, mostly orphans, to families in Germany.

Lebensborn e.V. had facilities, or planned to, in the following countries (some were merely field offices):

• Germany: 11
• Austria: 3
• North-Eastern occupied Europe (Poland): 3
• Norway: 9 (or as many as 15)
• Denmark: 2
• France: 1 (February, 1944 - August, 1944)
• Belgium: 1 (March, 1943 - September, 1944)
• The Netherlands: 1
• Luxembourg: 1

About 8,000 children were born in Lebensborn homes in Germany, and another 8,000 in Norway. Elsewhere the total number of births was much lower. For more information about Lebensborn in Norway, see War children. For children used as soldiers, see Military use of children. ...

Post-war trial

After the war the branch of the Lebensborn organization operating in North-Eastern Europe was accused of kidnapping children deemed racially valuable in order to resettle them with German families. However, of approximately 10,000 foreign-born children located in the American-controlled area of Germany after the war, in the trial of the leaders of the Lebensborn organization (United States of America v. Ulrich Greifelt, et. al.), the Court found that only 340 had been handled by Lebensborn e.V. The accused were therefore acquitted on charges of kidnapping. The defendants read the indictment on July 7, 1947. ...

The Court did find ample evidence of an existing kidnapping/forced relocation program of children in North-Eastern Europe, but indicated that these activities were carried out by individuals who were not members of Lebensborn. Exactly how many children were relocated by Lebensborn or other organizations remains unknown due to the destruction of archives by SS members prior to fleeing the advancing Allied forces. From the trial's transcript: [3]

The prosecution has failed to prove with the requisite certainty the participation of Lebensborn, and the defendants connected therewith in the kidnapping program conducted by the Nazis. While the evidence has disclosed that thousands upon thousands of children were unquestionably kidnapped by other agencies or organizations and brought into Germany, the evidence has further disclosed that only a small percentage of the total number ever found their way into Lebensborn. And of this number only in isolated instances did Lebensborn take children who had a living parent. The majority of those children in any way connected with Lebensborn were orphans of ethnic Germans.

As a matter of fact, it is quite clear from the evidence that Lebensborn sought to avoid taking into its homes, children who had family ties; and Lebensborn went to the extent of making extensive investigations where the records were inadequate, to establish the identity of a child and whether it had family ties. When it was discovered that the child had a living parent, Lebensborn did not proceed with an adoption, as in the case of orphans, but simply allowed the child to be placed in a German home after an investigation of the German family for the purpose of determining the good character of the family and the suitability of the family to care for and raise the child.

Lebensborn made no practice of selecting and examining foreign children. In all instances where foreign children were handed over to Lebensborn by other organizations after a selection and examination, the children were given the best of care and never ill-treated in any manner.

It is quite clear from the evidence that of the numerous organizations operating in Germany who were connected with foreign children brought into Germany, Lebensborn was the one organization which did everything in its power to adequately provide for the children and protect the legal interests of the children placed in its care.

Upon the evidence submitted, the defendant Sollmann is found not guilty on counts one and two of the indictment.

In Norway the Lebensborn organization handled approximately 250 adoptions. In most of these cases the mothers had agreed to the adoption, though not all were informed that their child would be sent to Germany. The Norwegian government brought back all but 80 of these children after the war. The Norwegian Lebensborn records are intact, the majority stored at the The National Archival Services of Norway.

Post-war sensationalism

Himmler's effort to secure a racially pure Greater Germany, the classification of Lebensborn as one of Himmler's race programs and sloppy journalism on the subject in the early years after the war seems to have marked Lebensborn as one of the frontiers of Himmler's race battle. In particular, the allegation of an attempt to create a master race through supervised breeding have stuck with Lebensborn and have reached a wider audience over the years. The master race (German: die Herrenrasse,  ) is a concept in Nazi ideology, which holds that the Germanic and Nordic people represent an ideal and pure race. It derives from nineteenth century racial theory, which posited a hierarchy of races placing African Bushmen and Indigenous Australians at the bottom of the...

The first stories of Lebensborn involvement in a master race plan can be found in the German magazine Revue, who ran a series on the subject in the 1950s. On January 13, 1961, the German movie Der Lebensborn (also known as Ordered to Love (US) and Fountain of Life (International)), produced by Artur Brauner, was released, later to gain worldwide circulation. The movie purported young girls forced to mate in Nazi camps. [4] In the decades to follow the subject has been revisited both by film makers and in printed press. Examples:

CBS Drama Explores Nazis' Plan For A `Master Race, The Seattle Times - October 19, 1986
Of all the many terrible aspects of the Nazi regime, one of the least familiar was the party's plan to create a Master Race through lebensborn. This was a program intended to mate the most Aryan of German girls with the most Aryan of S.S. members.

Nazi records found for breeding scheme, The Dallas Morning News - November 26, 1999
Thousands of Germans who were born as a result of one of the Nazis' efforts to create an Aryan "master race" have at last been given hope of tracing their parents - 54 years after the scheme was hurriedly abandoned at the end of the second world war.

How the Evil Began, and How It Spread, Newsweek - March 20, 2000
The Lebensborn program wasn't a sudden decision by Hitler and his cronies. It was part of a much larger Nazi policy on racial purity that evolved over many years ...

Recent movies: Lebensborn (US, 1997), Pramen zivota (Czech, 2000; also known as Spring of Life (US, 2000))

Open meeting

In November of 2006 an open meeting took place between several Lebensborn, with the intent of dispelling myths and encouraging those affected to investigate their origins.^[1]

See also

• War children
• RuSHA Trial
• Nazi eugenics

For children used as soldiers, see Military use of children. ... The defendants read the indictment on July 7, 1947. ... Nazi eugenics pertains to Nazi Germanys nazism and race social policies that placed the improvement of the race through eugenics at the centre of their concerns and targeted those humans they identified as Life Unworthy of Life, including but not limited to: criminal, degenerate, dissident, feeble-minded, homosexual, idle...

Books

• Catrine Clay & Michael Leapman: Master race: the Lebensborn experiment in Nazi Germany. Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton, 1995. ISBN 0-340-58978-7. (German version: Herrenmenschen - Das Lebensborn-Experiment der Nazis. Publisher: Heyne-TB, 1997)
• Marc Hillel and Clarissa Henry: Of Pure Blood. Published 1976. ISBN 0-07-028895-X (French version: Au nom de la race. Publisher: Fayard)
• Dorothee Schmitz-Köster: Deutsche Mutter bist du bereit - Alltag im Lebensborn. Publisher: Aufbau-Verlag, 2002.
• Gisela Heidenreich: Das endlose Jahr. Die langsame Entdeckung der eigenen Biographie - ein Lebensbornschicksal. Published: 2002.
• Georg Lilienthal: Der Lebensborn e.V. - Ein Instrument nationalsozialistischer Rassenpolitik. Publisher: Fischer, 1993 (possibly republished in 2003).
• Kare Olsen: Vater: Deutscher. - Das Schicksal der norwegischen Lebensbornkinder und ihrer Mütter von 1940 bis heute. Published 2002. (the authoritative resource on Lebensborn in Norway and available in Norwegian: Krigens barn: De norske krigsbarna og deres mødre. Published: Aschehoug 1998. ISBN 82-03-29090-6)
• Jörg Albrecht: Rohstoff für Übermenschen. Published: Artikel in Zeit-Punkte 3/2001 zum Thema Biomedizin, S. 16-18.
• Benz, W.; Graml, H.; Weiß, H.(1997): Enzyklopädie des Nationalsozialismus. Published: Digitale Bibliothek, CD-Rom, Band 25, Directmedia GmbH, Berlin.
• Trials of War Criminals - Before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals Under Control Council Law No. 10. Vol. 5: United States v. Ulrich Greifelt, et. al. (Case 8: 'RuSHA Case'). Publisher: US Government Printing Office, District of Columbia, 1950.
• Thompson, Larry V. Lebensborn and the Eugenics Policy of the Reichsführer-SS. Central European History 4 (1971): 54-77.
• Wältermann, Dieter. The Functions and Activities of the Lebensborn Organization Within the SS, the Nazi Regime, and Nazi Ideology. The Honors Journal II (1985: 5-23).

References

1. ^ Nazi 'master race' children meet, BBC News, November 4, 2006

External links

• Trial of Ulrich Greifelt and others Law Reports of the Trials of War Criminals, United Nations War Crimes Commission, London 1949 (copy at University of the West of England website)
• "The Lebensborn" Jewish Virtual Library's description of the Lebensborn program