Lebensborn

 

Lebensborn: literally “spring of life”.  

I have written a little about this elsewhere but have been reminded of it again after watching World on Fire on BBC 1. The story is all a little disjointed especially about Lebensborn but I was glad to have remembered it.  

I’m not intending to write a book about it as part of the Schellberg cycle but I may well write one at a later date in my historical fiction series.  It will be a while; after Schellberg 7 I have three books planned set in a slightly earlier era.

Lebensborn was established on 12 December 1935.  It looked at first like an innocent organisation that cared for unmarried mothers. Heinrich Himmler was in charge. Medical Director Gregor Ebener oversaw 3000 births at the Steinhoering home.  He was a close friend of Himmler’s. But already it becomes more sinister; he also carried out reproduction experiments on many women. The doctors at the home not only cared for the women and babies but also had to carry on with Nazi propaganda. Fourteen homes were established in Germany and Austria.      

You can see a brochure for the Lebensbron programme here: https://perspectives.ushmm.org/item/brochure-for-the-lebensborn-program

The Lebesnborn children were extremely healthy. The homes contained fantastic facilities for mothers and babies.  The regime looked after them well but after the war the mothers and children were often ostracised.  

There was a decline in the population after the Great War. Marriage prospects for German women once World War II had started were slim. Lebensbron offered an opportunity for maternity. Unmarried mothers could seek sanctuary at a home. Hitler declared that “it shall be forbidden to despise a child born out of wedlock”.  As well, Hitler expected every family to produce four children. German girls were prepared for motherhood in some of their BDM activities. We may marvel that Hitler did not marry – expect just before he committed suicide in the bunker - or produce children. Was he afraid of his own impurity? There was some history of mental illness in his family. There are rumours also that
he was impotent and had some Jewish ancestry.  

For a young woman to be admitted to a Lebensbron home her racial purity had to go back at least three generations. If the mother didn’t want to bring up the child it would be adopted or more precisely given to a “caretaker”. The homes were attractive but not all that easy to get into; only about 40% of the women who applied got a place there.

The Nuremberg trials later found out that many children were kidnapped between 1939 and 1945 if they had the right Aryan qualities  

This eventually became part of the Nazi programme about furthering the Master race.  It involved matching good Aryan girls with smart German officers. We may raise our eyebrows at Margret Attwood’s Gilead but this is just as horrific, if not more so. Every German soldier was encouraged to father a child before going to war.   

An unpleasant side effect of this programme was the increase in the occurrences of venereal disease.

There was also a problem of what to do with these children at the end of the war.  Homes had been established in other countries.  In Norway for example, they decided to carry on caring for the children. This led to a lot of resentment amongst the ordinary population that was still trying to recover from the war. 12,000 Lebensborn children were born in Norway compared with 8000 in Germany.  Anni-Frid Lyngstad, member of ABBA, is a Lebensborn child. She and her mother and grandmother moved to Sweden, where her mother died of kidney failure.  She was raised by her grandmother.   In 2018 Prime Minister Erna Solberg offered an apology to the mothers and children for the way they had been treated.    

Mothers who chose to keep their child also chose not to tell them the truth about their birth and made ups stories about a father that had left them or who died in the war.  

That sense of duty

I noticed when I was studying the letters from the Wilhelm Lőhe School that two words occurred quite often: camaraderie and duty.  Now, I’ve made one of the girls also notice the word “duty”.

All of these girls will have attended the meetings and training sessions of the BDM, the girls’ equivalent of the Hitler Youth. They would have thereby been indoctrinated.  This organisation at first glance seems much like our scouting and guiding movement. Young people are taught many useful life-skills, wear a smart uniform and get involved in a lot of outdoor activities. 

However it becomes a little more sinister, especially for the girls. They are to grow up to become useful women. Women were expected to be content with the bringing up children, working in the kitchen and going to church.  The latter may seem odd as the girls’ school was closed because it was a church school and did not teach Nazi values. Perhaps church was just a way of keeping the women occupied. 

Big families were encouraged, so that more Aryans may be born.  

The Lebensborn initiative was sinister. Women were encouraged to have good Aryan babies.  Single mothers were more than tolerated- as long as the father was a respected Nazi officer. Fantastic maternity homes and homes for young mothers were built. These became breeding centres. 

The BDM magazine again looks just like a scouting magazine – until you start looking at the book reviews. As the years went by, they changed from recommending outdoor activities to providing more and more articles about home-making. 

BDM girls were encouraged to think for themselves and not just think as their parents had thought. However, that thinking was encouraged to be anti-Semitic and over patriotic. Young girls aged 14-17 were encouraged to alert the authorities about anyone in their family who was thinking “wrongly”.  

The girls I am studying don’t seem that different from the young British women who lived through World War II. Our women worked in munitions factories, became land girls and took on many of the jobs that the men who had gone to war had left behind, including ones in middle management. The German girls had to do their RAD (compulsory work experience) and then war work. They had lived through hyperinflation and the depression which was worse in Germany than here because of the constraints put on the nation after the Great War. They were very young at the time of the hyperinflation but it would still have affected them and they lived with parents damaged by it.

Of course they wanted their country to be great. Why wouldn’t anyone want their own country to shine? 

In my latest novel, Erika, one of twins who have to run their father’s factory after he dies suddenly, and Frau Schmitz the secretary there, come up with their own version of what doing duty means. It is about being aware of the needs of others. And if that leads to Germany becoming great again, so be it.              

Image by Oberholster Venita from Pixabay

Lebensborn

Lebensborn literally means “Spring of Life”. This programme was set by  SS leader Heinrich Himmler. It provided maternity homes for the wives of SS members but also cared for unmarried mothers and ran orphanages. However, people who used them and babies who were born there and later brought up in the orphanages had to be “biologically” fit. For approval, especially amongst the unmarried women, purity had to be traceable over three generations. Later it came to be seen as a breeding programme, though no woman was forced to have sex with a man if she didn’t want to.

It reinforced the obsession with Aryan qualities. This showed up in other places and children were constantly assessed for how Aryan they were. One of the German girls finds herself involved in measuring and assessing the shapes of the noses and ears of the children in her charge. 

The children brought up within the Lebensborn system were given a good life, full of luxury but often suffered from psychological problems afterwards.  

The Lebesnborn initiative was an attempt to create perfect babies who would turn into perfect human beings. Do we still do this?
What about farm animals and pets? 
Would single mums have been more comfortable within the Lebensborn system than they would have been in Britain at the time? 
How does that compare with our experience in the 21st Century.