Lebensborn: The Nazi Program to Engineer a Master Race

Short and uninteresting, with a weak physiognomy, shy and awkward in social situations. This is a short and simple description of the young Heinrich Himmler, who later became, in the opinion of many, the Nazis’ greatest murderer. Perhaps it was this early trauma and the frequent mistreatment of his classmates that led him to his criminal dream of breeding a race that would not have the problems he had.

It was a dream of the rise of a new race of blue-eyed and timid Aryans to the position of masters of the world. To this end, he devised the Lebensborn programme, a kind of incubator for a new race of tall and strong men who would constitute the ruling elite in the millennial Reich.

Attempts to create the “perfect man” have been known since the Middle Ages. But none of these attempts was based on racial principles. It was not until the Nazi regime that it occurred to them that not a single Aryan child should be lost.

The Nazis perversely believed that they were something more, and they behaved like it. They used many methods to create their unique race, and nothing stopped them from achieving it.

The Nazi theorist and philologist Hans F.K. Günther worked as a racial theorist and eugenicist during the Weimar Republic. During the National Socialist era he wrote: “The Nordic man is the most beautiful creature in the world. Both in intelligence and in his incredible physique, he is superior. The Nordic man is fair-haired and has blue eyes. He is the king of kings in relation to all other human races on earth.”

A year before he took power, Hitler and members of his Nazi Party had already begun to plan what the new human race that would dominate the world for millennia would look like.

Himmler’s divine plan

Heinrich Himmler was an esotericist and occultist, but he was also an extremely efficient and pragmatic organiser. That is why he rose so quickly in the Nazi Party. He conceived a plan for an army of men based on the feudal past and the mythological origins of the German people. He set up the SS as an elite fighting force that would defend racial purity and provide bodyguards for the leading Nazis, but at the same time be a real army. He provided the template for the new Nazi world.

The SS was to be the priesthood of the new millennial Reich. These people were to be in charge of the ideology and ideological purity of the state. The SS was to be not just a political organisation, but a new order of gallant knights who would be the best in everything. If you wanted to be a knight of the SS, you had to prove that you were of pure Aryan descent.

The irony of Himmler was that he was physically stocky, frail and short-sighted, so he did not meet the criteria for joining the SS, and yet he led both the SS and the Gestapo.

Swastika has existed in Germanic history for millennia. Now it has become the symbol of the Nazi Party, uniting a nation bent on world domination. The swastika was surrounded by a white circle on a red background, symbolising the importance of the purity of the race in blood. It signified a rebirth, a recreation of the German people. But for Himmler, the swastika was more than a symbol of the Aryan race. It was the black sun, a symbol of power and energy.

For Himmler, the German people were corrupt, decadent, impure and defiled. He was convinced that a major programme of selective breeding and eugenics could purify the people once again. Germany once ran the whole world, they were a master race before they allowed themselves to be polluted by other ideologies, other religions, other people. From the beginning, he was convinced that he had a divine mission, so he wanted to find the culprit and turn the tide of history by attacking the cause of Germanic decline.

And he identified the Jews as the cause. The Jews were involved in capitalism and communism. The Jews were not just an inferior race, they were an anti-race. In order to create a living space for the Germanic race, the racial inferiors – the Jews, the Slavs and the Roma – had to be killed. He opened the first death camps.

Himmler also set up the Ahnenerbe, an SS-run institute to develop Aryan science. Since general science had been polluted by Jewish ideas, mystics, occultists and clairvoyants were recruited to investigate the archaeological and cultural history of the Aryans, using archaeology and anthropology to support the theory of a superior Aryan race. He demanded proof that Aryan superiority had its roots in mythological times.

According to this theory, the Germans originated more than 200,000 years ago. Over the centuries their power had declined due to intermingling with inferior races, and they had lost that power. Himmler was convinced that the SS could get it back. Ahnenerbe had to find proof of pure Aryans, so they started archaeological projects to find evidence to confirm these theories.

In 1938, Ernst Schäfer and his expedition organised a trip to Tibet to prove Himmler’s theory that the Aryans had fled there after the great flood that destroyed Atlantis. Anthropologists from Ahnenerbe measured skulls and looked for Aryan features. They were looking for the plavolas, the blue-eyed children, direct descendants from Atlantis. But the findings of the expedition were inconclusive and Himmler took a different path to realising the project.

Lebensborn

The Nazis believed that the Aryan race was destined to rule the world, but when they took power in the 1930s, Germany’s birth rate had been steadily and dangerously declining for years. In addition, the number of abortions was on the increase, partly because of the shortage of men to marry after the First World War plague.

This posed a serious problem for the Nazis: how could they have a ‘master race’ to rule the world when the downward trends in births indicated that the master race would soon disappear?

In an attempt to create a healthy, genetically strong Aryan race, the scientists of the Third Reich developed a unique programme called Lebensborn, the life boiler. One of the main authors of the race theory was Alfred Rosenberg, a renowned theoretician of Nazi ideology, and in 1936 Lebensborn came under the wing of Heinrich Himmler, Hitler’s loyal follower and close associate, who kept chickens during both wars.

Himmler was never an ordinary chicken farmer. That is how he was portrayed by Allied propaganda. He studied agriculture at the Technical University of Munich and was obsessed with breeding genetically pure white hens. It was only natural that Hitler entrusted him with the Nazi programme of creating a new master race. For Himmler was convinced that we could breed humans like animals and produce a perfect human race with the best mental, physical and spiritual abilities.

But who was to be the sexual engine of this patriotic reproduction? The members of Himmler’s SS. They have become both the instruments of terror and the genetic seed for the so-called Aryan race.

Lebensborn began as a social programme to stop the falling birth rate in Germany. Himmler’s aim was to support racially, biologically and hereditarily worthy families with many children and to encourage them to have more.

But he soon realised that strict married life was slowing down the reproductive process. He therefore actively encouraged his SS men to extend their physical duties beyond the marriage bed. SS officers were encouraged by the programme to take mistresses. The role of women changed considerably. Efforts were made to force a return to the Germanic virtues of the wife at the hearth.

The period of childbearing suddenly became the pinnacle of a German woman’s sense of life. Fertile women were held in the highest esteem and were given extra support for every Aryan birth. A cult of motherhood developed, and women who bore the most children were awarded the Mutterkreuz, the Cross of Honour of the German Mother, in recognition and distinction: a bronze cross for four children, a silver cross for six, and a woman with eight children was awarded the golden cross.

Contraceptive advertising was banned and the burgeoning birth control clinics were closed. Abortions were considered “acts of sabotage against Germany’s racial future”.

Twenty-eight-year-old childless men were forced to pay special fees. If they did not have at least two children by the age of 30, the amount increased. In addition, unmarried men were barred from promotion in the SS.

Nazi bride schools were opened to teach young Aryan women how to please and support their SS husbands. Himmler attended pagan weddings to produce the warriors who would shape the Reich for a thousand years. In these unions, love was not forbidden, but it was not as important as sexual power.

Himmler even decreed that communion in certain cemeteries was the best way to impregnate the foetus with the soul of dead Germanic heroes. Only then will they be able to rebuild a pure and magical Germany. Promiscuity was no longer immoral, nor was infidelity. You could have sex with whoever you wanted, as long as they were tall, shy, blue-eyed, square-jawed and generally fit, which was a handy guideline, because Himmler had just had sex with his secretary. He later had two illegitimate children with her.

In its early version, Lebensborn also served as a social welfare programme for the wives of SS men, operating facilities where they could give birth or get help with family matters. Over time, the programme focused more on unmarried women classified as “racially valuable”, sired by fathers with similar “racially valuable” characteristics, and enabled them to give birth to the future elite of the Third Reich in anonymity, thus avoiding social stigmatisation.

The leaders of the German Girls’ Union, the female version of Hitler’s youth, aimed to recruit girls with good genetic make-up as potential partners for SS and Nazi officials. Once they were recruited and found partners for impregnation, the Lebensborn programme helped them during their pregnancies. It provided them with facilities for childbirth and prenatal and postnatal care.

Hundreds of young girls came voluntarily to Lebensborn homes to bear children for the firer and the Third Reich. But not all of them were chosen. Only about half of the girls who applied to the Lebensborn programme met the strict racial criteria.

Careful records were kept of all the children involved in the secret Nazi Lebensborn project, but these were kept strictly confidential. No mention was made of illegitimate origin in official documents, and children born in the homes were only given a certificate of racial integrity so that they would not have problems with the authorities later in life. All this was a major problem in the post-war period, as it was very difficult to trace children born in this way. The disappearance of thousands of German Lebensborn files, destroyed by SS troops in the last days of the Second World War, deepened the mystery about the children’s true identity.

The Lebensborn homes

The programme’s homes were set up in former institutions for the elderly or disabled and in buildings confiscated from Jewish families. The first Lebensborn home was set up in 1936 in the village of Steinhöring near Munich. The organisation was funded by donations from Germany’s most powerful industrialists, bankers and wealthy Nazis who supported racial policies. Lebensborn also received its share from the confiscation of the property of Germany’s enemies at the time, mainly Jews.

Lebensborn’s homes offered mothers-to-be a place where they could give birth in secret, in a comfortable and luxurious environment with first-class medical care and exquisite food. The women who were placed in them also received greater political attention and had to undergo ideological training. They watched propaganda films, listened to radio speeches by the German rulers and had to sing Nazi songs. Nazism had to become a guiding principle for them and their children, and Adolf Hitler their god.

Each home had an SS doctor, a head of technical administration, a secretary and a head nurse, usually recruited from the ranks of the National Socialist People’s Social Organisation. The general conditions in the hostels were above standard until the end of the war, with luxury furniture and carpets, most of which had been confiscated from Jews in many parts of occupied Europe, and from 1943 onwards they were increasingly frequented by the wives of high-ranking Nazis and SS officers, who wanted to bring their offspring into the world in comfort and as far away as possible from the bombed-out cities.

A production conveyor belt of Aryan births without emotional support for them, a breeding programme based solely on numbers, was under way.

The Nazi ideal of strict education was decisive. The daily routine of the children born in the Lebensborn homes was tailored to serve the Reich and prepare them for their fate. Breastfeeding was carried out according to a schedule, not according to the child’s needs, and physical contact was allowed only to a very limited extent. The mother was told how to hold her baby so that he could not squeeze her. The children were to be hardened and moulded into strong National Socialist personalities.

Unmarried girls who became pregnant, in most cases, did not want to keep the child. Surrounded by general comfort, they were supposed to give birth there in peace, and their children then became the property of the SS, which placed them in suitable families. If the child had any physical defect or mental disorder, it was left to starve or otherwise liquidated.

Things did not always go as planned, however. Over time, many children’s eyes began to darken. The Nazi scientists were even more unpleasantly surprised when the children’s hair also began to darken. They immediately started re-examinations and research. The German doctor Josef Mengele, known for his brutal medical experiments, tried to develop a method to create perfect Aryans. He wondered whether the colour of the eyes could be changed.

He searched for the answer among the children interned in the Auschwitz concentration camp and carried out dozens of chilling experiments, but he did not find the answer. The racist medical project eventually led Himmler to decide to gas his own “superheroes” because they did not meet racial cosmetic standards.

Hildegard Trutz

Hildegard Trutz was an ardent admirer of Hitler and a staunch supporter of the Nazi regime from the moment the Nazis took power. She joined the League of German Girls as early as 1933. “I was crazy about Adolf Hitler and our new, better Germany”, she later admitted. “I realised how extremely valuable we young people were to the Reich.”

In 1936, 18-year-old Hildegard was at a crossroads in her young life, as she was finishing her schooling. One of the leaders of the organisation suggested something life-changing to the young woman, who, with her Germanic blond hair and light blue eyes, was the perfect example of a Nordic woman. “If you don’t know what to do, why not give the firer a baby? Germany desperately needs the offspring of a precious race,” he advised her.

Hildegard was literally made for childbirth, with her long legs and slender body, as well as her wide hips and pelvis.

The head of the Federation of German Girls explained to her exactly how the programme worked. She would undergo a series of health tests, and her family background and genealogy would be scrutinised. It was essential that she had no traces of Jewish blood. She was also to be immediately screened out of any history of drunkenness and hereditary or mental illness in the family. Once she had satisfied the strict criteria, a woman could choose an intimacy partner from among the SS officers.

Trutz listened enthusiastically to her supervisor and immediately applied for the programme. She was given an important role like she had never had in her life. She was chosen to be the woman who would give birth to a child who would be part of the so-called master race, in a new world where there was no place for imperfections or genetic defects.

With a seal of approval, the young woman was taken to an old castle in Bavaria, where she joined forty other girls. All the girls chosen to live there were given false names, because the name did not matter. All that mattered was the Aryan certificate – proof of the purity of the race, which had to go back to the generation of the great-grandmothers and great-grandfathers.

The castle itself was luxurious and had common areas for sports and games, there was a library, a music room and even a cinema. Trutzova later said that she had never eaten better than there and admitted that she quickly became self-important and lazy in the castle, as women did not have to work. The housemaids took care of everything.

The girls had to sign a document renouncing all claims on the children they would bear. These children were the property of the German Reich. They would be brought up in special institutions where they would be taught unconditional loyalty to the ideas of National Socialism.

After the girls had signed the document, Hildegard and the other girls were introduced to the SS men who were to become their intimate partners. Hildegard Trutz liked what she saw very much: “All the men were very tall and strong, with blue eyes and fair hair. We watched films together and spent social evenings in the castle. We had about a week to choose a man we liked.”

However, the girls never learned the names of the men. A key principle of the Lebensborn programme was complete anonymity.

Hildegard was delighted. She was not only aroused by the impending sexual act. She was aroused by the knowledge that she was doing all this for her beloved firer. “Because both the father of my child and I fully believed in the importance of what we were about to do, we were not ashamed and had no reservations.”

For the first week, the SS man slept with Hildegard for three evenings. The other nights he slept with other girls.

She became pregnant and was transferred to the maternity ward for the following months. “The birth was not easy, but no good German woman would have thought of injections to ease the pain. Only women in degenerate Western democracies did that.”

After giving birth, she breastfed her son for a fortnight, after which he was taken away from her and placed in a special home, where he was to be brought up as a loyal servant of National Socialism. Hildegard never saw him again, nor did she ever find out what had happened to her child. Nor did she ever see her son’s father again.

In the following years, she constantly thought about having more children for this project, but she fell in love with the young officer and got married. She later told her husband that she had participated in the Lebensborn programme and was surprised to find that he did not like it at all. However, he could not openly criticise his wife because she had done her duty to the firer.

The fate of the tyskerbarnas children

After the start of the Second World War, when the German army took control of most of Europe under Nazi control, the programme was extended to the occupied countries to help educate the “master race” with local “racially valuable” women. Eventually, the programme’s facilities were located in Germany, Austria, Poland, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and France.

The fate of the Lebensborn children was most cruel in Norway. The Nazis admired the Viking blood of the Norwegians and when Germany invaded Norway in 1940, the Wehrmacht commanders encouraged their soldiers in Norway to conceive as many children as possible with Norwegian women.

During the German occupation of Norway, women who had contact with German soldiers and officials had several advantages over other Norwegian women. If Germany had won the war, these women and their German children, tyskerbarnas, the Norwegian term for them, would have formed the local social elite. But Germany was defeated, and that was bad news for those who collaborated with the Nazis.

After the war, the ‘Lebensborn children’ and their mothers faced the wrath of their liberated countrymen. Many women and their children were harassed, beaten and called Nazi pigs by teachers, classmates and neighbours.

The post-war hatred of the ‘horizontal collaborators’ and their descendants, the tyskerbarnas, was so great that psychologists charged with studying the mothers and their children concluded that these women were asocial psychopaths. They added that many of them were backward and of limited capacity, which suggested a motive for their collaboration with the occupiers. Many children were forced to emigrate with their mothers as life in Norway became unbearable, and most of those who remained grew up to be social outcasts.

Those tyskerbarnas who remained were considered dangerous by the Norwegian government and many Norwegians because of their Nazi genes, fearing that they would form a fascist fifth column and create future Quislings. The government was desperate to get rid of this problem and tried to send them far away, to Australia and Brazil. Sweden took in several hundred of them, and hundreds more were sent to Germany.

Hundreds of children were taken away to institutions. The police sent some 14,000 women and girls who had slept with Wehrmacht soldiers to internment camps. The head of Norway’s largest psychiatric hospital declared that the women who had befriended German soldiers were “mentally disturbed” and concluded that 80% of their offspring were mentally retarded.

Paul Hansen carried this label for decades. The offspring of a brief affair between a Luftwaffe pilot and a cleaning lady who abandoned the child at birth, Hansen spent his first three years in relative comfort in the Lebensborn home north of Oslo. After the war, however, his life took a turn for the worse because of his German origins. He was transferred to Lebensborn’s collection centre for unaccompanied children. Because he was epileptic, he was rejected for adoption and dumped at the centre with 20 other Lebensborn children who had not found a home.

These half-German children were classified as retarded by officials of the Ministry of Social Affairs and sent to psychiatric institutions, where many were physically and sexually abused. Hansen recalls days of being insulted and beaten by guards and nights spent in bedrooms covered in excrement, listening to the psychotic screams of other young prisoners. “I told them, ‘I’m not crazy, let me go’,” he says. “But nobody listened to me.”

He was only released when he was 22. He found a small flat and a job in a factory and started looking for his parents. Lebensborn’s Norwegian papers were inaccessible, but with the help of the Norwegian Salvation Army, he learned that his father had died in Germany in 1952. He traced his mother in the East German town of Pasewalk. He travelled there in 1965, but was deeply disappointed when he met her.

“I expected her to hug me and say: ‘Oh, my son’. But she didn’t care,” he recalls. “When I told her that I had spent my life in mental institutions, she said: ‘So what? You weren’t the only one.'” Hansen never visited his mother again.

An estimated 8,000 children in Germany and about 12,000 in Norway were born this way. After Germany’s defeat, these unfortunate people were stigmatised, discriminated against or even bullied as socially inappropriate. Ironically, instead of being ‘super-slaves’, they were dismissed as mentally retarded.

Among the tyskerbarnas, the most famous name is Anni-Frid Lyngstad. Anni-Frid, better known as Frida, was born after the war in November 1945 as the fruit of a union between her mother Synni and the German orderly Alfred Haas, and is one of the singers from the Swedish pop group ABBA.

Because her mother was considered a “German whore” and was persecuted and ostracised for this, she and her grandmother were forced to flee to Sweden. The future pop star’s mother died of kidney failure when Anni-Frid was still a baby. She was brought up in Sweden by her grandmother. Frida grew up believing that her father had died, but many years later she discovered by chance that he was still alive and in 1977 they met in an emotional reunion at her Swedish villa.

The Swedish-Norwegian singer has stood up for the thousands of Norwegian Tyskerbarnas and is working to secure justice and compensation for the discrimination they suffered after the war.

Germanisation of abducted children

When Himmler reviewed the statistics after five years of the programme, he saw that the number of children born under Lebensborn was too small for his predictions and plans. The Germanisation, or Germanisation programme, was introduced in November 1939, a few months after the German occupation of Poland, and the worst phase of the Lebensborn project began.

In order to increase the number of Aryan children, the Nazis began to abduct children from families living in the occupied territories, in what was described as ‘the preservation and encouragement of racially valuable Germanic hereditary property’.

Hundreds of thousands of children were forcibly taken from their homes and off the streets, mostly in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. In Poland alone, 100,000 children were stolen and brought to Germany to be raised by foster parents. They were given new names, never saw their families again and were no longer allowed to speak their own language. Those who were not selected after a second screening were liquidated. Many of the children who managed to escape the gas chambers lost all trace of their placement in the German orphan camps.

Lebensborn began to take in children whose parents had been killed during the war in occupied European countries (e.g. Norway, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia) and who met the racial criteria of an Aryan child. Some of these children were forcibly taken and abducted from their surviving parents and taken far from home to Lebensborn institutions.

According to Himmler’s instructions, these children could not be more than eight or ten years old, because the Nazis believed that only by that age could they really change their national definition, i.e. definitively Germanise them. This was conditional on complete separation from all relatives. The children were given German names and their origins were kept by a special office.

The most desirable children were those who were between a few months and two years old, so that they could forget their real biological parents. After spending some time in the Lebensborn institution, they were given up for adoption to German families who were unable to have children or who felt able to bring up another child, in the spirit of Nazism, of course. The most desirable, of course, were the families of the SS. The true number of these stolen children is unknown.

Researchers on the subject estimate that more than 400 000 children were abducted during this part of the Lebensborn programme. Half of the victims, approximately 200,000, were abducted in Poland. In present-day Belarus, some 30,000 children were abducted, with the rest of the USSR providing another 20,000, and some 10,000 children were abducted from Western and South-Eastern Europe.

Abductions in Slovenia

Throughout Europe, the Nazis used a variety of means to take away wanted children of racial value. A typical example of one of the methods used occurred during the suppression of resistance activities in Celje between 3 and 7 August 1942.

It began with the rounding up of families from which partisans had come, families of shot hostages and families who sympathised with the “bandits”. Some 1 300 people from Lower Styria and Gorenjska were brought to the school yard of the primary school, which was the “catch camp”. After counting all the families, the Germans divided them into three groups: men, women and children.

The crying children, including toddlers and babies, were separated from their families and placed in pens where they were examined by the Nazis. Officials wrote down the physical and facial characteristics of each child in charts and tables to assess its racial value. Based on the findings, the children were divided into four categories.

Those in category 1 or 2 were those who met Himmler’s criteria of what a German child should look like and were labelled as potentially useful members of the Third Reich. Any hint of Slavic characteristics or signs of Jewish heritage placed the child in the lower racial category 3 or 4, Untermensch, who had no value to the Nazis and were only suitable for slave labour, assuming they were allowed to grow up to be slave labourers and were not simply liquidated.

430 children, ranging in age from infants to 12-year-olds, were classified as category 1 or 2, and their captors took them on a train and transported them to the detention centre at Frohleinten, north of Graz. There, they were subjected to a more thorough examination by “racial experts”. The children’s noses were compared with the official ideal lengths and shapes. Their teeth, lips, hips and genitals were also examined and compared with Nazi ideals. Those who did not pass the second examination were classified as category 3 or 4 and sent to concentration camps, where they were subjected to brutal punitive and repressive measures.

Children who passed the second screening and remained in category 1 or 2 were sent to the children’s camps Saldenburg in Bavaria, Neustiftbeifielsfon, Himmelberg and others, where they were re-educated using special methods. Special care was given to stolen babies, who most often ended up in Lebensborn homes and later as adopted children in Nazi families.

The Nazis preferred the youngest, with no memories of their childhood. Children between the ages of two and six were the easiest to brainwash into believing that they were Germans. These children were given German names and forged birth certificates with a new identity and were forced to speak only German. Their ‘new’ parents told them that they were war orphans. Children who refused to accept the lie were sent to extermination camps or killed outright.

The Germans kidnapped just over a hundred more children in a second wave of arrests, from 14 to 15 August 1942.

Stolen, found, torn and torn apart

Babies and children under two years of age were sent to Lebensborn homes, where they were prepared for adoption and dehumanisation. As these children could not yet speak, the rehoming was largely successful. The older children, however, actually lived in re-education camps where living conditions were extremely difficult and inadequate. Some of these children died, some were lost under foreign names, and few returned home after the end of the war.

Most of the children who returned to their homeland were left to fend for themselves. They endured psychological and physical violence and returned to homes that were empty, destroyed, looted or burnt down. Many lost their parents in concentration camps, some had their fathers shot as hostages, and no one came looking for them. Many of the people who lived in the villages to which the abducted children returned had enough problems and worries of their own, so they did not pay much attention to the orphaned children. They had to take up work and start living the life of an adult.

They received no schooling in the Third Reich, because Himmler had clearly ordered that these children should be taught, above all, obedience, diligence and complete loyalty to their German masters. All these children were supposed to know was how to count to 100 and to be skilled in farm chores and manual work. As a result of the effects of hunger and violence, these children were also in poor mental and physical health.

There were also many cases of parents returning home without their children. Finding their children, especially those who had been adopted, was extremely difficult. Even when they were found, lengthy trials and struggles ensued as parents sought to get their stolen children back.

Despite all the horrors, Pavla Pirečnik from Šoštanj survived Auschwitz and after the war, she and her 16-year-old daughter Marica, who had escaped from Vienna after the end of the war, started looking for her son and brother Ivan through the Red Cross and the International Refugee Organisation.

In 1950, they found him in Germany. Ivan became one of the thousands of children who found themselves in the Nazi Lebensborn programme. He was adopted by the German couple Sirsch in an orphanage near Leipzig and named Dieter. They even got a certificate that the boy was an orphan, the son of a Volksdeutcher who had fallen fighting with the partisans. Ivan, now Dieter, had a beautiful and happy childhood in Germany.

As soon as Pavla Pirečnik found out where Ivan was, she demanded that her son be returned to her. But the German court did not grant her request. The US Court of Appeals in Frankfurt also refused to return her son, who was 20 months old at the time of his abduction. In Slovenia, there were indignant protest rallies in support of Pirečnik’s mother, and the whole world followed the trial. Under intense public pressure from the Yugoslav leadership, a retrial was called.

Young Ivan, who of course did not know his biological mother, told the judges that he wanted to stay with his adoptive family in Germany. But his mother Pavla was insistent, and on 29 September 1952, in a retrial, the judges decided by two votes to one that Ivan should return to Yugoslavia.

The farewell was moving. The whole village said goodbye to Ivan, who was known only as Dieter. His classmates wept and a special mass was celebrated in the church. As reported in the American magazine Life, the last words that Josefine’s mother Josefina said to Ivan through the car window were “I will always love you”. Ivan replied, “Take care of yourself, Mommy.”

In the weeks of pain that followed his departure from Germany, 11-year-old Ivan quickly became accustomed to his Slovenian home and bonded deeply with his mother and sister Marica. Nevertheless, he once said that he felt he had been stolen from twice.

He never forgot his German parents. He kept in touch with his grandparents, Josefine and Gustav Sirsh, by letter, and visited them several times in Germany after his mother’s death.

The story of Ingrid von Oelhafen

In 1942, a nine-month-old girl brought to Germany from occupied Yugoslavia was examined by SS officers to see whether she met Himmler’s criteria of a “racially worthy” child with sufficient Aryan characteristics. She did, and was therefore included in the Lebensborn programme. As she was still an infant and had not yet acquired any significant cultural or linguistic characteristics, she did not need to be Germanised before being put up for adoption.

She was adopted by a deserving aristocratic German family and given a new name. For most of her life, Ingrid did not know her true origins and origins. As a child, she felt little connection and affection for her family, not least because her “mother” took her to an orphanage after Germany’s defeat in the Second World War and left her there. Little Ingrid, who found out by chance that she was adopted at the age of 11 and that she was not of German descent at the age of 15, did not receive any love from her cold mother and was even afraid of her father.

It was only at the age of 58, when she began to research her family history, that she discovered clues to her origins in Nuremberg’s court files and archives. She followed them and, after many disappointments and obstacles, discovered the truth about her origins. She learned that her name at birth was Erika Matko and that she had been abducted as a child and placed in the Lebensborn programme. Despite her belief that she had Austrian roots, it turned out that the descendants of her biological family lived in Rogaška Slatina.

Ingrid von Oelhafen discovered another family secret, namely that the occupation authorities had given her mother a surrogate child of unknown origin instead of the Aryan-looking girl they had taken to Germany. The substitute girl took her name and even her date of birth. Ingrid resents her mother for not looking for her after the war, although she tries to understand that times were very difficult at that time.

She tried to contact the “surrogate” Erika because she wanted to ask her what her mother was like, but Erika refused to contact her. Because of Erika’s poor health, Ingrid’s relatives also asked her to promise not to contact her again. The story of Ingrid Matko von Oelhafen, as she is now called, was also published under the title Hitler’s Forgotten Children: My Life in Lebensborn. The book has been translated into many languages, but has not been translated into German because German publishers have shown no interest in it.

Ingrid regularly comes to Celje for the traditional meetings of the Stolen Children Association. The members of the association, which has been headed by Janez Žmavc for many years, gather every year at the end of September for a commemorative ceremony and to recall the bitter memories of the genocide.

Many of the children in the Lebensborn programme have tried to find their roots and identity, their real parents. But most of them never succeeded, either because the Nazis falsified birth certificates and destroyed documents on abductions, or because they were lost in the chaos of the last days of the war.

The Allies returned only fifteen percent of the abducted children to their biological parents.

Post-war trial

When the war ended, the Allies tried in vain to gather all the facts and details related to the super-racist programme. While individual Nazis were indicted at the Nuremberg trials for the 40,000 stolen racially-appropriate children, time and again the Allies were met with a wall of silence from all those who had been involved in any way in this secret project.

The Court found ample evidence of the existence and operation of the Lebensborn programme, but labelled it a social organisation. While the evidence revealed that thousands upon thousands of children were undoubtedly abducted and taken to Germany by individuals and other agencies of the Nazi authorities, the prosecutors could not prove with certainty that Lebensborn employees were also involved in the systematic abduction programme.

Heinrich Himmler, the founder of the Lebensborn programme, committed suicide at the end of World War II. While in American captivity, he swallowed a cyanide capsule which he had hidden between his teeth. He was convinced that he was not a bloodthirsty man and not a person who enjoyed difficult tasks. “On the other hand, I have such strong nerves and such a great sense of duty that when I recognise something as necessary, I carry it out uncompromisingly.”

Max Sollman, head of the Lebensborn programme, was sentenced to two years and eight months in prison for his membership of the SS. He was never convicted for his involvement in the systematic abduction of children within Lebensborn. In 1950, as part of the denationalisation process, he was sentenced to thirty days’ community service and the confiscation of part of his property. After the war he worked in various fields such as advertising, business management and auditing.

Gregor Ebner was Himmler’s family doctor and medical director of the Lebensborn programme. At the Nuremberg trials, he was sentenced to two years and eight months’ imprisonment for his membership of the SS. Ebner was never convicted for his participation in Lebensborn. After the war, he worked as a general practitioner.

Emotional wounds of child survivors

After the defeat of the Third Reich, the Lebensborn programme ended unsuccessfully as a Nazi scientific and medical perversion and ended up on the scrapheap of history. These children were supposed to be part of a master race that would rule for another thousand years. But these children did not grow up to be the blue-eyed and shy-faced marionettes that Himmler imagined. As the years passed, more and more of the Lebensborn children discovered the secrets of their parents. In their own way, they were afraid of revealing the dark truth they suspected somewhere deep inside. Were they desirable children? Or did they only want them as an ideological figure for the system? Were their fathers Nazi murderers? What genes did they then carry within them?

After the war, their parents told them that there was nothing they could do or change. It was the way it was. But the Lebensborn children did not inherit their parents’ brainwashed genes. They developed something the opposite. They developed a kind of guilt. Guilt for their parents. They decided that they did not want to repeat their parents’ mistakes and to keep quiet about it. They want the truth to come out. They want to translate their feelings of guilt and shame into a duty to speak out about it, especially with young people, and to reveal the shameful details of the consequences of the programme.

But for decades after the war, societies tried to suppress any discussion of the Lebensborn programme. In 2000, the Norwegian government apologised to the Lebensborn children for their shameful treatment. A very late, but nevertheless important apology.

We cannot change the past, but the testimonies of the Lebensborn victims can help us to identify dangerous patterns in society and to identify early enough when history might repeat itself in a horrifying way.

Lebensborn children are supposed to be stronger, healthier and smarter. And yet the groups of survivors we meet today in both Norway and Germany are no more genetically perfect or aesthetically striking than other people. These victims, now in their early eighties, face the reality of nature just like everyone else.

(TEXT IN BOX AS A POINT OF INTEREST)

Living water for the Lebensborn children

For the children born under the Lebensborn programme, blood plasma made from “living water” mined in the Caucasian caves beneath Lake Ritsa was delivered from Abkhazia by submarines and planes. The blood plasma was consecrated with special prayers by Nazi magicians from Ahnenerbe, then frozen and transported in silver jerry cans to specific locations.

The Nazis are said to have adopted the secret technique and methods of working with blood from the Russian scientist A.A. Bogdanov, who headed the Institute of Haematology and Blood Transfusion in the 1920s. It is known that Bogdanov wanted to develop a life-extending elixir and the Nazis wanted to develop a biological miracle – Lebensborn children who would be able to live up to 200 years.

The work of the Nazis in Abkhazia was secret. In the local dialect, Abkhazia is called Apsny, which translates from the ancient Sumerian language as “underground well of living water”. The secret programme was codenamed Thor and was carried out at the Lebensborn Laboratory 1146 in the Bavarian Alps.

To carry out the genetic task of the Thor project, Ahnenerb scientists selected twelve beautiful blue-eyed and fair-haired girls of blue blood from Italian, Spanish and German aristocratic families. No doubt one of the aims of the secret Nazi experiments carried out in the closed institutes and laboratories of the special services was to prolong the life of the firer.