Arguably the most important of the Nazi ideology was of ‘racial purity’. And the Nazis did all in their power to fulfill this ideal… We remember the Holocaust, we remember their Anti-semitic policies. But we don’t seem to emphasise one massive project that was initiated by Heinrich Himmler. In order to aid the racial heredity of the Third Reich, the Nazis initiated the Project Lebensborn.
Founded on the 12th of December of 1935, the Lebensborn e. V was the Nazi response to the declining birth rate of Germany. At first, the program was to serve as a welfare institution for the wives of the SS officers. Nurseries if you like. But, in order to create the ‘racially pure’, these ‘nurseries’ became secret meeting places for the idealistic Aryan German women to meet SS officers and have their children. These children, born in the Lebensborn; the SS took charge of these products of genetic experimentation.
The immorality did not stop there however… The worst was yet to come…
Around the year of 1939, the Lebensborn program reached out to the ‘racially pure’ children of the Nazi occupied eastern Europe. The SS organised the kidnap of children that met the ‘blond haired, blue eyed…’ traits of the Nazi criteria. Thousands were moved onto the former nurseries and in order to be ‘Germanised’. For the children, at the point of entry, they were to forget and reject all about their birth parents and what they have learnt from them. Any signs of refusal meant physical beatings for these children. But fate would have it, at the end most of them were sent to the extermination camps anyway.
Now over 60 years after the war, t is nearly impossible to know how much children were kidnapped in the eastern occupied countries. In 1946, it was estimated that more than 250,000 were kidnapped and sent by force to Germany. Only 25,000 were retrieved after the war and sent back to their family. It is known that several German families refused to give back the children they had received from the Lebensborn centers. And in the most tragic of cases, the children themselves refused to come back in their original family: they were victims of the Nazi propaganda and believed that they were pure Germans.
This was the Lebensborn Project.
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