Wikipedia Deep Dive

Lebensborn

12 min read

The Children Who Were Stolen to Build a Master Race

Somewhere in Poland, in the chaos of the Second World War, Nazi officers would arrive at a village and simply take children. Not randomly. They were looking for specific features: blonde hair, blue eyes, the right skull shape. Children who looked "German enough" to be worth saving.

The ones who passed the tests were shipped to special homes across the Reich. They were given new names. Taught a new language. Told their real parents were dead, or had abandoned them, or had never existed at all. They were to become German children now.

The ones who failed the tests? They were sent to concentration camps.

This was Lebensborn, which translates to "Fount of Life" in German. The name sounds almost poetic. The reality was one of the most systematic attempts at human engineering in modern history.

What Lebensborn Actually Was

Lebensborn began as something that sounds almost benign. Founded on December 12, 1935, in Munich, it started as a welfare program for pregnant women, particularly unmarried ones who might otherwise face social stigma. In an era when having a child out of wedlock could ruin a woman's life, Lebensborn offered a way out: comfortable maternity homes where women could give birth secretly, with the option to put their children up for adoption afterward.

But this wasn't charity. This was eugenics.

The program was the brainchild of Heinrich Himmler, head of the Schutzstaffel, or SS, the paramilitary organization that would become one of the most feared instruments of Nazi terror. Himmler was obsessed with racial purity and population growth. Germany's birth rate was falling, and Himmler saw this as an existential crisis for the "Aryan race."

His solution was straightforward: produce more racially "pure" children by any means necessary.

To access Lebensborn's services, both mother and father had to pass racial screening by SS doctors. They examined family histories, physical characteristics, and health records. Only those deemed "racially, biologically, and hereditarily valuable" were admitted. About sixty percent of the mothers in the program were unmarried, many of them having had relationships with SS officers who were actively encouraged to father as many children as possible.

The Homes Where Master Race Babies Were Made

The first Lebensborn home opened in 1936 in Steinhöring, a small village near Munich. It was called Heim Hochland, and it set the template for what would become a network spanning occupied Europe. By the war's end, there would be facilities in at least ten countries: Germany, Austria, Poland, Norway, Denmark, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg.

Many of these facilities were established in buildings confiscated from Jews.

The homes provided exceptional care, at least by the standards of the time. After Germany's surrender, Allied press reported with some surprise on the "super babies" they found: unusually healthy, well-fed children at a time when much of Europe was starving. The babies spent time outdoors in sunlight, received two baths daily, and everything that touched them was disinfected. Nurses ensured every child ate everything given to them. Even in the final desperate days of the war, when German cities were being bombed to rubble, Lebensborn mothers and children received the best food and medical treatment available.

About 8,000 children were born in Lebensborn homes in Germany. A similar number were born in Norway, where the program was especially active because Norwegians were considered particularly "Nordic" and therefore racially desirable. German soldiers stationed in Norway were encouraged to have relationships with local women, and the resulting children were prized additions to the future master race.

But births were only part of the program.

The Kidnapping Program

In 1939, Lebensborn's mission expanded dramatically. The Nazis began systematically kidnapping children from occupied territories, particularly Poland, Yugoslavia, Russia, Ukraine, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Estonia, Latvia, and Norway.

Himmler's logic was chilling in its clarity. "It is our duty to take the children with us to remove them from their environment," he reportedly said. "Either we win over any good blood that we can use for ourselves and give it a place in our people, or we destroy this blood."

SS units would seize children in full view of their parents. The children were then subjected to a battery of racial tests and sorted into three categories.

The first group consisted of children deemed "desirable" for the German population. These were the blonde, blue-eyed children who most closely matched the Nazi racial ideal.

The second group was considered "acceptable," not perfect specimens but close enough.

The third group was labeled "unwanted." These children were sent to concentration camps to work. Many were killed.

Children in the first two groups, if between two and six years old, were placed with German families in a kind of foster arrangement. Older children, from six to twelve, were sent to German boarding schools. In both cases, the process was designed to erase their identities completely. They were assigned new German names. They were taught to speak only German. They were told to forget their birth parents. Any records of their true ancestry were destroyed.

Children who resisted were beaten. Those who continued to rebel were sent to concentration camps.

How Many Children Were Taken?

We will never know the true number.

In the final stages of the war, as Allied forces closed in, the SS destroyed the files documenting which children had been kidnapped and where they had been sent. This was deliberate: evidence of crimes was being burned even as the Reich collapsed.

The Polish government claimed that 10,000 children were kidnapped from Poland alone, and that less than fifteen percent were ever returned to their biological families. Other estimates go as high as 200,000 children taken from across occupied Europe. Historian Dirk Moses suggests a more likely figure is around 20,000, though he acknowledges the true number may never be established.

What we do know is that after the war, approximately 10,000 foreign-born children were located in the American-controlled sector of Germany. Many could not be returned home because no one knew where they had come from. Their names had been changed. Their documents had been forged or destroyed. Their memories of life before the program had been systematically erased.

Some of these children lived their entire lives never knowing their true origins.

The Trial That Failed to Deliver Justice

After the war, the leaders of Lebensborn were put on trial at Nuremberg. Max Sollmann and Gregor Ebner, the men who had run the organization, faced charges including kidnapping.

They were acquitted.

The court found ample evidence that a massive program of child kidnapping had existed. Thousands upon thousands of children had been taken from their families. This was not in dispute. But the prosecution could not prove that Lebensborn itself had carried out the kidnappings, as opposed to merely receiving children who had been kidnapped by other Nazi agencies.

The tribunal's transcript is remarkably candid about this distinction. "While the evidence has disclosed that thousands upon thousands of children were unquestionably kidnapped by other agencies or organisations and brought into Germany," the court found, "the evidence has further disclosed that only a small percentage of the total number ever found their way into Lebensborn."

Of the 10,000 foreign-born children found in American-controlled Germany, only 340 had been processed through Lebensborn facilities. And of those, the court determined, only isolated cases involved children who still had a living parent at the time of their placement. Most were orphans.

This narrow legal distinction, between actively kidnapping children and merely accepting kidnapped children, was enough for acquittal.

What Happened to the Children

The end of the war did not mean the end of suffering for Lebensborn children.

In Norway, where thousands of children had been born to Norwegian mothers and German fathers, the postwar backlash was severe. These children and their mothers were seen as traitors, collaborators, the human residue of occupation. Local communities took revenge on the women, beating them, cutting off their hair, driving them from their homes.

The children faced decades of abuse. They were bullied, ostracized, and in some cases placed in mental institutions. The Norwegian government attempted to deport them to Germany, Brazil, and Australia, though these efforts ultimately failed.

In 2008, a group of Norwegian Lebensborn children brought their case to the European Court of Human Rights, seeking compensation from the Norwegian government for its complicity in their mistreatment. The court dismissed the case on technical grounds: the events had happened too long ago. However, the Norwegian government did eventually offer each survivor a payment of approximately £8,000.

Many Lebensborn survivors, wherever they were born, faced the stigma of their origins for the rest of their lives. In an era when children born out of wedlock already faced discrimination, being identified as the product of a Nazi breeding program added an additional layer of shame. Some never spoke of their origins. Others spent decades trying to uncover the truth about their biological parents.

The Myth of the Breeding Program

For decades after the war, a particular myth circulated about Lebensborn: that it was a coercive breeding program, essentially state-run brothels where SS men were assigned to impregnate specially selected women.

This is not what Lebensborn was, though the reality was disturbing enough.

The myth appears to have originated in the 1950s, in a German-language magazine called Revue that ran a sensationalized series on the subject. The story proved irresistible: secret breeding farms where women were forced to produce babies for the Reich. It persists in popular culture to this day.

The truth is more complicated. Lebensborn did encourage relationships between German soldiers and women deemed racially suitable in occupied countries. Leaders of the League of German Girls, the female equivalent of the Hitler Youth, were instructed to recruit young women as potential partners for SS officers. Access to the program was strictly limited by racial criteria. This was, in a sense, supervised selective breeding.

And recently discovered records, along with testimony from Lebensborn children and their parents, confirm that some SS men did specifically father children as part of Himmler's program. This was widely rumored within Germany at the time.

But there is no evidence of the forced breeding facilities that popular imagination conjured. The horror of what actually happened, the kidnapping of children, the erasure of identities, the sorting of human beings into categories of desirable and disposable, was somehow not dramatic enough for the postwar imagination.

The Long Shadow

In November 2006, in the German town of Wernigerode, an unusual meeting took place. Several Lebensborn children, now elderly, gathered publicly for the first time. Their purpose was to dispel myths about the program and encourage others affected to investigate their own origins.

The records that survived the war are held by the International Tracing Service and the German Federal Archives. Various organizations continue to help Lebensborn children, some now in their eighties, search for information about their biological families. The association Verein kriegskind.de publishes search efforts, hoping to connect survivors with the families from which they were taken more than seven decades ago.

In 2018, a documentary called "Wars Don't End," directed by Dheeraj Akolkar and narrated by actress Liv Ullmann, featured several surviving Lebensborn children telling their stories. A video game called "My Child Lebensborn," which won a BAFTA award for "Game Beyond Entertainment," allows players to experience the bullying these children endured after the war.

The program has appeared in fiction, too. In the novel and film "Sophie's Choice," the protagonist unsuccessfully attempts to place her son in Lebensborn. In the television series "The Man in the High Castle," which imagines an alternate history where the Nazis won the war, several characters are revealed to be Lebensborn children.

Why It Matters Now

Lebensborn represents something that feels uncomfortably relevant in an era of renewed interest in genetic engineering and population management. It was an attempt to use the power of the state to shape human biology, to decide which people were valuable enough to reproduce and which were not.

The program combined several elements that seem almost quaint in their pseudoscience: the belief that race was a meaningful biological category, that "Aryan" traits could be identified and selected for, that human beings could be sorted by their hereditary value like livestock. We now know that race as the Nazis understood it has no basis in genetics, that the traits they prized, blonde hair, blue eyes, certain skull shapes, have no connection to intelligence, character, or human worth.

But the underlying impulse, the desire to engineer a better human population, has not disappeared. It has merely become more sophisticated. Modern eugenics operates through genetic screening, embryo selection, and the quiet choices of parents who can afford to choose the traits of their children.

The children of Lebensborn are a reminder of what happens when the state takes control of reproduction. Not the lurid fantasy of breeding farms, but something more mundane and in some ways more terrifying: bureaucrats with racial charts, doctors measuring skulls, children sorted into categories of worthy and unworthy, families torn apart in the name of building a better future.

The program's name, "Fount of Life," was meant to evoke something pure and natural. But there was nothing natural about it. It was a machine for producing human beings according to specifications, and like all such machines, it treated people as raw material to be processed, sorted, and disposed of according to their utility.

The children who survived carry that legacy still. Some have made peace with their origins. Others have spent their lives trying to discover who they really are. All of them are living proof of what happens when human beings are valued not for themselves, but for what they represent in someone else's vision of a perfect future.