5. The Fate of the Lebensborn Kids
The plan had been to breed a racial elite for Hitler’s Thousand Year Reich, but said Reich lasted only twelve years before going down to defeat and ruin, reduced to rubble by Allied bombers and rampaging Allied armies from east and west. The German Lebensborn children grew up in the war’s aftermath, many of them cowed by shame and uncertainty.
Even during the Third Reich, the breeding program was highly controversial, especially as illegitimate children were a social taboo in the eyes of many. To that end, SS Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler ordered the establishment of Lebensborn homes in Germany, Norway, and other occupied countries, to provide comfortable accommodations for the unmarried pregnant women.
Whether they were then kept by their mothers or adopted by “good” German families, the lucky program children were those who grew up and lived unaware of their origins. Children known to have been products of the Lebensborn had a rough time of it, not least because their mothers were widely scorned as “SS whores”. In addition, they grew up enduring not only the social stigma of illegitimate birth, which was a big deal back then, but also the fact that their very existence was an uncomfortable reminder of a dark past best forgotten.
Many struggled through life, simultaneously desperate to discover, and dreading, the truth about their family history and whether their fathers had been war criminals. That was on top of feelings of inadequacy, coupled with alienation from their mothers, whether biological or adopted, and their families, plus the shame of illegitimacy and association with the Nazi project. Eventually, after decades of alienation, the Lebensborn children started coming out of the shadows. In the early 2000s, a group of them, by then in their 60s, started going public with their plight, as they sought to find out who their true parents had been.