6. Lebensborn Children: Gisela Heidenreich
A typical example was Gisela Heidenreich, who came to understand while still a toddler that something was wrong, when she overheard people referring to her as “the SS bastard”. Born in a Lebensborn clinic in the Norwegian capital of Oslo, in 1943, Gisela’s mother had been a secretary in a Lebensborn program facility in Munich, who was impregnated by a married SS officer.
The pregnant secretary then travelled from her home in Bavaria to Oslo, to give birth discretely in one of the program’s Norwegian facilities. Growing up, Gisela was unable to get answers from her mother, who refused to answer questions about the circumstances surrounding her birth or the identity of her father. It was not until she was an adult that she finally managed to track him down.
It was a complex encounter, replete with doubts and ambiguities. Aware of just what types of atrocities the Nazis, and especially the SS, had committed, Gisela was unsure how she would react upon meeting her father. As she described how it went down, however: “When I first met him it was on a station platform. I ran into his arms and all I thought was ‘I’ve got a father … I accuse myself of shutting out who my father was. I never asked him what he did. My own reaction has helped me to understand how people in those days just put the blinders on and ignored the terrible things that were happening.”
She visited the Lebensborn home where her mother had been employed, Steinhoering, about an hour from Munich. It was there that Gisela’s mother had played a key role in signing program babies up for adoption. The former Lebensborn facility, now a center for the disabled, still had visible SS symbols, and its grounds contained a statue erected in the breeding program’s heyday, of an Aryan mother breastfeeding her children.