Nazi leader Heinrich Himmler’s Lebensborn (Front of Life, in German) program, created in 1935, was in the news this weekend. The program, likened to a stud farm, had the Nazis nurture thousands of children with apparently Aryan qualities, in order to breed a perfect master race for a future Nazi empire.
While millions of Jews were slaughtered, close to 8,000 children each in Germany and Norway were given to families of SS (Schutzstaffel) members to be raised for this Nazi racial experiment. Poland, Netherlands, Denmark, and some other countries in Eastern Europe were also a part of this shameful program. Mothers and fathers had to prove their Aryan qualities, absence of mental or any genetic illnesses, in order for their children to be adopted by the elite SS members. Unwed pregnant women were targeted primarily; conservative times forced many to give-up their children for adoption.
These children, most of who were ripped away from their parents, found themselves ostracized and reviled after the War. Once called Nordic-supermen, they were considered offspring of tainted parents from nights in bordellos, and condemned to suffer in silence.
After decades of ignominy, 60 of these so-called “war-children,” most of them in their sixties, gathered publicly in Wernigerode, East Germany, on November 4, 2006. They have courageously stepped forward to trace their roots, dispel myths, demand that the truth be unaltered, and break one of the last taboos about the Adolf Hitler era.
It waits to be seen whether they will be welcomed with open arms, or pelted with stones.
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