Lebensborn. How Russian children were brought up as Aryans.
Children of war! So many broken, crippled destinies. How many of them ended up in concentration camps, burned in crematoria. Many disappeared without a trace in the terrible confusion of those years. Children, along with adults, slowly and painfully died of hunger and cold in besieged Leningrad. A huge number of teenagers were taken to Germany for forced labor. Children served as donors for German soldiers and were expendable in the horrific medical experiments of German scientists.
Another page in the history of the crime of the German Nazis was the forced Germanization of children deported from the USSR and other occupied territories.
Reasons for Lebensborn
In 1931, the “Marriage Decree” was issued in Germany, drafted by Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler. According to this decree, it was forbidden for non-pure-blooded Germans to marry and have children. It was this law that marked the beginning of the selection policy of the German government, calculated to create a race of true Aryans and supermen.
Thanks to this approach to marriage in Germany, by 1933 there was a sharp decline in the birth rate, and cases of clandestine abortions became more frequent. It can be said that these events were the reason for the creation of the Lebensborn (Source of Life) club in 1935. The idea of creation belonged to Heinrich Himmler, who later supervised this organization.
The Reichsführer-SS was very concerned about the demographic decline in Germany. As a result, the main task of Lebensborn, in addition to selecting genetically pure children, was to help increase the birth rate. But another important task was to educate the little Germans in the future in the ideologically correct direction.
For this purpose, it was decided to create Mother’s Houses and Children’s Homes. Unmarried German women were encouraged to bear children for Germany and the Führer. All this took place under the noble slogans of anti-abortion and assistance to single mothers. In Lebensborn homes, young German women could secretly give birth to a child out of wedlock and leave it there.
However, the selection for this program was so scrupulous that not everyone passed it. Expectant mothers of little Aryans had to provide their clean pedigree, a certificate of no criminal record, a personal questionnaire, a medical card and indicate the father of the child (under oath).
After childbirth, the so-called culling was carried out. The babies were thoroughly tested according to numerous parameters established in Lebensborn: eye color, hair color, volume and shape of the skull, etc. If an infant was born underdeveloped or unhealthy, it was usually disposed of.
But by the beginning of the Second World War, the criteria for the selection of expectant mothers had been relaxed, and almost 70% of candidates had already passed it. However, this program did not produce any significant results at first. In any case, fewer children were born than Greater Germany needed.
Himmler then decided that future Aryans could be born by women from other European countries. Initially, he was interested in the “Nordic group” of peoples: Norwegians, Danes, etc. In the opinion of the Reichsfuehrer, they were related to the Aryan race.
The original Aryans were considered to be the ancient peoples who belonged to the “Nordic race.” The Germans, who cultivated the idea of Nazism, considered themselves to be the most racially pure modern Aryans, the best preserved of the “Aryan spirit.” The Aryans were seen as Kulturträgers, disseminators of high culture, and founders of great civilizations. This view is linked to the pseudoscientific idea of a close connection between the spiritual and the physical, and is a major aspect of racial theories and racism.
The most famous “Lebensborn” child is Anni-Frid Lyngstad (“Frida”), the lead singer of the band “ABBA”. She was born on November 15, 1945. Her father was a German sergeant named Alfred Haase. After the end of World War II, Anni-Fryd’s mother, Sinni Lyngstad, and her grandmother, Arntin Lyngstad, fearing persecution for their association with the Nazi occupiers, fled with the girl to Sweden. The girl was told that her father had died during the war, but in fact he had survived and worked as a pastry chef in Germany. Anni-Frid first met her father in 1977.
How Soviet Children Were Germanized
With the outbreak of hostilities in Europe, Lebensborn branches began to appear in Denmark, Belgium, Norway, and France. In the Allied press, these orphanages were called “Himmler’s Baby Factories.” But since millions of young Germans were sent to the front, and many of them died, of course, it turned out that the “Lebensborn” project again could not cope with the increase in the population of Germany only by increasing the birth rate.
They found another way out – the quickest thing to do was to take away children of other nationalities and engage in their forced Germanization. Lebensborn’s employees started their activities in Poland and then throughout Europe. But the most massive abduction of children was in the USSR since 1943.
Particular attention of Lebensborn employees was drawn to the regions of the Bryansk and Smolensk regions, as well as the Crimea. At first, children were taken away from Russian orphanages, then the children of executed partisans and underground fighters began to be sent to Germany. Then it got worse: they began to take the kids they liked from their parents and kidnap them right on the streets. Subsequently, all children underwent the strictest selection on a number of parameters to determine racial completeness.
In April 1944, a punitive operation against partisans began in the Polotsk-Vitebsk zone, codenamed “Spring Holiday”. In addition to the partisans and their families, tens of thousands of local residents were surrounded. Most of the children were sent to concentration camps, but 2.5 thousand little Belarusians ended up in Lebensborn.
In Himmler’s opinion, young Belarusians look like Aryans: fair-haired, blue-eyed, strong. As mentioned above, even the shape of the skull played a role. So they were almost Aryans and could become useful members of Germanic society. Children who did not meet any parameters were usually sent to concentration camps, where they were exterminated. According to various sources, from 50,000 to 300,000 children were deported from the USSR.
When the selected children entered Lebensborn, they underwent a specially designed “naming” ritual. Everything was furnished very pompously. On the symbolic altar, decorated with a swastika, was placed a portrait of Adolf Hitler. SS officers took the children in their arms and pronounced the oath of allegiance on their behalf, after which the children received new names. These were mostly Old Germanic names: Karl, Ulrich, Wolfgang, Caroline, Wilhelmina, etc.
Naming ritual
Further, after all the checks, the Lebensborn children who did not yet know how to speak properly were given to German families loyal to the Party and the cause of the Führer, so that the children would grow up in an ideologically correct environment and absorb the ideas of nationalism from early childhood.
Older children were placed in indoctrination centers and “Germanized” forcibly. They were taught German in a short time. In order to forget the native language, they beat me for every word. In the orphanages, there was strict discipline and a cruel system of punishment: beatings with rods and put in a punishment cell, which could be taken for the slightest offense (for example, dropping bread). The guys were told that they were Germans, frightened by the Soviet Union, told that they should be loyal to Hitler’s Germany and become valiant soldiers or excellent specialists, i.e. be useful to their new country.
In most cases, children easily learn foreign languages. As a result of daily drilling, after a few months, Lebensborn’s wards were already speaking German and their way of thinking was radically changed.
Lebensborn had its own passport office, where young “Aryans” were given false documents and given to “racially reliable” German families. The new parents were usually informed that the child was an orphan and his family had died for Greater Germany and the Führer. The adoptive family did not suspect that they were raising former Russians.
The fate of the wards of the “Source of Life” after the defeat of Germany
According to research by Professor Heinz Wirst, only 3% of Slavic children have returned home.
In 1945, the war was coming to an end. It is already clear who will emerge victorious in this terrible war. But the Lebensborn houses do not stop their work, because the leadership of the Third Reich does not want to give up their idea of creating a master race. Lebensborn’s branches move westward.
After the capitulation of Germany and its division into occupation zones, the main part of the shelters of the “Source of Life” ended up in the territory controlled by the United States. Americans were persuaded that Lebensborn is a charity that helps single mothers. The Americans found out the truth only a year later.
At the 1945 Yalta Conference, Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt agreed that Russian prisoners of war would be returned to the Soviet Union, whether they wished. With the help of the NKVD, the Repatriation Office created a powerful network, from search groups in Germany to services that were responsible for receiving citizens on the ground.
It was very difficult to find the “Germanized” children, and almost all of the Lebensborn archives were destroyed. U.S. military investigators noted that a huge number of Lebensborn wards did not want to leave Germany. Some, under the influence of Nazi propaganda, sincerely believed that they had the great honor and happiness of being Aryans. Others became genuinely attached to and loved their adoptive parents. The kids didn’t remember their past at all. The teenagers were intimidated that they would be outcasts in their homeland because they lived with the Germans. In any case, a very small number of Slavic children returned home after the war. And only a few of them found their relatives, most of them ended up in orphanages. In addition, the already destitute and unhappy children often faced people’s anger and bullying for living in Germany.
At the Nuremberg Trials, in the case of racial crimes, the employees of Lebensborn were charged under three articles:
1. Crime against humanity: removal of children from the occupied territories.
2. Plundering of public and private property in Germany and the occupied territories.
3. Belonging to a criminal organization.
On March 10, 1948, after 5 months of investigation, interrogation of witnesses and examination of documents, the American military tribunal in the city of Nuremberg issued the following verdict to the leadership of Lebensborn: its leader, SS-Standartenführer Max Sollmann, and his leading collaborators were acquitted of the first two counts and convicted of the third.
At the same time, the defendant Inge Firmetz, deputy head of Main Department A and one of the key figures of the Nazi organization Lebensborn, was acquitted on all three counts, on the grounds that she was a subordinate employee.
Max Solman was sentenced to only 2 years and 8 months in prison. Subsequently, he worked as a journalist in an art publication, headed the correspondence and advertising department, was the manager of the Munich Museum of Ancient Art, headed the board of a state joint-stock company, managed an accounting firm, and then a glass factory. He died in his bed, more than 30 years after the war.
In contrast to the USSR, the Polish government managed to clarify the fate of more than 30,000 Lebensborn pupils taken from the territory of Poland. They, too, were sent back to their homeland, where they were never able to become happy. They were forced to learn Polish anew and read Polish books. They were teased as fascists and cursed for what the Nazis had done, because to others these unfortunate children were identified with fascist Germany.
And what about the children who stayed in Germany? Until the end of their lives, many of them did not even suspect that they were not Germans at all and lived quietly in this ignorance all their lives. Most of those children who found out about their origins tried to find out information about their birth families. But for most of them, it was an impossible task, since they simply did not know or remember their real names and former places of residence. As mentioned above, the metrics in Lebensborn were forged, and by the end of the war, almost the entire archive of this organization was completely destroyed.
Currently, there is a public organization in Germany called “Stolen Children-Forgotten Victims”, founded in 2013 by a teacher from Freiburg, Christoph Schwarz. The organization demands that the “identifiable” children be recognized as victims of war and that they be compensated by the German state. As is well known, many applications are rejected by the German government, on the grounds that former Lebensborn pupils, due to the lack of archival documents, cannot prove that they are in fact Lebensborn.
I want to remind you that my articles are not the last instance and everyone decides for themselves whether to agree with this information or not. Both positive comments and criticism are welcome, but I ask you to avoid insults and conduct a dialogue within the framework of cultural communication.