Among the top Nazis, Heinrich
Himmler was the leading racial fanatic. As Reichsfuhrer and SS chief,
he personally set up the Lebensborn program in 1935
to turn the German population into a superrace through selective
breeding. Thousands of carefully selected German women were encouraged
to have intercourse with SS men, who were presumed to be among the
racial as well as the political elite. Once pregnant, the women were
signed into one of twelve special maternity centers, where they
received lavish medical and personal care. When one of his “new
breed” babies got sick, Himmler would fret and demand daily
bulletins until the child was well.To most Germans, and to the Al lied judges at Nuremberg who dispensed
minor sentences to Lebensborn person nel, that was all there was to
Himmler's program. New light is now being cast on a darker and less
well-known phase of Lebensborn: the wholesale kidnaping of hundreds of
thousands of foreign chil dren for the purpose of adding to Germany's
breeding stock.The wider scope of the program was revealed in a three-year
investigation by Journalists Marc Hillel, 46, a French Jew, and his
wife Clarissa Henry, 36, a French citizen of English Protestant
parentage. In a 400-page book on Le-bensborn to be published in France
in January and in a stark, 2%-hour documentary film, the Hillels trace
the pro gram's grotesque course. They show that Himmler had become
obsessed with the idea of “racial war” and told Lebensborn
directors that he wanted “racially acceptable” children in
occupied lands brought to the Fatherland to be raised as Germans.
“How can we be so cruel as to take a child from its mother?”
he asked piously, then answered: “How much more cruel to leave a
potential ge nius with our natural enemies.”Racially Valid. On his orders, SS men carried out mass examinations of
children in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Norway and France.
Those who were healthy and reasonably Aryan-looking — preferably with
blond hair, blue eyes and striking features — were pronounced racially
valuable.They were shipped to indoctrination centers in Germany, then sent for
adoption to “racially valid and ideologically trustworthy”
German families. More than 200,000 children were taken from their
families in Poland alone. In the in famous Nazi massacre in the Czech
vil lage of Lidice, the Germans first examined the community's 90
children. They saved eight for Himmler's program and gassed the rest.The Hillels' color documentary, Of Pure Blood, shown recently on British
television and shortly to be released all over Europe, is built around
interviews with survivors and former officials of Lebensborn. In the
film's most poignant se quence, an aged Polish woman pleads for some
sign of affection from her daughter, taken as a girl from her by
Himmler's men and now, 32 years later, a hausfrau in Flensburg, West
Germany. Next on the screen is a lawyer coolly explaining that the
daughter considers herself German and has no desire to remember the
past.
