레벤스보른, Lebensborn
나치 독일이 설치한 기관으로, 순수 아리아인의 수를 늘리기 위한 목적으로 출산을 장려하는 기관
레벤스보른은 나치 독일이 설치한 기관으로, "생명의 샘" 같은 의미이다. 1935년 12월 하인리히 힘러에 의해 설치되었다. 나치는 파란 눈, 금발 머리, 큰 체격 등의 특징을 가진 사람들은 순수한 아리아인으로 규정하였다. 물론 이 아리아인 이론은 유사과학 수준의 헛소리일 뿐이었지만 이런 오컬트적 사고방식에 빠졌던 힘러나 나치 고위 당원들을 생각하면 특이할 것도 없다.
아무튼 나치는 이에 걸맞은 인구를 늘리는 것을 목적으로 레벤스보른을 설립하여 처음에는 친위대 슈츠슈타펠 단원 부부가 자식을 많이 낳도록 했다. 나중에는 미혼의 여성을 받아들여 인종적으로 순수하고 가치 있다고 평가되는 사람끼리 시설에 들어가 교배를 하여 자식을 낳았으며 이는 결국 아기공장이라는 흉악한 시스템으로까지 평가 받는 결과로 나타나기에 이른다. 어머니는 대체로 자식을 포기했고, 포기된 아이들은 친위대원에게 입양되었다. 1941년에는 아리아인의 특징에 맞는 사람들이 많다는 생각에 노르웨이에도 레벤스보른을 설치하여 현지의 여성들을 유치했다. 이유는 나치가 생각하는 아리아인의 특징이란 흰 피부, 아리아인 특유의 골격, 금발벽안 등이었는데, 노르웨이 쪽에 이런 사람들이 많아서였던듯. 실제로도 북유럽계 유럽인들 중엔 금발벽안과 흰 피부를 가진 사람들이 상대적으로 많긴 하다. 역으로 북유럽이든 다른 유럽 출신이든 피부만 희고 이목구비만 서양인스럽지 흑발흑안, 흑발 + 갈색 눈, 갈색 머리카락 + 흑안, 갈색 머리카락 + 갈색 눈 등 동양적인 특징을 지닌 사람들도 제법 많다. 그리고 애초에 금발벽안이란 게 열성 유전과 관련이 있어서, 색소가 부족하게 태어나는 사람들만 그걸 타고난다. 그 와중에도 머리칼은 어린 시절에 금발이었다가 성장하면서 멜라닌 색소 증가로 색이 바뀌는 사람들도 상당하다.
그러나 자발적인 지원보단 사실상 강제로 나치 측의 아이들을 가지게 된 여성들이 많았으므로, 당연히 레벤스보른에서 태어난 다수의 아이들 역시 강간으로 인해 태어난 사생아 + 적군에 의해 태어난 사생아였다. 게다가 이렇게 '교배' 되어 태어난 아이들 중 "아리아인의 특징"을 갖추지 못했다고 간주한 아이들의 경우, 버리는 건 물론이고 죽여버리기까지 했으니 얼마나 많은 아이들이 거기서 태어나고 죽어나가고 했을지는... 게다가 아리아인이라 인정받지 못한 아이들의 경우, 자동적으로 그 아이를 낳은 모친의 양육권 역시 박탈되었기에 설령 어머니가 아이를 거두고자 해도 아이들을 거둘 수가 없었다.
이런 괴상망측한 짓을 한 이유는 레벤스라움이라는 망상과도 관련이 있는데, 소위 "아리아인이 살 땅을 마련하기 위해" 동유럽을 다 꿀꺽해 그 땅에 살던 타 민족을 복종이 아닌 절멸시키려고 하는 주제에 사실은 그 광대한 땅을 이용하기 위한 인력은 독일 국민 전부를 동원해도 턱없이 모자른다는 자가당착에 직면했기 때문이다. 결국 아리아인만을 빠르게 늘려 퍼트려야 한다는 망상에 빠지고 말았다. 이후 폴란드 등지에서 게르만화를 위해 아이들이 납치되었는데, 직접적인 레벤스보른과의 연관은 발견되지 않았다. 그 결과 레벤스보른에 참여한 고위 관료는 전후 처벌을 받지는 않았다. 여성이건 남성이건 자발적으로 들어온 것이 맞기에 처벌을 할래야 할 수가 없었다.
나치 패망 이후에 레벤스보른의 아이들은 대부분 친부모를 찾지도 못했으며, 특히 노르웨이에 남겨진 아이들은 사람들로부터 따돌림을 받았다. 보통 이들의 경우 '나치의 자식', '전쟁의 잔재' 등의 부정적인 꼬리표가 따라다녔으며 노르웨이 내에서 흑역사이자 인종차별의 대상으로 취급받았다. ABBA의 프리다(Anni-frid Lyngstad)가 바로 그런 경우였는데, 노르웨이에서 처벌받을 것을 두려워해 할머니와 어머니가 일찍이 스웨덴으로 이주해서 키웠다고 한다. 그리고 프리다는 한동안 아버지(SS 장교였다고 한다)가 군함 침몰로 사망한 것으로 듣고 자라다가 ABBA로 유명해진 뒤 독일 잡지 'BRAVO'에서 사실이 폭로(?)되었고 그제서야 아버지를 만나게 되었다고 한다.
높은 성의 사나이 - 조 블레이크: 나치가 세계 대전에서 승리한 배경인 높은 성의 사나이의 주인공으로 레벤스보른 출신으로 나온다. 하지만 이 쪽 세계의 나치는 제2차 세계 대전에서 승리한 우월한 민족이기에, 많은 아리아인 여성들이 이 레벤스보른 계획에 자원한 것으로 나온다. 그러나 조의 아버지 마틴 호이스만에 의하면 이 계획은 실패하였으며, 이후로는 미국인을 비롯한 게르만계 현지인에 대한 동화정책으로 바뀐다.
Dies irae - 리자 브렌나: 레벤스보른 소속이었다.
My Child Lebensborn(마이 차일드 레벤스보른): 레벤스보른을 소재로 하는 게임. 관련 단체의 지원을 받아 만들어진 게임으로, 아이를 키우는 육성 시뮬레이션이다.
The New Order: Last Days of Europe: 추축국이 2차대전에서 승리한 배경이다. 독일 내전에서 라인하르트 하이드리히가 승리해 총통이 되면 부르군트 기사단국의 하인리히 힘러에 반발해 다시 독일은 온갖 군벌들로 쪼개지고 2차 내전이 일어난다. 그중 주데텐란트를 지배하는 군벌 '아리아인 민족전선'의 지도자 콘라트 헨레인은 보헤미아-모라바 총독에서 독일 총통까지 된 하이드리히를 질투해 힘러의 환심을 사려고 레벤스보른을 복원한다. 하이드리히는 세력 확대를 위해 헨레인을 인정하고 자기편으로 끌어들일려고 하는데, 그 하이드리히 조차 레벤스보른을 역겨워하지만 헨레인이 자기만족하게 내버려둔다.
The spring of life: 체코의 영화. 나치 독일의 레벤스보른 프로젝트가 2차 세계대전 말기에 어떻게 진행되었는지 다루었다.
Lebensborn
The Nazis believed in “good blood” that ought to be sought out, preserved, and expanded, and in “bad blood”, which was to be identified, then ruthlessly eradicated. The latter gave us the horrors of the Holocaust. The former led to the Lebensborn (“Spring of Life”) program, which went to bizarre and often sinister lengths in an attempt to increase the stock of “racially valuable” Germanic children. Partly a human selective breeding program, partly a massive child kidnapping policy, it was another dark chapter in the history of the Third Reich.
Following are sixteen significant events and people from the Lebensborn program.
1. What Was the Lebensborn Program?
To say that the powers that be in the Third Reich were obsessed with race and racial purity would be an understatement. Most are familiar with the darkest manifestations of that obsession: the Holocaust and the murder of millions of racial undesirables. Another sinister manifestation, although a less bloodthirsty one, can be glimpsed in the lengths the Nazis went to in order increase the numbers of the racially desirable.
In 1935, the Schutstaffel (SS) implemented a program known as Lebensborn to increase the “racially pure” population by increasing the “Aryan” birthrate. Much of that amounted to a selective breeding program, just like breeding prize cattle, whereby unmarried “pure” Aryan women were matched up with pure SS members. Upon impregnation, they were often housed in SS-run maternity homes until they gave birth. The offspring were often adopted by pure Aryan families, particularly from the SS.
When much of Europe came under German control during WWII, German occupiers were encouraged to breed with women from Nordic populations. The offspring were often birthed in Lebensborn clinics, which were scattered across Europe, then raised as Germans. Thus, the wombs of acceptably Aryan-Nordic women from across Europe would be put to use in increasing Germany’s “Aryan stock”. So successful was the breeding program in occupied Europe that more Lebensborn children were born in Norway during just 5 years of German occupation, than were born in Germany during the entire 10 year span of the program.
Another part of the Lebensborn program involved straightforward kidnapping of children. Children who looked like pure Aryans were kidnapped by the hundreds of thousands from across Europe, and taken back to Germany. There, they were adopted by the same types who adopted the SS-bred children, with the ultimate goal being to Germanize them.
2. Eugenics, the Pseudoscience Behind the Lebensborn Program
In addition to stark racism, the Lebensborn program drew intellectually upon eugenics, a pseudoscience founded in the 19th century, that applied the principles of selective animal breeding to humans. It advocated for lower rates of reproduction or the sterilization of people with undesirable traits (negative eugenics), and higher rates of reproduction for those with desirable traits (positive eugenics).
By the early 20th century, a popular eugenics movement had emerged in Britain, and from there spread to much of Europe and across the Atlantic to Canada and the United States. For a time, the US became the world’s leading practitioner of eugenics, with most states adopting negative eugenics laws for the forced sterilization of those deemed unfit to reproduce.
Then the Nazis came along, and after taking power in 1933, they eclipsed everybody with the their own brand of eugenics, in which they were not content to merely sterilize those deemed unfit to reproduce. Instead, they went ahead and murdered such people by the hundreds of thousands in a program of involuntary euthanasia, known as Aktion T4.
Seen in hindsight, Aktion T4 was a practice run in which experience was gained, and some of the kinks were worked out, for greater horrors to come. The Third Reich simply took the pseudoscience of eugenics to its logical conclusion, and in so doing produced both the positive eugenics of the Lebensborn program, and the negative eugenics of the Holocaust.
3. Origins of the Lebensborn Program
It was an article of faith among Nazis that that the Aryan race was destined to rule the world, but when they took power in the 1930s, German birth rates had been steadily falling for years. On top of that, the number of abortions had been steadily rising, reaching roughly 800,000 per year in the interwar period, due in part to a shortage of marriageable men after the slaughter of WWI.
That posed a serious problem for the Nazis: how could they have a “Master Race” that would rule the world, if falling birth trends indicated that said race was about to get eclipsed? So in 1935, the Lebensborn program was established, commencing as social programs that placed the increase and improvement of the Aryan race at the heart of Nazi policies.
SS head honcho, Heinrich Himmler, placed the program, which aimed to select and adopt racially “qualified” children, under his personal direction. It sought to support “racially, biologically and hereditarily valuable families” with many children, and encourage them to have even more. It also sought to identify and select “racially valuable” fertile women who could be expected to produce racially valuable children, and to care for the children and their mothers.
In its early version, Lebensborn served as a social welfare program for SS wives, running facilities such as maternity homes where they could give birth or get help with family matters. Over time, however, it focused more on unmarried women classified as “racially valuable”, who had been impregnated by a similarly classified “racially valuable” fathers.
Leaders of the League of German Girls – the female version of the Hitler Youth – were directed to recruit girls of good genetic stock, as potential breeding partners for SS and Nazi officials. After they were recruited, matched with breeding partners, and impregnated, the Lebensborn program helped them during their pregnancy, affording them facilities in which to give birth and receive prenatal and postnatal care.
4. Lebensborn Program Operations
After WWII began and German armies brought much of Europe under Nazi control, the program was expanded to the occupied countries, in order to help breed the “Master Race” with local “racially valuable” women. Eventually, the program had facilities in Germany, Austria, Poland, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxemburg, and France.
The program’s homes were set up in former facilities for the elderly or disabled, or in houses confiscated from Jewish families, with the first Lebensborn home set up in Steinhoering, a village about an hour from Munich. There, the mothers recuperated after giving birth. Some of them kept the children, while others left them in the care of the program, until a “good” German family was found to adopt them.
The program enabled unmarried pregnant women – provided they and the man who had impregnated them were “racially valuable” – to avoid the social stigma of illegitimacy by giving birth anonymously. Roughly 60 percent of Lebensborn mothers were unmarried, and if they chose not to keep the child, the program ran children’s homes where the kids were cared for until adopted.
At least they were adopted if they were healthy and hale. Even before the Holocaust, the Nazis had launched an extermination program, Aktion T4, that engaged in the involuntary euthanasia of the disabled and undesirable. It would eventually claim about 300,000 lives. Lebensborn children with disabilities were prime candidates for euthanasia – they were literally born in the clutches of the SS.
Many of the newborns were baptized in bizarre SS occult ceremonies, not with a priest holding a pitcher of holy water over the infant’s head, but with an SS official holding a dagger. Instead of reading from a prayer book, the SS man would read from Mien Kampf, and instead of vowing to be good Christians, the children, through their SS interlocutors, swore lifelong allegiance to Hitler and the tenets of Nazism.
The program had kept a detailed registry of the participants, their offspring, and their fates and placements, but most records were burnt or destroyed during the chaos surrounding the war’s end. Between that and the refusal of many Lebensborn mothers to tell their children about the program, the truth surrounding the parentage of many children has been difficult to find.
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.
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.
7. Lebensborn Children: Guntram Weber
Another typical Lebensborn child was Guntram Weber, born in 1943. A creative writing teacher from Berlin, he had long suspected that his mother had lied about his father’s identity. He recalled sensing as a child that he was not quite normal, and that his family treated him with a certain degree of awkwardness that he could not help but notice.
He eventually discovered that the man he grew up thinking of as his father was actually his stepfather, not his biological one. However, he came to realize that the subject of his real father was taboo, and questions about him went unanswered and were discouraged. Eventually, to shut him up, Guntram’s mother made up a story about his father having been a member of the Luftwaffe who had been killed in the war.
She went on to add that his death had been traumatic, and was too painful for her to discuss. The story wrong hollow, however, and for decades thereafter, he suspected that his mother had lied. Especially after he snooped into her belonging, and discovered a silver cup bearing the inscription “Guntram Heinrich” on one side, and “From your godfather, Heinrich Himmler“, on the other.
Unable to screw up the courage to confront his mother, Guntram continued stewing in his doubts and wondering about his father’s true identity. An early break came when his sister, who had her own doubts about her parentage, discovered that she was a Lebensborn child, which made Gunter suspect that he was one, too, albeit from a different father.
Eventually, after significant sleuthing and digging, he discovered that his father had been an SS major general who had committed sundry atrocities during the war, convicted by a Polish court of war crimes in 1949, and sentenced to death. However, because justice is often elusive, he escaped to South America, where he lead a prosperous life, and died peacefully in 1970.
8. Norwegian Lebensborn: The Tyskerbarnas
The Nazis viewed the Scandinavians as an even more racially Nordic-Aryans than were the Germans themselves. Thus, once they occupied Denmark and Norway, the people in charge of the Lebensborn program had great hopes for breeding with the local women, setting up two facilities in Denmark, and nine in Norway. The breeding program in Norway proved even more fruitful than the German one, producing about 12,000 Lebensborn children in Norway, as opposed to 8000 in Germany.
The program’s efforts were warmly supported by Norway’s wartime government of Vidkung Quisling – a name that became synonymous with treason and collaboration. Quisling and his fellow collaborators were not only complicit in, but eager enablers of their German masters’ efforts to breed with blond and blue eyed Norwegian women.
As a result, up to 12,000 Lebensborn children were born in Norway. After Germany’s defeat and the liberation of Norway, things got grim for women who had slept with German soldiers during the occupation. They were viewed as traitorous whores, or “horizontal collaborators”. Many were subjected to indignities ranging from beatings to getting their heads shaved in public, or worse, and ostracized. Thousands were sent to Norwegian prison camps, were they toiled as virtual slaves.
Their children, referred to as Tyskerbarnas (“German children”) were an unwelcome reminder of the humiliation of Nazi occupation, and endured sundry forms of discrimination and mistreatment while growing up. Officials referred to them as “rats”, and between discrimination by schoolmates to discrimination by school authorities, few received a proper education or had a healthy childhood.
9. The Fate of the Tyskerbarnas Children
During the German occupation of Norway, women who had formed liaisons with German soldiers and officials had it made, compared to other Norwegians. Had Germany won the war, they and their Tyskerbarnas children would have formed a local social elite, but Germany was defeated, and that was bad news for those who had collaborated with the Nazis.
So great was the postwar hatred towards the “horizontal collaborators” and their Tyskerbarnas offspring that psychologists commissioned to study the mothers and their children concluded the women were asocial psychopaths. It went on to add that many of them were backwards, and of limited talent – implying a motive for their collaboration with the occupiers. Many of the children were forced to emigrate with their mothers after life in Norway grew intolerable, and most who remained grew into social misfits.
Of the Tyskerbarnas who remained, the Norwegian government and many Norwegians deemed them dangerous because of their Nazi genes, and it was feared that they might form a fascist fifth column and produce future Quislings. The government was desperate to rid itself of the problem, and attempted to send them as far away as Australia and Brazil. Sweden took in hundreds, and hundreds more were “sent back” to Germany.
Many were sent to special government-run homes, where they were raised as virtual prisoners, and there is evidence that drug trials were carried out on them and their mothers. Witnesses and documents indicate that the Norwegian military and Oslo University, perhaps at the behest of CIA, conducted experiments on them using LSD, mescaline, and other drugs.
They were eventually released in the early sixties as bewildered young adults into a world with which they had little experience. Of those who stayed with their mothers in the outside world, the verdict from a psychologist’s report that “father was a German” often sufficed to send them to mental institutes, were many were abused, physically and sexually.