What was Lebensborn?

Lebensborn was a German SS-initiated, state-supported, registered association in Nazi Germany with the goal of raising the birth rate of Aryan children of persons classified as 'racially pure' and 'healthy', based on Nazi racial hygiene and health ideology.

The Lebensborn project was one of most secret and terrifying Nazi projects. Heinrich Himmler created The Lebensborn in December 1935. The goal of the society ("Registered Society Lebensborn - Lebensborn Eingetragener Verein") was to offer to young girls "racially pure" the possibility to give birth to a child in secret. The child was then given to the SS which took charge of the child's "education" and adoption.

In the beginning, the "Lebensborn" were SS nurseries. But in order to create a "super-race", the SS transformed the nurseries in meeting places for racially pure German women who wanted to meet and have children with SS officers. The children born in the Lebensborn were taken by the SS; this allowed them to become victims of the German race policy. Without any contact with their mothers, without any parental love, most of them ended up becoming autistic.

From 1939 to the end of World War II in September 1945, thousands of children were transferred to Lebensborn centers in order to be "Germanized". In these centers, things were done to force the children to reject and forget their birth parents. The children who refused the Nazi education were finally transferred to concentration camps and exterminated.