The application for admission must be filed prior to 23 September In , membership stood at 8,, of which 3, were SS leaders. Leaders of Lebensborn e. Gregor Ebner. Initially, the program served as a welfare institution for wives of SS officers; the organization ran facilities—primarily maternity homes—where women could give birth or get help with family matters. Furthermore, the program accepted unmarried women who were either pregnant or had already given birth and were in need of aid, provided that both the woman and the father of the child were "racially valuable".
The program allowed them to give birth anonymously away from home without social stigma. In case the mothers wanted to give up the children, the program also had orphanages and an adoption service. The first home outside of Germany opened in Norway in Many homes were confiscated Jewish houses and former nursing homes.
While Lebensborn e. The main focus in occupied Norway was aiding children born by German soldiers and Norwegian women.
In north-eastern Europe the organization, in addition to services provided to SS members, engaged in the movement of children, mostly orphans, to families in Germany. About children were born in Lebensborn homes in Germany and —12, children in Norway. For more information about Lebensborn in Norway, see war children.
In Norway, the Lebensborn organization handled approximately adoptions. In most of these cases, the mothers had agreed to the adoption, though not all were informed that their child would be sent to Germany. The Norwegian government brought back all but 80 of these children after the war. Starting in , the Nazis started to kidnap children from foreign countries including Russia, Ukraine, Czech, Romania, Estonia, Latvia, but mainly from Yugoslavia and Poland for the Lebensborn program.
They started to do this because "It is our duty to take [the children] with us to remove them from their environment The Nazis would take children from their parents without question, right in front of the parents. The kidnapped children took several tests and were categorized into 3 groups: those that were desirable to be included into German population, those that were acceptable, and those that were unwanted. The children who were categorized as unwanted were taken to concentration camps to work or were killed.
The children from the other groups and between ages 2 to 6 were taken to be raised by families in the program, children ages 6 to 12 were taken to German boarding schools.
The schools gave the children new German names and would teach them to be proud to be part of Germany. They would also force the children to forget their parents and erased any records of their heritage.
Those that were unwilling to be become part of the German population were beaten and if continued to rebel they would be sent to concentration camps. In the final stages of the war, the files of all kidnapped children for the program were destroyed. As a result it is nearly impossible to know how many children were actually taken. After the war, the branch of the Lebensborn organization operating in north-eastern Europe was accused of kidnapping children deemed racially valuable in order to resettle them with German families.
They found children, aged six months to six years. Most of the mothers and staff had fled. The majority of these children were either put up for adoption or sent back to their birth families. Some of the children kidnapped in other countries who were living with families throughout Germany were repatriated to their native countries. Unfortunately, many were too Germanic to fit in.
It is nearly impossible to know how many children were kidnapped in the eastern occupied countries. In , it was estimated that more than , were kidnapped and sent by force to Germany. Only 25, were retrieved after the war and sent back to their families. It is known that several German families refused to give back the children they had received from the Lebensborn centers. In some cases, the children themselves refused to come back to their original family - they were victims of the Nazi propaganda and believed that they were pure Germans.
Download our mobile app for on-the-go access to the Jewish Virtual Library. Category » The Nazi Party. Party Platform. Nazi Regime in Germany. Nazi Organizations. German Police. Bund Deutscher Madel. Reich Security Main Office.
Schutzstaffel SS. Sicherheitsdienst SD. The Third Reich. Homosexuals in the Third Reich. Law and Justice. Military Organization. Power Structure. Political Parties. Women of the Third Reich. Most of the smaller children were taken away from their parents before they were old enough to comprehend what was even happening. The Third Reich built its model of superiority to other nations on its Nordic and Aryan heritage.
However, a problem soon arose in that the population of Germany was not sufficient to grow their Reich into a world power. Germany needed to have a population explosion. There are, of course, only a few ways to do this. One is to incorporate other populations into your own.
Another is to grow your own population through whatever methods necessary. Amid their rapid conquest of the lands to the north and east, they noticed many people within the population who would fit the stereotypes they had assigned to so-called Aryan heritage.
While many people from these Baltic states would technically be Slavic in heritage and thus sub-human by the Nazi standards , it was nonetheless decided to figure out some way to incorporate them — and, most importantly, their children — into the German Reich. Germany was losing thousands of men per day on both fronts. These losses would have to be made up in some fashion if the Third Reich was going to repopulate not only its own country but also the new lands captured in the east.
The Nazis began several programs designed to rebuild their population swiftly. Firstly and most heinously, they would go through captured territories and select children who were deemed to have sufficient Aryan features.
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