The Nazi’s Lebensborn Program And The Quest To Breed A Master Race

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Through breeding, kidnapping, and even murder, the Nazis’ Lebensborn program aimed at creating a super-race of Germanized children.

As far as secretive government projects go, the Lebensborn project was a doozy. The purpose of the Nazi-led program was to create the German’s glorified ‘super race’ – by means of a breeding bank for ‘racially-pure’ babies. Of course, indoctrination to Nazism for both mother and child followed.

The nature of pregnancy made this creation of a new master race a rather lengthy process. To rev things up a bit, the Nazis also set out to Germanize fair-haired kids who already existed.

This meant kidnapping and brainwashing genetically superior European kids into the Nazi regime. If the child resisted, they found themselves in a concentration camp where their ultimate fate was extermination.

Head Nazi SS officer Heinrich Himmler was the driving force behind the decade-long Lebensborn program, which started in 1935. He assured any unwed mother who fit the racial profile that giving birth inside a Lebensborn home was the best thing to do for their children. The Nazis would provide the best in care and education, and even handle the adoption process if desired.

Before the war, Germany’s birth rate had plummeted due to industrialization. Now the country’s goal was to grow the birth rate, especially with the ‘right’ kind of babies. With the Nazi party enacting the Nuremberg racial hygiene laws, which restricted Jews and Germans from marrying or having extramarital intercourse, they needed a plan to up the numbers.

The idea of using eugenics came largely from the United States, who was working to advance the ideology in the early 1930s. The Rockefeller Foundation, a funder of U.S. eugenics at the time, even financed some research conducted by Auschwitz doctor Josef Mengele.

Because the government wanted to grow the population quickly, the view of illegitimate children as shameful began to change. Any German baby born was now a blessing in the eyes of the SS – unwed mother or not. If the baby carried the coveted Aryan genes, that – of course – was the optimal scenario.