One of humanity's darkest pages.
Lebensborn (Spring of Life) was a program aimed at promoting the growth of the "Aryan race" and the propagation of "pure blood".
This is the story of a the Nazi human selective breeding and child abduction program.
The year is 1933, Birth rates had been declining for years and is compounded by a rise in abortions.
This population growth problem was exacerbated by a shortage of marriageable men following the devastation of World War I.
When the Nazis came to power they embraced eugenics as a core component of their racial ideology, which emphasized the superiority of the "Aryan" race and the need to preserve its "purity".
In 1935, the Schutzstaffel (SS) initiated the Lebensborn program with the aim of bolstering the "racially pure" population and elevating the birthrate of "Aryan" individuals.
Unmarried "pure" Aryan women were paired with SS members deemed equally pure.
Leaders of the “League of German Girls” were instructed to recruit young women with the potential to become good breeding partners for SS officers.
Following conception, these women were frequently accommodated in maternity homes overseen by the SS until the delivery of their children.
The offspring were often adopted by families considered racially desirable, notably those affiliated with the SS.
In 1939 Aktion T4 was implemented, A Nazi euthanasia program with the aim of systematically killing individuals deemed "unfit" or "undesirable" according to Nazi racial and eugenic ideology.
In the same year the kidnapping of kids from foreign countries started. The Nazis would forcibly take children from their parents (estimations vary from 20,000 to 50,000).
These abducted children underwent various tests and were divided into three categories:
- Those deemed desirable for inclusion into the German population.
- Those considered acceptable.
- The unwanted. (who were sent to concentration camps.)
During World War II, as German control expanded across much of Europe, German occupiers were actively encouraged to procreate with women from Nordic populations.
The Nazis considered Scandinavians to be even more racially Nordic-Aryans than Germans.
The Norwegian program surpassed the German program, yielding approximately 12,000 Lebensborn children compared to 8,000 in Germany.
The resulting children were frequently born in Lebensborn clinics, which were established throughout Europe, and subsequently raised as German citizens.
Their childeren of this program were referred to as Tyskerbarnas (“German children”). Notably, the lead singer of the ABBA group was one of them.
It is hard to overstate how the pseudo science of eugenics combined with a racist ideology resulted in a widespread suffering.
Many Lebensborn children were born to single mothers, grew up in uncertainty about their origin or without they biological families.
In the years following the war, Lebensborn survivors frequently faced shame and ostracism.
In today's conflicts, children are still being abducted to influence demographics. A tragic echo of historical strategies aimed at reshaping populations or exerting control over territories.
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