Heritage paper on families calls for 'marriage bootcamp,' more babies

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5. Children for Hitler

https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/article/nazi-germanys-lebensborn-program-children-for-hitler/

Children for Hitler
The Nazi Lebensborn Program was conceived to provide A supply of Aryan children for the future of the Third Reich.
This article appears in: April 2020
By Brent Douglas Dyck

By 1936, 18-year-old Hildegard Koch had reached a crossroads in her young life as she finished her schooling. Her leader in the local Bund Deutscher Mädel (the League of German Girls), gave her some advice: “If you don’t know what to do, why not give the Führer a child? What Germany needs more than anything is racially valuable stock.” It was the first time that Koch had heard of the Lebensborn Program.

In 1933, the year Hitler and the Nazis came to power, the birth rate in Germany was 14.7 per 1,000 people. This was less than half what it had been at the turn of the century. Additionally, there were hundreds of thousands of abortions performed in Germany every year. These two practices alarmed the Nazi regime. The Nazis needed children if they were to accomplish the two goals of Nazi ideology: conquer territory in the East and establish Aryan supremacy over Europe. Healthy young boys were needed to grow up to be soldiers in the German Army. Healthy young girls were needed to grow up and give birth to the next generation of super soldiers.

Heinrich Himmler, the leader of the SS, founded the Lebensborn Program on December 12, 1935. Lebensborn means “the fountain of life.” The program actually provided three services: it gave pregnant women, either married or unmarried, a place to give birth to their babies and receive the best medical care; a meeting place for men and women of true Aryan stock to create babies for Adolf Hitler; and a place to raise children who had Aryan features after they had been kidnapped from their parents from foreign countries.

Himmler explained the main purpose of the Lebensborn program in an undated letter to Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel. “Official statistics show that there are still some 600,000 abortions annually in Germany. I have been concerned for years about the fact that many abortions occur among those who can be counted as the best sections of German society. I do not believe that we can tolerate a situation where annually hundreds of thousands of valuable girls and women are lost as mothers of German stock because they have illicit abortions whose effect is often to render them sterile … the aim of protecting German blood, however, has the highest priority.''


The SS flag flies above a nurse who pushes baby carriages at a Lebensborn home in Germany.

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