Have You Heard of the Lebensborn Society?
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This book introduced me to a part of WWII history that I had never heard about, that I was shocked to hear about, and that I think everyone needs to hear about. The first paragraphs below give the historical information that I gleaned online. The novel then fleshes out all of the information in painful detail. I won’t give much detail about the novel, however. That would spoil all the shock that is about to come the reader’s way when they read the book.
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Here’s the history:
This book is about the Lebensborn Program, which existed in Germany for ten years starting in 1935. The word itself means the fountain of life, and the goal of the program was to increase the birthrate in Germany, which had been decreasing for generations.
Heinrich Himmler founded the project. There were many ways he envisioned increasing the population. One was to take in “racially pure” women who were pregnant and unmarried and give them a safe and secret place to have their child. The first such Lebensborn home was Heim Hochland, a beautiful and beautifully furnished estate near Munich. This facility was not just a maternity home, though, it was also a place where SS officers were encouraged to have sexual relations with “racially pure” women who just so happened to live there as “mothers in training.”
Over the ten years of the program’s existence, more Lebensborn homes were open. There were ten in Germany, nine in Norway, two in Austria and one each in Belgium, Holland, France, Luxembourg, and Denmark. But since this still did not breed enough babies to please Himmler, (about twenty thousand children were born in these homes) a third part of the program began as German soldiers kidnapped “Aryan-looking” children from the countries they occupied. It is believed that up to 250,000 children were stolen, 100,000 from Poland alone. Some were war orphans, but most were not.
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Here is what Jennifer Coburn did with these horrible facts:
The novel is the story of three women all of whom have arrived at Heim Hochland for different reasons.
- Gundi Schiller is a university student who had joined the resistance and, in the process, fell in love with and got pregnant by another member of the group. She is the only one who knows that the father of her child is Jewish and that most likely her child when born will not be blond-haired and blue-eyed.
- Hilde Kramer is a high school student who fully embraced Adolf Hitler’s movement, got a job within the Reich thanks to her dalliance with an officer of the Reich, and ultimately ended up at the home due to the pregnancy that followed.
- Irma Binz is a nurse whose response to the Reich was to keep her head down, focus on her own life, and assume that reports of the persecution of Jews and other minorities were exaggerations and nothing she had to deal with personally.
Through the eyes of these characters we learn a lot…
Through Gundi’s story we see the selection process by which she was determined to be racially pure and therefore eligible to go to the Lebensborn home. In this manner we learn of the actual screening tools used by the Reich such as eye-color buttons, skin-matching swatches, and skull-measuring calipers.
Through Hilde’s story we see a teenage girl participating in Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, and learn of the upbringing that got her there so willingly.
And then there is Irma, a German woman who was initially indifferent to the plight of Jews but eventually had her conscience reawakened. The author shows us what it takes for that to happen.
If all of this is not horrible enough, the author tells us about children’s books and board games that were used in that time to teach antisemitism.
I end where I started: This book introduced me to a part of WWII history that I had never heard about, that I was shocked to hear about, and that I think everyone needs to hear about.
I encourage everyone to read Cradles of the Reich.
Five Stars!
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Click here to learn more about Cradles of the Reich on Amazon.
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