Oct 12, 2022 5 min read

When most of us think of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, we rightly recall the Holocaust and the millions of mostly Jews sacrificed to the Third Reich’s perverse fantasy of an Aryan super race.

But there were other, less-familiar atrocities that took place, one of which involved not death camps but birthing farms where young women and teenage girls were impregnated to produce blond, blue-eyed babies for SS families to adopt.

Though many were not volunteers, especially as World War II went on, most of the early would-be mothers were willing participants in the program to make babies for Hitler.

At the time of Hitler’s rise, Germany’s population had been declining for several years. Hitler wanted to increase the Germanic/Nordic population of the country to 120 million with “racially pure” offspring and put Heinrich Himmler, the Holocaust’s chief architect, in charge of the nation’s population-growth machinery.

Thus, the “Lebensborn” program – meaning wellspring or fountain of life -was created in 1935, the same year the Nuremberg laws made it illegal for those of “German blood” to marry Jews. Basically, the program provided luxurious accommodations for unwed, pregnant women.

Part of the program’s attraction was that unwed pregnant girls could give birth in secret. In 1939, about 58% of the mothers-to-be who applied to the program were unwed, according to the American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise; by 1940, that number had swelled to 70%. Often, the homes were converted estates decorated by Himmler himself, using the highest quality loot confiscated from Jewish homes after their owners had been killed or sent to camps.

Girls who were already pregnant or willing to be impregnated by SS officers had to prove their Aryan lineage going back three generations and pass inspections that included measuring the size of their heads and the length of their teeth. Once accepted, they were pampered by nurses and staff who served them delicacies at mealtimes and provided a recreational diet rich in Nazi propaganda.

I confess that all of this was new to me as I read a preview copy of a historical novel, released Tuesday, called “Cradles of the Reich,” by Jennifer Coburn. In the novel, Coburn takes readers on a tour of pre-WWII Germany, where we witness the pogrom against the Jews through three female characters who eventually find their way to the same Lebensborn home by disparate routes.

Hilde is an enthusiastic Nazi eager to bear a child by a Nazi officer; Irma is let down by her fiance and becomes a nurse in the home; and, Gundi, in love with a Jewish boy, lands in the home because she is pregnant, blond and beautiful. Little do they know.

Though thousands of babies were created and farmed – Himmler wasn’t satisfied with the pace of procreation and began stealing babies and children from occupied countries.

An estimated 250,000 babies were kidnapped, 100,000 of them from Poland, where Germans could draw from a large population of blond, blue-eyed children. During a decade of the program, up to 7,500 babies were born in Germany’s 10 homes. Another 10,000 were born in Norway, which had nine Nazi nurseries. Austria had two homes, and several other countries had one each, including Belgium, Holland, France, Luxembourg and Denmark.

It’s possible you know a Lebensborn baby without knowing it, as most of the records were destroyed or hidden until relatively recently. One of those “babies,” 77-year-old John Gundersen of California, contacted Coburn when he learned of her book. In a phone interview, Gundersen told me, “All I ever knew growing up was that my blood father was a Nazi and my mother was a 16-year-old Norwegian girl.”

Gundersen said he became interested in learning more about his origins in 2010 when the History Channel ran a story about the Lebensborn children. He was actually born four months after the war ended and was adopted from an orphanage at 2 by a Danish couple, who had immigrated to the United States. Eventually, he found his birth certificate and learned the names of his biological parents. His own name at birth had been Magne Reidar Olsen, but a new name and certificate were issued upon his adoption. (He provided me with copies of both certificates.)

What does Gundersen think about all of this?

“It’s interesting,” he said. “Do I find it insulting or scary? No, I find it interesting. … When people complain about their parents or how they happened to be born, I say, well, at least you had that. I didn’t. A woman lined up to have me for the reich and for no other reason. I have to thank my adoptive parents, who are my family. … I’m living the dream.”

The contents of that dream – from tales of surfing to Vietnam to other exploits that he is more than happy to recount – might fill another book. Suffice to say, not all of Hitler’s progeny got so lucky.

Kathleen Parker’s email address is kathleenparker@washpost.com.