Nazis' prized children making peace with past

Those selected as kids for Aryan qualities seek truth and speak out

By Melissa Eddy

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

BERLIN — For decades they suffered in silence, aging Germans who as children were selected by the Nazis for their Aryan qualities and handed over to SS families. Collectively known as "Lebensborn children," some will gather publicly Saturday for the first time.

Many are trying to make peace with pasts they long kept cloaked in shame. They are asking questions, tracing their roots and demanding that the truth be told about SS chief Heinrich Himmler's Lebens-born, or "Source of Life," program.

"It is an important issue, and it is time that it finally comes to light," said Dagmar Jung, 64, whose adoptive parents refused for years to answer her questions about her past as a Lebensborn child.

This weekend, Jung will be in the eastern town of Werni-gerode, where the Nazis ran the "Harz" Lebensborn home, for a meeting of Lebensspuren — Traces of Life — an association formed last year. For the first time, part of the session Saturday will be open to the public.

Of the group's 60 members, nearly two-thirds are Lebensborn children who, now in their 60s, feel a growing need to uncover their past and break one of the last taboos about the Adolf Hitler era in Germany.

Lebensborn was a lesser-known side of Nazi racial experiments. As millions of Jews and others deemed "undesirable" were being slaughtered, thousands of children were carefully selected for Aryan physical qualities and given to families of SS members to be raised.

The Nazis kept the program so secret that many of those selected often do not know who they really are.

Created in 1935, the program became the stuff of legend in the postwar years. Misleadingly depicted in several films as a high-end bordello offering blue-eyed blondes to SS officers with the aim of creating a master race, association with the program became doubly shameful.

Conservative estimates put the number of Lebensborn children in Germany somewhere around 5,500, but exact numbers do not exist.

"There is far too little written about it in history books and reference works," said Jung, who has spent 30 years trying to piece together her true identity.

After years of urging, her adoptive father revealed clues that finally led to her birth mother, and Jung has built a relationship with her.

The search for her father took several more years and ended in disappointment when Jung discovered they had lived in the same city for years but he died in 1963.

Lebensborn was expanded after the Nazis overran Denmark and Norway in 1940. There, German occupation soldiers were encouraged to find suitable local partners, who were offered the chance to have babies in one of 10 Lebensborn homes set up in the region.

Some 8,000 children were eventually born in Norway, and thousands more were registered in Denmark. Lebensborn also operated in the occupied Netherlands.

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