Hitler's Forgotten Children (11 page)

Eugenics societies sprang up, often funded by wealthy American foundations, to promote (in the words of a 1911 Carnegie-supported research paper) ‘the Best Practical Means for Cutting off the Defective Germ-Plasm in the Human Population'. Sterilisation and euthanasia were the most popular suggested methods.

It was a belief system and a climate tailor-made for the Nazis. It supported their spurious belief that Germans were the true descendants of a breed of Aryan (sometimes called Nordic) supermen whose destiny was once again to rule the world. In 1925 Hitler had promulgated this concept in his autobiographical Nazi manifesto,
Mein Kampf.

The products of human culture, the achievements in art, science and technology with which we are confronted today are almost exclusively the creative product of the Aryan. That very fact enables us to draw the not unfounded conclusion that he alone was the founder of higher humanity and was thus the very essence of what we mean by the term ‘man'.

What we must fight for is to safeguard the existence and reproduction of our race and our people, the sustenance of our children and the purity of our blood …

Four years later, he followed this up in a speech to a party rally.

If Germany were to get a million children a year and remove 700,000 to 800,000 of the weakest people, the final result might be an increase in strength.

It was a refrain taken up by the man who became the Führer's most powerful henchman. When Himmler was appointed head of the SS that same year, he told his senior officers:

Should we succeed in establishing our Nordic race again in and around Germany … and from this seed bed produce a race of 200 million, then the world will belong to us. We are called, therefore, to create a basis on which the next generation can create history.

One of the first pieces of legislation passed by Hitler was the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring. This required doctors to register every case of hereditary illness among their female patients of childbearing age. Failure to comply was punishable by substantial fines. The opening paragraphs of the new law set out both the problem (as the Nazis saw it) and its primary cause.

Since the National Revolution [the quasi-legal putsch by which Hitler gained the power to rule by decree], public opinion has become increasingly preoccupied with questions of demographic policy and the continuing decline in the birth rate.

However, it is not only the decline in population which is a cause for serious concern but equally the increasingly evident genetic composition of our people.

Whereas traditionally healthy families have for the most part adopted a policy of having only one or two children, countless numbers of inferiors and those suffering from hereditary conditions are reproducing without restraint, allowing their sick and disadvantaged offspring to be a burden on the community.

The solution was – to Nazi thinking – obvious: sterilisation. A system of 181 Genetic Health Courts was set up to order the enforced neutering of those deemed substandard. A measure of the programme's immediate effect was the volume and outcome of appeals: in less than a year almost 4,000 people tried to overturn the decisions of the sterilisation authorities. Just 41 were successful. Five years later, by the start of the Second World War, at least 320,000 people had been forcibly sterilised under the legislation.

But if the draconian new law addressed the perceived problem of ‘inferiors' polluting or weakening the nation's blood-stock, it did not define just what that blood-stock should be. In September 1935, a leading Nazi doctor called Gerhard Wagner announced in a speech that the government would soon introduce a ‘law for the protection of German blood'
.
Within days this was codified into the Nuremberg Laws.

These introduced four official categories of human beings in the National Socialist state. People with four German grandparents were classified as ‘German or kindred blood'; those who had one or two Jewish grandparents were deemed to have come from ‘mixed blood' and were placed – in order of descending value – into two classes of
Mischling
; while anyone descended from three or four Jewish grandparents was irredeemably Jewish.

Only those who were formally registered as being the product of ‘German or related blood' were now ‘racially acceptable' and granted
the status of
Reichsbürger
(citizens of the Reich).
Mischlings
were placed in the lesser category of
Staatsangehörige
(state subjects). Jews were from that point on deprived of all citizenship rights, and marriage between Aryans and non-Aryans was outlawed.

The Nazis proceeded to formalise these race classifications. A new set of official documents,
Der Ariernachweis
(the Aryan Certificate), were introduced to prove that the holder was a true member of the Aryan Race. Those able to satisfy the requirement that their racial ancestry dating back to 1800 showed that ‘none of their paternal nor their maternal ancestors had Jewish or coloured blood' were granted a
Grosser Ariernachweis
. Others who could only produce seven birth or baptism certificates (covering themselves, their parents and grandparents), as well as three marriage certificates from their parents and grandparents, were provided with a ‘lesser' document, the
Kleiner Ariernachweis.

Two other pieces of paperwork became vital for life in the Nazi state. An
Ahnenpass
was a certificate, drawn from church records, which recorded the racial characteristics of a person's ancestors: quite literally, an ‘ancestors' passport'. It was often supplemented by an
Ahnentafel
– a carefully tabulated version of the ancestral family tree.

The Nuremberg Laws and the racial certificates that flowed from them were the foundations of the Nazis' determination to arrive at a ‘final solution' for the extermination of the Jewish population. But they were also the key cornerstones of the flip-side of that policy: the programme to create a new Master Race of pure-blooded Aryans who would rule Hitler's Thousand Year Reich. The organisation which was to deliver that outcome was Lebensborn, and its architect was Heinrich Himmler
.

Himmler's papers contained his own explanation for establishing Lebensborn. His motive was, he claimed, benign and caring.

I have created the Lebensborn homes because I believe it is not right that an unfortunate girl who expects a child out of
wedlock is kicked around by everybody … by all these paragons of virtue, of male and female gender, who feel entitled to condemn her and to mistreat her. I cannot think it right that she is being punished when the state does not provide the facility for help.

Every woman in these homes is addressed by her Christian name. One is Frau Maria and the other Frau Elisabeth – or whatever her name is. Within the homes nobody asks whether they are married or unmarried: we simply educate them, protect them and look after these mothers.

Even if this were true, I had to remind myself that Lebensborn homes were not open to every woman who found herself unexpectedly pregnant. Jewish women and
Mischlings
were excluded because they were seen as racially worthless.

As war loomed, the Reichsfüher's papers revealed a change in the purpose of the Lebensborn programme
.
No longer was it driven purely by the desire to increase pure Aryan blood-stock within the German population. By October 1939, Himmler had looked into the near future and seen a major threat to his plans for a future master race.

Every war involves a tremendous loss of the best blood. Many victories won by force of arms have inflicted a shattering defeat for a nation's vitality and blood. But the sadly necessary deaths of the best men – deplorable though they are – is not the worst of this. Far more severe is the absence of the children who were never born to the living during the war, or to the dead after it.

And so he issued a revolutionary order to the men under his command. In a proclamation marked ‘secret' and issued to every member of the SS and police, the Reichsführer instructed them to fulfil their sacred duty
to the Reich by fathering its next generation, whether or not they were married to the mothers.

Berlin, 28 October 1939

Beyond the limits of bourgeois laws and conventions, which are perhaps necessary in other circumstances, it can be a noble task for German women and girls of good blood to become even outside marriage, not light-heartedly but out of a deep moral seriousness, mothers of the children of soldiers going to war of whom fate alone knows whether they will return or die for Germany.

During the last war, many a soldier decided from a sense of responsibility to have no more children during the war so that his wife would not be left in need and distress after his death. You SS men need not have these anxieties; they are removed by the following regulations:

1.   Special delegates, chosen by me personally, will take over in the name of the Reichsführer-SS, the guardianship of all legitimate and illegitimate children of good blood whose fathers were killed in the war.

We will support these mothers and take over the education and material care of these children until they come of age, so that no mother and widow need suffer want.

2.   During the war, the SS will take care of all legitimate and illegitimate children born during the war and of expectant mothers in cases of need. After the war, when the fathers return, the SS will in addition grant generous material help to well-founded applications by individuals.

SS-Men and you mothers of these children which Germany has hoped for, show that you are ready, through your faith in
the Führer and for the sake of the life of our blood and people, to regenerate life for Germany just as bravely as you know how to fight and die for Germany.

The order did not merely authorise free sex; it demanded it. Racially pure men and women were ordered to procreate, whether or not they were married, so that the nation's stock of ‘good blood' could be safeguarded. There was to be neither financial penalty for producing illegitimate children nor social stigma.

It is hard to overstate the radical nature of Himmler's decree. Although the Nazis had been in power for six years and had done much to undermine the country's family-based traditional foundations, Germany was still a religiously conservative society. Sex outside marriage was taboo and neither the public nor the churches appeared ready to abandon their social mores
.

Even representatives of the Nazi Party and the Wehrmacht reacted badly to the Reichsführer's new population policy. Yet Himmler stood firm. Three months after his ‘procreation order', he issued an unyielding and unrepentant statement to his forces.

Office of the Reichsführer-SS and Chief of the German Police

Berlin, 30 January 1940

SS Order for the whole of the SS and Police

You are aware of my order of 28 October 1939, in which I reminded you of your duty if possible to become fathers of children during the war.

This publication, which was conceived with a sense of decency and was received in the same sense, states and openly discusses actual problems. It has led to misconceptions and misunderstandings on the part of some people. I therefore consider it necessary for every one of you to know what
doubts and misunderstandings have arisen and what there is to say about them.

Objection has been taken to the clear statement that illegitimate children exist, and that some unmarried and single women and girls have always become mothers of such children outside marriage and always will.

There is no point in discussing this; the best reply is the letter from the Führer's Deputy to an unmarried mother, which I enclose together with my order of 28 October 1939.

The Deputy Führer was Rudolf Hess. On Christmas Day 1939, the Nazi Party's daily paper,
Völkischer Beobachter,
had published an open letter to a notional unmarried mother in which Hess set out the new morality.

The National Socialist philosophy of life has given the family the role in the State to which it is entitled. However, in times of special national emergency special measures can be instituted, which are different from our basic principles. In wartime, which involves the death of many of our best men, every new life is of special importance to the nation. Hence, if racially unobjectionable young men going on to active service leave behind children who pass on their blood to future generations through a girl of the right age and similar healthy heredity … steps will be taken to preserve this valuable national wealth.

By calling on Hess, then more established in the hierarchy of Hitler's regime, Himmler was doubtless giving himself some political cover. But his own command of the SS was absolute and his faith in its fundamental importance to the next generation unshakeable.

The worst misunderstanding [of my original order] concerns the paragraph which reads: ‘Beyond the limits of bourgeois laws and conventions ...' According to this, as some people misunderstand it, SS men are encouraged to approach the wives of serving soldiers. However incomprehensible to us such an idea may be, we must discuss it.

What do those who spread or repeat such opinions think of German women? Even if, in a nation of 82 million people, some man should approach a married woman from dishonourable motives or human weakness, two parties are needed for seduction: the one who wants to seduce and the one who consents to being seduced.

Quite apart from our own principle that one does not approach the wife of a comrade, we think that German women are probably the best guardians of their honour. Any other opinion should be unanimously rejected by all men as an insult to German women.

For all the Reichsführer's protestations of outrage, this was far from an outright denial of the charge that he was promoting sex outside marriage. Fears about lax morals in Nazi organisations had been growing for several years: in the summer of 1937, several thousand copies of a privately printed open letter to Goebbels, the Party's propaganda minister, had circulated throughout the country. Signed with the pseudonym ‘Michael Germanicus', it pointedly referred to promiscuity throughout the National Socialist movement: