‘Nazi ‘master-race’ children meet

WERNIGERODE – The children of a Nazi programme aimed at creating an “Aryan elite” met publicly in Germany on Saturday in an effort to banish the spectre that has haunted many of them since their birth.

The “Lebensborn” or “font of life” project comprised a series of homes launched by Heinrich Himmler’s SS that were to provide the stock to help run a Nazi empire. The homes were popularised later as stud farms for a blond-haired, blue-eyed master race.Matthias Meissner, managing director of Lebensspuren (“traces of life”), a group representing the Lebensborn children, said the meeting was necessary to bring the homes out in the open and lay some of the myths about them to rest.”The aim was to take the children out into the open, to encourage those affected to find out their origins – but also to show the outside world that the cliché of the stud farm with blond-haired, blue-eyed parents is not correct,” he said.Many children from the Lebensborn homes, particularly in Norway – which was seen as the home to the most Aryan stock – were socially ostracised after the war and they have remained a sensitive topic that is seldom discussed in Germany.One of around 35 former children present at the first wholly public meeting in Wernigerode, a small town in eastern Germany which once had a Lebensborn home, was 63-year-old Hans Ulrich Wesch.With tears in his eyes, Wesch explained how he was raised in communist eastern Germany after the war and separated from his mother and sisters.The centres were launched around Germany from 1936 to boost the birth rate, particularly of SS members, and to take care of illegitimate children deemed to be of healthy “Aryan” stock.Nampa-ReutersThe homes were popularised later as stud farms for a blond-haired, blue-eyed master race.Matthias Meissner, managing director of Lebensspuren (“traces of life”), a group representing the Lebensborn children, said the meeting was necessary to bring the homes out in the open and lay some of the myths about them to rest.”The aim was to take the children out into the open, to encourage those affected to find out their origins – but also to show the outside world that the cliché of the stud farm with blond-haired, blue-eyed parents is not correct,” he said.Many children from the Lebensborn homes, particularly in Norway – which was seen as the home to the most Aryan stock – were socially ostracised after the war and they have remained a sensitive topic that is seldom discussed in Germany.One of around 35 former children present at the first wholly public meeting in Wernigerode, a small town in eastern Germany which once had a Lebensborn home, was 63-year-old Hans Ulrich Wesch.With tears in his eyes, Wesch explained how he was raised in communist eastern Germany after the war and separated from his mother and sisters.The centres were launched around Germany from 1936 to boost the birth rate, particularly of SS members, and to take care of illegitimate children deemed to be of healthy “Aryan” stock.Nampa-Reuters