Lebensborn is a German word meaning “the source of life.” Understood literally, it sounds wonderful. Given its origins in the German Third Reich, however, its meaning is somewhat more ambiguous.

Like in all totalitarian systems, name and content are often very different. In the Soviet Union, they sang “I know no other country [like the USSR] where a person breathes so freely!”—a land where tens of millions lived and died in labor camps. In the Third Reich, they sang “Nur der Freiheit gehört unser Leben”—“Our life belongs only to freedom” in a land where all freedom was regulated by the will of the Führer and granted exclusively to Nazis.

In democracies sliding towards dictatorship, like some believe is the case for today’s European Union or Poland, democracy—like communism—is now prefixed with an adjective, e.g., “fighting democracy.” One must be careful about what is said, even regarding the law, because even the law is only what those in power understand it to be.

Stealing Kids: What Happens When the State Tries to Create “Perfect Race” Families

 In light of that preface, let’s see how carefully we must handle that magnificent word, Lebensborn. Was its content equally magnificent? Lebensborn was an association founded December 12, 1936, on the initiative of Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler. Its long-term goal was to build a racially pure Aryan society while simultaneously overcoming the widespread contemporary aversion in Germany to single mothers. Such women were guaranteed anonymity, and if a mother did not want to care for her child, a discreet adoption was arranged by a “good” German family—most often families of SS-members.

During World War II, Lebensborn took on two more sinister connotations: the theft of children from Nazi-occupied countries and the recruitment of German girls to have “babies for the Führer.” Their unifying thread was eugenics, not respect for life: an “Aryan” baby was safe from abortion, a non-Aryan baby in an occupied country could be—and was—forcibly aborted.

On February 19, 1942, Himmler ordered the abduction of children who met Nazi racial standards from families in occupied countries. This mainly took place in the occupied territories of Poland, those directly incorporated into the Third Reich as well as the Nazi “General Government.” Deportations from the Zamość region were particularly drastic: children were transported to Germany in cattle cars in temperatures of -20 degrees Celsius. It is estimated that there may have been around 20,000 such kidnappings, and over 30,000 in total from the greater Lublin region. In total, approximately 200,000 children were taken from their families and subjected to Germanization. Children deemed racially pure were given to German Nazi parents and their identities changed. Only some were recovered after the war.

Meanwhile, German wartime losses of men, particularly on the Eastern Front and especially after the Battle of Stalingrad in 1943, posed demographic problems. The Nazis pushed the slogan that every German woman should give the Führer a child fathered by an SS-man. It was especially popular among young unmarried women, given the massive losses of men on all fronts. It resonated with German girls from the BDM (Bund Deutscher Mädel), who volunteered to be impregnated.

German women under 30 who did not have a partner were supposed to report to a Lebensborn unit, where an SS-man was assigned as the father of their offspring. These so-called “mating houses” were protected from outside scrutiny. Therefore, little is known about the practices used in them. Women willing to participate volunteered themselves, and partners were selected according to racial and eugenic criteria. Because high-ranking SS-officers often used these facilities, popular opinion often referred to them as SS brothels.

When the “Greater Good” Requires Disrupting the Family

Lebensborn practices were always shrouded in secrecy, primarily to prevent the biological parents of abducted children from finding them. After the war, it was difficult to determine what happened to the children born in this way, as well as to those who were forcibly taken from their families in the occupied countries. The searches sometimes lasted for decades, with elderly people searching for their families, nationality, and country of origin.

The German Lebensborn movement was eugenic, bound up with Nazi racial ideology. In some sense it was also altruistic: give your fertility for the good of others, your country. Looking at modern surrogacy, can we ask how different it is from the Nazi Lebensborn program? Many of the German girls who offered themselves for SS impregnation also did so voluntarily, altruistically, believing themselves doing something for the “greater good.” The “greater good,” of course, was used to deny natural biological and parental bonds, the results kept secret and contacts broken.

This moment in history begs the question: Is eugenics objectionable only when utterly coerced? Does the mere fact of voluntary consent for individuals rather than the state make the practice really that different? Or when children gestated in poor countries are then turned over to “better” parents in richer lands—is the exploitation really eliminated because the buyers left behind some money for a woman who must rent her womb?

History is not a circle—but neither is it also wholly novel. Yes, one might say Nazi Germany was more coercive and that today’s “democracies” provide “protection”—but given asymmetries of power and affluence, the severing of biological relationship and commodification of children leaves us—historical contexts notwithstanding—ultimately in the same place.

The Rev. Zygmunt Zieliński is Professor-Emeritus of Church History at the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Poland and a recognized expert in World War II German history.