Why Were Nazis Obsessed With Birth Rate?

Why were the Nazis so fixated on birth rates? How did they encourage larger families? And what was their surprising angle on extramarital pregnancies? In essence, what was the Lebensborn policy? Taking us through Nazi family policy today is Lisa Pine. Lisa is Fellow of the Institute of Historical Research, School of Advanced Study, University of London and Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. This episode was edited by Tim Arstall. The producer was Sophie Gee. The senior producer was Freddy Chick. Subscribe to the new Betwixt The Sheets YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/@BetwixtTheSheetsPodcast Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener surveyhere https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/6FFT7MK. All music from Epidemic Sounds. Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. History Hit is part of Little Dot Studios, a Certified B Corp™ Voting is now open for the Listener's Choice Award at this year's Podcast Awards! UK & Ireland listeners please place your vote on the Spotify mobile app here: https://open.spotify.com/s/xhg6PJa Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Kate Lister?

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• 0:38Speaker 01

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• 1:40Kate Lister?

  Hello, my lovely betwixters. It's me, Kate Lister. Welcome back once again to Betwix the Sheet, the podcast where we root around in the pants of history for your own entertainment. But before we go any further together, I do have to tell you, this is an adult podcast book about adults to other adults, about adulty things in an adulty way, covering a range of adult subjects, and you should be an adult too. Actually, here is a serious note. Today's episode is about Nazis, eugenics, and racist policy, so you might just want to sit this one out.

• 2:09Kate Lister?

  Leafing through this booklet, looking at the pictures, this seems like an advertisement for a lovely retreat for pregnant women. It looks fabulous. There are wooden beams, shutters, and candelabras, and so much land and fresh air. One in particular, the Hockland Home, has a lake out the front, there's a weeping willow on the bank, and an island in the middle. But these are no weekend retreats. If I flip back to the front of the booklet, yeah, there it is. That's a Nazi swastika. This booklet is a remnant of yet another troubling corner of Nazi policy: the Lebensbahn.

• 3:07Kate Lister?

  Hello and welcome back to Betwix the Sheet, the history of sex scandal in society with me, Kate Lister. You'd think starting a war against the entire world, the Nazis would have enough to be dealing with, but apparently not. As well as world domination, they spent an unhealthy amount of time panicking about declining birth rates and the reproductive rights of women. So how did the Nazis seek to raise the birth rate? And did they really run stud houses for SS officers? Today, I'm joined by Lisa Pine, author of a number of books, including Nazi Family Policy 1933 to 1945. And if anyone can help us understand the troubling policy of Lebensbahn, it's Lisa. Let's do this.

• 3:54Kate Lister?

  Well, hello and welcome to Betwix the Sheet. It's only Lisa Pine. How are you doing?

• 3:59Speaker 02

  I'm fine, Kate. Thank you very much for inviting me. It's a pleasure to be here today.

• 4:03Kate Lister?

  I can't believe it's taken us this long to actually get you on, you know?

• 4:06Speaker 02

  Well, here I am now.

• 4:07Kate Lister?

  Well, here you are, right? We have waited and we have saved you up. Your research, you teach at the University of London, you are a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and of the Institute for Historical Research, but your research area is the Nazis. That's a heavy research area, Lisa.

• 4:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I've been doing it for decades, but started studying as an undergraduate, then postgraduate, and my PhD was on Nazi family policy. So I'm kind of going back now with our topic today to something that I've been working on and off over the years, literally for decades, since the 1990s, yeah.

• 4:46Kate Lister?

  What was it that drew you to this particular area of research? Do you remember your academic origin story? How did you get interested in this?

• 4:54Speaker 02

  Well, I sort of do, although I'm not sure how interesting it is for others. But it was just a course I did at the LSE as an undergraduate on Nazism and fascism. And then when I did my master's degree, I kind of did my dissertation on fascist and Nazi film. And then it kind of got into the area of women in film and then looking for the PhD topic, something on women and the Nazis that hadn't been written about before. And this kind of whole field was new territory and opened up for me. And then I've kind of just been writing about different aspects of Nazi social policy since then.

• 5:33Kate Lister?

  Well, thank God you are doing that, quite frankly. There's just something about all of this that feels so horrendously pertinent to what's going on in certain quarters of the internet and politically today. We'll get into that, but we're talking specifically about, let me, I'm probably not going to pronounce this right, Lebensbaum? Lebensbahn?

• 5:51Speaker 02

  Lebensbahn.

• 5:52Kate Lister?

  Lebensbahn. What does that mean?

• 5:54Speaker 02

  So Lebensbahn was, the translation, the essential translation, is well of life or spring of life. So this was an organisation set up by Heinrich Himmler, who was head of the SS, headquartered at Munich, where he was based in Bavaria. And it was essentially to look after the wives of SS men and make sure that they could have their pregnancies and births in good conditions. But it was also, and this was the thing that was more controversial, it was also the kind of secondary function was to give a safe space for young women who were unmarried to give birth to their children out of wedlock. So this was very controversial at the time, of course.

• 6:39Kate Lister?

  Yeah. That's like the Magdalen laundries in Ireland, almost. Like, these are mother-baby homes.

• 6:45Speaker 02

  They were mother-baby homes. They were run by these kind of Brown Sisters, which were this kind of Nazi brand of nurses. But they kind of were very much an SS organisation. So they were essentially set up in homes that were in the countryside, so kind of rural areas, kind of shrouded in secrecy. So they're kind of behind an iron gate with SS runes, and they kind of sported this Lebensbahn flag, which was kind of a white flag with a red dot in the centre. So they weren't really meant to be known, and the people in the communities weren't really meant to interact with them. But then people did get to know about them. So there's this kind of very sort of tense environment around them, and this kind of

• 7:29Speaker 02

  created a taboo then about talking about them in the decades, many, many decades that have passed since.

• 7:36Kate Lister?

  I've just got back from Munich, and I went on an open bus top tour, and they didn't mention this at all. That was not part of the tour.

• 7:45Speaker 02

  No, it wouldn't be. It wouldn't be.

• 7:47Kate Lister?

  All right, so did it start in Munich?

• 7:50Speaker 02

  The organisation was headquartered from Himmler's office, so it was his organisation. So he was based in Munich, but the homes, they weren't in the centre of the city, and they spread out as well. So the first home was in Bavaria, but in the countryside. So as I said, kind of in this kind of very peaceful rural location. And the point of it was so that these young women who were unmarried could give birth to their children in a safe, secluded surrounding, but also somewhere, because ordinarily, there'd have been a stigma attached to it, it meant that they could give birth discreetly, so away from their own community.

• 8:33Speaker 02

  So it meant they could give birth away from prying eyes of their neighbours and their priests and things like that. So it was offering them an opportunity, and in a way... In a way, it was regarded by them as positive because

• 8:46Kate Lister?

  I was just thinking, as you were saying that, if it wasn't for the mention of Nazis, like you could almost be forgiven for thinking this, this sounds like a relatively good system for the time.

• 8:57Speaker 02

  Well, that's it as well. So in a way, it was a good thing or a positive thing because the medical care was so good, the attention was so good, that the infant mortality rate in the period before the war was 3%, which was half the national average. So you could see that these mothers were getting particularly good care in terms of prenatal, the actual birth, and then postnatal care as well.

• 9:22Kate Lister?

  But what I know about the Nazis is that this isn't going to have been done for good reasons. This isn't going to have been done for positive. We just want to help these, these poor young women out. So to try and sort of set the scene, why are the Nazis and the Third Reich interfering in births anyway? What is, what underlies all of this?

• 9:41Speaker 02

  Okay, so there's quite a long history to that, and some of it's a kind of intellectual history to do with the development of eugenics and good births or racial hygiene. But specifically, we need to look at the national birth rate, which had been declining. So in terms of demography and the birth rate, this was the problem. This was why the Nazis needed and wanted babies to be born. So of course, there's the deficit left from the First World War, but also during the Weimar years, the birth rate was, the German birth rate was declining at an alarming rate and continuing to decline. And so the Nazis were saying, well, you know, people have been too much concerned with having a good time and enjoying themselves,

• 10:24Speaker 02

  and they're not really putting the good of the nation at the forefront of their attention. And really, we need more births and more good births to, to, to deal with this decline in the nation's birth rate.

• 10:37Kate Lister?

  Right, okay.

• 10:38Speaker 02

  So that was at the centre of it. And then in terms of policy, they then implemented a whole load of policies directed at the family or directed at population growth.

• 10:51Kate Lister?

  They were big on that, weren't they? Like, family, family, family, like lots of blonde-haired, blue-eyed families. That was the Aryan nuclear family ideal.

• 10:59Speaker 02

  That's right. So the family ideal remained the same, but they didn't actually achieve that. So they talked, so even when we think about Himmler addressing his SS men, and he really put the onus on them to be the seedbed of the new German millennium.

• 11:14Kate Lister?

  Lovely.

• 11:14Speaker 02

  Nice. But again, they were meant to be the elite, and they were meant to procreate. So he actually put a very big burden on them, that they, they should have four or more children. This was the requirement.

• 11:25Kate Lister?

  Four or more children?

• 11:26Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 11:27Kate Lister?

  In marriage?

• 11:28Speaker 02

  Preferably in marriage.

• 11:29Kate Lister?

  Ooh.

• 11:30Speaker 02

  Right, four plus children. And then they called these families Kinderreiche children, so rich in children. But these were obviously the, the ones, as you've said, blonde, blue-eyed, of good stock, all of those things, hereditarily healthy. So those were the ones that were encouraged. But then in reality, you could say that the SS let him down because on average, the SS men were having 1.1 children per marriage.

• 11:55Kate Lister?

  Why? Like, why were the birth rates low in the Weimar Republic? I'm just thinking, like, from a sex stories point of view, were they using birth control? Were they just not having sex? Like, what was going on there? And why are the SS only having one child when they've been told have four?

• 12:09Speaker 02

  Right. Well, I guess, yeah, I mean, there are different reasons for that. But back to the Weimar years, so there was a lot more openness. Women were, you know, they could, they were, they weren't sort of stuck at home in the same way as they had been in the period before the First World War. You know, the First World War changed a lot in opportunities. You know, women had the vote for the first time, they could be elected. So the kind of new Weimar society was very exciting. And there was this new woman who was more, you know, not all of them were, but who were more open about their sexuality. There was also, you know, kind of a new, new openness, again, not in all quarters, but that taboo against lesbianism had gone, changed during the Weimar years. But then

• 12:51Speaker 02

  the Nazis, of course, clamped down on all of that, as they did with gay men. So that, that kind of whole thing. But, but yes, the question you asked about birth control is interesting because there was, there was an opportunity for advice, like kind of family planning advice, in a way that hadn't been there. So the 1920s were quite different. And it's not the same as the 1960s after the pill, but the 1920s, there was more advice, more talking about it.

• 13:20Kate Lister?

  Education's coming, right? It's like, family planning becomes a thing in Britain and in America, and all around the world, they're talking about, how can we control the fact that women are just giving birth and birth and birth and birth and birth? How can we stop that?

• 13:32Speaker 02

  And then exactly in that period is the period that we've just talked about, started to mention about eugenics and racial hygiene.

• 13:39Kate Lister?

  The two of them do coalesce, don't they?

• 13:42Speaker 02

  They do.

• 13:43Kate Lister?

  Very, very uncomfortably. Because you want the early proponents of birth control to be good people. You really want them to be like, yay! And just almost in every single case, you scratch the surface and they're eugenicists as well.

• 13:55Speaker 02

  Right. And that's not just in Nazi Germany, and that's what we have to remember. So, you know, we've got Francis Galton, who was the founder of eugenics, and kind of a whole movement in Britain about good births. But in Britain, it tended to be, I have to say, more about class. It was kind of more about, we want, we don't want the working class.

• 14:14Kate Lister?

  We'll stop the poor people breeding.

• 14:16Speaker 02

  Something like that. And we'll try and encourage the aristocracy to have more children, like that. But in Nazi Germany, of course, it was all about race. So it was about people with the right features and the right hereditary health, giving birth, and not those who weren't. So that was the key distinction.

• 14:35Kate Lister?

  But anyone that might be listening or watching, if they're not familiar with what eugenics is, could you just give us a quick summation of what it is?

• 14:42Speaker 02

  Okay. So essentially, it is about good births. So it is interfering, really, in exactly what you said before, interfering in who's giving birth.

• 14:52Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 14:52Speaker 02

  So we kind of talked about class in Britain. But in Germany, I mean, this became state policy. So the Nazis introduced all sorts of policies to encourage early marriages, and therefore good births, and many births of good children, what they considered to be good, valuable children, which means hereditarily healthy. And then on the other hand, negative policies. So they'd already been talking about sterilization in the end of the Weimar years, but it was a kind of plan for maybe voluntary sterilization. But what the Nazis did, literally within months of when they came into power, was to put into place a compulsory sterilization law.

• 15:32Kate Lister?

  Jeez.

• 15:34Speaker 02

  And they sterilized between January 1934, when the law came into effect, and the outbreak of the war in September 1939. 0.5% of the German population forcibly. So this is a forced sterilization campaign. And that's not people who they, you know, who they thought were, you know, inferior racially or something like that. This is people of German ethnicity, but people who they thought had things in their bloodline or background that were not deemed to be valuable. So it was

• 16:08Kate Lister?

  Such, like, like what? I mean, what were they looking? I mean, it's all nonsense, isn't it? Because there's nothing more genetically superior about having blonde hair and blue eyes than anything else. But that was what they were looking for. So what was considered undesirable?

• 16:20Speaker 02

  Okay. So, but so this, in terms of sterilization, was sterilizing people who had hereditary illnesses. So it was things like hereditary blindness, hereditary deafness, schizophrenia, all sorts of different sort of mental illnesses, and also physical disability, because the Nazis were very much concerned that these should not be perpetuated down the next generations. So that's what that was all about. So those people shouldn't be allowed to breed. And indeed, they put into place certificates of fitness to marry. So these, again, so you applied to marry, and you could only marry if they considered you to be fit, again, because of what children you might produce.

• 16:58Kate Lister?

  How did they check that? That you're fit to marry? Is that like a, because obviously they wouldn't have had a DNA test, but they're like looking into your family history?

• 17:05Speaker 02

  Exactly, exactly. And for the SS that we talked about before, Himmler was kind of making all of these statements. He introduced a, an engagement and marriage edict for the members of the SS with 10 points. So this kind of 10-point decree. And it was about who they could get married, who they could get engaged and married to, how they kept the records of it. And they had to be able to prove, so this was the SS man and his bride-to-be, they had to be able to prove their Ancestral history back to 1800, so over a few generations. So things like physical attributes and fitness, racial heredity, all of those things. So particularly for the SS, which was meant to be an elite.

• 17:50Speaker 02

  They checked that very, very thoroughly and they had to fill in all these questionnaires and all sorts of things.

• 17:55Kate Lister?

  What's really weird about this, I've never understood this. Hitler is not tall, blonde haired and blue eyed. Like loads of them in the higher echelons are not this ideal. Like what is going on there? How did they square that circle?

• 18:09Speaker 02

  That's right, very difficult to square a circle like that. And in fact, Hitler used Magda Goebbels, who was Joseph Goebbels' wife, as this kind of model of the kind of the mother of the Third Reich, because she was, you know, they had more than, they had six children, the Goebbels is, and they were kind of the model to be emulated and she was mother of the Reich. So she was kind of the public face or kind of almost like, I can't say a poster girl, but.

• 18:38Kate Lister?

  Who is she the poster girl for? Because like, so obviously the SS officers are under a huge amount of pressure to have your family history checked and presumably go through a physical and marry. The women that they are targeting, it was this propaganda issued to specifically to women with like Magda Goebbels, was it targeted at schoolgirls, for example?

• 18:59Speaker 02

  I would say that it was targeted to the girls of the Nazi Girls Youth Group. So the BDM or the League of German Girls. So they were kind of coming up through a system at the same time as, but separate from the Hitler Youth itself. So this kind of parallel organisation with separate, you know, they kept the sexes separate in the youth groups. And so they were, they were the targets of a lot of the policy. So when you kind of hear about these young girls wanting to give a child to the Fuhrer and to give a birth to the nation, so some of it's that.

• 19:31Kate Lister?

  Do you know what's really scary about this is it all seems to have happened so quickly? Like, they all got established so fast. And when they're indoctrinating girls, I mean, the Nazi party had been around for like, what, a few years by this point? And they've already got them at school age, child age, and they're indoctrinating them. This is what you're going to do, you're going to, you're going to grow up and you're going to bear children for the Reich. And it was so fast that this happened.

• 19:52Speaker 02

  That's right, that's right. All of the policy is incredibly fast.

• 19:55Kate Lister?

  Terrifying. You're painting a picture here, I can start to understand why the Nazi state are going to get involved in this is because they want future Germans for their German Reich and they want to replenish dwindling birth levels. And obviously it's about pushing this idea about we are the superior race. So we're going to make sure that only the best people are having babies. And then conversely to that, they are now sterilising people that they deem as undesirable. The big Nazi policy is like the nuclear family, but you've already mentioned that not all of the women who were taken to these Lebensborn institutions were married. So that already seems like we've got a contradiction in terms. What a contradiction, it's the flipping Nazis.

• 20:39Kate Lister?

  But like, this seems like another contradiction, that they are family, family, family, but also they're targeting unwed women.

• 20:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, so there was a kind of tension there and an ambivalence there, you're quite correct. And particularly then, I think, because this was Himmler's project. So Himmler, although he grew up in quite a Catholic upbringing, quite a strict Catholic upbringing, he kind of rejected all that. So he was actually quite against the morals of both Christianity and kind of middle class conventions. So the idea of illegitimate children actually didn't bother him.

• 21:11Kate Lister?

  Right.

• 21:12Speaker 02

  What he wanted was, I won't say a child at any price, because there's the kind of racial cost or, but as many racially valuable children to be born as possible. So he was saying, just because they're illegitimate, that doesn't make them less valuable. But that didn't sit with like more conservative members of the party or society that didn't sit comfortably, particularly, you know, Bavaria is a very Catholic, wasn't a very Catholic area. So very, very hard sell. And so that's kind of partly why they were shrouded in this kind of secrecy as well. So the people who lived in the area weren't very comfortable with these homes. And in fact, they were discouraged from really interacting with the, with the women.

• 21:56Speaker 02

  But nevertheless, they also felt shame that they had these homes in their villages and in their surroundings. So they kind of looked down on it as well. So it was a very uncomfortable and a very tense situation, very ambivalent.

• 22:09Kate Lister?

  How did pregnant unmarried women know about these homes? Because it sounds like they're like half secret, but not a secret.

• 22:16Speaker 02

  Okay, so they did have to apply. And in fact, more than half of them were rejected.

• 22:22Kate Lister?

  On what grounds?

• 22:23Speaker 02

  Not being racially valuable enough. So, so those were the exact grounds, exactly the grounds you'd think. So by 1939, there were six of these homes operating. And by the end of 1938, more than 600 mothers had given birth in these homes.

• 22:39Kate Lister?

  That's a lot of mothers.

• 22:39Speaker 02

  Right. But of course, there are more who had applied and they were rejected on grounds of not being racially valuable enough.

• 22:48Kate Lister?

  I'll be back with Lisa after this short break.

• 22:58Kate Lister?

  In case you weren't aware, World Mental Health Day takes place in October. And I don't know about you, but I'm taking this as a reminder to practise some proper self-care, saying no to plans I don't want to go to, guilt-free snacking and Halloween movie marathons. It's also the perfect time to check in with yourself and your mental health. For many, it can mean taking that step and speaking to a professional who can help and guide you through any difficulties you're having. But often when you try to do that, it's still way harder than it should be. A lot of online therapy platforms don't accept insurance at all, which means even during a month focused on mental health, you're stuck paying out of pocket or signing up for an expensive monthly subscription.

• 23:42Kate Lister?

  This is where Rula comes in. They partner with over 120 insurance plans, making the average copay just $15 per session. That's real therapy from licensed professionals at a price that actually makes sense. Because the whole point of World Mental Health Day is making sure people actually get help, not just think about it. And Rula sticks with you throughout your journey, checking in to make sure your care is actually helping you move forward. With World Mental Health Day this October, it's a good reminder that taking care of your mental health can start with one step. Visit rula.com/shets to get started. That's R U L A dot com slash S H E E T S.

• 24:24Kate Lister?

  You deserve mental health care that works with you, not against your budget.

• 24:32Speaker 01

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• 25:31Kate Lister?

  Hello, Betwixters. I'm jumping in here because I have some very exciting news. Betwixt the Sheets has set up a camp on YouTube. That's right, it took us a while, but we are there now. So if you are the kind of person who likes to see your podcasts as well as hear your podcasts, you can now go and find us right there and the link is in the show notes. And please remember to like and subscribe because the people in charge of the money really do like that. Right, let's get on with it.

• 26:13Kate Lister?

  Do you know what happened to the women that were rejected? Do they just vanish from the records?

• 26:18Speaker 02

  Well, I think, yeah, we don't know what happened to them, really.

• 26:20Kate Lister?

  But the women that were accepted into this, how much did they understand? And what was the plan? Are they going, like, so obviously they're getting good medical care and they're being looked after, but is the idea that, like, right, you've had your baby, now go and live a good Aryan life with your baby? Like, what was the plan here?

• 26:35Speaker 02

  That's a really good question. So there's kind of different outcomes. So certainly whilst they were in the home, as we said, the point was that they shouldn't feel stigmatized. There's the idea that they could make friends and camaraderie with the other mothers-to-be, that they could, that everybody there was excited about the birth, all of those kinds of things. But at the same time, they were getting a lot of education in terms of future motherhood. So they're kind of getting the practical education about breastfeeding or childcare. So they're getting that. They were also getting Nazi indoctrination. So they were getting ideological education. So there's three evenings a week of instruction, which could be lectures or watching propaganda

• 27:20Speaker 02

  films or singing songs. So there's kind of all of that, radio broadcasts, there's kind of all of that going on. But, you know, they did then have free time in which they could really relax. So, you know, it was recuperative in a way, you know, I mean, it was a nice environment for them in a way. The other thing that Himmler did, and I will still come back to what you did just ask me, the other thing that Himmler did was that he was very interested in the ins and outs of the running of it. So particularly things like, he took a lot of interest in the health of the mothers in terms of nutrition.

• 27:51Kate Lister?

  I don't know why this feels weird and icky to me. The whole thing just, like, I don't know why that in particular, like, why is he hanging around these pregnant women asking about their health?

• 28:00Speaker 02

  Okay, so there are a few things. So first of all, he's making sure that they get porridge, because that's very healthy. He's making sure that they have whole wheat bread, because that's healthier than white bread. He's making sure that they have their vegetables cooked correctly. So if they're cooking, if they're cooking potatoes, they should be in their skins, where all the nutrients are, that the chefs or the cooks should be trained to steam the vegetables so that, again, the nutrients were there. And most importantly, I think, during the wartime period, he made sure that these homes had sort of extra supplies or good supplies. So once, say, things like fruit or other luxury items were in short demand, he made sure that these homes were supplied.

• 28:44Kate Lister?

  You weren't kidding. He is really involved in this.

• 28:47Speaker 02

  Involved in a lot of detail. And to the extent that children born on his birthday, which was the 7th of October, so any child born in these homes on the 7th of October, they had special attention from him.

• 28:59Kate Lister?

  Right.

• 29:00Speaker 02

  So they got, they were presented with a candlestick, and then each year on their birthday, they'd get an extra candle sent for each year, and one rice mark sent so they could start a savings account. And he would keep tracks, he'd kind of get special information about how their weight and their height and how their general health was, every year, annual, so on the special Himmler birthday children.

• 29:27Kate Lister?

  Like, in the absolute horror of everything that was Third Reich, I don't know why this particularly creeps me out, but it's just, it's just weirdly, like, why, why is he, like, were they eating enough bread? Have they cooked their potatoes in the right way? Have they, ugh!

• 29:42Speaker 02

  It is incredible attention to detail.

• 29:44Kate Lister?

  What happens to the babies? Because, like, all right, the mothers are getting all of this attention and they're getting good nutrition, and I can see how if you are a poor girl and you're unmarried and you're pregnant, this might seem like a good option in the time and in that circumstance. But do they get to keep the babies?

• 30:01Speaker 02

  Ah, right, so that's a really good question. So they're different, just different circumstances. So if they were in a position and they wanted to keep their babies, they could. We've said that, obviously, a lot of them weren't in a position, so maybe they didn't know who the father was anymore, or, you know, didn't have contact with the father anymore, or just weren't in a position to bring that baby home to, you know, to the prying eyes of their priests and their parents and so on, neighbours. So what they did then, and so if they didn't want to take the baby with them, the baby would be looked after in the home for up to about a year, so for the first year of life of the baby. And then the baby was sent for adoption or kind of to be fostered by usually SS families or other German families of good blood. So that was what happened to them.

• 30:46Speaker 02

  And then, then, yeah.

• 30:48Kate Lister?

  Do we know much about who the fathers were? I'm just picking on what you said earlier about how the SS officers were encouraged to have four children in wedlock, but I do know that there was a pressure to just have babies.

• 31:00Speaker 02

  That's also why these homes came under quite a lot of scrutiny and even controversy, because there was this kind of whole thing, because they were in, shrouded in secrecy, there kind of came all these rumours about them, that they were procreation helpers, so literally men there to let these women get pregnant, or that they were stud farms for the SS. So all of these rumours were going around. The situation of secrecy in which they were shrouded meant that those rumours just were fuelled, but I'm not sure quite how accurate they were in reality.

• 31:34Kate Lister?

  Right. Is there any evidence for that, that they were basically forcibly breeding babies?

• 31:40Speaker 02

  I don't think there's too much evidence for that. I think they were more likely to have been, as we said, for the wives of SS men, because there was good medical care there. But then, equally, the secondary function that young women who were not wed could have their children there in comfortable circumstances.

• 32:01Kate Lister?

  So is this where SS officers are basically dumping their mistresses and their extramarital affairs?

• 32:06Speaker 02

  I think there could have been some of that.

• 32:07Kate Lister?

  There could have been some of that. And it wasn't just in Germany that this was happening, that these institutes were set up, were they? By the time they'd got to, was it, was it Norway, which had, you know, to the Nazis, they were like, oh, blonde hair, blue eyes, this is the genetic Aryan-ness that we want. I mean, they went nuts there, didn't they?

• 32:26Speaker 02

  Exactly. So now, this is the other key reason why these homes came under scrutiny and controversy, and arguably the stronger reason for it, which is essentially that they were used in the kidnapping.

• 32:39Kate Lister?

  Holy shit.

• 32:41Speaker 02

  Yes. And then Germanisation of children in all the territories that the Nazis occupied. And this is the bit that's not so well-known. So we can talk about Norway, and we will, but these homes were established then in the Western countries. So there was one in France, I think there were two in Austria, one in Belgium, one in the Netherlands, one in Denmark. So that's in the Western Territories. But then in Poland as well. And you think, well, why in Poland?

• 33:10Kate Lister?

  No, that doesn't make sense, because even I know that the Nazis were like, oh, we don't like Polish people, they're racially inferior.

• 33:15Speaker 02

  Right. So that was the broad scale, but they said, even among them, there must be some, and they found them, who they believed had, now this is really scary stuff, who they believed had the right racial characteristics. So what they did was essentially, in this general government region of Poland, they went in and they abducted these children. So they told the parents, well, we're just taking them on a kind of holiday or a kind of health retreat, because they're not safe either with you or in the orphanages where they, or kind of homes where they are. So there was some resistance put up, but eventually, of course, how much resistance can you do? So the Nazis took them and to the homes, so to the Lebensborn homes, and then they were assessed and kind of racially categorised.

• 34:00Speaker 02

  And if they were okay, now this is the really scary stuff, if they were considered to be okay, they then destroyed their original birth certificates. Yeah. They said, well, the mother died in childbirth, the father died in battle, and they kind of remade up a date. And so this as well made it very difficult in the post-war period for these people to actually trace their histories, because even the date, they didn't want to be the same. And then they kept these all in the, in the racial office in kind of secure documents.

• 34:33Kate Lister?

  Who's kidnapping these kids? I'm just trying to get my, what is this system? A Nazi soldier just walking around the streets and going that one, that one, that one?

• 34:39Speaker 02

  Well, something like that.

• 34:40Kate Lister?

  Like, wow!

• 34:41Speaker 02

  And then they selected them. So that was, that was the situation even in Poland, but then, so they had to, and then they said, well, they had to be of a certain age, so they had to be, like, between eight and 10 was the, or up to the age of eight and 10 was the ideal age.

• 34:56Kate Lister?

  Oh, terrific.

• 34:57Speaker 02

  Beyond that, then they'd kind of remember too much, I suppose. And then what they did was, they said they couldn't speak any Polish, they had to learn and speak only German. They had, they changed their names, so they changed their names away from a Polish name to a German name. And these children, they weren't to be referred to as Poles or anything like, Poles who were now brought to Germany for good reason, so nothing about their Polish heritage was to be there. They described them as Germans being sort of repatriated from the Eastern Territories. So it was kind of really much like that. So really, really.

• 35:33Kate Lister?

  It's grotesque.

• 35:36Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 35:37Kate Lister?

  It's, like, to just kidnap kids off the street, erase their entire identity, force them to speak a new language, and, like, it's just, I can't even get my head around that.

• 35:48Speaker 02

  And then we think about, in the aftermath of the war, so then we think about things like, well, did the homes come under kind of any, any investigation or trials? And the Lebensborn did come under the Nuremberg Trial first, and also later trials in Munich. But in all of the cases, the people who were involved either got away with very lenient punishment or...

• 36:14Speaker 02

  Completely got away. So this Dr Gregor Ebner, who was the man who was the chief medical officer of the homes, working very closely with Himmler, he just went into civilian life and practised as a doctor for decades after the end of the war. So, and again, I guess some of the argument made in those trials was while the homes were actually looking after the, in the defence, they were saying, well, the homes, they weren't working to the detriment of the children, they were actually bringing them up.

• 36:45Kate Lister?

  That's a tenuous argument, isn't it?

• 36:47Speaker 02

  Very tenuous, very tenuous, but they seem to have got away with it.

• 36:50Kate Lister?

  So they are kidnapping, literally taking kids off the street in Poland. Is this happening anywhere else?

• 36:57Speaker 02

  Yeah. So it's, as we said, it's kind of happening quite a lot right across Nazi occupied territory. And in fact, in July 1942, Hitler actually put into place an edict or a decree for Germanisation of children that could be taken. And then that could be applied much more widely in any of the Nazi occupied territories. And as we've said, Norway was one of the key targets because they were regarded to be the best racial stock. So again, you know, there's kind of all those arguments about hierarchy of the races that went back to the 19th century with the Nordic race being at the top. And so this

• 37:39Speaker 02

  was meant to be the best. And then we know that during 1943, 1,000 Norwegian women came and then in 1944, at least another 2,000 came to give birth in Germany and

• 37:53Kate Lister?

  That's a lot of women.

• 37:54Speaker 02

  It is, it is.

• 37:55Kate Lister?

  That's a lot of babies.

• 37:56Speaker 02

  And it's a very difficult history that, you know, continued to have ramifications and corollaries and legacies, I think, to this day, right?

• 38:06Kate Lister?

  Right. Were the governments of the countries where these homes were, were they in cahoots with them? Were they colluding with them? Did they resist this at all? Did they even know about it?

• 38:16Speaker 02

  I don't think that we can say that they resisted it much because they weren't particularly in a position to do that. Colluding is also difficult, but I suppose, I think the Norwegian case is interesting. So the Norwegian case was, as you rightly said a little bit earlier, they thought, well, this was the stock, this kind of Nordic stock was the ideal as far as the Nazis were concerned.

• 38:38Kate Lister?

  But they're not Germans. It's like, it's such a weird feat of mental gymnastics of like this, like we need to build Germans, Germans, Germans. Oh, Norway. But that's not what?

• 38:47Speaker 02

  I know. But they were, you know, they had the tall stature and the strong physique and the blondness and all of that. So they thought, well, this could only make the German stock even stronger for the future.

• 38:58Kate Lister?

  Okay.

• 38:59Speaker 02

  I mean, like I said, with the SS, Himmler was saying, you know, you should be the seedbed of a nation that would be 200 million strong. And, you know, there'll be farmers and then we'll rule the world. Essentially, that was the point. This kind of whole new German millennium, you know, they talked about a thousand year Reich.

• 39:16Kate Lister?

  They did, yes.

• 39:17Speaker 02

  So that was, that was the point and who it should be populated with. So it's absolutely shocking stuff. And of course, at the other end of, of the scale were those who were excluded and eventually expendable. So we know, of course, about the Holocaust and the T4 campaign to eradicate those who were mentally ill and physically disabled. So there's kind of all of that. So there's kind of two sides. As I said at the beginning, you've kind of got this kind of positive policies, if we can call it that, what they regarded to be positive population policy. And the Lebensborn really were the heart of that. And then at the other side, those who are not welcome at all and who were completely excluded. And as I said, eventually expendable too.

• 40:02Kate Lister?

  I'll be back with Lisa after this short break.

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• 41:15Speaker 03

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• 42:23Kate Lister?

  What happens after the war then? I mean, this is just, I'm trying to get your head around this. It's so, like I said, it's just grotesque. But then the war ends, the Nazi thousand year Reich has not been realised. It's all in wreckage, but they've still got all these kids who are presumably being raised in various foster families. But, but of course, the SS are now illegal. And if you're caught, if they know that you're an SS, then you might be put on trial. What happens to these poor kids?

• 42:50Speaker 02

  Well, that's a really interesting question. So what did happen to them? So what happened to them was, of course, for decades or a long time, they probably didn't know. And those who then, it's kind of more, more like by the, say, like late 80s and maybe 1990s, they're kind of starting to maybe look into that deep past and their childhood. But it's going to be very difficult because they kept being met with blanks, evasion.

• 43:14Kate Lister?

  False documents.

• 43:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:15Kate Lister?

  How do you look?

• 43:16Speaker 02

  How do you even find it? So, and again, I think that, so a lot of the parents where they were sort of foster or adoptive parents, they probably thought it's not even worth

• 43:26Kate Lister?

  Mentioning.

• 43:27Speaker 02

  telling them the truth because how difficult that would be. But some of them, some of them in the more recent years, they did go and kind of, once they found out, they did then go and kind of go back to the home in which they were born, maybe to try and get some sense of their own history, some sense of understanding, satisfying their curiosity. But also, I suppose also to know that it wasn't their fault. You know, they were, they were a victim of this policy because they weren't, it wasn't in their agency, was it? They're just born there and that's, that's their own story.

• 43:59Kate Lister?

  Having to reckon with that, I mean, obviously, no, it's not, it couldn't even possibly be their fault. But to understand that you're a product of Lebensborn means that you have to reckon with the fact that your mother made certain choices and that your father may have been an SS.

• 44:13Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 44:14Kate Lister?

  Officer. And I'm wondering, like, you know, we can look back now and say quite rightly that there is no shame and stigma attached to this at all. But at the time, like I'm thinking of the women in France who had their heads publicly shaved being collaborators. Were these children that were taken and raised as Nazis, did they face stigma?

• 44:32Speaker 02

  Again, I mean, I think maybe there's that sense of it just wasn't discussed. It was kind of all below the surface. So as I said, even in the communities where those homes were, people didn't want to, didn't

• 44:42Kate Lister?

  Didn't want to talk about it.

• 44:43Speaker 02

  Didn't want to talk about it. So that's what they were met with, was this kind of wall of silence, even if they were trying to find out about their past.

• 44:49Kate Lister?

  Has there been any kind of reckoning with this? Because it sounds like it took a long time for people to start asking questions and to start demanding answers. Has there been any kind, like, the government made reparations? Have they released files? Is like, what's the state of it today, I suppose?

• 45:05Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, not too much. I mean, the only reckoning is what I kind of described about these post-war trials. And a lot of it just went under, under the water, went under the radar.

• 45:15Kate Lister?

  It's just not discussed.

• 45:16Speaker 02

  Disappeared. And very much a taboo subject. I mean, most people haven't even heard of it.

• 45:21Kate Lister?

  No, no, they, they haven't heard of it. So as a final question then, what do you think the legacy of this is? Because the numbers for this are quite extraordinary.

• 45:32Speaker 02

  I suppose the legacy is difficult as well for those children because, for example, the ones in Norway, the ones from Norway, they didn't go back after the war. And again, partly because the Norwegians were very, very anti-German and they didn't want them back. And partly because they didn't really know their origin. So it is, it's kind of, there's a lot of personal, intricate and difficult histories there that probably, I mean, I know we're many decades now over, but unresolved. I think a lot of them just continue to be unresolved.

• 46:05Kate Lister?

  Everything that you've been saying is just, there's just horrible echoes of certain narratives that keep cropping up in the modern day, this obsession with declining birth rates and that we should all be having babies and sort of the vicious misogyny that you see arising that's like women, that they need to stay at home and need to be breeding families. It's horribly, horribly familiar.

• 46:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's very resonant, isn't it? And you just like, kind of just think these kind of phases of ideas that kind of repeat themselves and don't go away. And now we're like, you know, more than 100 years later, we're kind of hearing quite similar arguments to those in the 1920s. And here we are in the 2020s.

• 46:44Kate Lister?

  I didn't even ask you about what the Nazis thought about birth control or abortion for that matter. What was their policy on that?

• 46:50Speaker 02

  Okay. So the Nazis absolutely frowned on any kind of birth control, birth education, any of those kind of advice centres that had been set up during the Weimar years were immediately shut down, banned, anything like that, any form of contraception banned. Abortion was frowned upon too. So the Lebensborn homes, they helped to some extent because these young women could give birth out of wedlock. I mean, it's a very different society to how we are now. But in those days, of course, it was frowned upon. But in terms of racial value, from the point of view of the Nazi regime, they didn't want good births to be ended. So that's kind of part of the raison d'etre of those homes because they facilitated those good births. So

• 47:35Kate Lister?

  Just all sounds horrendously familiar.

• 47:38Speaker 02

  And at the height of the war, so in 1943, the Nazis actually put into place a decree of the death penalty for abortions.

• 47:47Kate Lister?

  Fuck.

• 47:48Speaker 02

  Yeah. So that's, you know, I mean, that's the extent of it.

• 47:51Kate Lister?

  It's just, I know, I keep saying it, but it just seems like horribly, horribly familiar, what you're saying. This obsession with birth, this obsession with like declining birth rights of taking away reproductive rights from women, of trying to force women back. And you'd think, like, have we not learned anything?

• 48:06Speaker 02

  It's just shocking, isn't it?

• 48:08Kate Lister?

  It's going to take me a moment to just sit with this. But you have been amazing. Thank you so, so much. And your work is so important. If people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you?

• 48:19Speaker 02

  Well, thank you. They can have a look at Bloomsbury Books that I publish with Bloomsbury. So if you have a look at their website, you'll find many of my books. And I've also done quite a lot of TV work, both here in the UK, Channel Four, Channel Five, and Netflix and other broadcasts.

• 48:37Kate Lister?

  Well, thank you so much for coming by. You've been, you've been horrifying, but spellbinding. Thank you so much.

• 48:43Speaker 02

  Well, thank you very much, Kate, for having me. It's been an absolute pleasure.

• 48:49Kate Lister?

  Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Lisa for joining us. And if you like what you heard, don't forget to like, review and follow along wherever it is that you get your podcasts. And if you'd like us to explore a subject or if you just wanted to say hello, then you can email us at [email protected]. This podcast was edited by Tim Arstall and produced by Sophie G. The senior producer was Freddy Chick. Join me again, Betwixt's A Sheet, The History of Sex, Scandal and Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.