BLONDE haired and blue-eyed, teenager Hildegard Koch was an enthusiastic member of the female branch of the Hitler youth, the League of German Girls.
So when the Nazi authorities were looking for “racially pure” girls to “fulfil their task as German women and donate a child to the Führer”, she felt duty bound to sign up.
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The state sponsored programme called Lebensborn – meaning ‘Spring of Life’ – was a bid to boost the Aryan population and ran for 12 years from 1933.
Chosen girls – often virgins – were separated from their parents and sent to special homes, dubbed “baby factories”, where they had sex with SS Officers and, when pregnant, signed away all rights to their child.
The shocking programme is highlighted in the latest series of BBC drama World On Fire, which sees proud patriot Marga, played by Miriam Schiweck, selected.
While her friends encourage her to resist, her parents are afraid to clash with Nazi authorities, while Marga sees it as an honour.
“Marga’s wrapped up in this terrible ideology and doesn’t actually know it or realise what she signed up to – she’s never even had sex before,” Miriam has said.
It is estimated that some 20,000 such babies were bred between 1933 and 1945, mostly in Germany and occupied Norway, where SS Officers were encouraged to impregnate blonde-haired women.
German women who gave birth to more than four children were awarded with the Cross of Honour.
But some mothers and children – including Abba’s Anni-Frid Lyngstad – were persecuted after the war, or forced into exile.
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The Lebensborn programme also led to the kidnap of thousands of children with “appropriate racial features” from Eastern European countries, including Poland and Ukraine.
Snatched from their parents, they’d be given to German families to raise.
The League of German Girls – the Bund Deutscher Mädel (BDM) – was set up as a branch of the Hitler Youth in 1930 and flourished after Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933.
The girls, dressed in Navy skirts, brown jackets and pigtails, were brainwashed with Nazi antisemitic ideology.
They took on activities to improve physical fitness in preparation for motherhood – the most important role a woman could play in the eyes of the Fuhrer.
Hildegard joined BDM aged 15 in 1933 after a member of the Nazi’s fitness division told her father she was “a real Hitler girl, blonde and strong – just the type we need”.
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“I was often presented as an example of the perfect Nordic,” she said. “The structure of my hips was perfect for conceiving children.”
The birth rate in Germany that year was 14.7 per 1,000 people – half what it was at the turn of the century – and the Nazis blamed a high abortion rate.
Keen to boost numbers of Germanic boys and girls to achieve the desired Aryan domination, SS Commander Heinrich Himmler came up with the Lebensborn programme.
It would couple up “a small elite of German women” with SS men “of equally good racial stock in order to lay the foundation of a pure racial breed”.
Hildegard signed up for the programme at 18, and after a raft of medical tests, including one to check there was no trace of Jewish blood, she was issued with the necessary “certificate of Aryan authenticity”.
She was then taken to an ancient castle in Bavaria, along with 40 other girls, all using false names.
To Hildegard, the accommodation was luxurious, with top chefs, servants, common rooms for sports and games, a bookstore and cinema.
On arrival she was forced to sign a contract “renouncing all claims” to the children she’d have there, as they would be “needed by the State” and given to vetted families.
The girls were introduced to SS soldiers and allocated a week to choose their SS partner, after which they’d “receive” the men in their bedrooms at night.
Hildegard said of hers: “He was a sweet boy, although he hurt me a little, and I think he was actually a little stupid, but he had smashing looks.
“He slept with me for three evenings a week. The other nights he had to do his duty with another girl. I stayed in the house until I was pregnant, which didn’t take long.”
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Taken after ceremony
Hildegard was then moved to one of the 25 Lebensborn maternity homes in Germany and the occupied territories, where she gave birth to a boy.
As was standard practice, she nursed him for two weeks – during which the SS hosted a “naming ceremony” attended by Hildegrad and the baby’s father, presenting the tot with a silver cup from ‘Your Godfather Heinrich Himmler’ – before he was taken away.
Many concerned families objected, claiming their daughters were intimidated into bearing illegitimate children.
But leaders claimed that due to the “shortage of men” due to WWII, not every girl should expect to find a husband and should “at least fulfil their task as German women and donate a child to the Führer”.
Hildegard – who never learned what happened to her son – went on to marry another young German officer and when she told him she had taken part in the Lebensborn programme, she was “surprised that he wasn’t as excited”.
Norway’s tragic kids
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While around 8,000 Lebensborn babies were born in Germany, over 12,000 were fathered by SS soldiers in Norway after the 1940 German occupation.
One was Abba star Anni-Frid, whose mother Synni was just 19 when she fell pregnant by German Sergeant Alfred Haase.
Born in 1945, as the war came to an end, Anni-Frid’s mother and grandmother were among the many who were ostracised as traitors for associating with the enemy and the infant was branded a ‘Tyskerbarnas’ – German child.
Her family was among hundreds who fled to Sweden, where sadly, Synni died of kidney failure before her daughter turned two.
Many more were sent to Brazil and Australia, but those that stayed behind suffered years of abuse, with children taken from their mothers and placed in government homes where they were tortured and raped.
A leading psychiatrist recommended tha Lebensborn children should be locked up in mental institutions because they were “genetically bad”, and a priest suggested they be sterilised to prevent them from becoming Nazis and waging war in the future.
Around 250 were sent ‘back’ to Germany while thousands of their mothers – labelled ‘German whores’ – were sent to Norwegian ‘concentration camps’ where they became slave labourers.
‘Chained up with the dog’
Harriet von Nickel was born in March 1942. In her autobiography, German Child, she details the horrific abuse she received growing up.
“As a two-year-old living with foster parents, I was chained up with the dog in the yard,” she wrote.
“As a six-year-old I was thrown in the river by a man from my village, who said he wanted to ‘see if the witch will drown or float’.”
When she was nine, drunk locals in her Norwegian village of Bursr used bent nails to carve a swastika into her forehead and threatened to rape her.
She said: “A woman saved me, and I rubbed sandpaper on my skin to get rid of the swastika.”
In 2018 the Norwegian government formally apologised to the mothers and children who had suffered abuse.
Stolen children
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Working on the ideology that any child with blonde hair and blue eyes could not be from an “inferior” race and must have German blood, Himmler declared in 1938: “I really do have the intention to gather Germanic blood from the whole world, to rob it, to steal it wherever I can.”
The SS snatched thousands of children from their parents and orphanages in German-occupied countries including Poland, Ukraine and Czechoslovakia to be “repatriated”.
The children were sent to brutal Youth Holding Centres and measured for 62 ‘Aryan characteristics’, including length of nose and, in the girls, width of pelvis to measure suitability for conception.
Kids aged two to six were placed for adoption with Aryan families – many of whom believed they had been orphaned – and older children were sent to the German Motherland School to be ‘Germanised’.
Those deemed not Aryan enough were sent to the Auschwitz and Treblinka concentration camps, where many were murdered.
In 1943, Malgorzata Twardecki, a single mother living in Nazi-occupied Poland, was ordered to bring her five-year-old son Alojzy to the local council office so he could be sent on a holiday to improve his ‘health’.
When she refused, the military police abducted the boy and he, along with other village children, was herded onto a train. She was never told where he was sent.
“You can’t imagine what it is like to have a child stolen. We didn’t give them our children. They stole them,” Malgorzata said years later. “Nobody had ever done anything as terrible as this.”
Alojzy was one of approximately 200,000 Polish children stolen by the Nazis between 1939 and 1944 to be ‘Germanized’.
Another was Zyta Sus, taken from a Polish orphanage in 1942.
Sent to live in the Lebensborn home in Steinhöring and forced to attend the Reich School for Ethnic Germans in Achern, she was forbidden to speak her mother tongue and starved or whipped if she slipped up.
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The children were forced to wear uniforms with swastikas, sing military songs and endure countless hours of drills and marches.
When suitably Germanised, Zyta was adopted by a loving Austrian family – where she had “the time of my life” – but was returned to Poland at 12 and was unable to trace her foster family after.
Other older girls were sent to maternity homes to become “breeding material” for SS officers.
It is estimated that only 40,000, or 20 per cent, of the 200,000 children stolen from Poland were ever reunited with their families.
In 2018 a German court ruled that children regarded as “racially pure” and abducted by the SS were not entitled to compensation under a scheme to help those who were persecuted as “inferior” by the Nazi regime, because they had been regarded as “high quality”.
Christoph Schwarz, founder of the campaign group Stolen Children, Forgotten Victims, added: “A great injustice has happened to these children.
“They were robbed of their childhood and remain the last group of Nazi victims without recognition and compensation.”
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