Breeding to Further the Reich

In the destitute months before and after the defeat of Nazi Germany, the blond, blue-eyed toddlers from the orphanage in this Saxon village walked along the rubble-strewn roadside each day, holding fast to a rope trailed by a matron to keep them together.

The skinny foundlings caught the eye of a lonely war widow who eventually took one of the girls, Aud Rigmor Harzendorf, then 3 years old, into her home and her heart.

“I must have been a pretty little one, with all those blond curls,” recalls Harzendorf, now a 58-year-old grandmother, whose classic Nordic looks proved to be her life’s heaviest trial as well as her salvation.

Harzendorf was never really an orphan. She was the product of a Nazi breeding campaign to create an Aryan elite, a 10-year experiment that researchers estimate gave birth to 11,000 children.

Her journey of discovery has acquainted her with her natural mother and long-lost brother, and offers a glimpse into the thousands of lives that were conceived in the minds of racist madmen.

Lebensborn (“Fountain of Life”) was begun in 1935 under the direction of SS chief Heinrich Himmler as a bulwark against a future dominated by what the Nazis viewed as “inferior races.” Women who had the “desirable” physical qualities of blond hair and blue eyes were urged to have sexual relations with tall, fit officers of Adolf Hitler’s elite SS troops to produce a master race for the Fuehrer.

The personal histories of the children of Lebensborn who ended up in East Germany were hidden for decades by the authorities of that postwar Communist state. Not only did the presence of “Hitler’s children” provide an uncomfortable reminder of the Nazi past in East Germany, but the identities listed in the secret registry of births offered convenient camouflage for spies whom the Soviet-allied state planted abroad.

Those records that survived in West Germany were kept for years in a repository in Heidelberg, ostensibly open to those born under the Lebensborn program--if they knew to ask. In November, the newly consolidated Federal Archives announced that the records from the two Germanys, though grossly incomplete, would now be available at the Berlin headquarters.

“They are only available to those involved in the program, to help explain their fate,” says Wilhelm Lenz, head of the department for documents from the Third Reich. “Until recently, many didn’t know or suspect they were Lebensborn children.”

Only about 1,000 files have survived intact and with the names of the natural parents included, since those who took part in the breeding program had the option of keeping their identities secret. Harzendorf’s case was somewhat unusual in that both natural parents allowed their names to be recorded.

Harzendorf is typical of a generation of Germans who came of age in a time when it was unwise to ask too many questions and in a place where answers couldn’t always be trusted. Children born before and during the Nazi era were seldom told of their parents’ roles in the Third Reich. Also kept in the dark were untold thousands who were born during the four-year Soviet occupation as a consequence of rapes, which historians estimate were committed against more than 1 million East German women and girls.

“Before the change [in 1989], no one ever talked about the past,” says Harzendorf, who still lives barely half a mile from the orphanage. “All my foster mother ever told me was that I didn’t have any parents anymore and I was coming to live with her. She was a good person and would never have imagined such things [as Lebensborn] ever existed.”

Early Years in Norway

Both of her natural parents were still living at the end of the war, but that was something she would learn only decades later.

Harzendorf was born in Norway--as were nearly half of the Lebensborn children--the product of an SS aviator from Dresden by the name of Georg Rudi Graefe and a Norwegian mother, Karin Edgren. Her mother worked as a bookkeeper for the Nazi army that was welcomed by the collaborationist wartime regime of Premier Vidkun Quisling.

Edgren gave the daughter born June 28, 1941, to an Oslo nursery that cared for Lebensborn offspring until the wards were evacuated to Germany in late 1943.

Hundreds of Lebensborn children from Norway were shuttled in and out of the children’s home here in the chaotic months before and after the war’s end, Harzendorf was told by one of the matrons who still lives in Kohren-Sahlis.

Harzendorf was one of at least six Lebensborn children from the home taken in by villagers. Her foster mother, Adelheid Helbig, who died in 1966, was never allowed to formally adopt her--for reasons never disclosed to Harzendorf.

“She loved me as much as any mother loves her child--I know that,” says Harzendorf, who describes her early life as one of blissful ignorance and good fortune.

When she was registering to marry at age 21, Harzendorf discovered that she was officially stateless: Her birth certificate and document of citizenship both had disappeared from the home. It was an administrative nightmare that was also to befall at least two other contemporaries from the orphanage whose identities were later used by agents of the Ministry for State Security--the dreaded Stasi--to pose as displaced Norwegians returning to their homeland, a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

Harzendorf, a weaver by profession, had a daughter she named Karin Adelheid after her natural and foster mothers, the former name taken from a document provided by the orphanage that told all she knew at the time about the woman who had given her life.

When East Germans revolted against the Communist regime in 1989, a friend of Harzendorf who knew he too had been born in Norway approached a Norwegian television crew covering the demonstrations to ask for help in uncovering his past. The friend, a Leipzig musician named Arno Kaube, encouraged Harzendorf to join in the search for their roots.

The effort ended unhappily for Kaube, whose natural mother refused to see him. With the help of Oslo journalists, Harzendorf was able to trace her own birth mother and discovered her ailing and haunted by a guilty conscience.

“It wasn’t an easy life for her. Women who had had relations with German soldiers were tortured after the war,” Harzendorf says by way of excusing her natural mother’s half a century of silence. “They were beaten and had their hair cut off or set on fire, the others hated them so much. So I can understand why she never tried to get me back.

“Still, I think she didn’t want to take this secret to the grave with her. She wanted some inner peace at the end of her life.”

They had only one meeting before Edgren’s death in 1995--a visit in Oslo three years earlier during which Harzendorf learned that she has a half brother three years her senior named Gunnar Edgren, who was raised by his natural mother.

Harzendorf also traced the life story of her natural father a few years ago, learning from his widow that he had four sons before he died in 1967 and often boasted during bouts of heavy drinking of having fathered a daughter in Norway.

Unlike the warm relationship she has fostered with her Norwegian half brother, who paid a visit with his wife and daughters in November, Harzendorf says she was dissuaded from getting to know her other half brothers by the brooding and drunken atmosphere of the one Graefe family reunion she attended.

Germany’s records concerning the Lebensborn program have traveled as twisted a route as many of its offspring. Files on “Hitler’s children” were moved with other official papers from one besieged city to another before the Nazi regime was finally defeated, and records left in what became East Germany were confiscated by central authorities or destroyed.

The Lebensborn program eventually grew to involve more than a dozen maternity homes. Selected SS officers mated with women deemed to have the right physical and moral characteristics, and expectant mothers were then cared for in secrecy by state cooks and nurses until their children were born.

Taking Comfort in Uncovering the Past

A few hundred were given up for adoption, as envisioned by Hitler’s misguided builders of a master race. But the vast majority were reared by their natural mothers, says Dorothee Schmitz-Koester, a German historian who has researched the Lebensborn program and written a book about daily life in the maternity homes.

Schmitz-Koester believes that most surviving offspring know the vague outlines of their origins.

“It’s not a new discovery for many. It’s more that, at a certain age, when people near retirement, they want to know more about it,” says Schmitz-Koester, who sees more comfort than conflict in the process of uncovering the past.

“I don’t know how difficult it is to deal with this background. Some people react very calmly and point out that they aren’t Nazis themselves, that this legacy is something they have to deal with,” the historian explains. “But I know others who feel ashamed to carry this racist stain.”

One mountain of material involving Lebensborn children still being sorted by the victims is the files of the notorious Stasi, East Germany’s secret police agency.

When the Stasi records became accessible to the public in the early 1990s, Germans from the east learned not just of the existence of the Lebensborn program but that its offspring had also been used as espionage cover.

Files Show Agent Used Woman’s Identity

Files discovered in the Stasi archives show that a woman agent used Harzendorf’s identity in the 1960s and 1970s to procure Norwegian documents she used while spying in Brussels. She is still being sought by unified Germany’s intelligence service, Harzendorf says she was told by authorities in Berlin.

A photo of her doppelganger--her double--is fixed neatly in a scrapbook Harzendorf has assembled to pull together the bits and pieces of a life formed in the shadows from the moment of its inception.

“I’ve found out all that I wanted to know,” she says, patting the plastic-sheathed pages that recount her life’s story. “I’ve written it all down so I won’t forget the details.”

Harzendorf says she would like to close the cover and leave behind further reflection on the Nazi and Communist footprints on her existence.

But with each chapter of her personal drama that has unfolded over the last decade, she has received letters from others who know or suspect they are Lebensborn children and want her advice on how to put their own pasts together.

“There are still so many people who want desperately to know where they were born and who they come from,” says Harzendorf, who maintains an informal Lebensborn contact network. “It gets tiring, going over all this Nazi history, but I understand their need to know the truth to be at peace with themselves.”