Nazi scheme to kidnap 'Aryan' children

[Kyt]

Oh dear, I'm afraid this is typical Mail hyperbole - there's nothing "revealed" about this - it's been known since the end of the war, and organisations like the Red Cross spent years trying to return and re-unite kidnapped children with their biological parents:

Revealed: Nazi scheme to kidnap 'Aryan' children from occupied countries

A chilling new book about Hitler's Lebensborn programme - the sinister project to create the perfect Aryan race to rule the world for 1,000 years - shows the Nazis kidnapped thousands of children from occupied countries to fill the demand for future manpower.

Lebensborn, or Fount of Life, was hitherto thought to be just a breeding programme where S.S. "studs" mated with suitable female specimens in Nazi nursing homes.

Nine months later the offspring were turned over to the state to be brought up in an all-Nazi environment.

These budding supermen were supposed to grow up to be hard, cruel standard bearers of Hitler's "New Order" in Europe.

But eminent German historian Volker Koop says in his new book "Give a Child to the Fuehrer - the Lebensborn Organisation" that the S.S.-run group kidnapped thousands of children from occupied lands and murdered those that quack racial "experts" back in the Reich deemed "unfit for Germanisation".

"Lebensborn was anything but a mechanism for simply promoting the procreation of healthy, vigorous Aryan warriors," said Koop.

"It was a criminal organisation and served primarily the racial-political illusion concepts of Hitler and Himmler."

Heinrich Himmler, lord of the S.S., created Lebensborn in 1935. German birthrates were stagnating as opposed to those in the Soviet Union, the sworn enemy of the fledgling National Socialist state.

Koop uncovered documents in the federal archives in Germany which show that Himmler wanted to halt what he termed an "abortion epidemic" in Germany - 600,000 a year - and create homes where pregnant women could deliver their child and their leave it behind for the state to care for.

Koop says the myth was that Lebensborn merely concentrated on S.S. men siring children with good Germanic maidens when "in reality it was a gigantic kidnap machine too".

On 25 July 1942, for example, Himmler instructed children from Slovenia to be sent back to the Reich. Their fathers had been shot for taking part in partisan operations against the Nazis, the mothers sent to concentration camps.

The children, 600 of them aged between six and 12, were handed over the Lebensborn officials. Kopp found the list in a federal archive along with notations from SS Hauptsturmfuehrer George Roedel who marked next to each name "parents shot".

Roedel arranged for those considered Aryan enough to be "Germanised" to be adopted by party and S.S. functionaries. Hans von Mann, Nazi leader of Munich, was assigned two of the children, the documents reveal.

The fate of many others is unclear but those not considered Germanic enough were probably shipped off to die in concentration camps.

Koop says the Lebensborn programme took charge of the "Lidice children" - the orphans of one of the greatest massacres of World War Two when the Czech village of Lidice was destroyed and all its inhabitants executed or imprisoned over suspicions they had aided the British intelligence operatives who killed Czech S.S. leader Reinhard Heydrich.

On 21 June 1943 Himmler and Lebensborn chief Max Sollmann met in Prague with SS Obergruppenfuehrer Karl Hermann Frank to oversee "the supply, education and accommodation of Czech children whose parents had to be executed because they were members of the resistance".

Himmler ordered that 98 orphaned Lidice children should be examined for their "ablity to become German."

Nazis used many quack methods to determine this, such as measuring the nose and thickness of the skull. He also ordered that those "bad" children among them should be sent to a concentration camp.

In the end only 13 of the Lidice children were considered good enough to become "Germanised".

Koop said Poland was the main hunting ground for the Lebensborn child-stealers who began emptying orphanages as soon as the panzers which overran the country in September 1939 had moved on.

"We must look especially for children who are suitable for Germanisation," said Himmler in a secret memo which Koop unearthed in a federal archive in Munich.

And in a speech in October 1943 in Bad Schachen, again not reported until now, Himmler told S.S. men it was an "obligation to take such children out of their environment even if it means stealing him or her". Such children were given German names.

Koop says that the programme ultimately failed to provide the manpower that Hitler wanted for his future legions: only 11,000 were born in Lebensborn homes and the kidnapped children ended up lost, murdered or, in some lucky cases, were reunited with their families at the end of the war.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/liv...n_page_id=1811