by Catherine Clay and Michael Leapman
This is the only semi-serious book on the so-called "Master Race" theory in English, indissolubly linked with an alleged Lebensborn "breeding" program.
Volker Koop says the book is more likely to create confusion than it is to enlighten people.
It is interesting to compare this book with "Lebensborn e.V" by Georg Lilienthal.
Lilienthal's book contains thousands of references to original German archive documents, while
Clay-Leapman's book contains not a single one!
Everything the book contains of any value on the Lebensborn has been more or less borrowed from Lilienthal, yet Lilienthal's book has never been translated.
The authors are Jews whose prior claim to fame was the production of a documentary on the same topic for the BBC.
- C.P.]
Inside cover blurb:
“In the run up to the Second World War, Heinrich Himmler embarked on Lebensborn, his obsessive programme to populate the Thousand Year German Reich with pure-blooded Aryan men and women – while the death camps were disposing of Jews, homosexuals and the other “sub-humans” enumerated by Hitler in Mein Kampf.
[COMMENT: Mein Kampf does not mention homosexuals or "sub-humans". Where do they get this bilge? - C.P.]
“Young women who displayed regular Ayran features, and could prove their descent over several untainted generations, were encouraged to bear the children of members of the SS security service whether or not they were married to them. The births took place in secret Lebensborn homes and between 1935 and 1945 an estimated 11,000 Aryan babies were born in Nazi occupied countries.
[COMMENT: They were already pregnant long before they ever applied to the Lebensborn. The Lebensborn was never secret. -C.P.]
“But the dream did not stop there. When the Germans invaded Poland, Himmler’s SS discovered many blonde, blue-eyed Polish children – the image of the ideal Aryan. Himmler had an estimated 200,000 of them stolen as they walked home from school or played in village squares. They were transported to camps and tested to gauge their racial quality. If they passed they were first ‘Germanized’ and then placed with good Nazi families; those who did not measure up were used as forced labour or sent to camps that specialised in killing children.
[COMMENT: The source for the figure of 200,000 is a newspaper article published in Poland in 1947.
In 1947, the Poles were still talking about "10 steam chambers at Treblinka", with 7 million deaths!
According to Lilienthal and Koop, most of the "Germanized" children were in fact of Germanic origin, usually orphans.
Some of these orphans had allegedly been taken away from their ethic German parents by the Poles and placed in orphanages after destroying the records. It is virtually certain that this did occur in some cases. Some of them were fathered by German soldiers; others were the orphans of partisans executed by the Germans.
The execution of partisans is legal under international law (although Koop calls it "murder").
There is no need to defend this sort of thing, but the fact remains that the Germans were the only military force in history to take responsibility for any orphans created by the own actions at all.
The Americans or British would simply have firebombed the whole area and left the survivors to starve, whether orphans or not.
In his lengthy "Tag der Freiheit" speech, given outside Posen on October 24, 1943, Himmler claimed that the toughest, stubbornest, most dangerous military resistance in Poland was always led, not by Poles, but by ethnic Germans, usually with a German military or administrative background and perhaps one Polish parent -- men who had come to identify themselves with the Poles and who rejected their German origins.
Such people were considered highly dangerous, precisely due to their German background and German traits: competence, efficiency, bravery, loyalty (to whatever cause) and obedience, in contrast to the chaotic, rebellious, conspiratorial Poles: "If they are allowed to work their effects, several German sons will die; if they are not allowed to work their effects, then only one person dies" -- them. So their children, in many cases, were taken way and sent to Germany to make Germans out of them. The total numbers involved were very low, 3 here, 5 there, probably no more than about 2,000 for all of Eastern Europe put together. Children accepted for "Germanization" were placed with German families who loved them and treated them extremely well. Those who were rejected often ended up in "apprenticeships" on farms or were sent to labour camps, although they were not killed. It does not appear that any attempt was made to return them to their parents (if they could be found).
The Poles and Czechs had very similar programs for the forced integration (or "Polonization" or "Czechisization") of Germans for 20 years.
In pointing out these things, I don't wish to imply that two wrongs make a right, only that there were two wrongs.
The most disgraceful part of the whole story concerns, not the Germans, but the Norwegians.
-C.P.]
“Now, some of these ‘perfect’ Aryans’ tell their stories, recalling the shock and confusion of discovering their real backgrounds and the emotional scars they have never been able to obliterate. Catrine Clay and Michael Leapman have written a moving investigation of the tragic history of racial hygiene and Nazi eugenics, and of the innocent victims of a fanatically-pursued ideology."
[COMMENT: Why don't the Jewish authors criticize the racial obsessions of their own people -- in Israel and elsewhere -- while they are at it? That way we might get somewhere. - C.P.]
[End of inside cover blurb]
“The ten-man patrol from C Company, of the United States Army’s 86th Infantry Division, swung quickly but warily down Münchener Strasse, the main street of the little village of Steinhöring, on the afternoon of 3 May 1945... they moved carefully up a concrete drive to a substantial building in Bavarian style, with a steeply-pitched roof. Sten guns at the ready, they kicked open the door.
“On the floor of a large sunny room, quite comfortably furnished, they found about forty babies and toddlers, some wailing and some quite silent, some dressed and some almost naked, but all obviously hungry and bewildered. In rooms upstairs were more babies and children, amounting to perhaps three hundred in all, from new-born to the age of six. There were a few mothers and some who would soon be given birth, as well as a corps of young nurses, many of handsome appearance. The women were sullen and resentful at the Americans’ intrusion and would not answer questions addressed to them in German. The soldiers had no way of knowing it then, but they had stumbled across the vestiges of the Nazis’ grandiose scheme to populate Europe with a master race of Nordic peoples, specially bred to keep lesser mortals in subservience until gradually eliminating them”, p. 2
[COMMENT: "Such claims are in no way proven. The documents on the conditions in the Hochland home in the Landesarchiv Hannover upon the arrival of the Americans show that the above description is untrue." - Volker Koop, DEM FÜHRER EIN KIND SCHENKEN, p. 234]
“...Dachau – a name they already knew as the place where the SS carried out its task of exterminating enemies of the Nazis, and which before long they and a horrified world would learn to identify with the regime’s insane racial obsession.” p. 3
[COMMENT: Exterminations at Dachau, yet! -C.P.]
“...the last pathetic remnants of this crazy attempt at genetic manipulation ... thanks to the eager compliance of healthy young women who, after an equally rigorous selection process, had been pronounced of pure enough breeding to ‘make a child for Hitler’...” p. 4
[COMMENT: There was no "genetic manipulation". Women had their children whether they were accepted in the Lebensborn or not. If they were rejected by the Lebensborn, they simply went to the NSV. -C.P.]
“Himmler... was obsessed with the practical detail of creating a fine, dignified and healthy environment for the mothers and future citizens of the Thousand Year Reich, resonant with German history and tradition”, p. 5.
[COMMENT: This much is the truth. -C.P.]
“The Lebenborns had conducted their own birth registration procedures almost since their inception, for Himmler thought it unwise to let the records of the beginnings of his new Germanic race from getting into non-SS hands...” p. 7
[COMMENT: As an elite police and paramilitary organization, it is a matter of course that the SS would have its own hospitals, including maternity hospitals. The reason for admitting non-SS women into the Lebensborn was to prevent abortions and suicides caused by prejudice against unmarried pregnant women. For example, the Ministry of Defense had a regulation prohibiting any man who had fathered an illegitimate child from becoming an officer or NCO, even if he married the mother afterwards, and even if she was only a few months pregnant at the time of marriage! The Ministry of Education had a regulation prohibiting any unmarried pregnant woman from remaining in a teaching position, and so on. This was the state of affairs all over the country. Himmler lacked the authority to change these things.
These women were commonly thrown out of their homes, were unable to work and were reduced to complete destitution. We are not talking about “loose women” who “slept around” or produced one illegitimate child after another; Himmler had no interest in protecting such people.
All candidates for admission to the Lebensborn had to identify the father of the child, and had to sign a written statement under oath saying that she had had no other sexual relations during the relevant time period, rendering absolutely certain the identity of the father; the father had to acknowledge paternity and contribute to the costs. If these conditions were met, they were assured of complete anonymity, including false documents which were replaced with complete and correct ones at a later time, on a case-by-case basis. Many of these same women found employment in the Lebensborn homes, where they received nursing training and sometimes stayed for years. –C.P.]
“... a ceremonial sword, bigger than the baby itself, was placed on its stomach...” p. 9
[COMMENT: This is a description of the SS christening ceremony. It was not a sword, it was an ordinary SS dagger. -C.P.]
“Creating a master race meant systematically eliminating those who might compromise the purity of its blood – the Jews, the gypsies, the Slavs, and those with hereditary physical or mental imperfections”, p. 9.
“[Darwin’s] followers went further, convincing themselves that, as mankind had become the dominant species through strengthening the features that distinguished humans from lesser beings and handing them down to succeeding generations, so it would be possible to enhance the race by deliberately choosing to breed from men and women whose qualities you wanted preserved. The corollary was the suppression, by extermination or enslavement, of people whose undesirable characteristics would pollute the mix.” P. 12
“...the Reichstag fire, staged by the SS to provoke fears of a communist coup”, p. 41
[COMMENT: The Reichstag fire, yet! More bilge. In 75 years not one scrap of evidence has ever been found to prove that Van der Lubbe did not act alone, exactly as he claimed. For more details, click here. -C.P.]