A perfect Aryan child
The Nazis created ‘Lebensborn’ homes for illegitimate children of the SS they believed would be genetically superior, said Valentine Faure in The Atlantic. After the war, the kids were abandoned.
AT THE SMALL elementary school in Jouy-sous-les-Côtes, in northeastern France, Gisèle Marc knew the rumor about her: that her parents were not her real parents, and her real mother must have been a whore. It was the late 1940s, just after the war, a time when whispered stories like this one passed from parents to children. Women who were said to have slept with occupying soldiers—”horizontal collaborators”—had their heads shaved and were publicly shamed by angry crowds. In the schoolyard, children jeered at those who were said to be born of “unknown fathers.”
The idea that Gisèle might have been abandoned by someone of ill repute made her terribly ashamed. At the age of 10, she gathered her courage and confronted her mother, who told her the truth: We adopted you when you were 4 years old; you spoke German, but now you are French. Gisèle and her mother hardly ever talked about it again.
Gisèle found her adoption file, hidden in a drawer in her parents’ room, and from time to time she snuck a look at it. It contained little information. When she was 18, she burned it on the stove. “I said to myself, ‘If I want to live, I have to get rid of all this,’” she told me.
Gisèle is 79 now, and she does not regret burning the papers. For a time, she was able to put aside questions about her origins. At 17, she took a job in a children’s home and hospital and realized she had found her calling. She spent her career working mainly in day-care centers and eventually founded her own. In 1972, she married Justin Niango, a chemistry student from the Ivory Coast. They bought an old hotel just behind Stanislas Square in Nancy and turned it into a house.
I visited Gisèle there in June. It was easy to imagine the vibrant family life that once took place inside: her children—Virginie, Gabriel, Grégoire, and Matthieu—running up and down the stairs and playing instruments in their rooms. At school, they were sometimes the only Black kids in their class. Gisèle has a lot of stories about the cruel comments made through the years; all the stories end with her confronting the culprit.
Gisèle held off on telling her children that she had been adopted, because she was worried that the revelation might weaken their bonds with her parents. When her mother died, in 2004, she gathered her children and told them. They were shocked, and asked questions whose answers she did not know.
After years of denial, Gisèle longed to find those answers. She remembered the name and place of birth that had been listed in her burned adoption file: Gisela Magula, born in Bar-le-Duc, in northeastern France. She started her research there and went on to write to the Arolsen Archives, the international center on Nazi persecution, in Germany, to ask if there was any mention of her in the organization’s extensive records.
In March 2005, Gisèle received a reply: She had not been born in Bar-le-Duc after all, but near Liège, Belgium, in a Nazi maternity home at the Château de Wégimont. That home and others like it had been set up by the SS, an elite corps of Nazi soldiers, under the umbrella of the Lebensborn association, through which the regime sought to encourage the birth of babies of “good blood” in order to hasten its ultimate goal of Aryan racial purity.
Everything Gisèle believed about herself wavered. The family she’d spent her adult life defending against racism, she realized, descended from one of history’s darkest racial projects.
NAZISM WAS AN ideology of destruction, one that held as its primary aim the elimination of “inferior races.” But another, equally fervent aspect of the Nazi credo was focused on an imagined form of restoration: As soon as they came to power, the Nazis set out to produce a new generation of pure-blooded Germans. The Lebensborn (“fount of life”) association was a key part of this plan. Established in 1935 under the auspices of the SS, it was intended to encourage procreation among members of the Aryan race by providing birthing mothers with comfort, financial support, and, when necessary, secrecy.
The SS was overseen by Heinrich Himmler, who hoped that its elite soldiers would serve as a racial vanguard for a revitalized Germanity. Himmler had no problem with childbearing outside marriage and criticized the Catholic Church’s hostility toward illegitimate births. Raising “illegitimate or orphaned children of good blood” should be an “accepted custom,” Himmler wrote. In 1939, he issued an order that called on members of the SS to procreate wherever they could, including with women to whom they were not married.
According to Himmler, the Lebensborn homes were intended “primarily for the brides and wives of our young SS men, and secondarily for illegitimate mothers of
good blood.” But the latter were, in practice, a majority. Far from the eyes of the world, single mothers could give birth in Lebensborn homes and, if they wanted to, abandon their babies, who would receive the best care before being placed in an adoptive family—so long as the biological parents met the racial criteria (photos of both were required).
By Oct. 11, 1943, when Gisèle was born, there were about 16 Lebensborn facilities in Nazi-occupied Europe. One afternoon last spring, I sat with Gisèle in her living room, dozens of documents and photographs spread out before us. A short woman whose white hair is shot through with a streak of brown, Gisèle is at once reserved and straightforward, with a wry sense of humor. “Himmler really bungled with me,” she joked, referencing her marriage to an African man and their mixed-race family.
A chance encounter helped Gisèle trace her origins. A few months after her mother’s death, just as she began her research, her cousin went to a funeral where a tall man with blond hair gave a eulogy for the departed, a teacher who had believed in him. The man, Walter Beausert, talked about his arrival in France as a child, in a convoy from Germany. Gisèle’s cousin, who was old enough to remember Gisèle’s adoption, struck up a conversation with Beausert. Her cousin wondered whether Gisèle might have been in the same convoy.
Beausert was a Lebensborn child. A decade earlier, he had been the first person in France to testify about the Lebensborn, in a 1994 television report on his quest throughout Europe to find where he was born. Gisèle’s cousin put her in touch with Beausert, and Beausert—who in fact had been in the same convoy and center for displaced children—soon helped Gisèle recover her own history.
The story that Gisèle has pieced together is still full of holes, but she now knows the identity of her biological mother. Marguerite Magula was a Hungarian woman who immigrated to Brussels with her parents and sister in 1926. Marguerite eventually went to Germany to work, with her mother and sister, in a garment factory in Saarbrücken. When she got pregnant, in 1943, she ran away and returned to Brussels.
Gisèle’s feelings toward Marguerite have changed over time. When she learned from the Steinhöring archives that some mothers had searched for their children after the war, trying to get them back, Gisèle came to hate her. “She never sought me out,” Gisèle said. “I have no compassion, nothing: quite the opposite. That’s not a mother.” Gisèle has been less curious about the identity of her father; she imagines him as the stereotype of an SS officer—undoubtedly “a bastard.” In 2009, Gisèle met a half-brother, Claude, born after the war, who was raised by Marguerite. They still visit each other from time to time. Claude, she said, describes their mother as having mistreated him. He once told Gisèle she was lucky not to have grown up with their mother.
IN THE SUMMER of 1945, Life magazine published a report, with pictures by the photographer Robert Capa, on the “super babies” of a Lebensborn home. “The Hohenhorst bastards of Himmler’s men are blue-eyed, flaxen-haired and pig fat,” one caption read. “Too much porridge, plenty of sunlight have made this Nazi baby in hand-knitted suit and bootees so fat and healthy that he completely fills his oversized carriage,” read another. “Grown pig fat under care and overstuffing Nazi nurses, they now pose to the Allies a problem yet to be solved.” The tone gives an idea of the level of resentment that Americans and Europeans felt in 1945 toward those who were spared the war’s horrors—even toddlers.
But not all Lebensborn babies were blue-eyed, flaxen haired, or even, for that matter, “pig fat.” Likely because of the lack of bonding with a caregiver, some children were developmentally delayed. For Gisèle and her fellow Lebensborn children, the Allies’ liberation of Belgium marked the beginning of a journey—in wicker cradles wedged in the back of military trucks—through a devastated Europe.
In the nine years the program lasted, at least 9,200 children were born in the homes. Some 1,200 were born in Norway, which had the most SS maternity homes outside Germany. Until the 1970s, however, the homes were treated largely as a rumor. When the news of Hitler’s death broke, officials burned as many documents as they could. The French journalist Boris Thiolay describes the goals of this purge in The Factory of Perfect Children: “The birth registers, the identity of the children, the fathers, the organization chart, the names of the people in charge: everything must disappear. The evidence of the Lebensborn’s very existence must be removed.” But the Nazis’ obsession with documents made fully expunging the records an impossible task— there were too many.
After several stops in Germany and Poland, Gisèle and Walter were transferred to Kloster Indersdorf, 9 miles from Dachau, where they were housed in a 12th-century monastery. There, the Lebensborn children lived together with survivors: Jewish children who had made it out of the concentration camps, as well as Eastern and Central European gentile teenagers who had been forced laborers during the war.
Were they “survivors,” these toddlers who owed their existence to Nazi birth policy, who ate fresh fruit and porridge while other babies were gassed or starved to death?
ON OCT. 10, 1947, in Nuremberg, four Lebensborn leaders appeared before a special American military tribunal as part of the Subsequent Nuremberg Trials, which prosecuted ancillary Nazi leaders. Three charges were brought against them: crimes against humanity, war crimes, and membership in a criminal organization. Three out of the four leaders were found guilty of the third charge. But the tribunal established that the Lebensborn had been only a “welfare institution.” The children, therefore, were not considered victims.
At home in Nancy, Gisèle keeps a photograph of her biological mother on display, though she doesn’t look at it much anymore. “It’s my heritage. I don’t want to forget that I was born from this woman,” she told me. All she wants now is for her story to be told. “I’m modest,” she joked. “I want the whole world to know about it.”
Her son Gabriel married a German woman, and her grandchildren speak German, a language she has completely forgotten. “It shows that history goes on,” she said. Her son Matthieu is working on a book about the Lebensborn, and with his wife, Camille, he wrote a play about the children’s story. Recently, I attended a reading at a small theater in Paris. I watched Gisèle, seated next to her daughter Virginie, as she watched her own story acted out.
“They say history is written by the victors,” one actor said. “But most of all, it’s written by the adults.” Gisèle discreetly dried her tears behind her glasses.
Adapted from a story originally published in The Atlantic. Used with permission.