Caroline Nilsen Planning the Master Race: Preparations for the Nazi Lebensborn Program in Norway

Nazi forces invaded Norway on April 9, 1940, continuing their victorious Blitzkrieg across continental Europe. In conquering Norway within just a few short weeks, Nazi ofcials believed they had become masters of a vast reservoir of “pure, Aryan” blood. Tey quickly made the decision to encourage members of the German armed forces to engage in romantic relationships with Norwegian women. In order to safeguard the children conceived by Norwegian women through relations with German soldiers, SS and Wehrmacht ofcials like Heinrich Himmler, Wilhelm Rediess, and Josef Terboven also decided in February 1941 to institute the Lebensborn program—already extant in Germany—throughout occupied Norway. Tis program consisted of a large network of ofces, home economics schools, maternity homes, and orphanages, ofering medical and monetary assistance to “racially valuable” expectant mothers. Tis memorandum, written by SS Gruppenführer Otto Hofmann, director of the SS Race and Settlement Main Ofce (Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt-SS or RuSHA), tells us a great deal about the primary goals and concerns of the Nazi ofcials directly responsible for instituting the Lebensborn program in Norway, 138 Annotation

This memorandum, written by SS Gruppenführer Otto Hofmann, director of the SS Race and Settlement Main Office, speaks to the concerns of the officials responsible for establishing the Nazi Lebensborn program in Norway. BA-Lichterfelde, NS 48/29. (Image courtesy of the Bundesarchiv Berlin-Lichterfelde.)

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140 Annotation as well as about the extent and various kinds of support enjoyed by the program. On the most basic level, Hofmann’s letter reveals some of the lines of interpersonal and bureaucratic communication that made the establishment of the program in Norway possible, through the individuals it explicitly names as well as its list of ofces to which the memo should be distributed. Te memo also designates a downtown Oslo location as the primary ofce of the Norwegian Lebensborn program. Tis sort of highly central urban location is analogous to the placement of the main German Lebensborn ofces in Berlin and Munich. Te visibility of this ofce stands in contrast to the location of the Lebensborn homes eventually established in Norway, which were usually in more suburban neighborhoods where the mothers could escape the prying eyes of a major city’s denizens, while still remaining connected by good roads to quality hospital care during childbirth. Te importance of location is also evident in Hofmann’s special attention to the question of Norwegian women living in more rural environs. Because most of the Lebensborn homes lay relatively near major urban centers (Oslo, Bergen, and Trondheim in the Norwegian case), from the Nazi point of view particular care needed to be taken to ensure that racially valuable mothers from the Norwegian countryside (ofen the locales in which German soldiers were quartered in closest contact with the occupied population) also had access to Lebensborn support. To this end, Hofmann notes that he would require the cooperation of the Reich Food Corporation’s (Reichsnährstand, RNS) “provincial agricultural leaders” and possibly also SS families, in order to fnd accommodations for these expecting mothers. In discussing potential sources of lodgings and board for the Norwegian Lebensborn mothers and their children, Hofmann also reports that SS Major Wilhelm Tietjen, frst director of Lebensborn in Norway, presented him with the idea that eventually these individuals could be cared for by the relatives of the SS or Wehrmacht soldier-father, provided that the mother had married the father (or was at least pursuing that marriage). Tis insistence upon marriage—and ultimately, the nuclear family unit—is highly revealing with respect to Lebensborn, a program that Himmler initiated in part as an anti-abortion incentive for racially valuable children conceived outside of wedlock, which sought to overcome the “bourgeois morality” that stigmatized such children as bastards and drove unwed pregnant women to

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desperate measures. Once a racially valuable child was born to Lebensborn, his or her upbringing would be rooted preferably in a traditional family structure, and most especially one in which the child would be imbued with the same Nazi ideology that German youth were subjected to during Hitler’s chancellorship (in an SS ofcer’s family, for example). Tietjen’s plan for eventually sending the Norwegian Lebensborn mothers and children to live with their German soldier’s family also highlights the desirability—from the Nazi perspective—of removing these racially valuable individuals from Norway and relocating them to Germany.1 Other details in Hofmann’s memo are equally revealing on this matter, especially through its discussion of the education planned for Norwegian Lebensborn mothers, which was aimed to make them into “fully fedged Germans” living within the bounds of the “Old Reich.” Primacy was ascribed to teaching the women the German language. Hofmann’s letter does not detail the curriculum of the “retraining course” planned for the Lebensborn mothers, though this might perhaps have included further instruction in German culture, as well as Nazi ideology and basic home economics skills. All told, the goal of these initiatives is outlined quite explicitly in this memorandum to be the reshaping of these Norwegian women into productive members of German society, mothers of the racial lifeblood of the Reich. Naturally, the benefts of accommodation, medical care, and language lessons were only reserved for those expecting mothers whom the Nazi ofcials deemed racially valuable, a theme that also comes to the fore in Hofmann’s letter. Te only Norwegian women proposed to be worthy of Lebensborn assistance are those who conform to Nazi racial standards in their appearance and in their biology/genetics. In order to help Tietjen make evaluations of the value and ftness of Norwegian women applying to Lebensborn for help, Hofmann explicitly ofers the expertise of a certain Wafen-SS lieutenant Castagne, an ofcer evidently qualifed to determine the biological Germanness of each applicant. Underlying these arrangements, as ever in the case of Lebensborn, was the overriding concern to protect the mothers and children of racially valuable blood, as well as the determination not to waste any of the Reich’s valuable resources on those who could never become true members of the Volksgemeinschaf, or “People’s Community.”

1 Only about 200 Norwegian Lebensborn children would make it to Germany during the course of the war. 142 Annotation

Tese resources, as outlined in Hofmann’s letter, did not just consist of medical care and education in maternity homes, but also ofen took the form of direct fnancial assistance. Tese stipends (alimony of a sort) and loans were perhaps even more complicated in occupied Norway’s Lebensborn program than those in Germany, because—as Hofmann states in his memorandum—women pregnant by an SS man or a Wehrmacht man could seek assistance from Lebensborn, whereas in Germany the program was restricted to the wives and girlfriends of SS men exclusively. Hofmann’s list of various Nazi institutions’ fnancial responsibilities to Lebensborn participants refects this complex entanglement of Lebensborn/ SS obligations with the larger Ministry of the Interior of the entire Tird Reich and the general occupation government of Norway. What Hofmann does not state here was the estimated costs of such fnancial support for the Norwegian women, German men, and mixed-nationality children involved with the Lebensborn program. Nor does Hofmann hazard a guess at the total number of individuals he imagines Lebensborn will eventually be required to care for. What is clear from this letter, however, is that the program in occupied Norway enjoyed a good deal of fnancial, political, and institutional support from the broader Nazi regime and state apparatuses. Hofmann’s memo of May 12, 1941 , represents an invaluable snapshot of the hopes and concerns of the Nazi ofcials tasked with establishing the Norwegian branch of the Lebensborn program during the early phases of the initiative’s development in that country. Many important logistical specifcs come to light in the letter, such as basic fnancial arrangements, the location of various ofces, and potential sources of accommodations for Norwegian Lebensborn mothers. In addition, Hofmann reveals several underlying and fundamental assumptions about who was worthy of Lebensborn’s assistance, where those individuals ought ultimately to live, and what characterized a good German citizen (or at least a good German mother/housewife) through his report on his discussion with Tietjen.

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