Someone Named Eva - A Lebensborn Story

This image depicts a young girl, with Nordic features, being measured to determine whether she qualifies for the Nazi-era Lebensborn program. Photo online via Der Spiegel, a German-language website. Should we succeed in establishing this , and from this seed bed produce a race of 200 million, then the world will belong to us.

Heinrich Himmler Mastermind of the Lebensborn Program

Everyone in the neighborhood admired the handsome young boy called Aleksander. Born in the Crimean town of Alnowa, he had blond hair and piercingly beautiful blue eyes. When the child was 1 year and 10 months old, Hitler’s troops swooped into Crimea (which, at the time, was part of ). It was 1942, and Aleksander’s parents were about to experience something far worse than the German occupation of their town. While Aleksander was playing outside of his parents’ home, two Nazi SS * officers spotted the child. The toddler fit a profile of children about whom the officers, like others in their unit, had been instructed. They were told to find ... and ... kidnap such children. The SS officers took the boy from the front yard of his home. , the head of the SS and one of Hitler’s right-hand men, had concocted a plan about creating a “.” The race would be -based. Its people would be strong with blonde hair, blue eyes and with not a trace of any features which appeared “Jewish.” The program was called “Lebensborn”—meaning—“Fountain [or Spring] of Life.” The plan consisted of two very different parts: SS officers, considered supremely Aryan, would either have four children each, with their Aryan-appearing wives or, if that were not possible, they would father children with blonde-haired, blue-eyed Nordic women who were not their wives. In a sense, these offspring would be "Children of the Master Race."

SS officers would remove Aryan-appearing children from families living in German-occupied lands, have them tested to be sure they were non-Jews and then give the kidnapped children (after they were "re-educated") to pre-approved Nazi couples who would raise the children as their own.

The scene in this image, which is maintained at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, depicts the kidnapping of a Polish child for the Lebensborn program. Aleksander, and his parents, were one of the unfortunates living in German-occupied territory. After he was forcibly removed from his home, the toddler was taken to a town in where he was examined. When he was found “worthy” of being "Germanized," he spent about one year at Sonnenwiese (“Sun Meadow”), a large, institutional "home" for Lebensborn children in Kohren-Sahlis, near Leipzig.

At Sun Meadow, the kidnapped children were not provided with love and comfort from their attenders. Instead, the Lebensborn nurses followed the child-rearing advice of Dr. Johanna Haarer (for whom rules and strict order were more important than love and tenderness). Beyond having no one to help them deal with their pain and sense of loss, the Lebensborn chilren were treated like products-on-a-shelf when potential adoptive parents came to visit: The Nazi-faithful foster parents came to this Lebensborn home in Kohren-Salis where they selected the children they desired, almost like products from a catalog - they could choose their German child. If the foster parents did not like us, it was also possible to return the child. So the child was simply a product, stolen goods. After completing his reeducation- program, Aleksander was given to a German couple for adoption. His real parents never saw their son again. For decades thereafter, Aleksander was (and still is) known as Folker Heinecke. His “parents” raised him well, providing him with love and a good education, but he never really knew who he was. Nor, apparently, did his adoptive parents. I have had a good life and I loved my adoptive parents, even though they were Nazis. I was just without roots and it was these roots that caused me to spend over 30 years of my life looking for the secrets of the past. ... I had a good upbringing after the war. My parents gave me a good education, spells in London, Paris and Ireland. They believed in at the time but they weren't war criminals and always did right by me. But of course they could not answer the question of who I was. They didn't know. After their deaths, Folker searched and searched and searched for answers. Who was he? Where was he from? Who were his real parents? Where were they? Not until the Red Cross opened a major Holocaust-era archive, in the German town of Bad Arolsen, did Folker get a chance to find answers to his questions. His quest, even at the archives which focus on displaced persons, was not easy. Sifting through documents, potentially applicable to millions of people, he was able to piece-together his childhood story. It was then that Folker learned his real name and the town of his birth. As reported in various newspapers: The files showed that he was first taken to Lodz in Poland—the Nazis called it Littmannstadt—where SS "doctors" examined him to find out if he was "worthy" of Aryanisation. "The files show I was measured everywhere – head size, body size, whether I had 'Jewish Aspects' or not," he recalled. "Then I was declared to be capable of being Germanised and was shipped back to the Fatherland." What Folker does not know, and what he would like to find-out, is what happened to his real parents. If he can learn those details, he would like to visit their graves: The former shipping agent, who lives in Hamburg, now has one quest left in life: to discover the grave of his real mother and lay flowers on it. Milada—the heroine of Someone Named Eva, a fictional story inspired by true events and written by Joan M. Wolf—is another beautiful child with blonde hair and blue eyes. She lives in , with her family. When Hitler’s forces occupy her country, Milada (and other children who fit the Aryan profile) are potential kidnap-targets. Since they are now in charge, SS officers are free to roam about the land, looking for children with Aryan features. Like Folker Heinecke, the fictional Milada is removed from her home and family. But her village—and everyone in it—suffered catastrophically at the hands of Hitler's forces during June of 1942. There was a "reason" for this Nazi aggression. On the 27th of May, that year, , a high-ranking SS officer, was fatally injured when Czech partisans threw a modified-tank grenade at Heydrich’s car as he was being driven to the airport in Prague. Heydrich died of his injuries on the 4th of June. When the assassins “got away,” the Nazi regime ordered that they be found. When they were not found, Hitler personally ordered that any village which had sheltered Heydrich’s killers would face the execution of all men in the village. Nazi decision-makers ordered an attack on the mining village of Lidice where, they believed, locals were protecting members of the Czech resistance. All of the village men were rounded-up and massacred on the 10th of June, 1942. About 173 men died in the village and 11 additional men were located, and killed, later. In addition, eight men and seven women, who’d already been detained for other reasons, were also executed. Because the Nazis planned to burn the village, the women and children of Lidice were also rounded-up. About 203 women and 105 children were initially taken to the local school. On the 12th of June, 184 women of Lidice were sent to the Ravensbrück concentration camp. Seven of Lidice's children were selected for the Lebensborn program. The Nazis burned the town and destroyed its buildings. Even the dead were not spared from the carnage when the Nazis disinterred graves, at the village cemetery, and burned those remains.

After Milada is selected as a Lebensborn child, and an SS "doctor" declares her fit for adoption, she has to go through even more life-altering events: As a girl in her “tween” years, she understands that she is Czech, not German. She speaks her own language, not German.

She needs to learn German ways and forget Czech ways.

She is ordered to never speak her own language.

She must live at a Lebensborn center, in Poland, until she is “Germanized.” That process takes two years, during which she is never allowed to see her family.

Since her name is Czech-sounding, she will no-longer be called Milada. Her new name is Eva.

Every kidnapped child, who was thrust into the Lebensborn program, went through the same process as Folker (if they were toddlers) and Eva (if they were older children). When she moves-in with her German family, Eva’s new parents—just like Folker’s new parents—do their best to make her life as happy as possible. Even so, we have to ask a series of hard questions about the situations: Who is Eva? Who is Folker? Does a change of name change a person?

Does being kidnapped from one’s own family destroy one’s identity?

When a government, like that of , allows the government’s military to steal children from families living in occupied countries, is the law moral?

Can a law be legal and immoral at the same time? In other words ... if it was legal, under Germany’s Nazi-era laws, for the SS officers to kidnap children, were they morally right to take them?

Did adoptive parents, who welcomed “Lebensborn” children into their homes, bear any fault for the Lebensborn program?

At one point in his life, Folker Heinecke wrongly believed that his German parents adopted him because he was an orphan. His parents, of course, at least knew that wasn’t the case. Perhaps the very existence of the “Lebensborn” program, which Himmler originally conjured-up in the mid-1930s, was even too embarrassing for the adoptive parents to truthfully discuss with their “children.” One thing the records at the archives seem to tell us: An estimated 200,000 children, between 1939 and 1945, fell to this Germanization of Nazi victims. [The children came] from Poland, , Slovenia, Czech Republic, Slovakia and - wherever the Nazi henchmen could rob children who met the Nazi’s theory of a superior [Aryan] race. Folker Heinecke tells us what it was like when, as an adult who knew the truth, he visited the village from which he had been stolen: I stood there and tried to imagine the SS advancing down here, their tanks and their motorbikes and their armored cars, and I tried to imagine them taking a little boy who was guilty of nothing ... I don’t want to end up as many of the other children like me have, driven bitter and mad over what befell them. I just want to know who I was and what I might have been if things hadn’t turned out the way they did. I have to keep searching to find something that might lead me to who my parents really were and where they are buried. Then I will have done my duty as a son. I will have honored my real parents. (Nazi Women: The Attraction of Evil, by Paul Roland, at page 86.) And what of the fictional Milada/Eva? Only 153 Lidice women and 17 children survived the war and returned to the new village of Lidice. Milada and her mother were among them. A sculpture, memorializing the lost children of Lidice, now overlooks the site of the destroyed village. Marie Uchytilová created the work which is entitled “The Memorial to the Children Victims of the War." The sculpture includes 82 bronze statues of children (42 girls and 40 boys), spanning the ages of 1 to 16, who were lost as a result of the Nazi reprisals against the villagers of Lidice. Despite the Nazis' best efforts to forever wipe Lidice off the face of the earth, people did not give-up hope. They rebuilt the village (although not precisely in the same place). * "SS" is short for Schutzstaffel. These "protection squads" employed ruthless tactics to carry-out the objectives of Hitler's Third Reich. Credits:

Image of girl being measured for Lebensborn, online via Wikimedia Commons.

Image of young Folker Heinecke, online via various news sources.

Image of Lebensborn home, at Kohren-Sahlis, online via Lebensspuren Deutschland.

Image of Reinhard Heydrich vehicle, , picture (“Bild”) 146-1972-039-44

Image of Lidice burning, German Federal Archives, picture (“Bild”) 146-1993-020-26A

Additional images of Lidice, before and after the 10 June 1942 massacre, online via Wikimedia Commons

Image of children's memorial, at Lidice, by Moravice. Released to the public domain.

Source of unattributed text quotes about the Bad Arolsen archive, and from Folker Heinecke, are from: "Ich suche nach meinen Wurzeln" (“I’m looking for my roots”) a 4 November 2014 radio program, broadcast in German, online via Bayerischer Rundfunk (a German-language, public-service radio station based in ). Translations by Carole Bos, creator of Awesome Stories.

See Alignments to State and Common Core standards for this story online at: http://www.awesomestories.com/asset/AcademicAlignment/Someone-Named-Eva-A-Lebensborn-Story See Learning Tasks for this story online at: http://www.awesomestories.com/asset/AcademicActivities/Someone-Named-Eva-A-Lebensborn-Story

Media Stream

Lebensborn - Sun Meadow Home View this asset at: http://www.awesomestories.com/asset/view/

Lebensborn - Kidnapping Polish Child View this asset at: http://www.awesomestories.com/asset/view/

Reinhard Heydrich Car - Assassination Attempt View this asset at: http://www.awesomestories.com/asset/view/

Lidice Destroyed View this asset at: http://www.awesomestories.com/asset/view/ Children of Lidice Memorial View this asset at: http://www.awesomestories.com/asset/view/

Lidice Map Locator View this asset at: http://www.awesomestories.com/asset/view/

Lidice Burning View this asset at: http://www.awesomestories.com/asset/view/

Lidice Before the Disaster View this asset at: http://www.awesomestories.com/asset/view/

Folker Heinecke - Toddler Years View this asset at: http://www.awesomestories.com/asset/view/ Lebensborn - Measuring for Racial Descent To assess a person's racial descent, doctors employed during Germany's Nazi-era would measure a person's physicial characteristics, such as the size of one's ear. The U.S. National Archives, where this photo is maintained, tells us more about the image: Establishing racial descent by measuring an ear at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology. Germany, date uncertain. Image online via the U.S. National Archives. View this asset at: http://www.awesomestories.com/asset/view/Lebensborn-Measuring-for-Racial-Descent

Lebensborn - Head Measurements and Racial Ancestry During the Nazi era, in Germany, Hitler and his supporters were obsessed with racial identity. The "Lebensborn" program was part of the Third Reich's effort to expand the . Before children could be sent to foster parents, or to adoptive parents, health-care employees would first have to examine them to determine whether their ancestry was acceptable to the Nazi regime. This photo depicts part of what happened during the "measurement" process. We learn more about this image from the U.S. National Archives, where the picture is maintained: At the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Genetics, and , a racial hygienist measures a woman's features in an attempt to determine her racial ancestry. Berlin, Germany, date uncertain. Image, described above, online via the U.S. National Archives. View this asset at: http://www.awesomestories.com/asset/view/Lebensborn-Head-Measurements-and-Racial-Ancestry Someone Named Eva by Joan M. Wolf When people think about "," what first comes to mind are concentration camps, killing centers and the decimation of Jews, Roma ("gypsies) and other individuals disdained by Hitler and his Third Reich. What does not immediately come to mind are the children, throughout German-occupied Europe, who were subjected to kidnapping from their families under the "Lebensborn" program. Joan Wolf's book—Someone Named Eva—tells a fictional story about a young Czech girl who is forced into the Lebensborn nightmare. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, the book's publisher, provides an overview of the novel: On the night Nazi soldiers come to her home in Czechoslovakia, Milada’s grandmother says, “Remember, Milada. Remember who you are. Always.” Milada promises, but she doesn’t understand her grandmother’s words. After all, she is Milada, who lives with her mama and papa, her brother and sister, and her beloved Babichka. Milada, eleven years old, the fastest runner in school. How could she ever forget?

Then the Nazis take Milada away from her family and send her to a Lebensborn center in Poland. There, she is told she fits the Aryan ideal: her blond hair and blue eyes are the right color; her head and nose, the right size. She is given a new name, Eva, and trained to become the perfect German citizen, to be the hope of Germany’s future—and to forget she was ever a Czech girl named Milada.

Inspired by real events, this fascinating novel sheds light on a little-known aspect of the Nazi agenda and movingly portrays a young girl’s struggle to hold on to her identity and her hope in the face of a regime intent on destroying both. Click on the image for a better view. Image and quoted intro online via Google Books. View this asset at: http://www.awesomestories.com/asset/view/Someone-Named-Eva-by-Joan-M.-Wolf

Someone Named Eva - A Lebensborn Story View this asset at: http://www.awesomestories.com/asset/view/Someone-Named-Eva-A-Lebensborn-Story0