The Impact of the Lebensborn Program on European Immigration Relations
Written by Olivia Tobolski; Edited by Andrew Ma
Published on May 13th, 2025
The Lebensborn Program was a program in Nazi Germany intended to promote the “Aryan race,” encouraging the birth of German blonde blue-eyed babies, while discouraging the birth of other races. The program had tremendous negative consequences, one of which is the lasting impact it has left on European racial relations by glorifying certain ethnicities over others. Many current anti-immigration parties and movements in Europe recently use rhetoric very similar to that of the program, showing yet another lasting effect of the Holocaust.
An event that has seemed to fade into the background of history is the Lebensborn Program, a lesser known side of the Holocaust, but not any less gruesome or horrific. Not only is what happened relatively unknown, but so is its impact on current European racial relations, especially on many ongoing migration crises. Though these crises largely started in 2015, the Lebensborn Program was started in late 1935.
Meaning the “fount of life,” this Nazi-run program focused on expanding the Aryan race. A large part of Nazi ideology focuses on a racial order, inspired by Herbert Spencer’s Social Darwinism and Eugenics, in which “racially pure” Aryans dominated above all others. Of course, there is little legitimate scientific evidence to support this. The idea of being Aryan is a pseudoscientific racial concept, referring to those who descend from the Proto-Indo-European racial grouping. This racial order, which claimed some “races” were purer or superior to others, was a key motivation for the Hitler’s brutal persecution and extermination of Jews during the Holocaust. His goal was to cleanse the population of Germany, although the Jewish people there only made up a very small percentage of the population and Judaism has never been a race, but rather a religion.
The program encouraged the birth of Aryan children, especially to those in the SS, the political soldiers of the Nazi Party. Applicants were heavily screened, their medical histories combed through to ensure no health issues or impurities that they might pass on to future generations. Even personal character traits were considered, as many Nazis believed they were inheritable. Financial assistance was offered to SS men to have big families, as SS leader Heinrich Himmler believed they were the racial elite of Nazi Germany. The program also offered single, pregnant Aryan mothers private maternity homes, financial aid, and adoption services, all kept away from the public eye. Abortions were discouraged for these mothers, while “hereditary health” courts ordered sterilizations for those on the lower end of the racial hierarchy. What wasn’t made so clear to these mothers was that the program would assume guardianship of their children and give them to wealthy German families.
Marine Le Pen, leader of the French Rassemblement National.
Credit: Wikimedia Foundation
The program reached terrifying new heights with the onset of WWII, which caused Himmler to worry about the number of Aryan lives being lost on the battlefields. Not only were more homes set up, but the program took control of the children who were born as a result of often forceful impregnation of foreign women in the lands that Germany occupied. Thousands of foreign children were kidnapped from eastern and southeastern Europe due to their German ancestry or Aryan-like facial features. These children were re-educated, sometimes abused, and placed with German families, who believed they were orphans of the war.
The program left huge consequences on these areas of Europe through its promotion of racist, anti-semitic, and pseudoscientific ideas about race, which many far-right and neo-nazi movements have adopted. Several politicians in Hungary, Germany, and Poland, countries that were impacted by the Lebensborn Program, have used the ideas of “racial purity” to support their stances on immigration. For example, Viktor Orban of Hungary has been adamantly against the entrance of Muslim and African immigrants into the country, arguing that they simply don’t work with the Christian and Hungarian identity of the nation. He has promoted policies to prevent the entrance of these personnel and has used rhetoric suggesting his pursuit of racial purity in Hungary. In Poland, Jaroslaw Kacsynski has made statements and supported policies in an effort to “protect” Polish culture amidst an influx of refugees from the Middle East and Africa. AfD in Germany, which stands for Alternative for Germany, has been outspoken about their anti-immigration views and their desire to resist the dilution of German identity. Germany has done a lot to confront their Nazi past (including this program) and educate about it, but this political movement still mirrors the ideas of the Lebensborn Program.
A country that is notorious for its treatment of women who had relationships with German men or SS officials, especially as a result of this program, is Norway. Norway had been invaded by Germany in 1940, despite being neutral, and thousands of young Norwegian women had intimate relationships with German soldiers there. Himmler especially encouraged the impregnation of these women, as Norwegians were thought to be an excellent contribution to the Aryan race. When the war ended, these women were nicknamed “German Girls” and many were stripped of certain civil rights, expelled from Norway, or imprisoned. Even the children who were born from the relationship were sometimes targeted by being placed in institutions, removed from their mothers’ care, or other cruel vengeances. They were coined “children of shame”. These institutions that they were sent to were often lunatic asylums, where they were heavily mistreated and abused, including instances where they were locked in rooms and tied to beds. After a series of lawsuits in 2001, Norway has since made an official apology to these women, but only recently. Still, in Norway and Sweden, there are far-right extremist groups who glorify the program as a golden age and promote ideas of racial separation, such as the Nordic Resistance Movement.
Norway was not the only country who persecuted women who had relationships with German soldiers during their time of occupation. France also did so, in a movement called epuration sauvage, in which women’s heads were shaved, women were covered in tar, stoned, beaten, sat on, and even killed. France and even the UK, although the program was not active there, have been facing their own racial tensions. Both of these countries have previously been in control of a great number of colonies, damaging their relationship with many African, Arab, and Muslim immigrants. For instance, the Brexit debate in the UK was heavily influenced by immigration concerns. The UK Independence Party pushed for the reduction of immigration in order preserve British national and racial identity. In France, the Rassemblement National, led by Marine Le Pen, has advocated for stricter immigration policies to protect the cultural heritage of France. Le Pen has recently been banned from the 2027 presidential race in France.
