Breeding the Super Race

I stumbled across this article about the "Lebensborn", the sick demented dream of creating the "Master Race".  I take this as what happens with unchecked power and that of unquestioned faith and loyalty.

Super Race Babies
Born of Hitler's master plan, children grew up scorned. Forty middle aged men and women set out on a day cruise in Norway and finally entered the light. These legendary super race babies of the Nazis, fathered by SS troops, had been hidden, some in mental institutions, in secret lives of shame. Ron Laytner found a handsome super race baby hidden in Germany who would have made Hitler proud…for a short time.

By Ron Laytner - Edit International

Meeting him first at a tiny railway station in Germany’s Black Forest, I caught for just a moment the excitement his Nazi breeders must have felt. Olaf was a living specimen of the ‘master race.’

He stood taller than 6 foot, 3, straight as a wooden soldier. His eyes were blue, his hair was blond. He had the face of a movie star.

Godfather Adolf Hitler would have been proud.

“Today I am supposed to be ruling the world,” said Olaf Sinner-Schmedermann, 43. “If Hitler had won I might be among the leaders of the Nazi empire.”

Instead, Olaf was the Deejay of a nightclub band in the small town of Calw-Ernstmuch, as well as an occasional cultural-events critic for the local newspaper.

Olaf is one of 2,800 babies born at the Third Reich’s first Nazi breeding clinic in Steinhoering, Germany. Lebensborn – literally ‘spring of life’ – was one of Hitler’s most well kept secrets. It might have been overlooked by history if not for a few photographs taken by Reich propagandists and published on these pages.

“I’ve had this secret all my life,” Olaf said. “I never told anyone I was a Lebensborn child because it was nothing to be proud of. In school we learned absolutely nothing about Lebensborn. It is still a mystery today.” He was speaking in a Germany 20 years ago still trying to get over its Nazi past.

Creating ‘racially pure’ Aryan babies was the aim of the Lebensborn program; world domination was its ultimate goal. The program was developed in 1932, a year before Hitler became chancellor. He and the founding members of the National Socialist party drew up the design for a new human race that would carry out his plan for the ‘Thousand-year-Reich”.

The children were bred for looks and raised for loyalty – Nazism would be their creed, Hitler their god. Racial standards were set by the party’s political theorist. Technical details were left to Heinrich Himmler, one-time schoolteacher and chicken breeder who as head of the Gestapo executed millions.

A team of racial selection agents was formed to search the world for beautiful unsuspecting women who would become brood mares for Hitler’s scheme. Agents infiltrated countries Hitler planned to conquer, England, Canada, Belgium, Australia, Holland, Norway, Iceland, Denmark, France, South Africa and the United States. They posed as ‘model scouts’ and kept photographic records of future victims.

When the Wehrmacht invaded Europe, agents arrested many of these girls and forcibly installed them in the Lebensborn program. These sex slaves, along with volunteer German women, were to form a kingdom populated by 120 million super-Aryans – a final fulfillment of the Nazi pseudoscience of eugencis.

The women were impregnated by SS soldiers in select hospitals throughout Germany and the occupied countries. A male German seeking admission into the program had to prove he was ‘racially pure’ as far back as 1750; was in perfect physical condition and had not even a single dental filling marring his body.

Married, but childless, SS men and their wives were encouraged to seek out other sex partners. Himmler gave orders to the SS to establish vacation homes where soldiers could meet young, idealistic girls from Nazi youth organizations.

Many women volunteered to have two or three babies. A German woman who had four or more was awarded the Mutter-Kreuz, “The Mother’s Cross”.

Himmler believed the Lebensborn program would provide Germany with an extra 600 divisions of crack SS troops by the year 1972.

In all of Germany only 7,900 Lebensborn babies were born of SS troops. Many SS couples did not want to have more than one child. When the program expanded to conquered territories, Norway alone, had 13,000 of the babies.

Before it ended in 1944, Lebensborn produced more than 42,000 babies. But in Poland, alone, 200,000 blond, blue-eyed children were kidnapped and disappeared in Hitler’s Third Reich.

Some were killed by Dr. Josef Mengele at Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland. His carried out medical experiments to find the genetic secret of eye and hair color and allegedly removed eyeballs of blue-eyed blond children prisoners and shipped them to laboratories in Berlin.

Babies that were born into the program but were premature or crippled were either poisoned or allowed to starve to death.

Olaf Sinner-Schmedermann was born in 1942 at a Lebensborn clinic in Steinhoering near Frankfurt. “When I was about five years old, my mother told me I was very special,” he recalled. “She told me I was a child of Adolph Hitler and born in a special hospital. She had asked the government to be allowed to go to Steinhoering so that she could do her duty for the third Reich.”

As we talked, it became apparent that Olaf, born as a future leader of Hitler’s master race, hated everything the Fuehrer loved – and loved everything Hitler hated.

Sitting in the gloomy apartment he shared with his unrepentant Nazi mother until her death in 1976, Olaf said, ”It’s a good thing for the world that the dreams of my mother did not come true.”

Olaf’s mother, Anna Marie Schmedemann, was an early member of the Nazi party, an assistant to the Gauleiter of Strasburg and wore a gold party badge. His father, Max Sinner, came from Bunischugen and was an equally fanatical Nazi.

“My mother was very beautiful, with blond hair and blue-green eyes,” Olaf recalled. “I saw my father only about a dozen times. My parents never lived together. He was blond and blue-eyed and very tall.”

Olaf’s mother took her son from the Steinhoering clinic when he was just a few days old and his father was fighting on the Russian front.

The royal treatment afforded the mothers and children at the clinic enraged the war-weary townsfolk. “My mother once told me the SS had to place guards around the clinic,” Olaf said, “because sometimes the townspeople threw rocks at the mothers and called them whores.”

Olaf spent the early years of his childhood in torment. “When I was very young my mother would beat me if I cried. She made me stand straight like a soldier for long periods of time. She told me that I would someday be a ruler of the world. But when she realized the war was truly lost she began to resent me and told me I was an embarrassment to her, was a souvenir of the Nazis and would have been better off dead.”

As Olaf grew older, his mother grew more embittered. She made him feel inferior. He rebelled, took dance lessons and became a ballet dancer.

“Eventually, I became a homosexual,” said the handsome German. “Hitler would not have been too proud of me. My mother told me that in the Third Reich, people like me were gassed.”

At age 16. Olaf Sinner-Schmedemann went to Paris and danced for three years with the Ballet d’Arcy. The troupe played around Europe, then embarked on a tour of Israel.

“I told the Jewish people about my background, and they did not care. They accepted me as a person,” he said.

His mother, however, was obsessed with hatred of the Jews. “She was a Nazi until the day she died,” said Olaf. But he himself was drawn to the Lebensborn clinic to verify his bizarre past.

The names of babies born in the clinic are kept in old Nazi record books, carefully guarded and classified as secret. However, town officials have access to them when a Lebensborn child seeks a birth certificate in document-conscious Germany.

“When I was 24, I went to Steinhoering and saw my birth document. It bore the SS insignia and the old German sign of life.”

Olaf had heard of the forced-breeding bordellos of the SS. “But my parents were married before my birth. I am sure they were happy in the beginning, though later my mother hated my father, I don’t know why.

“One year after my birth she kicked him out of the house and he went back to his mother and family in Karlsruhe.

“He’d been wounded in 1943 on the Russian front but came home. Because he’d been in the SS, his family hid him as a farm worker from the occupying Americans.

“He died at 63 from liquor and drugs. He hadn’t lived with me since I was a baby. I visited him one day when I was 20 years old and was shocked. He was an alcoholic who didn’t work and didn’t have a home. The last time I saw my father I stepped over his drunken body in the street.”

Olaf is lucky to be alive. Lebensborn, designed to promote new births and joyous camaraderie in sanctioned sex, resulted instead in thousands of deaths.

Many of the newborn, blue-eyed babies began to undergo a darkening of their eyes. And Nazi scientists were appalled as the children’s hair turned from blond to brunette.

Medical experiments were carried out. Doctor Mengele, financed by the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin, worked on the children of Auswich.

Could hair be turned blond from constant exposure to light rays?

What began with Adolf Hitler’s first musings in ‘Mein Kampf” about a ‘higher race … a master people’ finally led to one of Nazi Germany’s darkest secrets – the gassing of its own super babies for failure to meet racial cosmetic standards.

As the Third Reich crumbled, Hitler tried to exterminate all Lebensborn children but was stopped by their mothers and German and Allied soldiers. It’s not known how many children died or were refused readmission to their native lands.

In 1946, invading American troops found an abandoned nursery in Bremen containing 50 hungry toddlers. They were little citizens of Norway. SS General Wilhelm Rediess, the commander-in-chief of German police in occupied Norway, had launched Lebensborn there, using German soldiers to impregnate Norwegian girls.

The Bremen children still bore their mothers’ surnames and had not yet been given German citizenship. But the new administrators of Norway refused to allow them back calling the 2 and 3-year-olds – ‘potential traitors.’

Some children were finally taken to neutral Sweden, placed in foster homes and adopted. The Red Cross returned others to relatives in Norway.

Norwegian Le bensborn mothers and babies were treated terribly, confined to Mental Institutions and regarded as insane for having had sex with SS soldiers. The babies were regarded as mentally defective and kept for decades in Norwegian mental institutions.

At the Steinhoering Lebensborn clinic, more than 200 abandoned children, ranging from infants to 4-year-olds, and a few mothers and pregnant women were found by US troops on May 6, 1945. Most of the mothers and officials had fled.

 Said Steinhoering Mayor Karl Stabernak, “The US Army took care of these babies, and the mothers stayed on for just three months after giving birth and then went away. Only a few took their babies with them after the war. Most were afraid to go home with a Lebensborn baby.”

Many of the Lebensborn children disappeared into foster homes in Germany. Children were often picked up and taken back to barracks by concerned Allied soldiers and cared for by German girlfriends who later became occupation brides. Some of the Lebensborn children live today in England, Canada and America.

When the war ended, the War Crimes Commission tried vainly to investigate the super-race program. Some Nazis, in fact, were charged at Nuremberg with the wartime disappearance of 40,000 identified blond and blue-eyed Polish children, kidnapped for racial experiments. In 1946, Alfred Rosenberg, the racial supremacist who theories launched many extermination campaigns, was hanged at Nuremberg.

Even today, there continues to be a resounding silence in Germany about the Lebensborn program - from officials and even mothers who lost their children in occupied countries. Few master-race progeny will admit to their origins.

In her last years, Anna Marie Schmedemann grew close to her son..

“We were happy here for some time,” Olaf said, “As much as I despised her when I was young, I find I miss my mother these days. I could discuss things with her. We had a lot of interests together. Now I’m all alone.

“I hope the world can learn from what happened to Germans like us. I am ashamed to have been born a Lebensborn child.

“But I am very proud that I am a human being.”

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STEINHOERING, 2005 – Olaf Sinner-Schmedemann is now 63-years-old with white hair. When I tracked him down for the second time he said my interview changed his life. “I received letters of support from all over the world, Canada, Norway, England, The United States, Israel and even from Mombassa, Africa.” He has written two books on culture and reports for a local German newspaper.

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The sick demented minds of those who gain power you know, it's a pity that we as a society choose not to learn from History.