Steinhöring

About fourty kilometres east of Munich lies a small town called Steinhöring and there the SS bought a building in 1936 and opened the first Lebensborn. It was located in a secluded and a quiet picturesque area and was called Heim Hochland. 

In 1935, SS chief Heinrich Himmler founded Lebensborn. Lebensborn was a place where racially approved families and single women could get help and advice regarding pregnancy and reproduction. Most often these were placed at existing orphanages or similar. At Lebensborn, women could also come and give birth and rest after childbirth. The responsibility for Lebensborn lay in a department within the SS called RuSHA (SS-Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt). RuSHA was responsible for ensuring the Aryan race within the SS and it was therefore natural that Lebensborn was placed within RuSHA. In 1938 Lebensborn was transferred to Himmler’s personal staff.  

For a long time there was a persistent reputation that racially approved SS men could come to a Lebensborn and mate with racially approved women. But this is not true.  Most of Lebensborn was established in Germany, all together there was ten (plus three in Austria), followed by Norway with ten and Poland with eight. A total of about 35 Lebensborn were established. The Nazis also devoted themselves to kidnapping racially-approved children from Eastern Europe, mainly from Poland. These children could end up in a Lebensborn before being placed in racially and politically approved families. How many children were kidnapped for this purpose is impossible to determine because they were given new identities. Therefore, many people still do not know their biological origin or even aware that they was kidnapped during the war.