During the time of Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945, that is, to the end of World War II, the most horrific crimes in human history took place. Nazi Germany was based on militarism, racism, ...anti-Semitism, ideologism and occultism. First, the Nuremberg Laws were passed, which led to the Holocaust, and on December 12, 1935, in Munich, by the order of the commander of the SS troops, Heinrich Himmler, a secret state Lebensborn project was established. The goal of this state project was to create a pure Aryan race, which was considered a key condition for Germany to become the world's leading power in military, economic and cultural terms, and for the German people to rule the world with their sublime tradition and culture. The Lebensborn project involved the birth of children from biological mothers carefully selected from the ranks of racially pure young, beautiful and healthy German girls and biological fathers from the ranks of SS troops, who would later be housed in Lebensborn homes or in the homes of SS officers or prominent purely Aryan families. Children abducted all over Europe, who met the criteria of seemingly belonging to the members of the pure Aryan race, were also accommodated in these homes. In addition to custody and upbringing, the educational activities and teaching of these children in Lebensborn homes were carried out under strict supervision, based on the principles of fascist pedagogy the point that will be discussed in this theoretical study.
What does it mean to be German after Hitler and National Socialism? Gisela Heidenreich’s memoir Das endlose Jahr: Die langsame Entdeckung der eigenen Biographie—ein Lebensborn Schicksal (The Endless ...Year: The Slow Discovery of My Own Biography—A Lebensborn Destiny, 2002), highlights the dependence on physical markers and monuments in understanding one’s place in history. Heidenreich discovers her origin as a Lebensborn child through family secrets, but it is not until she traverses the landscape of her past that she truly begins to understand her place within history. I argue that, along with family photographs and narratives, places play an integral role in the identity process through the metaphor of the palimpsest. In Heidenreich’s memoir, the German notion of Heimat reveals itself as a process, rather than a static and immovable space. Das endlose Jahr addresses the interplay between memory, places, and space through Heidenreich’s complex relationship with her mother, and her ambivalent sense of belonging through the palimpsest markers that remain. At its core, Das endlose Jahr is a memoir about the search for Heimat in all the wrong places.
There is a hidden legacy of war that is rarely talked about: the children of native civilians and enemy soldiers. What is their fate?This book unearths the history of the thousands of forgotten ...children of World War II, including its prelude and aftermath during the Spanish Civil War and the Allied occupation of Germany. It looks at liaisons between German soldiers and civilian women in the occupied territories, and the Nazi Lebensborn program of racial hygiene. It also considers the children of African-American soldiers and German women. The authors examine what happened when the foreign solders went home and discuss the policies adopted towards these children by the Nazi authorities as well as postwar national governments. Personal testimonies from the children themselves reveal the continued pain and shame of being children of the enemy.Case studies are taken from France, Germany, the Netherlands, Czechoslovakia, Norway, Denmark and Spain.
Aharon Appelfeld differentiates between the adult testimonies on genocide and those of children. Whereas in the case of adults the testimonies have to be factual, reliable and chronological, in the ...case of children—who are refused the status of witnesses because of their incapacity to reconstruct the past from memory—the “reconstruction” is based on invention, sensory elements and feelings, in other words on perception. According to Appelfeld, this particular resort to imagination and senses is at the origins of the Holocaust literature. My intervention will focus on the definition of the “testimony” and on its place within the literary work. “Surviving children could not rememorize the Holocaust in the same way as adults. Their contribution is inseparable from the experience they lived. Yet, despite being limited, this experience is profound. It is therefore not astonishing that the Holocaust literature should be born with them.” (Aharon Appelfeld, “Holocaust through the eyes of the children”, Le Nouvel Observateur 2097, 13-19 January 2005).
By the 1920s in Central Europe, it had become a truism among intellectuals that natural science had "disenchanted" the world, and in particular had reduced humans to mere mechanisms, devoid of higher ...purpose. But could a new science of "wholeness" heal what the old science of the "machine" had wrought? Some contemporary scientists thought it could. These years saw the spread of a new, "holistic" science designed to nourish the heart as well as the head, to "reenchant" even as it explained. Critics since have linked this holism to a German irrationalism that is supposed to have paved the way to Nazism. In a penetrating analysis of this science, Anne Harrington shows that in fact the story of holism in Germany is a politically heterogeneous story with multiple endings. Its alliances with Nazism were not inevitable, but resulted from reorganizational processes that ultimately brought commitments to wholeness and race, healing and death into a common framework. Before 1933, holistic science was a uniquely authoritative voice in cultural debates on the costs of modernization. It attracted not only scientists with Nazi sympathies but also moderates and leftists, some of whom left enduring humanistic legacies. Neither a "reduction" of science to its politics, nor a vision in which the sociocultural environment is a backdrop to the "internal" work of science, this story instead emphasizes how metaphor and imagery allow science to engage "real" phenomena of the laboratory in ways that are richly generative of human meanings and porous to the social and political imperatives of the hour.
rom 1931 to 1945, leaders of the SS, a paramilitary group under the Nazi party, sought to transform their organization into a racially-elite family community that would serve as the Third Reich's new ...aristocracy. They utilized the science of eugenics to convince SS men to marry suitable wives and have many children. Marriage and Fatherhood in the Nazi SS by Amy Carney is the first work to significantly assess the role of SS men as husbands and fathers during the Third Reich. The family community, and the place of men in this community, started with one simple order issued by SS leader Heinrich Himmler. He and other SS leaders continued to develop the family community throughout the 1930s, and not even the Second World War deterred them from pursuing their racial ambitions. Carney's insight into the eugenic-based measures used to encourage SS men to marry and to establish families sheds new light on their responsibilities not only as soldiers, but as husbands and fathers as well.
Based on the novel Ice Ages by German journalist Hannelore Hippe, Georg Maas's thriller Zwei Leben/Two Lives (2012) was inspired by the stories of Lebensborn children with German fathers and ...Norwegian mothers, who were taken from Norway and raised in East German orphanages. The film's protagonist represents those "orphans" who returned to Norway as Stasi spies. The film's key theme, the return of the repressed, plays a central role both in individual and collective memory. In this article, an overview of the Lebensborn program, particularly in Norway, and the Stasi exploitation of Lebensborn orphans, will provide the context for a discussion of the film. An analysis of the repression of individual traumatic memories and of the appearance of involuntary memories (flashbacks) is based on recent neurobiological findings. The cinematic depiction of flashbacks will be examined and followed by a discussion of the collective postwar amnesia of the Norwegian collaboration in the program and the reprehensible treatment of Lebensborn children and their mothers by the Norwegian government and its citizens in the postwar years.
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