Before Gilead, There Was Lebensborn
The real-life Nazi breeding program they skipped in history class.
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Hedonism has a half-life. Give it ten years, and someone will try to outlaw orgasms.
It’s a pattern as old as society itself: freedom, followed by backlash. Jazz Age? Hello, Prohibition. The sexual revolution? Here comes Reagan. And if you were a girl having any kind of fun in 1930s Germany — flirting, dancing, or (God forbid) having sex — you weren’t just a rebel. You were a national threat.
But it started with sexual rebellion. 1920s Berlin made Vegas look like Bible camp. Sexual liberation? Check. Open queerness? Check. Women with bob haircuts dancing in cabarets? Double check. And the fun police — known formally as the National Socialists — hated every sequined minute of it.
So when the Nazis took over in 1933, their first order of business (after banning political opposition and free thought) was to resurrect the medieval idea that young people should never think about sex, unless it was strictly for making more “racially pure” babies.
To meet this goal, the Hitler Youth and its sister group, the League of German Girls, otherwise known as the Bund Deutscher Mädel (BDM) girls were established. These were not your average after-school programs. Imagine the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, but if the cookies were replaced by state-sanctioned eugenics. Boys were groomed to become perfect soldiers; girls were taught that their highest calling was “Kinder, Küche, Kirche” — Children, Kitchen, Church. (You know, just a little light misogyny with your arts and crafts.)
Then, for good measure, they organized co-ed camping trips. One of the most infamous examples came during the 1936 Nürnberg Rally. The League of German Girls (BDM girls) and Hitler Youth boys gathered in mass formations, marched around, saluted flags, and then were left largely unsupervised after curfew.
The result will only surprise the bible thumpers. Following the rally, good Germans saw a spike in teen pregnancies — publicly condemned by the Nazis, but privately expected. After all, if you mix state-enforced abstinence with biological inevitability and throw in a massive nationalist orgy of uniforms and hormones, you’re going to get babies.
To control the teenage lust, patrol units like the HJ-Streifendienst, juvenile courts, and their own families monitored teen girls. They were even subjected to gynecological exams if suspected of promiscuity.
Sex education literature with titles like Why Weren’t We Told This Earlier? and A Word to Young Female Comrades warned girls that premarital sex would ruin their chances of being accepted into the Aryan ideal.(1) Young women were basically taught that their wombs were battlegrounds for the future of the Reich.
Of course, these policies were wildly successful at making teenagers exactly zero percent less horny. By 1940, Hitler Youth reports were buzzing with horror stories of “moral decline.” (Translation: teenagers acting like teenagers.)
Young girls often snuck off to train stations and barracks looking for “adventures,” and young boys, well, discovered the joy of close, shirtless camaraderie in all those delightful “nature hikes.” To the horror of the regime, this led to “issues.” Unwanted pregnancies. Venereal diseases. Homoerotic bonding that didn’t exactly scream “Aryan family values.”
Faced with this scandalous outbreak of normal adolescent behavior, the Nazis did what any rational dictatorship would do: they set up re-education camps.
One of the most infamous was Uckermark, a “youth protection camp” (read: teen gulag) designed specifically for “sexually wayward” girls. Officially, it was for “community aliens, juvenile delinquents, and morally endangered girls.” Unofficially, it was for teenagers who dared to flirt, kiss, or, God forbid, enjoy themselves.
Girls sent to Uckermark were treated to a delightful daily schedule of hard labor, humiliation, and Christian moralizing — because nothing says “reformation” like working twelve-hour shifts followed by sermons about how you ruined Germany with your libido.
Meanwhile, teenage boys in the Hitler Youth received abstinence-only education that boiled down to:
Don’t touch girls, ever.
If you must touch a girl, make sure it’s for the Fatherland.
Masturbation will turn you into a sad, weak traitor.
For girls who got pregnant, things got even weirder. Because Nazi Germany, ever the overachiever in bureaucratic perversion, didn’t just punish “bad” girls. Sometimes, it rewarded them… if they slept with the right men.
In other words, if a “wayward” girl happened to get pregnant by a racially “valuable” man, she could sometimes avoid punishment by popping out a baby and handing it over to the state’s “Lebensborn” program.
Lebensborn — literally, “Fountain of Life” — was a Nazi eugenics-based breeding program launched by Heinrich Himmler in 1935. The goal was to engineer a master race by producing racially “pure” Aryan children.
Here’s how it worked: if you were a young, blonde, broad-hipped German girl with good cheekbones and no Jewish grandparents, congratulations! You might be eligible to join the state-sanctioned baby factory. SS officers — also ideally blonde and terrifying — were encouraged to sleep with these women out of wedlock. The babies were then taken, baptized in Nazi ideology, and handed off to elite families or raised in Lebensborn homes where they were basically swaddled in eugenics.
Photograph by Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images
This wasn’t some fringe project. Himmler himself pushed officers to father at least four children, whether married or not. By war’s end, over 8,000 babies were born in Lebensborn homes in Germany, and another 12,000 in Norway.
The selection process was ruthless. Only 40% of women who applied to Lebensborn made the racial cut. Those who did were housed, pampered (by Nazi standards), and often sent back into the program for repeat performances. The children — if judged sufficiently Aryan — were either raised in the homes or adopted into elite Nazi families.
One of those children was Gisela Heidenreich, who would later discover she was a product of a state-run baby factory. Her mother had been selected, impregnated by an SS officer, and then kept in the Lebensborn program. Heindenreich was then raised under the careful gaze of Nazi social engineering.
But Lebensborn wasn’t just about German women and SS hookups. As the war expanded eastward, the program got even more sinister. Children in Poland and Ukraine who happened to have the misfortune of looking blonde and blue-eyed were kidnapped — some right out of schools, orphanages, or homes — and transported back to Germany. There, they were subjected to racial testing: head measurements, blood type, hair, and eye color charts.
Those who passed were renamed, forced to speak German, and handed over to adoptive Nazi families. One Polish boy remembered being renamed Johann Suhling and ordered to call his new German captors “mother” and “father” until he forgot who he actually was. Speaking Polish was punished with beatings and food deprivation. Another boy was taken with 80 other pupils from his school and never saw his parents again.
Historian Richard Lukas reported that Polish girls deemed racially valuable were sometimes even funneled into Lebensborn homes to be used as breeding stock. Once the children were “suitably Germanized,” they were available for adoption. This was eugenics with a national adoption agency.
After the war, the Lebensborn children were left with a double stigma: their fathers were often Nazi officers, and their very existence was engineered for political ideology. Some were never reunited with their biological families. Others never even learned who they truly were.
The absurdity is this: a girl who kissed a boy at a rally could end up at Uckermark doing hard labor. A girl who got pregnant by an SS officer could end up in Lebensborn, her baby celebrated as a future soldier of the Reich. Same hormones, different paperwork.
Both systems were run by men who thought they knew exactly what a woman’s body was for.
And that, as history keeps proving, never ends well.
Now, fast-forward a century. Today, the roaring 2010s’ hookup culture — Tinder, Bumble, the seven million think pieces about “ghosting” — is sputtering out. In its place? A growing purity movement. Abstinence influencers. “Chastity coaches.” Books with titles like Sex Was Never the Problem (Lust Is). (No points for guessing who’s usually at fault in these manuals.)
Sure, no one’s building teen detention camps — yet — but the rhetoric is eerily familiar. The same anxiety over “ruined” girls. The same creepy fixation on virginity. The same idea that the answer to a complicated world is to slap a chastity belt on it.
Of course, modern purity culture has Instagram filters and branded merch, which somehow makes it worse. Imagine the Hitler Youth but with Canva templates and a TikTok account called @GoodGirlsOnly.
The lesson here, should you choose to learn it, is this: Every time a society tries to police sexuality, especially teenage sexuality, things end badly. Very badly. Like, “mandatory-camp-for-kissing” badly.
You can’t repress human nature out of existence. You can only drive it underground, make it dangerous, and hurt a lot of people in the process.
(1) Gretel Blome, and Karl Blome, Ein Wort an junge Kameradinnen von Gretel und Karl Blome. Berlin: Verl. Neues Volk, 1941, 2.
Carlyn Beccia is an award-winning author and illustrator of 13 books. Love grim history? Subscribe to A Grim Historian for a weekly dose of the darkest and most depressing history.
trump has telegraphed his belief in this sort of thing long before his second term. talking about immigrants from Norway are ok. "make America feared again..." he and his minions preach women staying home and making babies, submit to being a second class citizen at best, an object or tool at worst. Vance's remarks have been even worse. we are heading there
BDSM girls and National Socialist boys?
mmmm yes please
Who brought the nachos?