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This program is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. It contains mature adult themes. Listener discretion is advised. Gita Serini slowly approaches a farmhouse on a wet and cold February evening in 1946. She knocks on the front door. There is no answer. She sees a dim light emanating from one of the home's windows.
as faint as all lights have been in Germany since the war. After knocking again, she pushes the door and it opens. She emerges into the kitchen. There sits a family of six around their dining table. Two gray-haired grandparents, a brown-haired farmer and his equally brunette wife, and two young children, a boy and a girl, twins, both blonde-haired and blue-eyed.
At her intrusion, she hastily explains that she's from the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. The farmer's wife sits up. "Johann? Marie?" "To bed." Before bolting upstairs, the young girl with tight, fair braids gives her mother a giant hug. The boy glances warily at Gita as he leaves the room. Gita sits across from the adults. They open up about their lost children.
Their 17-year-old son had died fighting the Russians just after graduating into an elite Nazi force. And their teenage daughter had perished in a freak auto accident whilst attending a Hitler Youth summer camp. "We applied for adoption," the mother states plainly. "Do you know where Johanna Marie's natural parents are?" Gita asks. "They're dead," the mother replies. Gita takes a breath.
We think they might be in Poland. She looks the mother directly in the eye. And I'm afraid they need to go home. From the 1930s until the end of World War II, the Nazis unleashed unspeakable horrors upon Europe. Hiding behind false scientific rhetoric, they committed ethnic genocide on a truly terrifying scale.
But in their pursuit of a pure Aryan race, they also established disturbing eugenics programs, both at home and across the continent. The Nazis viewed women as housekeepers, but more than anything else, baby factories. If they failed the tests, if they were assessed and considered inadequately Aryan, they were sent to camps. The general plan oaths
was a plan for genocide, for ethnic cleansing on a monstrous scale. In this episode, through talking to specialist historians, we'll investigate another branch of the Holocaust, the disturbing methods the Nazis used to populate their Herrenrasse, or master race.
From the establishment of bride schools and breeding programs, to the kidnapping of 400,000 children from across occupied Europe, you're listening to Forbidden History, the podcast series that explores the past's darkest corners, sheds light on the lives of intriguing individuals, and uncovers the truth buried deep in history's most controversial legacies. This podcast.
is the Aryan campaign of Nazi Germany. Before the onset of World War II, the Nazis had been brought to power on Hitler's promise to tackle unemployment and stabilize the country and its economy. But these pledges were underscored with pure bigotry, feeding upon pre-existing prejudice and the German population's hunger for a scapegoat.
Hitler preached that the racial impurity of their country had led to their suffering and that he was going to fix it. To expand is author and journalist Jane Thin. Race was at the foundation of everything to do with Nazi policy and it was evident right from 1923 when Hitler wrote Mein Kampf that his fixation on the Jews was going to inform Nazi policy every step of the way.
For more context is Lisa Pine, Associate Professor of History at London South Bank University. Hitler believed that there was a hierarchy of races and the Herrenvolk or the master race was what the German Aryan race comprised of and at the very bottom of the heap of this hierarchy was the Jewish race.
So he had a very uncompromising racial anti-Semitism. And introducing author and historian Andrew Goff. In Hitler's speeches and writings before he came into power, he clearly expressed his
demented racial views. He spoke of the Aryan German race, an ancient race that was tall, blonde hair, blue-eyed, and they had to be kept pure because they were the future of the new Germany. All the other, in his words, inferior races were to be exterminated. In the early days of Nazi rule, Hitler began his pursuit of an Aryan state by targeting Germany's Jewish population.
For an insight is specialist author and historian on the Third Reich, Professor Frank McDonagh. If you want to understand Nazism, you've got to understand that anti-Semitism was at the core of Nazism. They introduced something called the Aryan Clause to all public service jobs, and because of that they can start to exclude Jews. The racial laws came into force in 1935. They were called the Nuremberg Laws.
And still, there was anti-Semitism on the streets and attacks on Jews and those kinds of things. There were more and more laws passed during the 1930s that were anti-Semitic that made it very, very clear to everyone, whether they were Jews or Germans, what this regime was about. And, as is well known, this government-sanctioned oppression of Jews descended into unquantifiable horror. Historian Adrian Wheel explains.
The legacy of Hitler's racial views was 5 to 6 million murdered Jews. It was the displacement of vast populations across the whole of Europe and utter devastation. The Nazis persecuted anyone who they believed threatened their ideal of a pure Aryan race. This included disabled people, queer people, Roma and Sinti people, and the black and mixed race population of Germany.
Most of these groups were either sent to death camps or forcibly sterilized.
In addition to the genocide of various groups, the pursuit of a pure Aryan race also took on another branch: the production of pure-bred Aryan children. Hitler believed that the German master race was destined to govern the world, and therefore the Nazis needed to think generationally. And a vital element of their strategy was women.
Before the Nazis took control, women's rights in Germany were some of the most progressive in Europe. They had top-quality schooling that had been in place for decades, and they were able to attend university. Most importantly, they had the vote. Therefore, to Hitler, they were just as important to appeal to as men.
So before Hitler came to power, the Nazi Party didn't receive that much acclaim or attention from women. But once the Depression really hit Germany very hard and they were very much concerned about trying to get food on the table, and Hitler was promising
jobs and economic recovery, then the number of women voting for Hitler increased. And he did become increasingly popular among women by the time he came to power. When the Nazi Party came to power, just as many women voted for them as men did. From statements taken from women at this time, they seemed to have been less charmed by Nazi ideology and more disillusioned about the current state of affairs.
They believed Hitler might hold the answer to their poverty and crumbling way of life. But a surprising amount took their admiration even further.
It's phenomenal how popular Hitler was amongst women. He had more fan mail from women than the Beatles and Mick Jagger rolled into one. They found him interesting, eccentric, a little bit odd, and he kind of added this frisson of excitement. The charisma that he showed really attracted a lot of people to him, coupled with the economic crisis. He was...
absolutely inundated with gifts. Women would send him baby booties and cakes and lots and lots of love letters and "let me bear your child for you, mein Führer." His popularity was mostly amongst women or more amongst women than amongst men. And of course they used this. In order to maintain this fanaticism,
Hitler's love life was kept strictly private. Hitler couldn't marry. Hitler was seen to be married to Germany, and he couldn't be seen with a girlfriend, even though he had one. So Eva Braun, who was his secret girlfriend, was kept
very, very concealed most of the time down in Munich. Nobody ever saw her. And so it was completely hidden from the German people until very, very late on in the war that Hitler even had a kind of female interest. The purpose of this was to deflect any idea that Hitler cared for one woman more than anybody else. And so, yes, the adulation of women was profoundly important in the spread of Nazism.
The Nazis told the women of Germany that they had a vital role to play in the development of the Third Reich. This was first and foremost to be the loyal wife of a Nazi husband and the mother of as many pure-blood German children as possible.
In 1936, Heinrich Himmler, leader of the SS, the Nazis' high-ranking political police, issued a decree that said that the wives of SS men should be trained to adhere to strict Nazi standards.
On Himmler's orders, the first Reich Bride School was established in 1937. It was a residential school. You went for six weeks and you stayed there. And at the end of it, you had to take a certificate. You had to learn all sorts of things like cooking and childcare, cooking.
and how to obey a man properly. And you had to pass an intensive physical, a very difficult intensive physical, which would measure your facial, all your facial features and the color of your eyes, really detailed physical checks, not just their
height and their weight, they had to be photographed in swimsuits to see that their bodies conformed to an Aryan ideal. And so you were very, very scrutinized and you also had to provide records of your great grandparents so that there was no suggestion of any mixed blood, you were absolutely pure Aryan. So the bride schools were seen as this very important training ground for women to marry into the SS.
Eventually, schools were set up throughout the country for every German woman to attend. All the way from age 10 up to their early 20s, they were taught to become the perfect wives and mothers.
There were bride schools and there were mother schools. Although mother schools were not actually compulsory, if you didn't go, people would come round and wonder why you were not going. So every stage of a girl or a woman's life was really closely monitored and this had two benefits. One, people
People never had time on their own, so they had no time for dissent. If you keep women and girls in very controlled and very busy organisations, then they don't have time to think what else they might be doing. So you have a huge amount of time to promote your message. As well as being loyal wives and mothers, many women would go on to participate directly in the Third Reich.
organizing Nazi assemblies, as well as creating unions and groups to encourage other women to follow Nazi standards. Many were also direct perpetrators of the Holocaust, organizing deportations and mass shootings, or working as guards at concentration camps, or even as nurses at euthanasia extermination centers.
For Hitler, his interest in women wasn't just about controlling marriage or the ways in which women conducted themselves as Nazis. It was primarily about controlling the children that would result from those marriages. If the Nazis were going to grow and expand their empire, they would need future generations of loyal Aryan children to grow up and continue the cause.
The Nazis viewed women as housekeepers, but more than anything else, baby factories. Their job was to look after their man, look after their soldier, and to raise their Aryan baby because they would be the future
Introducing Nicholas O'Shaughnessy, academic and professor at Queen Mary University. Nazism is based on the concept of an existential threat. In other words, the idea that the German race, the Aryan race, is facing extinction. We must stop it. We must resurrect it. We must have a
huge numbers of children. It was definitely an intention of the Nazi regime to try and increase the nation's population, and there were incentives for this. So, first of all, you had basic things like tax incentives so that women were given money to stay at home, and they were given money the more children they had.
There was the Cross of Honor for the German mother, and this was awarded in bronze, silver, and gold for four, six, and eight children, respectively, as a kind of symbolic tribute to motherhood. And with the aim of stimulating women to produce ideal Aryan children, a competition was launched to find the most beautiful Aryan baby. The winner, selected by Joseph Goebbels, the minister of propaganda himself, was six-month-old Hesse Levinson's Taft.
However, this poster child for the biologically superior Aryan race had a bit of a secret. She was Jewish.
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As well as the production of Aryan children being of paramount importance, so too was their education. The role for women actually in terms of rearing their children and bringing them up
in the Nazi era, was very much to imbue the next generation with German culture, with German traditions, whether that's literature or art, but also with Nazi ideology, so that they would be the future generation of soldiers. For more insight, it's historian and author Terry Charman.
Every apparatus of education and indoctrination was used by the Nazis. I mean, boys and girls joined the Hitler Youth or the League of German Maidens. There was a degree of idealism, especially amongst the youngsters, that the Nazis played on, and it was a perverted idealism. Hitler recognised that if you condition people very, very early on, from the crib onwards, then you have control of them, or you can attempt to have control of them.
So a lot of the areas of life that we would consider the private sphere, actually the Nazis penetrated those areas. So into the family, into traditional education. So there was a lot of indoctrination from quite early on in young people's lives through the youth groups and then through the education system with changes in the curriculum.
Education in the Third Reich served to promote Nazism and National Socialist views. Teachers spoke about the superiority of the Aryan and Nordic races.
while denouncing Jews and Slavs as parasitic and racially unclean. If you were telling a child Cinderella, the handsome prince would be a stormtrooper and the ugly sisters would be ugly not because they didn't look good but because they were Slavs. You would have maths problems, like it costs 500 marks to keep a disabled child in an institution for a year.
How many poor families could be fed with that money? There's always this slant. Every point in a child's education, this National Socialist polish would be applied.
Mothers were also encouraged to continue their children's education at home. For example, if you look at the bride schools that women who were marrying into the SS had to attend, one of the things that they learned was how to teach prayers to your children. And you would pray not to our father, but to our Führer.
Of course, it's how totalitarian societies work. You make sure that you keep people absolutely fixed at every moment of the day on your message. And that is what the Nazis were very successful at doing. Despite their efforts, the birth rate required by the Nazis was not being met. It seemed that the children born from only married couples alone was not sufficient enough.
This is where the Nazi pursuit of Aryan domination went beyond incentives and propaganda. New schemes were conjured to meet demands, and the Nazis had direct control over the babies they deemed worthy to be born.
They did this by establishing a state-run organization known as Lebensborn. Lebensborn was an organization called the Well of Life or the Fountain of Life, that's how it translates. And it was an organization that allowed, let's say, young girls who were single and pregnant to carry their baby to term and to give birth in a very discreet place.
The Nazis were mad keen on increasing Germany's population. And it didn't matter whether it was in wedlock or out of wedlock. Lebensborn were really sort of SS maternity homes. Lebensborn was originally began by Heinrich Himmler in pursuit of stopping abortions throughout the country.
The program provided welfare for unmarried mothers, but only those they deemed to be pure Aryans or racially hygienic.
They also often facilitated the adoption of these children to childless parents who they deemed to be pure Germans. The idea was that Germany would plan to have children who were born out of wedlock, for example, or maybe they were orphans for one reason or another. But if they were Aryans, he wanted them to be integrated into German society and become part of the master race. The program was not just confined to Germany.
Once the Nazi invasion of Europe began, it was eventually rolled out across the occupied nations, and around 20,000 children were born as a result. One of these was Gisela Heidenreich. She was born under the Lebensborn program in 1943 in the Norwegian capital of Oslo, while it was under Nazi control.
My mother was a tall, very good-looking woman, not really blonde, but a little bit darker, what we called dark blonde, which was still okay, and blue-eyed. And she went to Bad Tölz, where there was a Junkerschule, which means a school of SS officers. And there she met my father. For some years he was a commander of this officer school.
and she was his secretary, so you could even think it was like a love affair. But he was married, and he had already two sons. Himmler said an SS man, who of course should be blond, blue-eyed, and so on, which my father really was. Those who have these physical attributes should be the ones who have more children than within their marriage. Himmler believed that the occupied Scandinavian countries
such as Norway, provided a "suitable gene pool" for the production of Aryan children. And in 1936, he issued an ordinance that every SS member must father at least four children, in or out of wedlock. It was 40,000 occupants of German soldiers. They should have love affairs with Norwegian women.
to get as many as so-called Nordic children to be brought back to Germany and to be adopted here by SS officers or SS families. For the SS officers, it was like an order.
But for the women, it was like they got an award. But for many of these children, the circumstances under which they were born went on to have profound effects in their later lives. Being a Lebensbarn child myself, I feel horrible.
This is what I know from others also, because I know many of them who never talked about it. They came out and showed their shame and their guilt. You feel guilty being the idea, the crazy idea of mad brains. We are kind of the other part of Holocaust. There should be one race should be produced and the others who were not as precious were killed.
And as Hitler's rampage across Europe headed eastward, Lebensborn would take on a different strategy. The Nazis encountered populations they deemed to be racially inferior and in turn created a program to deal with them. It was known as Generalplan Ost, the General Plan for the East.
This was a top-secret procedure to deport entire populations that didn't match Nazi ideals, and to subsequently colonize those occupied territories with ethnically pure Germans. The general plan asked
was a plan for genocide, for ethnic cleansing on a monstrous scale. And really to create a massive German empire. The Nazis' racial views were a key deciding factor on who would be allowed to stay in the newly Germanized territories and who would be exterminated. Hitler had this idea that it wasn't just the Jews who were a problem to be eradicated.
but there were all kinds of what he called "Unter-Menschen", especially what he called "Slavic people". So he had this idea that, you know, if they started to take over Eastern Europe,
and they extended into the Soviet Union. I think he estimated that there could be 30 million of these subhumans. He said, "We've got to deal with that, and we'll deal with that through eradication of them." The primary peoples they deemed inferior were those of Slavic descent. Polish people especially would suffer a terrible fate.
By 1941, the Nazis had decided that within 10 to 20 years, the Polish people, their history, their culture would simply cease to exist. And for those who were not either killed or deported, but were able to work, the plan for them was to stay on and live in servitude to their new German settlers.
For a further explanation of these disturbing plans is historian and author Nigel H. Jones. His intention was to let the surviving Slavs inhabiting those lands be a race of slaves, be a race of helots, if you like, under the supervision of...
German settlers, German colonizers who would have the whip hand. The timescale for the plan was 25 to 30 years. And by that point, 45 million so-called non-Germanizable people from Central and Eastern Europe would be removed, and 14 million would remain as slaves.
And in their place, 8 to 10 million Germans would be settled. Hitler was legitimating the whole idea by saying, well, these places had once hosted German communities. Therefore, we're not doing anything actually outrageous. But of course, it did mean that all those other cultures would be exterminated culturally and in many ways physically as well. But for the Nazis, their plan had a problem.
There were simply not enough Aryan Germans to replace the vast areas they were intending to ethnically cleanse. So they decided to bend their own rules on race.
Himmler set up secret plans to provide something called the Germanization Programme, whereby children would be taken from their parents if they conformed to an Aryan ideal, and they would be brought into Germany. With this particular programme, you looked for the physical evidence, and you just went about stealing these children because they were blonde, they were Germanic.
"Therefore, they are, you take them and Germanize them." What the Nazis did when they went to the areas that they occupied in Poland and other parts of Europe, they abducted or took away children from their families. If they thought that they were of good racial stock and they could
depolonize them or make them German. The idea was, you know, they'd go through local children, families and so on, and they'd say, "Ah, right, okay. There's a nice blonde child there, right? You go over that side. Ah, there's a nice blonde kid there, yeah? You go over that side." I don't think it was very scientific. Remember, Nazi racial theory wasn't very scientific. If they could see people who looked as if they were Aryan stock, just visually,
You know, speaks German, is blonde, looks a bit Nordic. Let's have them in the people's community. Although the Nazis wanted to eradicate the Polish nation because of its so-called racial inferiority, they were perfectly happy to steal their children, bring them up in Germany, and proudly call them Aryans.
They regarded the Poles as subhuman and inferior and all of those kinds of things. If they took these children away, they could somehow save them and create racially valuable Germans now for the future. They had to conform to an Aryan ideal. They would be put in institutions and taught to speak German and to forget their Polish heritage and to forget their Polish name. They were given German names and they spoke German. And if they spoke Polish, they would be beaten.
beaten. And then they were offered up for adoption largely to SS families. Children were taken from all the occupied territories. They were ripped from their families and sent to Germany to be turned into the next generation of Nazis.
400,000-plus children were brought into the Reich. If they failed the tests, if they were assessed and considered inadequately Aryan, they were sent to camps. So it was a terrible,
ordeal all round. But the ones that did stay and were adopted and lived through the war then faced this difficult thing after the war where they discovered or were informed that their parents were not their real parents and they were genuinely Polish. And quite a few of them did not want to go back to Poland because they'd grown up, you know, they'd bonded with a German family. Some were identified and taken away from their adoptive families by Allied forces.
They were returned to Poland where, because of time passed, they couldn't understand the language and saw their birth parents as strangers. Most were only able to remember their previous lives through Polish nursery rhymes. The majority of the children stayed in Germany. Some learned the truth and grew up with conflicted identities. They would attempt to find their birth parents on their own, but with all records destroyed, it was fruitless. However,
Most of them lived out their lives entirely unaware of what had happened to them. Their birth parents left with no answers and unable to mourn for their disappeared children. All of this suffering and all in the pursuit of a baseless and bigoted ideal.
Hitler's pursuit of a non-existent Aryan master race was ultimately a false and immoral campaign for totalitarian control of Europe and possibly even the world. The horrific methods used to exterminate the Jews, Slavs, and other groups are well known, but lesser known are the realities of the production of this Aryan race.
the tyrannical indoctrination of women as brides and baby factories, the seedy breeding programs, and the arbitrary categorizing and kidnapping of hundreds of thousands of children. Hitler inflicted human suffering on an incomprehensible scale. But what is easily understandable is that this period was one of the darkest in human history, never to be repeated.
What did happen to the Jewish girl who won the most beautiful Aryan baby Nazi propaganda contest? For a deep dive into the captivating life of Hesse Levinson's Taft, listen to our extra episode, Forbidden Fruit, available soon on all your favorite podcast platforms.
This is an audio production by Like A Shot Entertainment. Presented by Bridget Lappin. Executive Producers Danny O'Brien and Henry Scott. Story Producer Maddie Bowers. Assistant Producer Alice Tudor. Thank you for listening.