Himmler's Fountain

Among the top Nazis, Heinrich Himmler was the leading racial fanatic. As Reichsfuhrer and SS chief, he personally set up the Lebensborn (Fountain of Life) program in 1935 to turn the German population into a superrace through selective breeding. Thousands of carefully selected German women were encouraged to have intercourse with SS men, who were presumed to be among the racial as well as the political elite. Once pregnant, the women were signed into one of twelve special maternity centers, where they received lavish medical and personal care. When one of his "new breed" babies got sick, Himmler would fret and demand daily bulletins until the child was well.

To most Germans, and to the Al lied judges at Nuremberg who dispensed minor sentences to Lebensborn person nel, that was all there was to Himmler's program. New light is now being cast on a darker and less well-known phase of Lebensborn: the wholesale kidnaping of hundreds of thousands of foreign chil dren for the purpose of adding to Germany's breeding stock.

The wider scope of the program was revealed in a three-year investigation by Journalists Marc Hillel, 46, a French Jew, and his wife Clarissa Henry, 36, a French citizen of English Protestant parentage. In a 400-page book on Le-bensborn to be published in France in January and in a stark, 2 1/2%-hour documentary film, the Hillels trace the pro gram's grotesque course. They show that Himmler had become obsessed with the idea of "racial war" and told Lebensborn directors that he wanted "racially acceptable" children in occupied lands brought to the Fatherland to be raised as Germans. "How can we be so cruel as to take a child from its mother?" he asked piously, then answered: "How much more cruel to leave a potential ge nius with our natural enemies."

Racially Valid. On his orders, SS men carried out mass examinations of children in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Norway and France. Those who were healthy and reasonably Aryan-looking -- preferably with blond hair, blue eyes and striking features -- were pronounced racially valuable.

They were shipped to indoctrination centers in Germany, then sent for adoption to "racially valid and ideologically trustworthy" German families. More than 200,000 children were taken from their families in Poland alone. In the in famous Nazi massacre in the Czech vil lage of Lidice, the Germans first examined the community's 90 children. They saved eight for Himmler's program and gassed the rest.

The Hillels' color documentary, Of Pure Blood, shown recently on British television and shortly to be released all over Europe, is built around interviews with survivors and former officials of Lebensborn. In the film's most poignant se quence, an aged Polish woman pleads for some sign of affection from her daughter, taken as a girl from her by Himmler's men and now, 32 years later, a hausfrau in Flensburg, West Germany. Next on the screen is a lawyer coolly explaining that the daughter considers herself German and has no desire to remember the past.

According to the Hillels, the Allies had some information about Lebensborn, but with all records destroyed in the war, it would have taken an enormous effort to locate and return the kidnaped children. Besides, the Hillels say, in the cold war atmosphere of 1946 and 1947, the Allies were reluctant to drain West Germany of potentially valuable citizens, particularly those who would have to be returned to Communist-held lands. After exhaustive research, the Hillels concluded that Himmler's plan to build a Nordic superrace was a failure on its own terms. "A superrace?" asks a German nurse who cared for children at one Lebensborn center after the war. "Not at all. These children were a mixture of bright, average and retarded. They were quiet and unexpressive, like most institutional children."

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