Hitler’s “final solution” attempted to strip the German population of Jewish people and others deemed not white. At the same time, the Lebensborn program sought to purify the Aryan gene pool and counter a plunging birthrate through “homes” where “hereditarily healthy” Aryan women conceived, carried, and bore the “racially valuable” children of SS men.
Adriana Allegri’s debut novel The Sunflower House (St. Martin’s Press, 2024) captures the slow-building horror that unfolded at the Hochland Home in Steinhöring, the first facility in the program.
“Himmler’s Children”
Lebensborn was the brainchild of Heinrich Himmler. The program began December 12, 1935, and lasted through the war. Besides Germany, homes were in Austria, Norway, Belgium, France, and Luxembourg. “Lebensborn” means “fount of life.”
In Himmler’s chilling words:
“The organisation ‘Lebensborn e.V.’ serves the SS leaders in the selection and adoption of qualified children. The organisation … under my personal direction, is part of the Race and Settlement Central Bureau of the SS, and has the following obligations:
1. Support racially, biologically and hereditarily valuable families with many children.
2. Placement and care of racially, biologically and hereditarily valuable pregnant women, who, after thorough examination of their and the progenitor’s families by the Race and Settlement Central Bureau of the SS, can be expected to produce equally valuable children.
3. Care for the children.
4. Care for the children’s mothers.”
Baby Farms, Experiments, and Neglect
Children who did not fit the blond-haired, blue-eyed ideal, especially those deemed “slow” or physically disabled, became subjects of Himmler’s cruel medical experiments, or worse. The few records that survived indicate “the systematic elimination of all the abnormal children who, according to the principles of selective eugenic reproduction, should never have been born.”
The facts are astonishing:
• Possibly 25,000 children were born in the Lebensborn homes.
• Some women birthed multiple “children of Hitler,” often with multiple men, handing the babies over, after weaning, to couples deemed sufficiently Aryan.
• Women were enticed to participate because supposedly there weren’t enough men to go around.
• Only about half of the women who volunteered were deemed sufficiently Aryan in appearance and were rejected.
Hochland Home opened in 1936. The meeting rooms where the chosen women mingled with SS officers were festooned with grand furnishings and antiquities pilfered from Jewish homes. Women were instructed in child care and nutrition, and breastfed their babies for a few months. But after that time, if the children weren’t adopted, they were moved upstairs, where they received only the rudiments of daily care from the overworked staff. And periodically, some of the rejected older babies and toddlers were taken away, fodder for Himmler’s experiments.
An Author Obsessed
Allegri’s grew up hearing her parents talk about their experiences living in Europe before, during, and after the second world war. She researched for two decades before spinning the tale of a young nurse who works with the pregnant women and their children at Hochland Home.
While searching the archives at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., Allegri learned that Himmler had the records of the Lebensborn program destroyed shortly before the end of the war.
But Lebensborn victims’ voices cannot all be silenced, and some have told their stories: I am a Lebensborn Child by Adele Meredith, NBC News’s Secret Nazi Lebensborn Children Go Public and BBC History Magazine’s The Woman Who Gave Birth for Hitler are a few.
“Why a novel about the SS Lebensborn program? The answer is simple: once I learned about the facilities like Hochland Home, I couldn’t get them out of my head,” Allegri wrote in the Author’s Note.
She imagined a mother and daughter and “family secrets hidden in a box embossed with a swastika, but nothing more. Because I couldn’t get those first pages out of my head, though, I decided to find the story and tell it.”
An Observant and Compassionate Nurse
The tale centers around nurse Allina Strauss, who learns of her maternal Jewish heritage as an adult. The German officer with whom she comes to conspire at Hochland Home also has hidden Jewish ancestry. They are both “Mischling:” hybrid, mongrel, half-breed.
As the tale opens, an SS officer finds Allina, shattered after a gang rape that happened after her village was decimated, the aunt and uncle raising her among the many dead. The officer takes her to Hochland Home, where she is put to work as a Schwester, or nurse. Her first post is to tend the newborns, where SS officer, Gruppenfuhrer von Strassberg observes her singing to comfort a child – against the rules that call for sensory deprivation. They meet again and slowly develop a tentative friendship, before Allina realizes how much they have in common.
Alas, the tale takes a predictable romantic turn, perhaps to broaden the appeal. It instantly reminded me of the excruciatingly sappy love story in Kristin Hannah’s novel The Women, (see It’s the Biggest New Novel of the Year. It’s Almost Unreaadably Bad in Slate.) “Kristin Hannah’s The Women is like if Colleen Hoover wrote a Vietnam novel.” When The Sunflower House mentioned the Gruppenfuhrer’s strong, handsome jaw for the third time, I knew we were in for it.
I digress.
The Mysterious Third Floor
The horror begins to unfold when Allina shows her new friend the toddlers on the third floor, sequestered because they are “slow.” These children have been silent since 6 months of age, Schwester Allina explains, because their cries have been ignored. They give up.
“Children learn to speak from their parents by mimicking the words they hear. We barely speak when we tend them. We’re too busy, so no teaching occurs,” Allina explains to the Gruppenfuhrer. The staff is also too busy to see that children eat, so they become malnourished, although the home serves bountiful food.
The room of quiet children on the third floor reeks. “There aren’t enough Schwestern to tend the children,” Allina whispers to the Gruppenfuhrer. “We’ve little time to interact with them, never mind toilet train. We treat them like pets. No, that’s not true. Hunting dogs get more affection.” The toddlers, still in diapers, regularly remove them, she adds.
In the rec room, many of the two dozen kids lay on mats, staring into space, rocking, others “humming or babbling like infants.” A boy, Otto, rises and approaches the visitors, legs bowed.
“Otto must be the victim of a birth defect,” the Gruppenfuhrer comments.
No, Allina explains. The children are tucked so tightly into bed at night, because there aren’t enough staff to meet their needs, that skeletal development halts. “Even the oldest ones still prefer to crawl.” And some 40 percent of the children at Hochland Home are deemed “slow, unfit to be a ‘child of Hitler.’”
Otto and the group are headed to “a special orphanage run by the Lebensborn program” within the month, Allina whispers. “Adopting families want perfect children. They’ll never accept ones like these. They expect Edelprodukt – top-quality goods – not sick and slow children.” The narrative doesn’t elaborate on their fate.
A Hopeful Ending
As Allina and the strong-jawed Nazi officer grow closer, they learn of each other’s hidden Jewish ancestry. And then they get to work, with a network of others, arranging transport of doomed children out of Germany. Adriana Allegri evokes a scene that is a far cry from the Von Trapp kids traipsing over the mountains to safety as they yodel away.
I love historical fiction because facts are woven into a narrative context that humanizes atrocities. The Sunflower House takes its place among Kristin Hannah’s The Nightingale and Kristin Harmel’s The Forest of Vanishing Stars as compelling historical fiction illuminating a most terrible time.
Adriana Allegri’s webpage.