Lebensborn e.V.

Scope and content

The collection mainly comprises files about the professional activities of Dr. Gregor Ebner who was a board member of Lebensborn e.V., director of its health care department, and director of the Lebensborn home Hochland in Steinhöring. The topics at times exceed, as he himself once noted, his official responsibilities (NS 1 / 7095, fol. 164; digital archive: ID no. 82458553). For the most part the documents cover the extensive field of care and support for mothers and children outside of and more specifically inside Lebensborn homes. Their contents include matters of support for single mothers in need, conditions during home stays, food and medical supplies as well as general and particular medical incidents and issues concerning the doctors; they also contain rather disconcerting files on the treatment of disabled children and children with behavioural problems, and on the ideological indoctrination of mothers. 22 files with medical statistics are relatively extensive; records dealing with questions of guardianship and adoption are less substantial. With the ongoing archival descriptions, however, supplementary information has to be expected from the so-called "Child Tracing Archive" at the ITS. Files on the subject of marriage and marriage agency originated partly from public misconceptions about the functions of Lebensborn e.V. To some extent it was assumed to be an ideology-driven marriage agency. The correspondence available on the subject reveals efforts to correct those perceptions and to offer some advise in the response to enquiries. Compared with the volume of these fragmented records, the documents relating to Lebensborn personnel are fairly comprehensive. There are of course also files concerning general administrative matters of the association and the homes, for example schedules of daily routines etc. Several files cover building and property administration matters. Central among the foreign Lebensborn homes are those in the General Government (one file), Luxembourg (two files), France (one file), the Netherlands (one file) Belgium (four files) and Norway (three files). The collection has a strong imprint of Ebner's personal style and contains a large number of correspondences of a semi-private and often of a private nature. A total of 26 folders containing entirely private correspondences had to be separated from the official record classification and assigned a class specifically created for them.