I FIRST HEARD about the Lebensborn program from my mother-in-law, the late Lidia (Krawchuk) Skrypuch. The Nazi front passed through her city of Zolochiv twice and soldiers took over her house. She and her parents became prisoners in their own home. One day she overheard bits of conversation from the Nazi officers. Something was happening at her school the next day. Her parents kept her home. When she did go back to school, all of her blond and blue-eyed female classmates had disappeared. She heard they had been taken for the Lebensborn program. I asked her what that meant.

The Lebensborn Program

The Holocaust—the Nazi murder of six million Jews during World War II—is well documented. Most people are not as aware of the Nazis’ plans for other people. Hitler and the Nazis believed that the Germanic peoples of Central Europe were the descendants of “Aryans”—members of a “master race” whose destiny was to rule the world. Other ethnic groups were sorted into a pecking order, based on how much “Aryan blood” they supposedly had. Most of the peoples of Northern Europe, Great Britain, and the Low Countries, as well as parts of France, were considered mostly or partly Aryan. Other groups, especially in the south of Europe, were judged less pure but acceptable as neighbors and allies. At the very bottom of this hierarchy were the Jews, along with the Roma (Gypsies). The Nazi goal was to exterminate every Jew and Rom in the world. The Nazis also planned to kill people they deemed mentally or physically unfit.

Nazi policy regarding the Slavs—who include the Russians, Ukrainians, and Byelorussians, as well as the Poles, Czechs, and many others—was less consistent. Slavs were categorized as racially inferior, and Hitler declared that most of their lands in Eastern Europe belonged to Germany as Lebensraum (“living space”) for the expansion of the Aryan race. Although the Nazis did not call for a Holocaust-style eradication of the Slavs, they treated civilians in Eastern Europe far more harshly than they did civilians elsewhere in Europe. Historians estimate that at least 10 million civilian Slavs were killed by the Germans in Poland and the USSR.

In order to free up “living space” for Aryans, Slavs were to be deported en masse from their homelands. Others were to be sent to Germany as slave laborers. People from the eastern part of Ukraine made up the bulk of these slave laborers. British intelligence reports indicate that the rate of deportation from Soviet Ukraine at times approached 15,000 to 20,000 a day. Soviet cities were full of what the Nazis considered “superfluous eaters”—and death by starvation was common.

Hitler wanted more Aryans to be born, but German women weren’t having babies quickly enough. In 1936, Hitler’s secret police, the SS, created the Lebensborn (Fount of Life) program to increase the number of Aryan children, so that the master race could populate more of Europe. In the beginning, the Lebensborn program concentrated on making sure more Aryan babies were produced in Nazi-occupied parts of Europe. But between 1940 and 1942, the Germans also turned their attention to the blond, blue-eyed Polish and Ukrainian children from Eastern Europe, children who also looked Aryan. They began to steal these children from their parents.

There were two methods of rounding up children. The first was to take every child of a certain age in random villages or towns and sort through them, sending some to be killed, assigning others for slave labor, and yet others for adoption by Nazi families.

Method two involved using specially trained Nazi women known as Brown Sisters to go through a town searching for children with Aryan features. An Aryan-looking child would be offered candy, giving the Brown Sister the chance to ask questions. The child’s home would then be raided in the middle of the night and the child taken away.

The stolen children were put through tests, including the measurement of sixty-two body parts, to ensure that they were “racially valuable.” Any tiny shortcoming meant the difference between an adoptive home and either a concentration camp or a slave labor camp.

The final round of racially valuable children was then sent to special homes where the children were brainwashed into thinking that they were German. Some were told that their parents were dead, or had only been spies and liars. Children who were still young—under the age of eight—were then placed with their new Nazi families. Older children were put in Nazi Youth boarding schools or fostered out.

The Nazis went to great lengths to destroy the records of these children when it became clear that Germany would lose the war, so it is hard to know exactly how many were stolen in this way, although it is estimated to be about 250,000 Polish and Ukrainian children alone. The Nazis were so successful with this program that after the war, most of the stolen children refused to leave their German parents, even if their birth parents were still alive and could be located.

The Ostarbeiters

The Nazis didn’t just steal children. They also forced millions of young adults into forced labor. Those from Eastern Europe were called Ostarbeiters (Eastern Workers). They were treated harshly—often worked to death. They were required to wear a badge stitched with the letters OST and most lived behind barbed wire in guarded camps. There were 3 to 5.5 million Ostarbeiters in Nazi Germany. Most were Ukrainian. Many were forced to work in German munitions factories because the Nazis realized that these factories were prime targets for bombing by the Allied nations. Many Ostarbeiters died in Allied bombing raids.

Ukrainian Identity

Before World War II, the land where Ukrainians had lived for more than a thousand years had become part of Poland and the Soviet Union. Since wartime statistics identified people by their citizenship, not ethnicity, Ukrainians were identified as Polish or “Soviet” (which was often inaccurately presumed to be Russian). The fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 has made long-suppressed archival information more available to researchers, and has also heightened public awareness of ethnic distinctions among the peoples of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. Both developments have allowed a truer picture of the Ukrainian experience of World War II to emerge. The nation of Ukraine declared its independence in 1991.