The Nazi Program That Stole 200,000 Children & Erased Their Identities

Added: 2026-06-03

[00:00:00]Did you know the Nazis didn't [music] just breed children? They stole them from their own families and made them disappear completely. It was called the Lebensborn program. Most people think it was just about SS officers fathering children with German women, but that was only part of it. Across occupied Poland, Norway, Czechoslovakia, >> [music] >> and Yugoslavia, SS officers moved through villages looking for children with light eyes, light hair, and what they called good bone structure.

[00:00:27]Children as young as 2 years old were taken. Their parents were handed a piece of paper saying the child had died. The children were given new German names, new families, [music] and new birth records. Every trace of who they actually were got destroyed.

[00:00:41]After the war, thousands of these children grew up as Germans with no idea they had been stolen. Some were in their 40s and 50s before they found out the truth. One survivor, Erika Matthias, searched for her biological family for over 30 years. Her mother had never stopped looking for her, either. They had both been searching their entire lives without knowing the other was still alive. The cruelest part was not the theft. It was the silence that followed it.