Good   blood   trauma   on   the   basis   of   factual   texts   on   the   organisation   Lebensborn e.V. (Gisela Heidenreich and Ingrid von Oelhafen) Cover Image

Trauma „dobrej krwi” na podstawie tekstów faktograficznych na temat organizacji Lebensborn e.V. (Gisela Heidenreich i Ingrid von Oelhafen)
Good blood trauma on the basis of factual texts on the organisation Lebensborn e.V. (Gisela Heidenreich and Ingrid von Oelhafen)

Author(s): Joanna Bednarska-Rydzewska
Subject(s): Politics / Political Sciences, Social Sciences, Sociology
Published by: KSIĘGARNIA AKADEMICKA Sp. z o.o.
Keywords: Lebensborn e.V.; remembrance; „good blood”; autosociobiography

Summary/Abstract: This article presents the memoir books of Ingrid von Oelhafen and Gisela Heidenreich. The authors are children of Lebensborn. Lebensborn was an institution functioning within the structures of the SS, officially operating as a welfare and charitable association. In reality, it was concerned with acquiring “good blood” for the Reich, mainly by fighting abortion and robbing children of non-German nationalities. There is a false myth in the culture about it, according to which the organisation’s houses were elite SS brothels and breeding houses. Von Oelhafen was kidnapped from her biological family as a child and subjected to a process of Germanisation. Heidenreich was born in a Lebensborn home as a child of declared Nazis. Both speak as mature women about the search for their own identity. A feeling that accompanied them throughout their lives was the shame of their own origins. Von Oelhafen and Heidenreich described their experiences of the Lebensborn organisation in autobiographical books, but emphasised that they represented not only themselves, but a whole group of people with similar life experiences. Therefore, the books will be interpreted using anautosociobiographical approach, i.e. they will be treated as the voices of a groupof people recognised by the National Socialists as representatives of the so-called”good (Nordic) blood”, and thus as racially superior people.

  • Issue Year: XXI/2024
  • Issue No: 92
  • Page Range: 99-118
  • Page Count: 20
  • Language: Polish
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