Description: My Enemys Cradle is about the Lebensborn Program of Nazi Germany during World War II which affected so many women and children in so many countries, and yet no one seem to know about it. Compelled to learn more, Sara Young knew that this was a book that needed to be written.
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M ining a lost piece of history, Sara Young takes us deep into the lives of women living in the worst of times. Part love story and part elegy for the terrible choices we must often make to survive, My Enemy's Cradle keens for what we lose in war and sings for the hope we sometimes find.
The Nazi's Lebensborn program urged women of "pure Aryan blood" to bear children in pursuit of a 'master race." In many cases, the fathers were high ranking officers in the SS, both married and unmarried that obeyed the SS leader Heinrich Himmler directive to procreate with carefully screened women. Lebensborn was another component of Nazi racial policy which killed 6 million Jews, sterilized countless other people viewed as defective, while encouraging the birth of children to populate the expanded Germany
Over 20,000 children were born in Germany and Norway alone as part of the Lebensborn master race breeding program, initially formed in 1935 by Himmler. In addition to the 23 Lebensborn maternity clinics in Germany, Austria and Norway, other facilities operated in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Poland and Luxembourg during World War II.