Stories of this Canadian girl's adventures exploring Europe & beyond...join me!

Saturday, May 28, 2011

gramps

The other night, great guy and I went to our lieblings platz (favorite place), called ‘the bauer’. On this particular evening, a cheery, old guy approached us and loudly said, ‘Hallo!’ Here was a man; white, wavy hair, over-sized glasses sitting too far down on his nose, a blue, plaid shirt with suspenders, too short trousers, with brown socks and sandals…seriously, a text-book description of a fairy-tale grandpa.

He used to help great guy get parts for his old BMW motorbike, but they hadn’t seen each other for a while. So, gramps sat down with us and chatted away.

Gramps talked about everything, from motorbikes to how he and his wife were star-crossed lovers when they first met, from being a postal carrier to how his son and daughter-in-law won’t move out. But, then he started talking about his wife’s family, and how his wife’s sister (the first child) was born in a Lebensborn, on the outskirts of Wien (Vienna), sometime around 1942.

I had no idea what a Lebensborn was, and so he explained it to me. Shocking. The abridged version, is that Hitler created these idyllic, serene, luxurious nests in the late ‘30’s and through-out WWII. The Nazis would hand-pick all the blonde, blue-eyed, beautiful girls from around Germany and Austria and ‘invite’ them to live in these beautiful places. Here, they wanted for nothing, where all around them on the outside people had nothing. And, in these places, the soldiers and generals from the Nazi Reich, and these girls would ‘hook up’…thereby creating, what Hitler hoped, the perfect people.

It sounds so unbelievable to me…like it could only have been a film plot. Of course, I know that there were many unimaginable things that happened here, and which still happen in places all around the world. But, I just would like to ask one question: Why was Hitler trying to create a perfect group of people which he never would have belonged too?
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