The Lebensborn programme was the brainchild of Himmler: an extraordinary plan to create an Aryan master race, leaving behind thousands of displaced victims in the wake of the Nazi regime. In 1942 Erika, a baby girl from Sauerbrunn in Yugoslavia, was taken for a medical examination by the Nazi occupiers. Declared an Aryan, she was removed from her mother and held in a childrens home; her true identity erased, she became Ingrid von Oelhafen. Later, as Ingrid began to uncover her true identity, the full scale of the Lebensborn scheme and the Nazi obsession with bloodlines became clear - including the kidnapping of up to half a million babies like her, and the deliberate murder of children born into the programme who were deemed substandard. Written with insight and compassion, this is a powerful meditation on the personal legacy of Hitlers vision, of Germanys brutal past and of a divided Europe that for many years struggled to come to terms with its own history.
