A group representing thousands of people born under the Lebensborn (Spring of Life) programme of Heinrich Himmler, the leader of the SS, met at the weekend in Wernigerode, the site of a Lebensborn birth clinic, to share experiences and help each other to trace their true parents — who were often committed Nazis.

Peter Naumann, the chairman of the self-help group, which was set up last year, said: “A lot of us have only recently started to seek out where we came from. When you retire you look back on your life.”

Most Lebensborn records were burnt at the end of the Second World War and the children have been confronted by silence from their families for decades. Some documents were found recently in the loft of the half-timbered Wernigerode clinic, which was a women’s hospital until 1999.

The mothers’ silence, the taint of illegitimacy and the connection with a Nazi project prompted many Lebensborn children to keep quiet about their past for decades. But the sense of shame has waned with time, and the curiosity has returned.

The programme was attached to the SS and designed to encourage women of “pure blood” to bear blond, blue-eyed children. Lebensborn, set up in late 1935, was aimed at halting the high rate of abortions of illegitimate children in Germany caused by a shortage of men to marry after the First World War. It enabled women who had become pregnant out of wedlock to give birth anonymously away from their homes. Lebensborn also ran children’s homes and an adoption service if the mother did not want to keep the child.

The fathers were in some cases married members of the SS who had heeded Himmler’s call to spread their Aryan seed. The entry requirements for the clinics were as strict as for the SS itself. The women had to prove that they and the father were of Aryan stock back to their grandparents.

The children were christened in an SS ritual in which the SS dagger was held over them as the mother swore allegiance to Nazi ideology.

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Hitler believed the “Nordic race” was destined to rule the world. But many Lebensborn children ended up emotionally scarred underachievers, craving the warmth of family ties and alienated from their foster parents or mothers, who in many cases refused to speak about the programme, either out of shame or loyalty to the SS oath that they had sworn. The children’s suffering was worst in Norway, where many never recovered from the stigma of having a German father. Some were put in mental asylums.

Guntram Weber, 63, a creative writing teacher from Berlin, found out only recently that Heinrich Himmler was his godfather and that his father had been a major-general in the SS. “I suspected my mother had been lying to me for decades,” Herr Weber said. “She told me my father was a lorry driver for the Luftwaffe and died in Croatia. But there were no documents or photos.”

Acting on a hint from his stepfather, Herr Weber started researching when he was 58 and found out that he was a Lebensborn child.

“From one day to the next I knew my father was a war criminal,” he said. “He was married with three children when he got my mother pregnant. She must have been impressed by his rank. He fled to Argentina and died there in 1970.

“It gave me a feeling of low self-esteem, of loneliness, of uncertainty. But then I met other children who went through the same experience and it was a huge relief — although I haven’t been able to shake this feeling of inadequacy.”

Gisela Heidenreich, blue-eyed and tall with fair hair, found out in the 1950s that her father had been a married SS officer and her mother a secretary for Lebensborn. She started investigating her past when she was shown a magazine report about Lebensborn “studs” and “SS whores”.

“My world fell apart. My mother wasn’t a harmless quiet secretary, she was this whore who bred me,” Frau Heidenreich said.

Many of the mothers refuse to speak about Lebensborn all their lives. “Telling the truth is such a dreadful thing” said Frau Heidenreich, who has written a book about her own search for the truth.

“The guilt, the shame, the fear at having been caught up in the regime. They build a wall of lies and then someone comes along and threatens to tear it down. It’s almost life-threatening to them. That’s why they don’t talk.

“Many women swore the SS oath ‘My honour is loyalty’ which still seems to play a role in their lives. They’d rather die than tell the truth.”

NAZI EUGENICS

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