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superior in strength to any other in the world. By 1939 the SS numbered approximately 500,000 and were the principal enforcers of the Nazis racial doctrine. It was the SS who ran the majority of Hitler’s concentration and extermination camps as well as forming the Einsatzgruppen (special forces) who were given the task of cleansing eastern Europe of Jews. In January 1937, Himmler made a speech during which he stated that the sole mission of the German people was ‘the struggle for the extermination of any sub-humans, all over the world, who are in league against Germany, which is the nucleus of the Nordic race; against Germany, nucleus of the German nation, against Germany the custodian of human culture; they mean the existence or non-existence of the white man, and we guide his destiny.’ 6 These could have been the words of any member of the Thule Society so in tune were they with the group’s beliefs, but unlike the Thules, Himmler actually had the power to put his dreams into action. From the outset of his career in office, Himmler pursued his idea of racial selection and introduced special marriage laws which encouraged the coupling of people of ‘high value’. In turn this led to the establishment of a human stud farm known as the Lebensborn.
    Initially the Lebensborn, which was set up by Himmler in December 1935, worked with one aim in mind, that of permitting racially pure young girls the possibility of giving birth to a child which would afterwards be adopted by an SS family. But with the passing of time Himmler’s plans grew ever more sinister and on 28 October 1939 he made a speech which included the now famous edict that, ‘it will be the sublime task of German women and girls of good blood acting not frivolously but from a profound moral seriousness to become mothers to children of soldiers setting off to battle.’ 7 He subsequently turned the Lebensborn into a place where German women with perfect Nordic traits could ‘meet’ SS soldiers with the sole intention of producing children who would then be classed racially superior because of their parentage. Himmler also sanctioned the kidnapping of children who matched the Nazis’ idea of racially pure stock – blond hair and blue eyes – from the Reich’s eastern occupied territories. Thousands of children were transported to the Lebensborn and told that their parents had abandoned them. Afterwards they would be ‘re-educated’ (Germanized) with a few lucky ones being adopted into SS families. The rest, those who refused to co-operate with their kidnappers, were later transported to concentration camps and killed.
    But the most extreme example of Himmler’s wickedness occurred in 1942 when an SS unit was sent to the Czech village of Lidice after the assassination of the local SS governor Reinhard Tristan Heydrich in Prague. In reprisal for the killing of Heydrich, the SS executed the entire male population of the village. They then selected ninety-one children whom they considered met the Nazis’ racial standards and these children were taken away to be resettled at the Lebensborn while those left behind were sent to extermination camps.
    To this day no one has been able to calculate just how many children were kidnapped from the eastern occupied territories although, in 1946, the estimate ran at approximately 250,000. After the war a mere 25,000 were tracked down and returned to their proper families but many SS parents refused to let their ‘adopted’ children go, with some of the children even refusing to be repatriated because they had been so indoctrinated that they believed themselves to be 100 percent Germanic.
    As horrific as the Lebensborn project was, it was only one of many criminal schemes perpetrated during the war in the name of racial purity. What the Thule Society had begun blossomed during the Nazi era in ways unimaginable to most of humanity. On 15 September 1935