OF PURE BLOOD

Even the most habituated student of Nazism will be appalled by this account of the Lebensraum ""Fount of Life"" organization, which not only ran SS breeding centers but participated in mass kidnappings of children in occupied territory, according to the authors' three-year researches. These children--estimated at 20,000 in Poland alone--were then sorted out; some were killed, some sterilized and dispatched to slave labor, and the ""most racially acceptable"" sent to be adopted as German youth. Young girls were branded, given hormone shots to accelerate puberty, and then slated for death after their procreative stints. Meanwhile, the SS maternity homes, spreading from Germany to parts of the Greater Reich, continued to turn out ""eugenically superior"" children--with an exceptionally high mortality rate and a disproportionate incidence of birth defects and mental backwardness. After the war, the authors charge, the Nuremberg Court neglected evidence of the Lebensraum role in crimes against humanity; and, as the Cold War intensified, the Allies obstructed repatriation of stolen children to Eastern Europe (while some grown children insisted they didn't want to know their real parents). Written in often disconnected but forceful fashion, with abundant interviews, photographs, case histories, and documentary evidence, this is an essential addition to the annals.