These are the children of the Lebensborn, an SS program devised to propagate Aryan traits. On this chilly weekend, they gathered here in a corner of central Germany to share their stories, and to speak publicly, for the first time, about the horror of finding out they had been bred to be the next generation of Nazi elite.

“This is the opposite example of the Holocaust,” said Gisela Heidenreich, 63, a family therapist from Bavaria, whose mother was unmarried and whose father, she later discovered, was a senior SS officer. “The idea was to further the Aryan race by whatever means were available.”

Lebensborn, or spring of life, refers to a series of clinics scattered throughout Germany and neighboring countries, to which pregnant women, most of them single, went to give birth in secret. They were cared for by doctors and nurses employed by the SS, the Nazi Party’s feared paramilitary unit.

One such clinic sits at the top of a gentle hill in Wernigerode, a remote town near the Harz Mountains. The building, long abandoned now, was part of a bittersweet homecoming tour for the 40 or so people who turned out for the meeting of an association known as Traces of Life.

To be accepted into the Lebensborn, pregnant women had to have the right racial characteristics — blonde hair and blue eyes — prove that they had no genetic disorders, and be able to prove the identity of the father, who had to meet similar criteria. They had to swear fealty to Nazism, and were indoctrinated with Hitler’s ideology while they were in residence.