German Nazis plan SS-style baby farm

Anger of a quiet German village where neo-Nazis plan an SS-style baby farm
By Tony Paterson in Berlin
16 July 2004


A normally tranquil west German village has been traumatised by a notorious neo-Nazi lawyer's plans to turn its 19th-century manor house and adjoining estate into an Aryan-style baby farm designed to further the Nordic race.

The dubious project has been launched by Jürgen Rieger, a wealthy 57-year-old Hamburg lawyer and specialist in defending members of the German far right. He has convictions for incitement to racial hatred.

The former member of the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party has appeared at far-right rallies in Britain and praised the British fascist Oswald Mosley. He is also a fervent advocate of "racial purity". In a book on the subject, he wrote of the "disastrous effects of bastardising races" and promised, "the white giants are coming".

This year, Mr Rieger paid €225,000 (£150,000) for the graceful Heisenhof, a turn-of-the century manor house and its estate, in the idyllic commuter village of Doerverden near Bremen, in Lower Saxony.

This week, Doerverden's inhabitants have been shocked to learn what Mr Rieger is planning. "We are seriously worried about public order," Rainer Herbst, the village mayor, said. "The image of Doerverden is likely to suffer. At first, we thought he was merely planning to develop agricultural fertilisers and manure. We didn't realise human fertilisation is intended."

The villagers' suspicions were aroused after German media reports revealed that the official purchaser of the Heisenhof was the Wilhelm Tietjen Foundation for Fertilisation Ltd, a London-based fertility research organisation of which Mr Rieger is director.

The foundation is funded by the copious financial assets of the late Wilhelm Tietjen, a diehard Nazi loyalist and stock-market speculator who set up his fertility research organisation to further the Nordic races before his death in 2002. Mr Teitjen was infertile.

The concept was developed during the Third Reich when the Nazi party set up its notorious Lebensborn organisation, encouraging German mothers to produce offspring by having sex with hand-picked SS men.

Mr Rieger, a senior member of a group called "Germanic faith community for life creation", says the foundation "aims to help childless couples produce children". He claims the foundation is based in London for legal reasons. "The use of surrogate mothers is banned in Germany but not in England," he said.

Mr Rieger declined to comment on the "Nordic" aspect of his proposed fertility clinic and has not revealed whether British surrogate mothers might be involved.

Previous attempts by Mr Rieger to set up Nordic race farms were disastrous. In 1995, he invested €1.1m in a similar manor house and estate in western Sweden which was intended to house a "Germanic land collective for members of the Nordic-blond race". The project failed because not enough Aryan participants could be found. The collective's attempts at farm fertilisation was chaotic. A breed of carefully nurtured Nordic pigs escaped the estate and devastated private gardens.

Alarm bells are now ringing in the government of Lower Saxony. Uwe Schuenemann, the interior minister, said: "We shall be keeping a close watch on Doerverden."