The Lebensborn was an organisation founded in 1935 on the initiative of Heinrich Himmler, leader of the SS, initially for the wives of SS men and also to enable unmarried pregnant women to give birth and have their child adopted. When the war came the Lebensborn also took in the offspring of women in certain of the occupied countries who had become pregnant by members of the German armed forces. After the war many ex-Lebensborn children found themselves in the German Democratic Republic, whose spy-masters hit on the idea of sending them to the West for espionage purposes. The story of The Lebensborn Spy is loosely based on one such mission.