Spring Of Life

The DVD includes an interview with author and historian Michael Leapman, entitled Children, Lebensborn And The Nazi Racial Ideal, an impressively thorough, if slightly dry feature (33 minutes in length) which provides detailed historical background and context for the film’s events, explaining the theory and practice of Lebensborn.

The DVD also features a stills gallery with key images from the film, alongside the film’s original Czech trailer (albeit lacking English subtitles), and some other poorly chosen promotional trailers for much more explicit films, which appear to have little or nothing in common with Spring of Life.

Of far greater interest are the four excellent pieces of archive footage, comprising: a selection of Lebensborn yearbooks from the 1930s; a section of photographs, posters, books and other documents outlining the racially motivated origins of Lebensborn; Hitler youth campaigns to indoctrinate the young into the notion of Aryan supremacy; and a selection of miscellaneous but nevertheless well-chosen Nazi propaganda material.

What makes this DVD so unusual is that, for once, the package eschews the obvious ‘Making of’ feature and interviews with the cast, in favour of a detailed and impressive historical background to the film which is entirely appropriate to the subject matter, especially given that Lebensborn is one of much less well-known facets of Nazi ideology. A happy middle-ground which included some kind of dialogue with the cast, the director and/or the writer of the novel would have been nice, but the end result is nevertheless a very impressive companion to the film.