Published: Mar 12, 2005 OSLO, Norway (AP) - Gathered at the Royal Christiania Hotel overlooking rain-swept Oslo, the men and women with their name tags and windbreakers could pass for a perfectly ordinary party of over-60s on an outing.
Posted on 03/12/2005 11:21:47 AM PST by TheOtherOne
Innocent Children of Hitler's Racial Master Plan Still Haunt Norway 60 Years After War's End
Published: Mar 12, 2005 OSLO, Norway (AP) - Gathered at the Royal Christiania Hotel overlooking rain-swept Oslo, the men and women with their name tags and windbreakers could pass for a perfectly ordinary party of over-60s on an outing.
But these 30 or so Norwegians, about to set out on a day cruise, are anything but ordinary.
There's Paul Hansen, who grew up in a mental home even though there was nothing wrong with him. There's Tove Laila Strand, sipping a drink and looking as fragile as the single orange zinnia on her table. Her parents used to beat her with a clothes hanger.
Downstairs in the lobby, Hugo Frebel, a large, amiable 62-year-old, starts to tell his story, then lowers his voice and glances around. "People are listening," he says, and leads his guest upstairs to the company of the few people who can possibly understand what he has been through - the League Lebensborn of Norwegian Children of War.
Of all the victims of World War II who still gnaw at Europe's conscience, these are the last and in many ways the saddest. They are the children born of Hitler's dream of breeding a master race by pairing German soldiers with north European women deemed to meet the blond, fair-skinned "Aryan ideal."
Their parentage condemned many of them to the margins of society. It denied them an education or cost them their marriages. Only now, as the 60th anniversary of the war's end approaches, is the government offering them a measure of compensation.
"I was a German baby. Worse than an insect," Frebel recalls. "They threw stones at us. In the winter, we had to shovel snow out of the living room because people had broken the windows with rocks."
During the five-year occupation, tens of thousands of children across Europe were born of relationships between German soldiers and local women. But in Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands and Belgium, there was a more sinister side to the liaisons. It was called Lebensborn, or Fountain of Life.
The program had been set up by German SS chief Heinrich Himmler in 1935 to propagate Aryan children. After the Nazis overran Germany's neighbor states in 1940, German occupation soldiers were encouraged to find suitable local mates. Once pregnant, the women could turn to one of 10 homes, which would eventually register about 8,000 Lebensborn children. The first opened in March 1941.
A Lebensborn home was used not as a breeding facility, as some people have believed, "but more as a care facility," said Stein U. Larsen, of the War and Children research project in the western Norway city of Bergen.
Lebensborn mothers were cared for and gave birth in the homes. They could then choose to keep the baby or have it adopted by a staunchly Nazi family in Norway or Germany. But only those who met the Nazis' race criteria were accepted.
After the war, Paul Hansen was one of many Lebensborn children who were put in mental institutions, even though their only abnormality was having a German father. Hansen is 62 now, and the memory still brings him close to tears. "Why the hell did they send us there?" he asks. "What did we do wrong?"
Norwegian society has long preferred to dodge the question.
When the Lebensborn finally started coming out of the shadows and organizing a few years ago, the government said it was too late to investigate their postwar treatment, and the courts threw out their class action suit because the statute of limitations had expired.
In 2002, however, Parliament ordered the state to make amends, and last July the government made an offer: up to 200,000 kroner ($31,750), depending on how much suffering the victims could document.
Frebel was furious.
"The compensation offer was a slap in the face," he says. "I'll be damned if I'll sit in front of a government panel and let them decide how much I suffered."
Norway is so far the only Lebensborn-affected country to make such an offer. Denmark has at least 5,000 "German Babies."
Some have formed an association, more to trace their biological roots than to seek compensation, since there were few reports of government abuses in Denmark, and the children's ancestry was kept hidden.
But for some, a deeply guarded family secret became the shock of their lives, revealed by accident.
"It could be a family member who was drunk at a family gathering or an angry mother shouting at her child," Arne Oeland, a Lebensborn child who now chairs the association Children of War Denmark, said in Copenhagen.
"It was terrible. Afterward we had to live with the horrible descriptions that our father was a German war criminal and our mother was a prostitute," he said.
In the Netherlands, Albert van Aldijk was born in May 1942 in Haarlem, near Amsterdam, to a Dutch mother and a German navy officer. He said there were at least 15,000 "German Babies" in the Netherlands, many of whom are still afraid to come forward.
Van Aldijk, like many, was given his mother's Dutch name, he said.
Outside Germany, Norway was the jewel of the Lebensborn program, and the postwar hatred of its children was the greatest.
Hundreds of Norwegian resistance fighters had been killed on missions, or tortured and executed. Norwegians felt betrayed by their German-appointed puppet ruler, Vidkun Quisling, whose name has become a dictionary synonym for a traitor. Anything German was regarded as tainted.
"For half the population, we were the German bastards. For the other half, the religious half, we were the immoral love children," said Bjoern A. Drivdal, secretary of the League Lebensborn.
In the hotel, as the war babies gather to board a Denmark-bound ferry on which they'll hold the annual meeting of their organization, the stories emerge one by one:
-Paul Hansen, born in a Lebensborn home to a German Luftwaffe pilot, Paul Lissak, was institutionalized from age 3 and released 20 years later. "It seems that I sustained some damage there," he says in quiet understatement, his eyes blinking rapidly. His mother had moved to Germany and he visited in 1965 after his release, but felt he was an intruder. His father had been dead for 12 years. "Our mothers were bitter, but we were the ones who got the blame."
Without much education or job training, Hansen ended up working as a janitor at a college.
-Tove Laila Strand's German father, Werner Perku, was killed in action and she was taken in by his parents in Germany. She was happy then, but after the war the Norwegian government repatriated her to her mother and her new husband, both of whom hated her. "That's when hell started," she said. "They would beat me with a clothes hanger. One would hold me and the other would beat me." Twice divorced, she has two children and lives on a disability pension.
-Egil Paul Gustavsen, a housepainter, remembers an uncle who kept dogs and "would train me as if I were one of the dogs." But he never quite new why. Even after he discovered his father was a German soldier who had returned to Germany, he didn't think much of it. But after the father died, he visited his half-sisters in Germany. They took one look, brushed his birth certificate aside and said they saw their father in him. Gustavsen had finally found a family of sorts, with whom he remains in contact. "Now I am also not afraid to show who I am."
Jan. G. Lehmbecker, born of an adulterous fling with a German soldier, was a living humiliation to his stepfather. "He didn't want a 'German devil' having his name." So he joined the merchant marine at age 15.
So did Hugo Frebel, born to German army Capt. Ernst August Frebel. "Most Norwegians go to sea. We war babies fled to sea," he says.
Frebel and his half-brother by a different German soldier grew up with their mother in Krampenes, a village of about 100 people in the Norwegian Arctic.
There were whispers of "German Baby," and even before starting school, he learned who his father was. Years later he tracked him down in Germany, but "he wanted nothing to do with me."
He found refuge in the wilderness, and occasional companionship with the Sami, the indigenous reindeer herders of the Arctic. They had something in common: The Sami, like the war babies, were shunned by mainstream society.
The Sami "did not care that we were war babies," said Frebel. "But sometimes they got a hard time about it from the so-called 'proper Norwegians'."
The hurt continues.
"My aunt said to me a week ago, 'I won't give you a share of my inheritance because your father was German.' I said, 'It was not my choice. I had no say in who my parents were.'"
---
Associated Press reporters Jan M. Olsen in Copenhagen and Daniel Peters in Amsterdam contributed to this story.
---
On the Net:
http://home.no.net/lebenorg
http://www.nkbf.no/Engelsk/main(underscore)e.htm
http://www.krigsboern.dk
http://www.warandchildren.org
AP-ES-03-12-05 1359EST
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ping
The treatment of these people is shameful.
They were the product of a diabolical scheme, but off course are totally innocent.
Cheers.
Interesting story. Yet more proof that the Nazis were basically a form of utopian leftists - not Gerrman nationalists as the leftist MSM has been stating for decades. The "Aryans" were a non-exisitant race who were to be created from raw material after which they would assume their rightful place as masters of the universe. It's the standard leftist melodrama of the oppressed supermen rising to overthrow their oppressor subhumans in order to usher in utopia. Lenin and Stalin were going to create the "new Soviet man" form the raw material of the workers and peasants.
Yet another twist on the central lie of all leftist thought from Rousseau, Hegel, and the Jacobins onward: Man = God. As real faith is abandoned, false gods arise. Beware, America.
The article doesn't seem to say how the female participants were, uh, "recruited." It's probably not a tale that would reflect well on the Nazi occupation authorities.
Yet another twist on the central lie of all leftist thought from Rousseau, Hegel, and the Jacobins onward: Man = God. As real faith is abandoned, false gods arise.
The anciet Jews had this figured out long ago. Read Moses, The 10 conmmandments, the golden Calf.
You're right, of course. The central lie has been around since Satan's rebellion, and people have been falling for it since Adam and Eve. "...for God knows that when you eat it, your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil."
Hitlers planned race breeding, ping.
Little need to recruit them. The Nazi propaganda machine made such births a service to the Fatherland. The more kids,-- the more awards, the more medals, even a pension.
More Margaret Sanger nonsense
.
Except that the Fatherland of Germany hardly means much to Norwegians.
Cheers.
how sad
The Nazis regarded conventional ideas about marriage and the nuclear family as mere bourgeois morality. The Lebensborn program is one example of this; Hitler's having five children with Eva Braun without marrying her is another. This is one of the clearest indications that their ideological origins were on the left.
Another way in which they show their true commie socialist bona fides.
This shows we haven't learned a thing from history. Right now, muslim terrorists rape village women in Sudan in order to breed the tribes out of existence. This was also done in Bosnia.
Norski roots ping.
Thanks for an interesting, but disturbing post.
Interesting echo of WW2.
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