Norwegians born in Nazi baby farms go to court

Published on Tuesday 30 October 2001 00:00

A COURT in Norway yesterday began hearing the claims of people "sired" at Nazi baby farms during the Second World War, who grew up in their liberated land as second class citizens.

They are now seeking millions of pounds in compensation and are reckoning with history which they claim modern day Norway is unwilling to give them.

The claimants were all offspring of Norwegian women and German men, most of them born into the "Fountain of Life" scheme set up by Hitler’s chief genetics mastermind, the SS leader Heinrich Himmler.

The Lebensborn Foundation was the Nazi quest to create an Aryan race to rule Europe and Russia. Hundreds of thousands of children were born to SS studs in these baby farms across Europe.

Some 50,000 Norwegian women are estimated to have been in the programme or to have had affairs with occupying German soldiers resulting in 12,000 babies being born to them.

Himmler saw in the blond, blue-eyed Norwegians acceptable Nordic traits that made them eligible for inclusion in the German super race planned to govern the continent.

But the court near Oslo yesterday heard how a liberated Norway treated the offspring of the Lebensborn programme with utter contempt and callousness.

People claimed they were shut away in mental homes, that they were beaten and tortured because, in the words of one man, "we were regarded as the rubbish that the Germans left behind."

Paul Hansen was born on 7 April, 1944 and dumped into a Lebensborn home after birth where SS nurses were to indoctrinate him in Nazi ideology. The war ended 13 months later and with it, he said, any chance of a normal life.

In one of the 150 specimen cases being brought before the court near Oslo, he said: "The Norwegian government sent me to a home for the mentally ill because of my origin.

"I lived in a variety of mental homes, attended special schools and had no contact with normal children even though there was nothing wrong with me.

"First they took my childhood then my youth.

"Now as a man I demand an apology and compensation for what I suffered."

Harriet von Nickel, born to a German father and Norwegian woman in Oslo, was not created at one of the baby farms, but that did not save her from the wrath of brutal foster parents who "took every opportunity to beat the German out of me".

She added: "I was an outcast. Drunken fishermen grabbed me when I was little and carved a swastika on my forehead with a rusty nail. I was regarded as fair game."

Randi Hagen Spydevold, a lawyer for some of the claimants, said: "The matter of concern is making the public know what happened to them and to get an apology from the government.

"I remember when I was a child all we learned in school was how bravely the resistance fought against the Nazis. But what we were not allowed to get to know was how we treated our own children."

Tor Brandacher, spokesman for many of the claimants said: "We needed somebody to hate after 1945 and the women and their children were the ideal target."

Mr Brandacher himself, the son of an Austrian soldier, was shut away as a child and repeatedly sexually abused in a government home.

Many damning documents will be presented to the court. Dr Johan Riis - who toed the government line after 1945 that these children represented a rogue gene in the body of Norway - turned the entire concept of the racial programme on its head when he wrote in 1945 on an official document "nobody should think that these genetically inferior children will become valuable citizens".

"One could as well hope that the rats in the cellar were turning into guinea pigs," Dr Riis wrote.

The previous governments have wanted to hear nothing about apologies saying that the attitudes of previous governments do not reflect modern day thinking.

Mr Brandacher said an apology must be made, adding: "No society can live with such a past in peace.

"We want a full reckoning with that past in court."