War children

Based on Wikipedia: War children

The Children Nobody Wanted

Imagine being punished for something that happened before you were born. Not a crime you committed, not a choice you made, but simply the circumstances of your conception. This was the reality for hundreds of thousands of children across Europe—born to local mothers and occupying soldiers during World War II, then made to pay for it their entire lives.

They were called "German kids" in Norway, spat upon in the streets. In France, their mothers' heads were shaved in public squares while crowds jeered. Some were shipped to mental institutions not because anything was wrong with them, but because nobody knew what else to do with these unwanted reminders of occupation, collaboration, and the complicated moral landscape of survival.

These are the war children.

What Makes a War Child

The term "war child" refers specifically to children born from relationships between local civilians and foreign military personnel—usually from an occupying force, though it also applies to children born near foreign military bases. This is distinct from children orphaned by war or displaced by conflict. War children carry a different burden: they are living evidence of fraternization with the enemy.

Throughout history and across nearly every culture, having a child with a member of a hostile military force has been viewed as betrayal. The logic is tribal and ancient: you've given comfort to our enemy, you've strengthened their bloodline, you've chosen them over us.

The reality, of course, was far more complicated.

The Impossible Choices Women Faced

Consider a young Norwegian woman in 1942. Her country has been occupied for two years. German soldiers are everywhere—billeted in homes, running the local administration, controlling the food supply. A relationship with a soldier might begin as genuine romance, or as a survival strategy, or as something in between that defies simple categorization. Sometimes there was no choice at all.

If she became pregnant, she faced a brutal calculus. Her options were limited, and none of them were good:

• Find a local man willing to marry her quickly and claim the child as his own
• Claim the father was unknown, dead, or had abandoned her, and raise the child alone
• Acknowledge the relationship openly and face the consequences
• Accept welfare from the German Lebensborn program, which supported children deemed racially valuable
• Give the child up for adoption or leave it at an orphanage
• Emigrate to Germany and start over with a new identity
• Seek an illegal abortion, risking her life

The postwar reckoning often ignored these impossible circumstances. It ignored the rapes by occupying forces. It ignored that survival under occupation sometimes meant doing whatever it took to get food, shelter, and protection. Victory brought liberation, but for these women and their children, it brought punishment.

The Lebensborn Program

To understand the Norwegian situation specifically, you need to understand Lebensborn. The word is German for "wellspring of life," and the program was one of several initiated by Heinrich Himmler, the leader of the Nazi SS, to engineer what they believed would be a racially pure Aryan population.

The program began as a welfare institution for the children of SS men and mothers who met Nazi racial standards. But as German forces occupied northern Europe, Lebensborn expanded dramatically. Norway was considered particularly valuable because Nazis viewed Norwegians as ideal Aryans—blonde, blue-eyed, Nordic.

A local office called Abteilung Lebensborn was established in Norway in 1941. It operated between nine and fifteen homes where pregnant women could give birth in safety, receive medical care, dental treatment, and child support. The facilities also served as permanent residences for some women until the war's end.

The numbers are striking. Of the estimated ten to twelve thousand children born to Norwegian mothers and German fathers during the occupation, eight thousand were registered with Lebensborn. In four thousand of those cases, the father's identity was documented. Many mothers were encouraged to give their children up for adoption, and significant numbers were transferred to Germany to be raised in orphanages or adopted by German families.

This created a strange situation. Children who had been born into a program designed to celebrate and protect them would find themselves, just years later, among the most despised people in their countries.

The Reckoning

When the war ended in May 1945, Europe erupted in a mixture of relief, grief, and rage. The occupation was over, but the losses were staggering. Families had been torn apart. Resistance fighters had been tortured and killed. Collaborators—real and suspected—faced immediate retribution.

The women who had been with German soldiers were easy targets.

In Norway, fourteen thousand women were arrested immediately after the peace on suspicion of "collaboration" or association with the enemy. Five thousand of them were placed in forced labor camps for a year and a half without any judicial process. Their heads were shaved. They were beaten. Some were raped—the same crime that many had endured from the occupiers.

Their children did not escape. A 1945 survey by the Norwegian Ministry of Social Affairs found that local governments in one-third of Norway's counties expressed unfavorable views toward war children. The children were called "tyskerunger"—a term that translates roughly as "German brats" or "Kraut kids."

In one particularly horrifying account, war children living in an orphanage in Bergen claim they were forced to parade through the streets so the local population could whip them and spit on them. These were children. Some were toddlers.

Proposals for Mass Deportation

The Norwegian government's response to the war children reveals how deep the hatred ran. Officials seriously proposed forcibly deporting eight thousand children and their mothers to Germany. The plan was ultimately shelved—not because of moral objections, but because there were concerns the deportees would have no means of livelihood in devastated postwar Germany.

Sweden was considered as an alternative destination. When Sweden declined to accept them, Australia was briefly discussed. The government was essentially shopping for any country willing to take these unwanted citizens.

Meanwhile, the five hundred children still being cared for in Lebensborn facilities when the war ended had to leave as the homes were closed. Some ended up in state custody during an era when such institutions were marked by strict discipline, inadequate education, and physical abuse. About twenty children were placed in a mental institution in 1946—not because they had mental illness, but simply because there was no space for them elsewhere and adoption attempts had failed. Some remained institutionalized past their eighteenth birthdays.

The Long Shadow

The persecution of war children wasn't a brief explosion of postwar anger that quickly burned itself out. The discrimination lasted for decades.

The mistreatment fell into predictable patterns. Name-calling was universal—"German whore" for the mothers, "German kid" for the children. Families were isolated by their communities. Children were bullied at school, sometimes by other children, sometimes by teachers and adults. Mothers lost their jobs. Opportunities were closed off.

These children grew up with a secret they could never discuss, in countries that wanted to forget they existed. Many describe living in a kind of "inner exile" until the 1980s, when some finally began to acknowledge their origins publicly.

In 1987, a woman named Bente Blehr became one of the first to refuse anonymity. An interview with her was published in a collection called "Born Guilty," which gathered twelve accounts from people whose parents had been associated with German forces in occupied Norway. Six years later, Eystein Eggen published "The Boy from Gimle," the first autobiography by the child of a German soldier and Norwegian mother. He dedicated it to all such children.

It had taken forty years for anyone to speak openly.

The Fight for Recognition

In December 1999, one hundred twenty-two Norwegian war children filed a claim in court against the state for failing to protect them as Norwegian citizens. The lawsuit was designed to test the boundaries of the law, with seven people formally signing the claim. It failed. The courts ruled the suits void due to the statute of limitations—too much time had passed to seek justice.

Norwegian law does allow citizens who experienced neglect or mistreatment by the state to apply for "simple compensation," an arrangement not subject to time limits. In July 2004, the government expanded this program to include war children who had experienced "lesser difficulties."

The compensation amounts are telling. The basic rate for what the Norwegian government termed "mobbing"—the bullying that defined these children's lives—was set at twenty thousand Norwegian kroner, roughly three thousand American dollars. Those who could document additional abuse might receive up to two hundred thousand kroner, about thirty thousand dollars.

Thirty thousand dollars for a lifetime of persecution.

In 2007, one hundred fifty-eight war children brought their case to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. They demanded reparations of between fifty thousand and two hundred thousand dollars each for systematic abuse. The Norwegian government contested the claim, arguing that the abuse had not occurred with government consent.

The case was dismissed in 2008. Each plaintiff was offered eight thousand pounds—roughly sixteen thousand dollars—as a token payment from the Norwegian government.

The LSD Experiments

In a disturbing footnote to this history, a motion filed in 2000 alleged that ten war children had been subjected to experiments with the psychedelic drug LSD, approved by the Norwegian government and financed by the Central Intelligence Agency, the American intelligence agency commonly known as the CIA.

This allegation fits into a broader pattern. During the postwar years, medical researchers in several European countries and the United States conducted clinical trials involving LSD, most taking place between 1950 and 1970. In Norway, these trials officially involved volunteer patients and followed medical protocols after traditional treatments had failed.

Whether war children were specifically targeted for experimentation because of their status—because they were considered expendable—remains a disturbing question that the historical record has not fully answered.

Beyond Norway: A European Pattern

Norway's experience, while well-documented, was not unique. The same dynamics played out across occupied Europe, with variations shaped by Nazi racial ideology.

In Denmark, which was occupied from 1940 to 1945, German soldiers were similarly encouraged to pursue relationships with Danish women, who were also considered suitably Aryan. The Danish government has documented five thousand five hundred seventy-nine such children, though estimates range up to eight thousand. The mothers were nicknamed "German Girls" in the same pejorative spirit as Norway's "German whores."

In 1999, the Danish government allowed war children access to parenthood archives, exempting them from the country's normal eighty-year secrecy period for such records. This was a significant gesture—allowing people approaching their sixties to finally learn who their fathers had been.

France presents a more complex picture. At the beginning of the occupation, German soldiers were actually forbidden from having relationships with French women. The Nazi regime viewed the French as racially inferior to Scandinavians. But enforcement proved impossible, and the military eventually tolerated fraternization while never officially encouraging it.

The numbers in France were staggering. Estimates of children born to French mothers and German fathers between 1941 and 1949 range from seventy-five thousand to two hundred thousand. When German troops were expelled, women known to have had German relationships were arrested, publicly judged, and exposed to condemnation in the streets. The head-shaving ritual that occurred across Europe was particularly widespread in France, creating iconic images of humiliation that have come to symbolize this period.

French war children eventually organized to represent their interests through groups like "Amicale Nationale des Enfants de la Guerre" and "Coeurs sans frontières," which translates to "Hearts without borders."

Finland: A Different Context

Finland's situation was unique. Finland was not occupied by Germany but rather allied with it against the Soviet Union—the enemy of Finland's enemy. This created different dynamics entirely.

Of the nearly half-million children born in Finland between 1940 and 1945, about eleven hundred were fathered by foreign troops. Approximately seven hundred had German fathers, two to three hundred had Soviet prisoner-of-war fathers, and about one hundred had Swedish volunteer fathers.

The German soldiers in Finland—numbering up to two hundred thousand, mostly stationed in Finnish Lapland—were generally aware of birth control methods, and the Wehrmacht kept them well-supplied with condoms. This appears to have kept pregnancy rates relatively low compared to other occupied territories.

Interestingly, a 1943 Wehrmacht publication actually allowed German soldiers to marry Finnish women who could be considered to represent the "Aryan race"—though the phrasing suggests uncertainty among Nazi authorities about whether ethnic Finns met their genetic standards. The Finns, after all, spoke a language completely unrelated to German and had cultural origins distinct from the Germanic and Nordic peoples.

The fate of Finnish war children varied greatly depending on their father's background. Children of German soldiers faced some discrimination but in a different context than those in occupied countries. Children of Soviet prisoners of war faced perhaps the most difficult circumstances, born to a mother who had relations with the hated enemy who had invaded Finland.

The Famous War Child

You may have heard a war child's voice without knowing it. Anni-Frid Lyngstad, the dark-haired singer from the Swedish pop group ABBA, was born in Norway in 1945 to a Norwegian mother and a German sergeant. Her mother fled to Sweden when Anni-Frid was two years old, escaping the persecution directed at women who had been with German soldiers.

Lyngstad didn't learn her father's identity until 1977, when a German magazine tracked him down. He was still alive, living in Germany, and they eventually met. Her story put a famous face on a history that many countries preferred to forget.

The Sounds of History

There's something particularly painful about the way these children describe their experiences. They talk about living with their identities in "inner exile"—carrying a secret about themselves that could never be discussed, in societies that had made clear such children were unwanted.

In a 2000 New Year's Eve speech—a traditional moment for Norwegian prime ministers to address the nation—the Prime Minister publicly apologized to the war children. It came fifty-five years after the war ended, when most of these children were in their fifties or approaching sixty. Many of their mothers had already died, never seeing their treatment acknowledged as wrong.

The apology mattered. Recognition matters. But it came after lifetimes shaped by shame and silence.

What War Children Teach Us

The story of war children reveals something uncomfortable about how societies process trauma. In the immediate aftermath of occupation and liberation, people needed villains. The rage was real—years of humiliation, deprivation, and loss demanded some outlet. But the targets chosen for that rage included people who had no choice in their circumstances: women who had to survive under occupation, and children who had no say in their conception.

It's worth noting that these children were, by definition, completely innocent of any wrongdoing. Even if their fathers had committed war crimes—and many German soldiers did—the children had nothing to do with it. Yet they were punished as if the guilt were hereditary, passed down through blood.

The comparison some war children and their supporters have made to genocide is controversial but worth considering. Certainly the Norwegian government's proposals to deport thousands of children represented an attempt to make them disappear as a population. The institutionalization, the denied opportunities, the systematic exclusion from normal society—these policies, whether coordinated or not, had the effect of trying to erase war children from the national story.

Perhaps the most important lesson is how long the effects lasted. We might imagine that postwar passions cooled quickly, that rationality returned within a few years. But the discrimination against war children continued into the 1950s, the 1960s, and beyond. Children who were toddlers when the war ended faced bullying as teenagers and barriers to employment as adults. The stigma followed them their entire lives.

The Children of All Wars

While the term "war children" is most associated with World War II, the phenomenon is not unique to that conflict. Wherever occupying forces go, wherever military bases are established on foreign soil, children are born to local mothers and foreign military fathers.

American soldiers fathered children in Vietnam, Korea, Japan, Germany, and dozens of other countries where U.S. forces have been stationed. Soviet soldiers fathered children during their occupations. Peacekeeping missions have generated similar situations. The circumstances change, but the pattern remains: children caught between two worlds, often rejected by both.

What varies is how different societies handle these children. The Nordic countries' experience shows both the worst impulses—persecution, institutionalization, proposals for mass deportation—and the eventual path toward acknowledgment and compensation, however inadequate. Other countries have handled similar situations with more or less grace.

The key insight is that war children are a predictable consequence of military occupation. They will exist. The question is whether societies will treat them as innocent individuals deserving of protection, or as symbols to be punished for the sins of adults and the circumstances of history.

Living Memory

The Norwegian war children who filed suit in 1999 and 2007 are now in their eighties, if they are still alive. The window for firsthand testimony is closing. Soon these experiences will exist only in documents, interviews, and the memories passed down to the next generation.

But the pattern they lived through—the scapegoating of the vulnerable, the punishment of children for the perceived sins of parents, the way societies process trauma by finding easy targets—these patterns don't require living memory to repeat. They are always waiting to emerge in the next conflict, the next occupation, the next moment when a society looks for someone to blame.

The war children's story is a reminder that the children of our enemies are still children. It shouldn't be a difficult point to make. And yet, seventy-five years after World War II ended, it still needs making.