Norway’s Nazi offspring claim compensation

In a landmark case, a group of Norwegian war children whose mothers were deliberately impregnated by German soldiers as part of a Nazi plan to build a blond-haired blue-eyed race, are today demanding a payout from Oslo for the suffering and discrimination it has caused them.

The applicants — numbering 154, plus four Swedes and a German — claim that the Norwegian Government was guilty of failing to protect them from the Nazis’ Lebensborn scheme during the German invasion of Norway in the Second World War between 1940 and 1945. They also claim the state institutionally discriminated against the children of Nazi soldiers for years afterwards.

Up to 12,000 children with a Norwegian mother and German father were born under the scheme, meaning Fountain of Life, which was founded by Heinrich Himmler, the SS chief, in 1935.

Norway was the jewel of Himmler’s programme and, if today’s cases at the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) are successful, they are expected to lead to a flurry of complaints from other Nazi children in the country as well as children of German troops from neighbouring Sweden, which was also part of the scheme.

“We want it to be recognised that the Government of Norway violated the rights of these people, and we are asking for financial damages,” Randi Hagen Spydevold, a lawyer for the group, said.

The application was lodged with the ECHR after Oslo’s City Court in 2003 rejected a case by seven of the applicants because their claims came too long after a statutory time limit.

Norwegian courts have always ruled against any compensation claimants in the past, saying the country’s government cannot be held responsible for failing to sufficiently protect the Lebensborn children before 1953, when it signed the European Convention on Human Rights — however, the group of claimants argues that the ill-treatment continued long afterwards.

“They claim the violations are continuing in the sense that they are still reminded in negative terms of their origin and value,” the ECHR said in a statement.

The court said that many mothers of war children claimed they had been marginalised, had difficulties in obtaining employment, and their children were often adopted or placed in foster homes or institutions for their own protection.

Many Norwegian war children, meanwhile, were deprived of their original names and identity, subjected to discrimination, harassment and ill-treatment and left with psychological problems and registered disabled at an early age, the statement adds.

The cases include that of a woman who was regularly locked up when she was a child, sometimes with a dog chain, by her foster father, and had a swastika marked with a nail on her forehead when aged nine or 10.

One man, Paul Hansen, claims he was placed in psychiatric institutions until 1965 without his mental health ever having been assessed, while another, Karl Otto Zinken, said he was placed in a school for mentally disabled children where he was raped by two men.

In an attempt to settle the dispute, the Norwegian Government in 2002 offered to pay the children 200,000 kroner (now worth £16,700), provided they could prove that they had suffered sufficient discrimination. However, the group is now demanding £34,000 per person, and up to four times as much for those who suffered the most.

The ECHR will hear the group’s arguments today before deciding whether the case is admissible. A decision could take several months.

One of the world’s most famous Nazi children is Anni-Frid Lyngstad, the brunette member of the pop group Abba, who was one of thousands of Swedish children known to have been born to a German soldier.

In Sweden the youngsters were often referred to as Tyskerbarnas, or German children, and Ms Lyngstad has spoken in the past of being persecuted and isolated in her own country.