Strasbourg, France – They were locked up in mental homes and denied education, the victims of a monstrous Nazi scheme and decades of public prejudice.
Now a group of Norwegian “war children,” born as part of a German plan to create a genetically pure race, are taking their case to Europe’s human rights court, demanding financial compensation and recognition of their suffering from the Norwegian government.
Up to 12,000 children with a Norwegian mother and a German father were born in Norway during World War II under the scheme known as “Lebensborn,” or “Fountain of Life,” first introduced by German SS chief Heinrich Himmler in 1935 to propagate Aryan children. Outside Germany, Norway was the jewel of the Lebensborn program.
A group of 154 Norwegians, together with four Swedes and one German national, have turned to the Strasbourg-based European Court of Human Rights, arguing that they suffered lifelong discrimination, and that the Norwegian government’s inaction to protect them against it violated their civil liberties.
“We want it to be recognized that the government of Norway violated the rights of these people, and we are asking for financial damages,” said Randi Hagen Spydevold, a lawyer for the group.
Norwegian courts have ruled that the government cannot be held responsible for failing to sufficiently protect the Lebensborn children before 1953, when Norway signed the European Convention on Human Rights. But the group argues that ill-treatment continued for long afterward.
They say discrimination included public denouncement by doctors and the clergy, who claimed war children were mentally and genetically defective and potential Nazi sympathizers. The victims also faced difficulties in obtaining employment and faced harassment at school or work.
One of the claimants, Paul Hansen, said he was locked up in a psychiatric institution until 1965, when he was released without his mental health being assessed – the fate of many children of war. Another claimant, Karl Otto Zinken, said he was sent to a special school for mentally retarded children, where he said he was raped by two men.
“The big problem is that the rights violations started before 1953 but continued long after. Research has been done showing what they had been exposed to, and we say the Norwegian government was to blame,” Spydevold said.
In 2002, the Norwegian parliament ordered the state to make amends, and the government subsequently offered to pay the war children up to $32,260 each, depending on how much suffering the victims could document.
But the group is demanding $65,500 per person – and up to four times as much for those whose lives they say were destroyed by the years of discrimination.
The European Court of Human Rights will hear the group’s arguments Thursday before evaluating whether the case is admissible. A decision on whether to try the case could take months.
