Let me finish with the homes.
Belgium: the Ardennen in Wegimont near Lüttich (from 1943 to September 1944) for mothers of German blood, fertilized by S.S. soldiers.
France: the Westland in Lamorlaye near Chantilly.
The Netherlands: the Gelderland in Nijmegen with 60 beds for mothers and 100 beds for children, and, finally,
Norway, where this was a flourishing activity and from whence today there is a little army, not of baby boomers, but of baby doomers, about 12,000 all told, born between 1942 and 1945:
Heim Geilo (1942), 60 beds for mothers, 20 for children.
Kinderheim Godthaab near Oslo, opened in 1942.
My name is Ester, today. I was born at Kinderheim Godthaab as Gisela. When I turned two my mother advertised in the local newspapers that she was putting me up for adoption. I had blonde curls and I was pretty. When the people who adopted me found out my father was German, they returned me to my mother and drew a large swastika on my little rucksack. Then another family came forward and my mother told them the truth. They were wonderful parents, but they never told me I was adopted. When I turned forty-three a woman called and said, For years I have been shadowed by a little girl with blonde curls and a swastika on her rucksack. I am your mother.
Twenty-seven children from Kinderheim Godthaab were declared mentally retarded and consigned to institutions for the retarded throughout Norway. Many of them spent their whole lives there. Some thirty children were secretly sent to Sweden. In Sweden their names were changed and they were put up for adoption. Those who adopted them were told they were children of members of the Resistance who had been killed, or Jewish orphans. Most of these people don’t know to this day that they are not the people they believe themselves to be. Most of them have no idea they are someone else. I only found my German relatives in 1995.
I, too, lived at Godthaab. I was assigned number 603. My mother brought me there and left right away. The discipline was rigorous. The nurses had white, starched uniforms and spoke only German. Then in 1946 they moved me to a lunatic asylum. I almost went mad with terror. Inmates were bound with chains. Some defecated in their clothes. Wherever. They screamed. I was five. When I turned twenty-three they released me. They said, You’re free, good luck. I was fortunate, however. No-one ever raped me. I completed two grades of elementary school. I worked in a factory at the hardest physical jobs. I tried to kill myself, shoving my arms into a machine for cutting waste, but I survived. My name is Hansen. I found my mother in 1970. She said, Get out of my sight. She said, Your S.S. father croaked in 1953.
I was born in 1943. My father died that same year and my mother was too ill to look after me. They sent me to Godthaab when I was six months old. At the end of the war they decided I was mentally retarded. At the age of seven I was sent to the Emma Hjorth mental hospital where they put me in a straight jacket at night. When they released me I got a job as a housecleaner. I don’t know who my mother was. I don’t know who my father was. I am a member of the society of Lebensborn children who are demanding compensation from the Norwegian government. I know Hansen. After the war they had to hate someone, so they hated us, the children of German soldiers. But there was no talk about us in public. We are a footnote to a history which Norway would like to expunge. After the war they tried to send us all to Germany, but Germany at that point was poor and devastated and couldn’t take us in.
Then the Lebensborn home in Trysil, then
the Hurdalsverk, opened in 1942, with 40 beds for mothers and 80 beds for children.
The Klekken opened in 1942.
Heim Bergen in the town of Hop near Bergen opened in 1943.
Kinderheim Stalheim opened in 1943, could accommodate one hundred children.
I lived at Stalheim. When the war ended they returned me to my mother, who didn’t want me. My mother sent me to a home. I sat in a doctor’s office with six doctors who confirmed I was mentally retarded and that I must never have children. Two staff members from the social welfare centre abused me with oral sex and told me this was obligatory therapy. I was five. I spent twelve years in the Merchant Marines. In 19961 had a nervous breakdown. My wife left me. I spent a year being treated for manic depression at a psychiatric clinic. My mother died in 1988. I found my German father in 1997 and in 1998 he, too, died. I am sixty-five. I am an empty man. My name is Karl Otto Zinken.
Stadtheim Oslo in downtown Oslo opened in 1943. That same year, another state home opened in Trondheim.
I was born at the Trondheim home. My mother was one of the 14,000 who got pregnant with an S.S. man, one of the 5,000 women who were sent to work camps after the war, and before that their hair was cut on the main square in Tro ndheim. I was one of the 12,000 children who posed a threat to Norwegian society. When I turned two they gave me to a family for care and the family kept me chained in the yard with their dog. When I turned six a man threw me into a river, shouting, Let’s see if the witch sinks! When I was ten, drunken villagers from Bursur near Trondheim branded my forehead with the shape of a swastika using bent nails, and howled, Now we will rape you! I was saved by a woman. Afterwards, I used sandpaper to rub at the swastika on my forehead to remove it. When I turned thirty I wrote a book called The German Child. Then I found my mother.
Then, Heim Os near Bergen
My mother’s name was Synni Lyngstad. My mother fell in love with Alfred Haase, a married S.S. sergeant. During World War Two, from 1940 on, once Norway had been occupied, there were about 350,000 German soldiers roaming around Norway. My mother was eighteen when she fell in love with S.S. Sergeant Alfred Haase. I was born in Ballangen, near Narvik, on 15 November, 1945, a bastard. In early 1946 my mother, grandmother and I moved to the little town of Eskilstuna in Sweden. We were safe there: no-one knew of my mother’s past. At Eskilstuna in Sweden no-one would say to my mother after the war, You are a Tyskerhor. You are a German whore, a traitor of Norway. No-one shaved my mother’s head in Sweden, nor did they send her to a work camp. They did not consign me to an orphanage or a mental hospital, nor did they ship me off to Germany or overseas to get rid of me. We were safe in Sweden. Sweden knew who we were, but kept quiet. That was the agreement between Norway and Sweden, that Sweden would keep quiet. Sweden agreed to receive several hundred children like me, several hundred half-German, traitorous children who are sixty-year-old Swedes today. My mother Synni died in 1948 of kidney disease, and for thirty years I believed that my father had been killed at the end of the war on his way back to Germany from Norway. That is what my grandmother told me, Your father is dead, she’d say whenever I asked. Then in 1977 a German magazine published a story about my background and claimed that former S.S. Sergeant Alfred Haase was alive. So I found my father, who came to Sweden to meet me. It was difficult to talk with him. He was an elderly S.S. man and a retired pastry chef. I don’t believe he was a war criminal; he was never taken to court. The two of us are physically similar and this disturbs me. My name is Anni-Frid Lyngstad. I was a singer in ABBA. The brunette.