The war children born to Nazi fathers in a sinister eugenics scheme speak out

They were the blue-eyed blonds born into a sinister SS scheme to further the Aryan race. But the defeat of the Nazis left Norway's 'Lebensborn' facing the vengeance of an entire nation. Here, five former war children talk for the first time about their ordeal – and their fight for compensation

They stare blankly into the lens, their lips tellingly pursed. All are the Norwegian subjects of a terrifying Nazi experiment. All were involved in one of the most shocking trials of eugenics the world has ever known. All are Lebensborn – the "spring of life". And all are here to tell their stories for the first time.

The Lebensborn Society was born on 12 December 1935, the brainchild of Heinrich Himmler, Hitler's right-hand man and head of the SS. He had designed a project to promote an "Aryan future" for the Third Reich and turn around a declining birth rate in Germany. People were given incentives to have more children in the Fatherland as well as in occupied countries, most importantly in Scandinavia, where the Nordic gene – and its blond-haired, blue-eyed progeny – was considered classically Aryan.

But after the conflict had ended, many of the Norwegians born into the programme suffered. In an attempt to distance itself from the occupying forces, the Norwegian government publicly vilified the children born by Norwegian mothers and Nazi fathers. Many of those children subsequently experienced intense bullying, and in some cases, extreme mental and physical abuse. In recent years, a Lebensborn group in Norway has been fighting what it sees as the Norwegian government's complicity in their horrific ordeal.

Now, these once-persecuted children, many of whom are in their sixties, have been brought together by British photographer Lucinda Marland, who travelled to Norway to interview them and take their portraits, with a 1940s 5x4 plate camera, reproduced exclusively here.

"The people I met described themselves as the lucky ones and maintain that hundreds of others were never able to come to terms with the prejudice and cruelty they ' suffered," says Marland. "They were incredibly humble and proud people still coming to terms with their demons; many of them would be welling up when they were talking to me."

The Lebensborn programme arrived in Norway in March 1941, six years after the scheme was started in Germany. The occupying soldiers were officially encouraged to father children with the local women. They were reassured that the Third Reich would take care of the child if they did not wish to marry the mother, or were already married. As well as paying all the costs for the birth, the Lebensborn association gave the mothers substantial child support, including money for clothes, as well as a pram or cot. It was noted at the time that only a small proportion of the German fathers wanted to marry the pregnant women and bring them back to the German Reich.

Hotels and villas were requisitioned and 10 Lebensborn homes were established from scratch. Here, more than 8,000 children were registered, and issued with a Lebensborn number and file containing their medical records.

For many of the young, impressionable Norwegian girls who had become pregnant at the hands of the invaders, it was a convenient place to give birth – well away from the disapproving eyes of their peers, with access to the best available care.

But towards the end of the war, the exiled Norwegian government – which had set up shop in London – started broadcasting ominous warnings to collaborators in Norway. One said: "We have previously issued a warning and we repeat it here of the price these women will pay for the rest of their lives: they will be held in contempt by all Norwegians for their lack of restraint."

Soon afterwards, the war ended, Himmler committed suicide and Norway's pre-war leaders returned. Norwegians cut off the hair of many of the "German whores" who had sired children with the Nazi soldiers, and they were paraded through the streets and spat at. Though the women hadn't broken any law, several thousand were arrested and many interned. A large number lost their jobs, for as little as having been seen talking to a German, and many were traumatised for life. "We will never be rid of the stigma, not until we are dead and buried," says one of the Lebensborn interviewed by Marland, Paul Hansen. "I don't want to be buried in a grave; I want my ashes to be scattered to the winds – at least then I won't be picked on any more."

The condemnation escalated. The Norwegian government tried to deport the Lebensborn to Germany but the scheme was vetoed by the Allies. In July 1945, one newspaper expressed the fear that Lebensborn boys would "bear the germ of some of those typical masculine German characteristics of which the world has now seen more than enough". A leading psychiatrist advised that a large proportion of the 8,000 (officially registered) children must be carrying bad genes and therefore would be mentally retarded; "genetically bad", he said, they "belonged in special institutions". As a result, hundreds of children were forcibly incarcerated in mental institutions. Here they were often abused, raped and their skin scrubbed until it bled. A member of the Norwegian ministry of social affairs said of them in July 1945: "To believe these children will become decent citizens is to believe rats in the cellar will become house pets." '

Through legal action, many of the children have sought compensation from the Norwegian government for its discrimination against them. A few were offered limited financial recompense. But still officials refuse to take the blame. "The government has acknowledged that several war children have been subject to harassment in society," says government lawyer Thomas Naalsund. "But it is highly difficult to say now, 50 years later, that the government was responsible for these events."

Last year, 157 of the children appealed to the European Court of Human Rights but lost on the grounds that their problems happened too long ago. "There is a hypocrisy at the heart of Norway, home of the Nobel Peace Prize, a country that prides itself on resolving conflicts around the world but refuses to acknowledge its own victims of war," says the Lebensborns' lawyer, Randi Spydevold. "I'm disappointed and embarrassed on behalf of Norway. I thought Norway was a great country, the best country for human rights; I didn't disbelieve that for one moment until I took this case."

Now, what hope that still exists among the Lebensborn is in their desire that by sharing their stories, one day an international standard will be set that will prevent future war children from being discriminated against, and enduring the atrocities that they themselves have had to live through. Their chilling tales, some of which are reproduced here, are just one small step towards that potential resolution.

Ellen Voie: 'I was locked in a dark room'

I was born in 1942 in a Lebensborn home, where I stayed until I was adopted aged two. My adoptive parents were incredibly cruel: they beat me and locked me in a small, dark room for hours. To this day I'm still afraid of the dark and have nightmares.

We lived in a small community where everyone seemed to know I was a German child and told me how awful I was. I was very disruptive; I couldn't concentrate. When I was 16 the local priest refused to confirm me because I did not have a baptism certificate. I had to go to the local authority where I found out that my parents had changed my name.

Then I went to Denmark to study. While there I worked as a nursery nurse, and fell in love with a German, but my parents disapproved and I had to return to Norway to continue studying.

A year after I returned, a friend and I were walking to the cinema when a car pulled up with some boys in it. My friend said she knew them so we got in, but the car broke down. My friend went off with one of the boys to get spare parts and left me alone with the other boy, who raped and almost killed me. A taxi driver saved my life.

I later discovered I was pregnant from the attack. I was 19 years old. My parents threw me out of the house and put me in a home, where I stayed until my son was born. My parents then insisted I give up my baby; I was only allowed to hold him for a few minutes before they took him away. But I was determined that history would not repeat itself and with the help of a social worker I got my son back.

Despite all the hardships, I got an education and my work as a social worker has helped me deal with my past. I've dedicated my adult life to helping others, children in particular. It helps me to forget my own tormented past. I now live with my husband and dogs in Oslo.

Paul Hansen: 'They classed me as a retard'

I think my mother's family put pressure on her to give me up, so I was born in a Lebensborn home in 1942 and my mother left me there.

I later learnt that after the war a government delegation came to the home to decide what to do with the 20 war children, including me, who had been left there. We were lined up and the doctor said he would take us. It turned out that he was the head of a mental institution. There was no medical prognosis behind his decision; it was just that we were war children, and therefore must be "retarded" due to our parentage. They made no effort to trace any of our family members, they just locked us up with children so sick that some were incontinent and incapable of feeding themselves. I was four years old.

By the time I was released I had lost any chance of a proper education and for the next few years I went from one home to another.

I was eventually sent to a special school for children with learning disabilities and mental illness. This was the only formal education I received. War children were segregated from the rest of the school. We were not allowed any contact with the outside community. I was then moved to a boys' home and then another mental institution, where I was finally old enough to sign myself out. The people there helped me get a job in a factory. My colleagues used to taunt me mercilessly until one day I stood up and told them what had happened to me. They never taunted me again and I stayed there for 17 years.

In 1975 I got married but my wife had a nervous breakdown and we divorced in 1977. Then I lived with someone for nearly 20 years but she died of cancer.

I now work as a cleaner and janitor at the University of Oslo and have a long-term girlfriend. As much as it hurts to talk about my past, I do so because it's important that people know what happened to us. I spent the first 20 years of my life in mental institutions just because my father was a German.

Kikki Skjermo: 'I was raped when I was 10'

I was born in 1945 near Trondheim. My mother was away a lot, finding work. It was my grandparents who brought me up and told me about my father. They provided for me, but never showed me any warmth. I felt like I lived behind a wall of silence; life was very empty and confusing.

At 10 years old I was raped by a local man, who had a deep hatred of the Germans. I didn't know him but he knew I was a German child. He told me people like me were born to be used. I didn't dare tell anyone; I stayed in bed for a week pretending I had a stomach upset.

At 15 I was granted special permission to marry my husband. It took me a couple of years to tell him about my history but he has always been a huge support and we've been married for 47 years.

Both he and my children encouraged me to trace my father, who I met for the first time when I was 42. We have a wonderful relationship and, when my daughter got married, she asked if my father could walk her down the aisle to show the world that the spell was broken.

It's taken me a long time to be able to say, it's OK, I'm a German child. It's important to speak out to help other war children who aren't as fortunate as me.

Bjorn Drivdal: 'They beat me up at school'

Growing up in Oslo, I was told my father was sent to the Eastern Front, where he died in action. But my mother would never tell me anything more about him.

I later learnt that when my mother discovered she was pregnant she tried to get an abortion, but the German authorities wouldn't let her.

I endured school until I was 15; I was always being beaten and couldn't understand why. I then went to sea, working mainly on cargo ships. On shore leave, I'd often find myself on the shadier side of town – I found it easier to be around people with something to hide.

I've been married twice and have five children. Both marriages ended in divorce; I wasn't easy to live with.

When I turned 57 I took early retirement because I couldn't concentrate and was having nightmares, and it was then that I confronted my past. I started seeing a psychologist and learnt to explore who I was.

I decided to go to Germany. I knew where my father had lived, so I went to the local newspaper, which helped me with my research. I found my father's grave and discovered he had actually died in 1974 in a car crash, not in the war as I had been led to believe. It was a devastating blow. But my trip to Germany wasn't all bad; I met my two half-sisters, who had no idea I existed, and this summer my nephew and his children are coming to visit me.

Gerd Fleischer: 'I was called a whore'

My mother and father planned to marry, but to marry an SS officer you had to prove three generations of Aryan blood. My mother's Lapp heritage meant she was not pure enough.

I was born in 1942. My father returned to Germany while my mother fell into poverty, not qualifying for any support from the state, my father or even the Lebensborn programme.

We lived a relatively untroubled life in Lapland until I went to school. One day a fellow pupil called me a "German whore"; I didn't know what this meant so I ran home and asked my mother. She told me that not everyone is open-minded.

My mother then married a former resistance fighter, who hated anything German, particularly me. Abuse and beatings soon became a regular part of my home life. At 13, I ran away.

Somehow I survived, putting myself through school. I remember being lonely, hungry and cold. The authorities knew about me but did nothing to help.

When I was 18, I left Norway and didn't return for 18 years. I worked as an au pair in England, and worked and studied in Germany. I managed to trace my father, who initially denied all knowledge of me. But when we met it was physically obvious I was his daughter. I was furious at him – even more so when he spoke ill of my mother. I successfully took him to court for the maintenance he had never paid to me.

Before returning to Norway I spent several years in Mexico, where I fostered two street children. I brought them home with me, but soon realised that Norway hadn't progressed in its attitude towards ethnic minorities. So I founded the organisation Seif [Self Help for Immigrants and Refugees] to fight for justice for all.

Independent

Family memoirs with a Nazi past

Berliner Katrin Himmler was shocked at SS ties and grandmother's connections

As a young girl, Katrin Himmler asked her grandmother about the man in a black suit in a photograph hanging on her living-room wall. Her grandmother didn't say much, but she cried.

The man in the picture was Ms. Himmler's grandfather Ernst, a brother of Nazi SS chief Heinrich Himmler. The little that Katrin's family did tell her about her grandfather, who disappeared during fierce fighting in Berlin in 1945, was that he was apolitical.

Decades later, Ms. Himmler discovered that her family's story was untrue. Her father, long suspicious, encouraged her in 1997 to go dig in wartime archives that the U.S. had recently returned to Germany. Ernst Himmler, she learned, joined Hitler's National Socialist German Workers' party as early as 1931. Two years later, he joined the SS guard, the special unit responsible for carrying out many of the Nazi regime's worst atrocities.

Now 40 years old and married to an Israeli Jew, Ms. Himmler says she was shocked when she found out that Ernst was in the SS. "It might sound strange, but I never considered this possibility," she says.

Ms. Himmler investigated further. She unearthed records of Heinrich's elder brother, Gebhard, and coaxed his children into sharing memories and letters. She wrote a book, "The Himmler Brothers," about her family's history -- and the trauma involved in uncovering it.

Ms. Himmler's book, published in German in 2005 and in English this past summer, is one of several recent memoirs by the children and grandchildren of old Nazis that aim to reflect on how the party affiliation affected their families. Another book, published this past summer in German, "Kind L 364," tells the story of Heilwig Weger, a girl reared in one of the Lebensborn settlements the SS built for orphans and other so-called Aryan children. Ms. Weger was later adopted by Oswald Pohl, a Nazi officer hanged in 1951 for war crimes. The book conveys the pain she felt at losing him, the only father she knew, while being ostracized by other children because of his actions. Later, she hid her background from her own children.

The documentary "2 or 3 Things I Know About Him," released two years ago in Germany and this year in the U.S., shows how the filmmaker Malte Ludin and his siblings wrestled with the conflict of loving their father, a prominent Nazi executed after the war, while reviling what he had done.

At first, Ms. Himmler's relatives supported her determination to explore the family's history. But when she uncovered painful details, they balked, calling her a Nestbeschmutzer, someone who fouls her own nest. Ms. Himmler, for instance, found out that the grandmother she adored had made use of her husband's Nazi connections, and stayed in touch with ex-Nazi officials after the war.

In the postwar period, memoirs of Nazis or their families were long taboo. Ms. Himmler has vivid memories of those years. In high school one day, a classmate asked during a history lesson whether she was related to the Himmler. When she said yes, a tense silence gripped the room, Ms. Himmler recalls, after which the teacher continued her lesson as if nothing had happened.

"I think she lost an opportunity," says Ms. Himmler. "She could have used what happened to discuss the link that our generation bears to the past."

Ms. Himmler, an introverted but friendly woman, who pedals around today's liberal Berlin on a bicycle, met her future husband while studying political science at the Free University in Berlin. His family fled Poland and the Nazis in the 1930s. In the early days of their courtship, Ms. Himmler says, they raked over the past obsessively. They visited Nazi landmarks in Berlin, such as the stadium where the 1936 Olympic Games were held. They went to Krakow, in southern Poland, to see the Jewish quarter where his grandparents once lived.

Through Ms. Himmler, her husband refused requests for an interview; she declined to identify his name out of concern for protecting his privacy. She says her husband never held her family's past against her, even as he struggled with anger over his family's persecution by the Germans. His parents, who live in Israel, knew postwar Germany well from their own travels there and didn't object to their son's relationship with her.

Ms. Himmler spent several years burrowing through microfilmed wartime records and phone logs the U.S. returned to the German Federal Archive in Berlin in 1994. As she dug deeper, she uncovered painful truths about family members, including the grandmother she had loved until the old woman died in 1985.

As newlyweds, her grandparents acquired a home in a well-kept Berlin suburb. To make room for the couple, the Nazis "freed" the house of its former occupants: a union administrator, a painter and a civil engineer. Ms. Himmler never found out what became of them.

Ms. Himmler also found records of phone calls her grandmother made to Heinrich Himmler in 1944, as the Allies intensified their bombing of Berlin. Responding to her pleas to relocate the family somewhere safer, the SS chief hid them in a village in Poland.

After the war, Ms. Himmler's grandmother again made use of her Nazi connections, as she sought to secure an income and jobs for her children. At age 15, Ms. Himmler's aunt got work as a secretary in a factory owned by former Nazis.

Ernst vanished in Berlin in the spring of 1945, as the Allies pushed into the city. The government later informed the family that he was believed dead.

Ernst's elder brother, Gebhard Himmler, in a written account of his life, described himself as a civil servant, barely referring to the Nazi party, and never once mentioning Hitler. During her research, Ms. Himmler discovered her great uncle had been a party member, too. In charge of licensing engineers to work in Germany, he based his decisions on the devotion candidates showed to the Führer.

Today, Katrin Himmler and her husband live with their 8-year-old son in an apartment not far from the Reichstag, the seat of the German Parliament. They talk a lot with the boy about the past. Ms. Himmler says she isn't sure whether he has yet put it together that his mother's side of the family once tried to exterminate his father's.

Examining her grandparents' lives has led Ms. Himmler to question whether she would have acted any differently. "I'm not sure I would have," she says. When asked later how her husband felt about this, she replied in an email: "My husband thinks exactly as I and many other people: that ordinary people are in certain circumstances able to act in a horrible way -- and to tolerate horrible crimes. And most of us can't be sure how we would have behaved in that time (at least if we are honest and not moralistic)."

Some critics in Germany say that recent memoirs seek to profit from deplorable family histories and run the risk of apologizing for the Nazis, by offering humanizing portrayals of them as loving parents and grandparents.

"I'm definitely not apologizing for them," says Ms. Himmler. "It's hard to look at these people as ordinary men and women, but we really have to do this," she says. "They were doing monstrous things, but they were not monsters."

Wall Street Journal

Revealed: Nazi scheme to kidnap 'Ayran' children from occupied countries

A chilling new book about Hitler's Lebensborn programme - the sinister project to create the perfect Ayran race to rule the world for 1,000 years - shows the Nazis kidnapped thousands of children from occupied countries to fill the demand for future manpower.

Lebensborn, or Fount of Life, was hitherto thought to be just a breeding programme where S.S. 'studs' mated with suitable female specimens in Nazi nursing homes.

Nine months later the offspring were turned over to the state to be brought up in an all-Nazi environment.

These budding supermen were supposed to grow up to be hard, cruel standard bearers of Hitler's 'New Order' in Europe.

But eminent German historian Volker Koop says in his new book 'Give a Child to the Fuehrer - the Lebensborn Organisation' that the S.S.-run group kidnapped thousands of children from occupied lands and murdered those that quack racial "experts" back in the Reich deemed "unfit for Germanisation."

"Lebensborn was anything but a mechanism for simply promoting the procreation of healthy, vigorous Ayran warriors," said Koop. "It was a criminal organisation and served primarily the racial-political illusion concepts of Hitler and Himmler."

Heinrich Himmler, lord of the S.S., created Lebensborn in 1935. German birthrates were stagnating as opposed to those in the Soviet Union, the sworn enemy of the fledgling National Socialist state.

Koop uncovered documents in the federal archives in Germany which show that Himmler wanted to halt what he termed an "abortion epidemic" in Germany - 600,000 a year - and create homes where pregnant women could deliver their child and their leave it behind for the state to care for.

Koop says the myth was that Lebensborn merely concentrated on S.S. men siring children with good Germanic maidens when "in reality it was a gigantic kidnap machine too."

On 25 July 1942, for example, Himmler instructed children from Slovenia to be sent back to the Reich. Their fathers had been shot for taking part in partisan operations against the Nazis, the mothers sent to concentration camps.

The children, 600 of them aged between six and 12, were handed over the Lebensborn officials. Kopp found the list in a federal archive along with notations from SS Hauptsturmfuehrer George Roedel who marked next to each name "parents shot."

Roedel arranged for those considered Ayran enough to be "Germanised" to be adopted by party and S.S. functionaries. Hans von Mann, Nazi leader of Munich, was assigned two of the children, the documents reveal.

The fate of many others is unclear but those not considered Germanic enough were probably shipped off to die in concentration camps.

Koop says the Lebensborn programme took charge of the 'Lidice children" - the orphans of one of the greatest massacres of World War Two when the Czech village of Lidice was destroyed and all its inhabitants executed or imprisoned over suspicions they had aided the British intelligence operatives who killed Czech S.S. leader Reinhard Heydrich.

On 21 June 1943 Himmler and Lebensborn chief Max Sollmann met in Prague with SS Obergruppenfuehrer Karl Hermann Frank to oversee "the supply, education and accommodation of Czech children whose parents had to be executed because they were members of the resistance."

Himmler ordered that 98 orphaned Lidice children should be examined for their "ablity to become German." Nazis used many quack methods to determine this, such as measuring the nose and thickness of the skull. He also ordered that those "bad" children among them should be sent to a concentration camp. In the end only 13 of the Lidice children were considered good enough to become "Germanised."

Koop said Poland was the main hunting ground for the Lebensborn child-stealers who began emptying orphanages as soon as the panzers which overran the country in September 1939 had moved on.

"We must look especially for children who are suitable for Germanisation," said Himmler in a secret memo which Koop unearthed in a federal archive in Munich. And in a speech in October 1943 in Bad Schachen, again not reported until now, Himmler told S.S. men it was an "obligation to take such children out of their environment even if it means stealing him or her." Such children were given German names.

Koop says that the programme ultimately failed to provide the manpower that Hitler wanted for his future legions: only 11,000 were born in Lebensborn homes and the kidnapped children ended up lost, murdered or, in some lucky cases, were reunited with their families at the end of the war.

Daily Mail

Secret tapes of top Nazis

Richard Overy reviews Tapping Hitler's Generals: Transcripts of Secret Conversations, 1942-45 ed by Sönke Neitzel

From 1942 onwards the British kept a number of captured German staff officers, most of them from the army, at Trent Park house in the north London suburb of Cockfosters. Here they lived a boring but relatively free-and-easy existence, chatting, exercising, enjoying an occasional ramble.

What they did not know, though several seem to have guessed at it, was that a dozen of the rooms were bugged so that their private conversations (there was nothing strictly 'secret' about them) could be overheard by British Intelligence officers and, if useful, employed for Allied operations.

The conversations were, as it turned out, of very limited help to the conduct of the war, though they did supply a wealth of evidence on the nature of the National Socialist system which seems to have been largely ignored or poorly exploited when it later came to putting German generals on trial for war crimes.

Sönke Neitzel, a professor at the University of Mainz, has edited a volume of key extracts from the tape-recorded discussions and there is no doubt that they are of much more service to the historian than they ever were to British Intelligence.

After a brief introduction, where Neitzel explains with great clarity and detachment why the conversations matter, the book deals first with the officers' views of German politics and strategy, then their discussions of war crimes and atrocities and finally a shorter section on their reaction to the July Plot, the failed attempt in 1944 by a small coterie of army officers to assassinate Hitler.

Not surprisingly there is no clear unity on any of these issues. Some of the officers were inclined to dismiss atrocity stories as Allied propaganda until confronted by a fellow-general whose detailed description of some of the terrible horrors he had witnessed made the stark truth all too clear ('18,000 Jews killed in one morning', one Eastern Front commander told a doubter).

Some thought the July Plot a trick of Hitler's, to secure popular support for a last-ditch war effort. On politics the group remained divided: some unambiguously blamed the German people and their blind loyalty to the dictator, others thought Hitler a good thing, but badly advised. All detested Heinrich Himmler and the SS, and in that repugnance lay the root of the post-war myth that atrocities were the work of the black-shirted security corps and not of the army.

The 167 extracts, though well supported with extensive notes and a helpful 'who's who', will be hard going for anyone not already familiar with the territory. For the wider public the most revealing and accessible of the documents concern the issue of war crimes.

Although some of the officers found it hard to imagine that regular soldiers had committed crimes, there are simply too many instances exchanged between them for the idea of a 'clean' war to hold up. Over the three years during which the recordings were made, the whole panoply of crimes (the mass murder of Jews, the shooting of hostages, burning down churches filled with victims, and so on) is acknowledged and described.

Some of the nastier generals clearly disliked the Jews, although few would admit that murdering them en masse was a good thing. But at least one thought that killing 100 hostages for the death of a single German was quite justified - 'that's military law'.

At one point one of the prisoners remarks to a confidant that when it came to crime, the Allies had no idea of 'what really happened'. Little did he know that the British knew exactly, because they listened in to every confession. The question that remains is why so few of the officers were ever tried afterwards - despite the things to which they privately admitted - or why, on reading accounts from as early as 1942 and 1943, the British did not expose more fully the horror of what was going on on the Eastern Front.

To their credit a number of the prisoners were simply aghast at what they heard, and thought German defeat a punishment from God. But others hoped for German victory, or at the least the idea that even in defeat the German armed forces had fought a 'war with honour'. After 1945 it was this view that prevailed. By the 1960s the idea of the 'clean war' undermined by party fanatics was dominant.

These extracts exert a grim fascination. They represent a unique and unmediated window into the minds of a military elite, brutalised by the First World War, embittered by what they saw as Germany's unjust treatment, and finally ensnared in the seductive coils of Hitler's radical nationalism. The strange blend revealed here of resentment, racism, political innocence and professional arrogance is a cocktail that leaves a nasty aftertaste.

Telegraph