Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II (33 page)

In the immediate aftermath of the war, Norwegians were extremely bitter about the behaviour of some of their women and girls. In the early summer of 1945, thousands of women accused of sleeping with Germans were rounded up and put into jails and prison camps – some 1,000 of them in Oslo alone.
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As we have already seen, many had their heads shaved during the liberation, and some were publicly humiliated by mobs. Perhaps more worrying, however, were the calls from people in authority to have them stripped of their Norwegian citizenship and deported to Germany. Such an action would have been extremely difficult to justify, since sleeping with German soldiers was not against the law. In any case, the national body for trying war criminals and traitors had already begun to establish that stripping people of their citizenship should not be used as a punishment.
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As a consequence, calls to deport women who had slept with Germans were gradually dropped.

Women who had gone so far as to marry Germans, however, would not escape so easily. In August 1945 the Norwegian government resurrected a law from twenty years earlier stating that women who married foreigners automatically took on the nationality of their husbands. In order to limit this law, an amendment was made stating that it should apply only to those who married a citizen of an enemy state – in effect, Germans. Against all the principles of Norwegian justice, the law was to be applied retrospectively. Almost overnight, therefore, hundreds – perhaps even thousands – of women who had believed themselves to be acting within the law lost their citizenship. They were now designated ‘German’, and as such they faced the possibility of deportation to Germany, and along with them their children.
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The position regarding the children of German soldiers was even simpler to establish. According to the same law, the nationality of war children was defined by their paternity. Even without the law these children had few if any champions, and a consensus developed across the country that they should be considered unequivocally German. As a consequence, they too faced the prospect of immediate deportation. There were many people, including those in authority, who believed that such deportations should be carried out irrespective of whether their mothers were allowed to stay in the country.

Naturally such a proposal opened up all kinds of moral and political problems. While few people were likely to oppose the deportation of ‘German’ orphans, the expulsion of children who had living, still-Norwegian mothers was much more difficult. When the War Child Committee was set up at the beginning of July 1945 it was specifically asked to investigate the changes in the law that needed to be made in order to expel children and their mothers. If this was not possible, it was to consider what other measures should be put in place, both to protect the children from a resentful society, and to protect society from a potentially dangerous group of children.

The War Child Committee considered these problems for the best part of five months at the end of 1945. Their findings were, and still are, extremely controversial. On the one hand they suggested that the government should mount a public campaign to get local communities to accept these children, while on the other hand they suggested that, if local communities so wished, children should be taken from their mothers and sent to other areas of Norway, or even abroad. The Committee also recommended that neither the children nor their mothers should be forcibly deported; and yet its chairperson, Inge Debes, reportedly offered all 9,000 war children to an Australian immigration delegation, apparently without regard to what the children’s mothers would think of such a move. (The offer was eventually turned down on logistical grounds, but also because the Australians decided in the end that they did not want ‘German’ children either.)
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Since it was looking increasingly unlikely that the government would be able to deport these children, the Committee began to look into the consequences of keeping the children in Norway. One of the things that worried Norwegians most was the possibility that these children might be mentally substandard. There was a widespread belief in Norway, as in other countries, that any woman who allowed herself to be seduced by a German soldier was probably feeble minded. Similarly, any German who would take such a mentally deficient partner must himself also be feeble minded. Following this circular logic to its inevitable conclusion meant that their children would almost certainly possess the same defects. To assess the problem, the Committee appointed an eminent psychiatrist named Ørnulf Ødegård to give a statement regarding the mental condition of war children. Based on a sample of a few dozen patients, Øregård suggested that as many as 4,000 of the 9,000 war children might be mentally retarded or otherwise hereditarily inferior. While the Committee did not fully accept this statement, it did not stop one of its members writing in a newspaper about the likelihood of both mothers and children being mentally deficient.

Consequently, many war children were labelled retarded on no evidence whatsoever, and some of them, particularly those in the old German-run orphanages, were damned to spending the rest of their lives in institutions. According to a doctor who looked after one such group during the 1980s, had they been treated the same as other, ‘non-German’, orphans they would probably have gone on to lead perfectly normal lives.
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The War Child Committee did, in fact, recommend that all war children should be psychologically assessed in order to determine the state of their mental health, but this never happened because it was deemed far too expensive.

The branding of children as feeble minded by their nation, their communities and even sometimes their schoolteachers merely added another possible layer of persecution for a group that was already vulnerable. Some later told stories about being routinely taunted by their classmates at school, being excluded from the anniversary celebrations of the end of the war, being prevented from playing with ‘pure’ Norwegian children, and having swastikas painted on their schoolbooks and satchels. Many were rejected by their wider families, who regarded them as a source of familial shame. When their mothers later married, many suffered verbal, mental and physical abuse at the hands of stepfathers who resented them on the grounds that they were ‘children of the enemy’.
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Some even suffered rejection from their own mothers, who saw them as the source of all their own suffering. Six-year-old Tove Laila, for example, who was taken away from her mother by the Nazis during the war to be raised as a German girl, was returned to her family in Norway in 1947, by which time the only language she knew was German. Her mother and stepfather managed to beat the German out of her in just three months, and forever afterwards mistreated, humiliated and bullied her. In the absence of the sort of social services now taken almost for granted in Norway, this unfortunate girl spent the rest of her childhood being called a ‘damned German swine’ by her own mother.
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The most common experience of war children was that of a shameful silence about their paternity. This silence existed at both a national level and a personal one. After their initial interest in the fate of war children, particularly when it looked as though they might be able to get rid of them, the Norwegian government pursued a policy of trying to erase all traces of the children’s German heritage. They did not pursue German fathers for child maintenance, and actively discouraged paternal contact. When a child had a German-sounding first name, the government claimed the right to change it to something more traditionally Norwegian.
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On a personal level, such silence could be even more damaging. The children’s mothers often both refused to talk about their paternity and forbade them from talking about it themselves. Some children did not learn about their father’s nationality until they went to school and found themselves being taunted in the playground. It seems that silence on the subject rarely prevented the children from being verbally abused outside the family.
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The devastating effects that such universal rejection had on these children have only recently come to light. According to the study sponsored by the Norwegian government in 2001, war children suffer higher death rates, higher divorce rates and worse health than the rest of Norway’s population. They are typically less well educated, and earn lower incomes than other Norwegians. They are also significantly more likely to commit suicide than their peers. The worst mortality rates occurred in those born in 1941 and 1942 – a tendency that the authors of the study partly ascribe to the fact that these children were old enough at the end of the war to understand what was happening to them. The immediate postwar years were the time when bitterness towards these children was at its strongest.
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War children in Norway would remain outcasts for years to come. In some crucial ways they were treated even more harshly than their mothers. In 1950 a new Citizenship Act gave those women who had married Germans the right to reacquire their Norwegian citizenship; war children, by contrast, were denied this right until they reached eighteen years of age. Every year, right up until the start of the 1960s, these children and their guardians had to undergo the annual humiliation of applying to the local police office for permission to remain in the country.

Broadly speaking, the experiences of Norwegian war children are fairly representative of the experiences of those across the whole of western Europe. Children with German fathers were threatened, teased and shunned wherever they were born. Sometimes they were physically abused, but more often the abuse was verbal – derogatory nicknames like
bébés boches, tyskerunger
or
moeffenkinder.
War children from every country speak of being bullied by other children, teachers, neighbours and sometimes members of their own family. They were often ignored in classrooms and shunned in their communities.

As in Norway, a culture of shameful silence followed these children wherever they went, both in their private lives and in their dealings with officialdom. War children in Denmark, for example, later claimed to have been ‘born into an atmosphere of pain, shame and lies’.
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Those Danes who wanted to discover information about their German fathers were often actively obstructed from doing so.
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Governments across Europe consistently under-reported the numbers of ‘German’ children in their midst - indeed, in Poland the official number of war children is still zero: realistic estimates of the phenomenon did not sit happily alongside the newly established national myths about ‘universal resistance’ to occupation.
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Of course, this is not the only story – there were many children who suffered little or no discrimination at all because of their paternity. Indeed, in one study by the University of Bergen almost half of the war children questioned claimed that they had had no problems because of their background. However, that still means that more than half
had
had problems.
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In the vast majority of cases there was nobody to stand up for these children but their mothers, who were themselves often the objects of contempt. One can only applaud the bravery of the French mother who confronted a schoolteacher who had called her daughter a
‘bâtard du Boche
’ with the words: ‘Madame, it was not my daughter who slept with a German, but me. When you want to insult someone, save it for me rather than taking it out on an innocent child.’
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15

The Purpose of Vengeance

Vengeance is a much-condemned but little-understood aspect of the immediate postwar period. Much as we might now deplore vengeance in all its forms, it is important to acknowledge that it served several purposes, not all of which were entirely negative. For the victors, it underlined the defeat of Germany and its collaborators, and established beyond any doubt who now held the reins of power. For Hitler’s victims it restored a sense of the moral equilibrium, even if it did so at the expense of relinquishing some of the moral high ground. And for the European community as a whole it at last gave expression to some of the frustration that had built up throughout the years of Nazi repression.

Acts of vengeance certainly gave individuals, as well as communities, a sense that they were no longer passive bystanders to events. Rightly or wrongly, the mobs who lynched German soldiers on the streets of Prague or Black Brigade members on the streets of Milan were collectively satisfied by what they had done: not only had they struck a blow at fascism, but they had taken power back into their own hands. Likewise, the millions of foreign slave labourers who were released from captivity in Germany usually took delight in stealing food and valuables from German houses, and occasionally also mistreated the German families they found there. They saw this as their right after years of their own hunger and mistreatment.

In some parts of Europe, where the people had lost all faith in their institutions of law and order, the recourse to vengeance at least gave them the sense that some kind of justice was possible. In other parts, the less violent forms of revenge were sometimes thought to have had quite positive effects on society. The most common form of vengeance in western Europe – the shaving of women’s heads – was credited at the time with reducing violence and giving occupied towns and villages a new sense of pride. Though we now find such events reprehensible, it is undeniable that they brought communities together and made them, at last, feel re-empowered. Acknowledging such facts does not mean that we have to condone vengeance – but if we fail to acknowledge them we will never have a proper understanding of the violent forces that drove events during this chaotic period.