Norway apologizes to women victims of reprisals for their relations with Nazis in wartime: NPR

Norway on Wednesday apologized to women who had faced retaliation and public shame for maintaining relations with German occupying forces during the Second World War.

According to the BBC, nearly 50,000 Norwegian women would have had intimate relations with German soldiers. Many of them faced reprisals from the government after the end of the war, including illegal arrests, dismissals at work and withdrawal of their nationality.

Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg has formally apologized to these "German girls" at an event marking the 70th anniversary of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

"For many, it was only a teenage love, for some, the love of their lives with an enemy soldier or an innocent flirt that left its mark for the rest of their lives," said Solberg. "Today, on behalf of the government, I want to apologize."

Many German men in Nordic countries were encouraged by their leaders to have children with local women. Lebensborn – which translates as "the spring of life" – was the Nazi leader Heinrich Himmler's infamous effort to create an Aryan super-race by commandeering the offspring of blue-eyed blond Germans and their counterparts from the occupied countries by the Nazis.

Norway's Scandinavian gene pool has made it a prime target for this racist effort. The country was invaded by Nazi forces in 1940.

The New York Times reports that German SS have set up clinics in the occupied territories to ensure the birth of children born to SS soldiers.

"We can not say that women having personal relations with German soldiers participated in the German war effort," Guardian Guri Hjeltnes, historian and director of the Center for Studies in the Field, told The Guardian. Holocaust and minorities. "Their crime violated unwritten rules and moral standards, and they were punished even more severely than the profiteers of the war."

Women In The World reports that nearly 30 Norwegian men who married German women during the occupation have not been the subject of government reprisals.

The children of these unions were subject to alienation and identity confusion after the war. The ABBA singer Anni-Frid Lyngstad, born to a Norwegian mother and father of German sergeant, is one of them, The Guardian reports.

Lyngstad's mother and grandmother were ostracized after her birth and immigrated to Sweden soon after. Those who remained in Norway were socially discriminated against, struggled to find work and would have been labeled "rats" by government authorities.

These "children of shame" received an apology from the government in 2000.