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| Europe |
| Kids of Hitler Breeding Program Wonder What They Did Wrong |
| 2005-03-15 |
| Gathered at the Royal Christiania Hotel overlooking rain-swept Oslo, the men and women with their name tags and windbreakers could pass for an ordinary party of people over 60 on an outing. But these 30 or so Norwegians, about to set out on a day cruise, are anything but ordinary. There's Paul Hansen, who grew up in a mental home even though there was nothing wrong with him. There's Tove Laila Strand, sipping a drink and looking as fragile as the single zinnia on her table. Her mother and stepfather used to beat her with a clothes hanger. Downstairs in the lobby, Hugo Frebel, a large, amiable 62-year-old, starts to tell his story, then lowers his voice and glances around. "People are listening," he says, and leads his guest upstairs to the company of people who can understand what he has been through: members of the League Lebensborn of Norwegian Children of War. Victims of World War II, these are the children born of Hitler's dream of breeding a master race by pairing German soldiers with north European women deemed to meet the blond, fair-skinned Aryan ideal. Their parentage condemned many of them to the margins of society. It denied them an education or cost them their marriages. Only now, as the 60th anniversary of the war's end approaches, is the government offering them compensation. "I was a German baby. Worse than an insect," Frebel recalls. "They threw stones at us." |
| Posted by:Desert Blondie |
| #5 I just got back from a visit to Oslo and had a chance to get to the Norwegian Resistance Museum. They had a very interesting WWII history and spent 5 years under German occupation. And if that wasn't enough, they spent the next 50 years watching that big neighbor, USSR, to the north who always coveted an open water port, just like Norway has, for that end of the USSR. The museum had pictures of the Nazies marching in front of the Palace in 1940, and of everyone taking to the same street in 1945. It appeared to me that the norwegians put up a more substancial "resistance" than the cheese eating surrender monkeys... Not that it can be rationalized, but I can understand the dynamic of hatred that these victims were subjected to. |
| Posted by: Capsu78 2005-03-15 5:19:50 PM |
| #4 Zhang, Thanks for clearing that up. I did not know that Japan has already paid compensation to the countries involved which never got to the real; victims. -- I stand corrected. And I agree that these women pretty much got screwed by Japanese army then screwed by their own families and people |
| Posted by: CrazyFool 2005-03-15 4:06:56 PM |
| #3 CrazyFool: Japan still refuses to apologize (or even acknowledge) or give compenstation to the victims citing various post-war 'treaties'. The Japanese paid out huge sums of money as compensation for war-related indignities. The post-war governments of the occupied countries chose to allow these women to be ostracized and generally discriminated against without compensating them from the funds paid by the Japanese government. You gotta love how these guys are double-dipping by taking the money and running, sticking it to the comfort women, and then calling the Japanese government names. As far as I'm concerned, the politicians and the citizens of the occupied countries really need a good beating. They are like the husband whose wife is raped, is paid monetary compensation, keeps the money and then beats his wife for not killing herself after being raped. |
| Posted by: Zhang Fei 2005-03-15 4:00:13 PM |
| #2 Lets not forget the Comfort Women of the Japanese Empire. These are women who were taken (sometimes unwillingly - sometimes deceptively (to work in factories)) from their homes to serve in de-facto sexual slavery to the Imperial Japanese army. (Note: This is Imperial Japan of WW II and not what I consider moden Japan). Japan still refuses to apologize (or even acknowledge) or give compenstation to the victims citing various post-war 'treaties'. |
| Posted by: CrazyFool 2005-03-15 1:06:55 PM |
| #1 Facism and Nazism goes both ways... These people who dumped on kids is exactly the same as people blaming a child born because the mother was raped or, in past times, the parents weren't married. |
| Posted by: BigEd 2005-03-15 11:58:41 AM |