9. The Fate of the Tyskerbarnas Children
During the German occupation of Norway, women who had formed liaisons with German soldiers and officials had it made, compared to other Norwegians. Had Germany won the war, they and their Tyskerbarnas children would have formed a local social elite, but Germany was defeated, and that was bad news for those who had collaborated with the Nazis.
So great was the postwar hatred towards the “horizontal collaborators” and their Tyskerbarnas offspring that psychologists commissioned to study the mothers and their children concluded the women were asocial psychopaths. It went on to add that many of them were backwards, and of limited talent – implying a motive for their collaboration with the occupiers. Many of the children were forced to emigrate with their mothers after life in Norway grew intolerable, and most who remained grew into social misfits.
Of the Tyskerbarnas who remained, the Norwegian government and many Norwegians deemed them dangerous because of their Nazi genes, and it was feared that they might form a fascist fifth column and produce future Quislings. The government was desperate to rid itself of the problem, and attempted to send them as far away as Australia and Brazil. Sweden took in hundreds, and hundreds more were “sent back” to Germany.
Many were sent to special government-run homes, where they were raised as virtual prisoners, and there is evidence that drug trials were carried out on them and their mothers. Witnesses and documents indicate that the Norwegian military and Oslo University, perhaps at the behest of CIA, conducted experiments on them using LSD, mescaline, and other drugs.
They were eventually released in the early sixties as bewildered young adults into a world with which they had little experience. Of those who stayed with their mothers in the outside world, the verdict from a psychologist’s report that “father was a German” often sufficed to send them to mental institutes, were many were abused, physically and sexually.
