During the Second World War, an estimated 10,000 children were born in Norway out of liaisons between occupying German soldiers and local women. The Nazis set up special Lebensborn homes for single mothers and their babies.

From 1940 till the end of the war, almost half a million German troops occupied Norway. According to some, it was a relatively "soft occupation". The Nazis, obsessed with their own ideas of racial purity, saw Norway as a pureblood Aryan land and so an edict from Heinrich Himmler himself, proclaimed that Norwegian women were to be treated "like goddesses". They were encouraged to fraternize with German soldiers, and if some of these unions bore fruit, so much the better.

A series of Lebensborn homes were created throughout the country. Lebensborn literally means "the fountain of life". They were essentially refuges for single mothers and their babies. The children of German soldiers and Norwegian women were considered to be the perfect Aryans for the mighty Third Reich, and so they were very well taken care of in these homes - at least for the duration of the war. After their first months in these homes, some of these babies remained with their mothers, but many were adopted out to German or Norwegian families or sent to their German grandparents.

Horizontal collaboration

After the German defeat however, the lives of these Norwegian women and their children went through a drastic change. The estimated 50,000 or so Norwegian women who had participated in "horizontal collaboration" were treated very badly. Some were shipped to detention centres, others went into hiding and kept their pasts hidden for the rest of their lives. And many of the children born of these unions were destined for lives of cruelty and despair.

Paul Hansen and Tove Laila are two such examples. Paul’s mother abandoned him in the Lebensborn home where he was born, and he grew up in a series of children's homes until he was four, when he was separated from the other children and placed in an adult mental institution. He was to remain remain there until he was officially an adult.

He talks of being frightened of the screaming adults and teenagers around him, of the excrement on the walls, of the total absence of touch throughout his childhood. "The staff did not abuse me, but they were just doing their jobs - I was never hugged or given any special attention," he says.

Taboo and silence
 
Tove Laila Strand, also born in a Lebensborn home, was a toddler when she was sent to grandparents in Germany. She remembers the love she got from them, and their collective horror when they were informed after the war that she was going to be forced back to Norway to rejoin her mother who had abused her when she was a baby.

She was only six when she came back to Norway, but vividly remembers climbing out of the bus to meet her mother, her new stepfather and baby half sister. "I remember the terrible look in my mother's eyes when she saw me," says Tove Laila, "and the man she'd married - they were both looking at me in a terrible way. That was the day hell started." Tove Laila, torn from grandparents who had loved and wanted her, arrived in a household where she was treated as a servant, with total responsibility for her baby sister. And she remembers the daily beatings.

She was sexually molested by her stepfather, and her mother's favourite name for her eldest daughter was "German pig". Tove Laila finally escaped when she was 16 and was so frightened of the stigma of her childhood that she never talked about it to family and friends.

For most of the war children, finding out the truth about their backgrounds, perhaps even meeting their parents, has been one of the biggest issues. Another one is to finally be able to talk about what for most of their lives was a taboo subject. "We've been harassed into silence," says Gerd Fleischer, "and its hard to understand why they hated us so much after the war that it took us 50 years for us to be able to even speak about it."

Children of the Hated was produced by Dheera Sujan. The documentary was originally broadcast in June 2003.