Court to Consider Compensating Nazi "Lebensborn" Children

In 1935, Nazi SS leader Heinrich Himmler launched the "Lebensborn" program to breed a blond-haired blue-eyed master race. After many decades of silence and discrimination, 150 of these surviving Lebensborn children, all with a German father and Norwegian mother, have come forward to ask for compensation from their home country, Norway, before the European Court of Human Rights in Strabourg, France.

During the years of Nazi occupation in Norway, a half million German soldiers were urged to father children with "pure blood" Norwegian women --- "descendants of the Vikings" - thus, helping create a master race. More than 10,000 babies during the Norway occupation came out of the Lebensborn program.

The 150 Lebensborn children petitioning the Court claim that their own government has continuously ignored their pleas of discrimination. In Oslo's Nazi Resistance Museum, there's no mention of the Lebensborn children (or as they call themselves, "war children").

After the war, these children became a hated symbol of the Nazi Occupation. Many of them wound up in orphanages or mental institutions.

Besides his dream of a master race, Himmler created the Lebensborn program as a response to the low German birth rate and high number of abortions. Many of the Lebensborn fathers were married members of the SS, Hitler's elite soldiers. Newborns often went through a Nazi "baptism", a dagger held over their body and their mother pledging allegiance to Adolf Hitler. During the war, the Nazi occupation government gave Lebensborn mothers benefits including discounted rent and cheap loans.

"I never fought in the war. I never started it. I never ended it. I didn't participate. I was a product of it," said Gerd Fleischer, one of the 150 "war children" now before the Court.

While the Nazi Lebensborn program is very much a historical fact, historians have yet to prove that a "stud farm" ever existed. This was a common belief after the war.

Other occupied countries with Lebensborn programs included Austria, north-eastern Poland, Denmark, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg.

SOURCES:

http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,446978,00.html

http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/C3A85675-8AB4-4A45-B599-165F821AD742.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebensborn

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/crossing_continents/1691452.stm

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/Lebensborn.html