Дети войны: рожденные в оккупации и послевоенное преследование

Child born to a local parent and a parent belonging to a foreign military force

War children are those born to a local parent and a parent belonging to a foreign military force (usually an occupying force, but also military personnel stationed at military bases on foreign soil). Having a child by a member of a belligerent force, throughout history and across cultures, is often considered a grave betrayal of social values. Commonly, the native parent (usually a woman) is disowned by family, friends, and society at large. The term "war child" is most commonly used for children born during World War II and its aftermath, particularly in relation to children born to fathers in German occupying forces in northern Europe. In Norway, there were also Lebensborn children. The discrimination suffered by the local parent and child in the postwar period did not take into account widespread rapes by occupying forces, or the relationships women had to form in order to survive the war years.

Estimates of the number of war children fathered by German soldiers during World War II are difficult to gauge. Mothers tended to hide such pregnancies for fear of revenge and reprisal by family members. Lower estimates range in the hundreds of thousands, while upper estimates are much increased, into the millions.

"Lebensborn" was one of several programs initiated by the Nazi leader Heinrich Himmler to try to secure the racial heredity of the Third Reich. The program mainly served as a welfare institution for parents and children deemed racially valuable, initially, those of SS men. As German forces occupied nations in northern Europe, the organization expanded its program to provide care to suitable women and children, particularly in Norway, where the women were judged suitably Aryan. In Norway a local Lebensborn office, Abteilung Lebensborn, was established in 1941 to support children of German soldiers and their Norwegian mothers, pursuant to German law (Hitlers Verordnung, 28 July 1942). The organization ran several homes where pregnant women could give birth. Facilities also served as permanent homes for eligible women until the end of the war. Additionally, the organization paid child support on behalf of the father, and covered other expenses, including medical bills, dental treatment and transportation. In total, between 9 and 15 Lebensborn homes were established. Of the estimated 10,000–12,000 children born to Norwegian mothers and German fathers during the war, 8,000 were registered by Abteilung Lebensborn. In 4,000 of these cases, the father is known. The women were encouraged to give the children up for adoption, and many were transferred to Germany, where they were adopted or raised in orphanages. During and after the war, the Norwegians commonly referred to these children as tyskerunger, translating as "German kids" or "Kraut kids", a derogatory term. As a result of later recognition of their post war mistreatment, the more diplomatic term krigsbarn (war children) came into use and is now the generally accepted form.

As the war ended, the children and their mothers were made outcasts by many among the general populace in formerly occupied countries, as societies grieved and resented the losses of the war, and actively rejected everything associated with Germany. The children and their mothers were often isolated socially, and many children were bullied by other children, and sometimes by adults, due to their origin. For instance, immediately after the peace, 14,000 women were arrested in Norway on suspicion of "collaboration" or association with the enemy; 5,000 were, without any judiciary process, placed in forced labor camps for a year and a half. Their heads were shaved, and they were beaten and raped. In an interview for the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter, war children claim that, while living at an orphanage in Bergen, they were forced as children to parade on the streets so the local population could whip them and spit at them.

In 1950, diplomatic relations improved so that the Norwegian government was able to collect child support from identified fathers of war children who were living in West Germany and Austria. As of 1953 such payments were made. Child support from fathers living in East Germany was kept in locked accounts until diplomatic relations between the two countries were established in 1975. Some of the war children have tried to obtain official recognition for past mistreatment. Supporters claim the discrimination against them equated to an attempt at genocide. In December 1999, 122 war children filed a claim in the Norwegian courts for the failure of the state to protect them as Norwegian citizens. The case was to test the boundaries of the law; seven persons signed the claim. The courts have ruled such suits as void due to the statute of limitations. The law of Norway allows citizens who have experienced neglect or mistreatment by failure of the state to apply for "simple compensation" (an arrangement that is not subject to the statute of limitations). In July 2004 the government expanded this compensation program to include war children who had experienced lesser difficulties. The basic compensation rate is set to 20,000 NOK (€2,500 / $3,000) for what Norwegian government terms "mobbing" (bullying). Those who can document other abuse can receive up to 200,000 NOK (€25,000 / $30,000). On 8 March 2007, 158 war children were to have their case heard at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. They demanded reparations of between 500,000 SEK (≈ 431,272 NOK) and 2,000,000 SEK (≈ 1,725,088 NOK) each for systematic abuse. The Norwegian government contested the claim that the children were abused with the consent of the government. In 2008 their case before the European Court of Human Rights was dismissed, but they were each offered a £8,000 token from the Norwegian government.

In conjunction with the 1999 claim by the war children, a motion was filed in September 2000 alleging that 10 war children were subject to experiments with LSD approved by the Norwegian government and financed by the CIA, the American intelligence agency. In the postwar years, medical staff in several European countries, and the United States, conducted clinical trials or experimental treatment involving LSD, most of them at some point between 1950 and 1970. In Norway, trials involved volunteer patients under a protocol after traditional medical treatments had proved unsuccessful. The most famous of Norway's war children is Anni Frid Lyngstad, the former ABBA singer.

German forces invaded Norway in 1940 and occupied the country until 1945. At the end of the war, the German forces stood at 372,000. It is estimated that between 10,000 and 12,000 children were born to Norwegian mothers with German partners during the occupation. As Nazi ideology considered Norwegians to be pure Aryans, German authorities did not prohibit soldiers from pursuing relationships with Norwegian women. Their Lebensborn organization encouraged it. After the war these women especially, but also their children, were mistreated in Norway.

German forces occupied Denmark between 1940 and 1945. German soldiers were encouraged to fraternize with Danish women, who were also considered pure Aryan. The government has estimated between 6,000 and 8,000 children were born to Danish mothers with German partners during or just after the occupation. The women were nicknamed "German Girls", used in a pejorative sense. The Danish government has documented 5,579 such children. In 1999 the Danish government allowed this group access to parenthood archives. They exempted these descendants from the country's normal secrecy period of 80 years for such records.

German soldiers were forbidden from having relationships with French women by the Nazi regime at the beginning of the Occupation. Due to difficulties of enforcement, the military later tolerated fraternization. This was an intermediate situation between the encouragement of similar relationships in Denmark and Norway, and strict prohibition in Eastern Europe. The different regulations were based on Nazi racial ideology as to which populations they considered racially pure enough as to be desirable for children born to their men. The number of war children born to French women in France by German soldier fathers in the years 1941–49, is estimated to be 75,000 to 200,000. After the expulsion of German troops from France, those women who were known to have had relationships with German soldiers, were arrested, "judged", and exposed in the streets to public condemnation and attacks. Having their heads shaved in public to mark them was a common punishment. Such descendants have formed a group to represent them, Amicale Nationale des Enfants de la Guerre. Another group of French, German and Austrian children of war exists under the name of Coeurs sans frontières Herzen ohne Grenzen.'

During the wartime and the post war period, Finnish women gave birth to 468,269 children in Finland in the period 1940–1945. A small portion, about 1,100 of the children, were fathered by foreign troops. Some 700 children were born to German soldiers, 200–300 to Soviet POWs, and 100 to Swedish volunteers. Depending much on the foreign father's background, most of these children were left fatherless, and some of the mothers, along with their children, faced discrimination in Finnish society.

Following the revision of the Anti Comintern Pact in 1941, there were no more than 200,000 German soldiers in Finland, the vast majority of them stationed in the Finnish Lapland in the period 1941–1944. According to the National Archives of Finland, as many as 3,000 Finnish women, some working for the voluntary auxiliary paramilitary organisation Lotta Svärd and some for the Wehrmacht, had relationships with German soldiers. An estimated 700 children were born to German soldiers in Finland, and were mostly unplanned. Many German soldiers were aware of safe sex and the Wehrmacht kept them well equipped with condoms, which has been estimated to effectively keep a relatively low impregnation rate for the Finnish women who had sexual intercourse with German soldiers. A booklet published by the OKW in 1943, Der deutsche Soldat und die Frau aus fremdem Volkstum, allowed German soldiers to marry those Finnish women who could be considered to represent the "Aryan race", hinting that there was some uncertainty among Nazi authorities about ethnic Finns' "genetic suitability". After the war, most of the Finnish mothers that had children with German soldiers were left as single parents. Some of these children were adopted by the Finnish men who later married the children's mothers. Some Finnish women who were associated with German soldiers faced discrimination in Finnish society. The discrimination was not generally as harsh as that most other European women experienced elsewhere for the same reason, mostly due to the concept of a "Finnish German brotherhood in arms" during the co belligerence and their shared mutual enmity with the Soviet Union. Some Soviet POWs captured by the Finns were also intimately involved with Finnish women, a situation considered far more socially unacceptable and deserving of censure (see the section below). However the children fathered by German soldiers still encountered discrimination in their youth as well. These women's backgrounds varied: some were unmarried, while others were widowed by the war. Some relationships were adulterous, as some of the women were married to Finnish soldiers who were absent at the time. The usage of condoms was scarce, partially due to the lack of their availability to POWs, and partially due to the lack of rural Finnish women's awareness of condom usage. After the Moscow Armistice, Finland started to return the surviving POWs to the Soviet Union, and most of the Finnish mothers that had children with POWs were left as single parents. Some of the mothers married Finnish men afterwards. Relationships between native women and ethnic Russian POWs were especially disapproved of in Finnish society, much more so than similar relationships with German soldiers and with POWs from other Finnic peoples, such as Karelians. A strong factor behind this greater censure was the long lasting anti Russian sentiment in Finland (ryssäviha in Finnish). Some women's heads were shaved for allegedly having relationships with Soviet POWs. Pejorative terms such as ryssän heila (ryssä's girlfriend, the word ryssä being a common Finnish slur for a Russian) and ryssän huora (ryssä's whore) were widely used. The children fathered by Soviet POWs also faced discrimination in their youth, such as bullying in school. There is no official record of these children, but researchers estimate their number to be at least 200. The relatively low number, some authors argue, was because only a small proportion of pregnancies resulted in births, due to the mothers' fears of discrimination. Abortions were easily accessible in Greece at that time, and it is claimed that the Orthodox Church encouraged silence on the matter and assisted women in obtaining abortions.

The Nazis considered the women of the Netherlands to be Aryan and acceptable for fraternization by German soldiers. The Dutch Institute for War Documentation originally estimated that around 10,000 children by German fathers were born to Dutch mothers during the occupation. However, recent figures, based on newly available records at the archives of the German Wehrmacht (name of the German armed forces from 1935 to 1945), indicate that the true number could be as high as 50,000.

Some Japanese soldiers married Vietnamese women like Nguyen Thi Xuan and Nguyen Thi Thu and fathered multiple children with the Vietnamese women who remained behind in Vietnam while the Japanese soldiers themselves returned to Japan in 1955. The official Vietnamese historical narrative view them as children of rape and prostitution. The Japanese forced Vietnamese women to become comfort women and with Burmese, Indonesian, Thai and Filipino women they made up a notable portion of Asian comfort women in general. Japanese use of Malaysian and Vietnamese women as comfort women was corroborated by testimonies. There were comfort women stations in Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines, Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, North Korea and South Korea. Out of these relations a number of children were born that were later abandoned by their Japanese fathers after the war, while a large number of soldiers would also remain behind in Vietnam, married Vietnamese women, and raised families. In 1954, the Vietnamese government had ordered the Japanese soldiers to return home. They were “encouraged” to leave their families behind effectively abandoning their war children in Vietnam. more than 37,000 illegitimate children were sired by American fathers in the 10 years following the German surrender (in general agreement with Hohn's numbers cited above). Locals generally disapproved of any relations between the occupation forces and German and Austrian women. Not only were the Americans the recent enemy, but the residents feared the American fathers would abandon the mothers and children to be cared for by the local communities, which were severely impoverished after the war. A majority of the 37,000 illegitimate children ended up as wards of the social services for at least some time. Many of the children remained wards of the state for a long time, especially children of African American fathers. The mixed race children, called "brown children", were seldom adopted in what was then a very racially homogeneous country. Around 8,000 of these children were born. Arrangements were made for some such children to be adopted by African American couples or families in the United States. The food situation in occupied Germany was initially very dire. By the spring of 1946, the official ration in the US zone was no more than 1275 calories per day (much less than the minimum required to maintain health), with some areas probably receiving as little as 700. Thousands of US soldiers exploited this desperate situation to their advantage, using their ample supply of food and cigarettes (the currency of the black market) as what became known as "frau bait" achieving survival sex. Each side continued to view the other as the enemy, even while exchanging food for sex. Even after the lifting of the ban, West German courts had little power to gain child support from American soldiers. An unknown number exceeding 10,000 children of African American soldiers was born to British and European women through 1955. Generically, they were called Brown Babies, but were referred to in various ways in the countries in which most were born: England, Germany and Austria. A very small number was born in the Netherlands, but a 21st century oral history project there, "The Children of African American Liberators," provided an in depth understanding of their lives into adulthood. As well, in 2016 the Folklore Museum of Vienna mounted a thorough exhibition, "Black Austria. The Children of African American Occupation Soldiers." In the earliest stages of the occupation, American soldiers were not allowed to pay maintenance for children they admitted having fathered, the military classifying any such assistance as "aiding the enemy". Marriages between white US soldiers and Austrian women were prohibited until January 1946, and with German women until December 1946. A famous example is Eric Clapton.

On liberation, many Dutch women welcomed the Allied troops and had relationships that resulted in babies; these were called 'Liberation babies'. It is estimated that about 4,000 "liberation babies" were fathered by Canadian soldiers before they left the area in early 1946.

In Austria, war children ("Russenkind") by known Soviet fathers of the occupation were discriminated against, as were their mothers. The Austrians also resented women who had relations with American soldiers, calling them 'Yanks' chicks' (Amischickse) or 'Dollar sluts' (Dollarflitscherl) and, in the case of those who had relations with black soldiers, 'chocolate girl' (Schokoladenmädchen). In April 1946, the Stars and Stripes newspaper warned "pregnant Fräuleins" that military authorities would provide no assistance to them or their children if the fathers were US soldiers. The paper said that a "'Strength Through Joy' girl who ate from the forbidden fruit should accept the consequences," referring to a Nazi slogan.

The term Lai Dai Han (or sometimes Lai Daihan/Lai Tai Han) is a Vietnamese term for a mixed ancestry person born to a South Korean father and a Vietnamese mother, including the victims of sexual assault by Korean soldiers, during the Vietnam War. Lai Dai Han often live at the margins of Vietnamese society. The exact number of Lai Daihan is unknown. According to Busan Ilbo, there are at least 5,000 and as many as 30,000.

Numerous Asian European children were also born during the colonial years of the British, French, and Dutch administrations in India and various Southeast Asian countries. In many cases, the father was a colonial civil servant, settler or military officer based in the occupied Asian country while the mother was a local. The term "Eurasian" is used but has variants depending on country of origin and nationality of the parents. Examples include the Indos in Indonesia, Burghers (Portuguese or Dutch) in Sri Lanka, Kristang (usually Portuguese) in Malaysia and Goans (Portuguese) and Anglo Indians (British) in India.

Numerous war children were born as the result of their mothers being raped by enemy forces during World War II. Military rape of conquered women has been practiced in numerous conflicts throughout human history. Recent examples include during the longstanding wars in the Congo and Sudan.

In the 1990s organizations were formed to classify such violence against women as among the prosecutable war crimes in former Yugoslavia. Some Muslim women in Bosnia who were raped in Serbian camps were aided by humanitarian organizations.

The recognition in 1989 that violence against women in the form of rape was a deliberate military strategy and human rights abuse led to the approval of an international Convention on the Rights of the Child. Since 2008, the United Nations Security Council bans such sexual violations, defining them as a war crime. The German weekly Die Zeit described this action as an historical milestone.

One author suggested that adoption and assimilation of a child into a new family might be a solution to prevent war children from growing up as unwanted and mobbed by people in a hostile environment.

Occupation forces after World War II strictly interdicted fraternization by military personnel with people of the occupied territories. Couples who became involved tried to hide their relationship because of these interdictions and the resentment and disapproval by the occupied population. Fathers of war children were generally excepted from civil actions by mothers to claim alimony or child support. Communication with the mothers of war children often ceased when the soldiers suddenly were reassigned, often without time to say goodbye. Some of the soldiers were killed in action. In the post war period, soldier fathers were prevented by conditions from returning to former native women and war children even if they wanted to. Others had wives and families to return to at home, and denied having war children. In some cases, they never knew they had sired children when serving abroad.

At the end of war, mothers with war children were prosecuted as criminals and punished in humiliating ways for their relations with the enemy. They were isolated socially and economically. Many of them could only rehabilitate themselves and become respected by marrying a fellow countryman. Long term persecution of a former girlfriend of a German soldier is documented in a book by ANEG; she says that she was traumatized for the rest of her life.

Since the late 20th century, as they reach retirement age, many war children from World War II have begun to search for their full identity and their roots. The legal children of a German father may also be interested in contacting the previously unknown war child of their father, if they know one or more exists. Public opinion has become more compassionate toward the past generation of war children. Few of the biological fathers are still alive. Subject to bullying and humiliation, many of the mothers never told their children about their foreign fathers.

The government has advised that persons trying to do research should gather the complete birth documents, including the birth certificate (not only parts of it). The Norwegian archive at Victoria Terrasse in Oslo burned down in the 1950s, and many of these important documents were lost. The Norwegian Red Cross has some records. It is often easier to trace the Norwegian mother first by Church records.

The government and researchers recommend that persons search for documentary evidence from Nationalsozialistische Volkswohlfahrt, Auslandsorganisation – Amt für Volkswohlfahrt und Winterhilfswerk (1941–1944) about alimony payments. Old photographs with greetings on the back or private letters may provide clues to a father's identity.

Since 2005 the society, Amicale Nationale des Enfants de la Guerre (ANEG), has worked in both France and Germany to help descendants of parents of mixed nationalities, whether a German father in France or French father in occupied Germany. Cœurs Sans Frontières/Herzen ohne Grenzen (Hearts without Frontiers) is another French / German organization supporting the search for family members of French children whose fathers were German soldiers during the occupation and German or Austrian children whose fathers were prisoners, forced laborers or French soldiers in the immediate post war period.

Mixed children of white German women and black WWI soldiers were called "Rhineland Bastards". This phrase, along with many other racial epithets, reinforced a negative stereotype that black men were beasts and did not care for their children. The "Brown Babies" became an international concern, with the African American press publicizing and advertising for adoptions. In these efforts there was a distinct emphasis in both countries on the skin color of the child (for example: advertised as "Brown Babies" rather than simply as "orphans"). This was important because a dark skin color both excluded children from German national identity, and allowed them more acceptance in the United States than was offered to light skinned "German" babies. This distinction was further emphasized when "Brown Babies" who were adopted into the US were afterwards forbidden from speaking their native German. This served efforts to erase an entire generation of Afro Germans. Since 2009 the German government has granted German citizenship upon application and documentation by war children who were born in France to French mothers and German soldier fathers in WWII.

Post war war children often search in vain: their knowledge of their father's personal data may be vague, some archives are closed, and much data has been lost. Since 2009 the German based association, GI Babies Germany e. V., also assists in the search for the roots of children of German mothers and GIs in the occupation.

Organization Canadian Roots UK helps war children in Great Britain to trace a Canadian father. Conversely it also helps Canadian veteran fathers to trace a child born in the UK during or shortly after WWII.