March 08, 2007

'Lebensborn' sue Norway. A group of Norwegians who were fathered by German soldiers in World War II are suing the Norwegian authorities at the European Court of Human Rights. More on the lebensborn.
posted by HawthorneWingo 17 years ago
  • Being partly Norwegian-American, I feel shame for this. I had thought that the Norwegians were so great during the Winter Olympic Games, and all. Should I really feel shame or pride for being associated with them? Technically I should feel neither. According to General Semantics, and the principle of non-identity , individuals are innocent of the madness of crowds, unless they actively participate, and so are the children of occupying army progenitors innocent. But governments are not so innocent, for they are the 'head of the snake'. They should have known better, and should make amends to those very children who can prove their case.
  • Wow, two Nazi-related threads in one day! Is this a Monkeyfilter first?
  • So what I want to know is, did the Nazi "positive eugenics" program have any positive results? (I mean besides making lots of blonds.) Did it "breed out" bad things, like "the Jews" are trying to do? Not everything about eugenics is evil or wrong just because the Nazis did it, y'know; of what great value is Huntington's disease? (I'm talking about voluntary "selective breeding", not "eliminating" people judged "unfit" nor even "curing" teh Ghey.)
  • I wonder how many of the occupying soldiers were Nazis. My bet is that there weren't as many as we think, and that the love affairs during the war were as natural as any other love affair. Do the kids deserve compensation? Yep. Some of the abuses were systematised in the state, which means the victims should be compensated by the state. A good novel that deals with some of this is The Half-Brother, by Lars Saabye Christensen. It's available in English.
  • OK, forget that last comment. These are kids who were farmed in Germany. I reserve judgement because I can see many sides to the case. Let the court do its job.
  • I've always wondered what happened to all those Lebensborn. Great posts, HawthorneWingo. You can't ignore consequences when those consequences happen to be actual human beings (although you can try). I wish these people much luck in rising above what they had no control over in the first place.