War 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.

An example are the children born during and after World War II whose fathers were military personnel in regions occupied by Nazi Germany.

The first autobiography by the child of a German occupying soldier and Norwegian mother was The Boy from Gimle (1993) by Eystein Eggen; he dedicated his book to all such children.

Additionally, the organization paid child support on behalf of the father, and covered other expenses, including medical bills, dental treatment and transportation.

[citation needed] During and after the war, the Norwegians commonly referred to these children as tyskerunger, translating as "German-kids" or "Kraut kids", a derogatory term.

[citation needed] 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.

[3] In a survey conducted by the Norwegian Ministry of Social Affairs in 1945, the local government in one third of the counties expressed an unfavorable view of the war children.

The same year the Ministry of Social Affairs briefly explored the possibility of reuniting the children and their mothers with surviving fathers in post-war Germany, but decided against this.

[citation needed] Due to the political attitudes prevailing after the end of the war, the Norwegian government made proposals to forcibly deport 8000 children and their mothers to Germany, but there were concerns that the deportees would have no means of livelihood there.

[5] 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.

[citation needed] 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).

[8][9][10] 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.

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.

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".

Subsequently, most of these women returned to Finland, as their presence was commonly unwelcome in Germany and some faced active mistreatment, such as forced labor.

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).

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.

[42] In 2017 the Japanese Emperor Akihito and his wife Empress Michiko visited Hanoi as at the time Japan had become the largest donor of aid to Vietnam and a top investor into the country.

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.

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.

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".

[43] The official United States policy on war children was summed up in the Stars and Stripes on 8 April 1946, in the article "Pregnant Frauleins Are Warned!

Notable children of British servicemen and German mothers include Lewis Holtby, Kevin Kerr, Maik Taylor and David McAllister.

[51] 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.

[51] In coordination with American groups, an Austrian welfare program was started after the war to send the mixed-race children of Austrian/African-American parents to the United States for adoption by African-American families.

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.

[53] 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.

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").