We, the children of the members of "Nasjonal Samling", Vidkun Quisling's party, had to go through all kind of difficulties before we managed to constitute a group. The energies which gathered our parents and made them strong together, during the difficult war years as well as during the even more difficult post war years, the same energies seem to have split the NS children, to have driven us from our parents' community. Having rejected our origins, we have ended up as refugees in our own country . The result is that most of us don't know other NS children but our own brothers and sisters.
In 1949 our parents founded the "League for social satisfaction". A newspaper, "Folk og Land" (People and Nation), linked the criminalized party members together where they lived scattered throughout the country. In 1971 the "League" changed its name to "INO", "the Institute for Research in Occupation History".
In 1988 a journalist asked the Institute to get in touch with some NS children. Ten children were chosen by the INO, and all of them, except Bente Blehr, asked for anonymity. It was then impossible for other NS children to contact the interviewees. Even today, ten years after, we only know three of the participants. The interviews were published with the significant title "Born Guilty".
In 1991 Eystein Eggen wrote, under his real name, a chronicle in the influential newspaper "Aftenposten" titled "The Lost Generation". Shortly afterwards we met in my apartment in Oslo. A first group was quickly established. One of the initiators was the Social Democrat Helge Fjugstad from Asker. We were around ten destiny bound fellows who regularely met, sometimes in privacy, other times in a quiet restaurant. We were all born between 1942 and 1950. Much time was spent presenting ourselves to the others, telling our individual life story. For each newcomer the procedure had to be repeated. An obligatory question was : "Which is your worst remembrance as an NS child ?"
Enlarging the group was difficult. Some children appeared with a passionate story for never reappearing. Others just sat there, unable to get out from the closet. The contact between Eystein Eggen and myself developed, and during periods we phoned each other daily in the purpose of talking over the group, our situation, our moral and psychological progress. To generate the conversation we used the hottest subjects : the generation gap, the holocaust, our feeling of guilt.
It happened during a walk in the park of "Frogner" in Oslo, the spring 1993, that we formulated the question :
"Can a child be born guilty ?"
Evidently the answer was :
"No !"
From this very moment we stopped trying to expiate. On the contrary it was important to fight for regaining our normal place in society. At best the war was not our affair. Why couldn't we put all of our parents' war engagements in parenthesis, and rather tie our lives to our grandparents ? The majority of them had never been members of the NS and could therefore legitimate our normal position in the chain of the generations. We are fully Norwegians, whatsoever revengeful anti Nazis may say and whatsoever we might feel ourselves.
The "revelation" which fell over us like the sunshine over the park this early summer day might appear absurd in its simplicity. But so much is absurd in the life of an NS child. Formulating the thought was fundamental.
Eystein Eggen had already in 1990 thought about writing his autobiography. Thanks to our group he extended his project, trying to write all the NS children back into the History from which we had dropped out. The book was published in 1993 with the title "The Boy from Gimle". (In Norse mythology the Gods lived in the castle "Gimle". Quisling's residence on the peninsula Bygdøy in the inner Oslo fjord also had this name. The dominating building on a basis of rustic granite heaves upwards ending in a heavy romanesque tower.) Around seventy NS children are mentioned with their real name in his book.
Eystein Eggen is a historian and sociologist with the old Norwegian farms as his specialty. In "The Boy from Gimle" he devotes all his erudition in explaining the NS movement through the old landowner families' philosophy and strive for defending Norwegian agrarian traditions in times when the Norwegian Labor Party progressed with their slogans for the "dictatorship of the proletariat" and the "extermination of the bourgeoisie". The pretended Norwegian Fascism, the NS movement, is not a diabolic ideology imported from the Continent. The movement is rooted in our country's own history. If a devil has sneaked within, it undoubtfully is a good old Norwegian troll.
Norwegian nationalism awoke in the 19th century, carried by romantic personalities like Edvard Grieg and Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson. The Norwegian Liberal Party, "Venstre", founded in 1884, canalized the national spirit and became, at the end of the century, the dominant party. This party's policy led to Norway's independence from Sweden in 1905. Bente Blehr's grandfather, Otto Blehr, was Prime Minister at that time. Both Eystein Eggen's grandfather as well as mine were "venstremenn", i. e. Liberals. From the Liberal Party to the NS there were connections through the old landowners' families. Due to his old enthusiasm for the Liberal Party Knut Hamsun supported the NS without being a member..
Even though family Conservatism is the main topic in "The Boy from Gimle", Eystein Eggen establishes a front against the national legacy of "Venstre" where this legacy departed from its local foundation and entered into a more general pan-German racism. We NS children often get a feeling that it has been more important to annihilate the old families than to destroy Nazism as such. Eggen underlines that in his father's family there was, besides a remarkable support of the popular national romantic based NS, also a more racist tendency leading for instance both to Eggen's father and a cousin of his father succeeding each other as directors of the Norwegian edition of "SS-Leitheft", the magazine of the Organization which organized the Holocaust.
The saga of the NS children is in no way cut off from our country's deeper history. Restoring our alignment to History was Eystein Eggen's central motivation. Several chapters in his book are a sociological analysis of the Hov family which has resided on the manor Hov in Gauldalen since the Middle Ages. In 1945 thirty members of the family were convicted for association with the NS, amongst them Eggen's mother.
"The Boy from Gimle" got a great many reviews in the newspapers, most of them laudatory. Thanks to Eggen's book several members of our group were drawn into newspaper debates, and little by little the concept "NS children" became fully established in the media.
The 17th of February 1995 I honored Eggen's book in the article "The Jubilee and Losers' Children" which got a whole page in the newspaper Dagbladet.
Four days later I got an answer under the title "Give the NS children an excuse", written by the daughter of a Resistance member who died in 1944.
The 8th of May 1995, on the fiftieth anniversary for the Liberation, both King Harald and the Speaker of the Storting (the Norwegian Parlament), spoke regretfully about the mistreatment of the NS children after the war. The Speaker read the following text in front of the deputies complete in number :
"And today we see more clearly that there were sufferings on both sides of the front. This is also one of the reasons why not all the Norwegians fully participate in our joy today. I am here thinking of those who have suffered because their fathers chose the wrong side during the war, and of those who were born with a German soldier as father. Fifty years later we must also be able to say that the populace's corporal punishment of the so-called "German soldier hores", done during the liberation days, does not belong to the most honorific chapiters of our post war history."
The same day three from our group participated in a documentary on TV 3 under the title "The losers' children".
We had to put on the shirt of Nessus and fight against an establishment which so long had shut us out from history.
We managed to break through, to become the jubilee's new main topic. We made an opening.
Among the war destinies we have in Norway around 10 000 children born of love between Norwegian girls and German soldiers. In 1945 the children were rejected as so-called "German kids", by official doctors reported as potential fifth columnists because of their Nazi genes. From outside they have been maltreated because of the roaring hatred in the post-war times of peace, from inside their souls have been eaten by their Nazi anguish. In spite of all, Per Löhr Meek and some other "German kids" managed, in 1986, to establish the "League of Norwegian War Children". The League was early split, the dynamic inheritor is "The League of Norwegian War Children Lebensborn", led by the devoted and fearless Tor Brandacher. His initiative to sue the Norwegian State has in the year 2000 produced international interest. A pioneer in organizing help for the German kids has been my relative Ragnhild Klüwer Führer, herself a so-called "German hussy". From her Berlin home she has helped many of the kids finding their unknown fathers.
In 1999, the "German kids" - they now call themselves "war children" - lack a base in history. The majority of them do not claim just money compensation for wounds and disgrace, something the "League of Norwegian War Children" has promoted as their main issue. They wish acceptance and integration, with following freedom from anguish. Only our old Germanophile family clans can give to these kids the peace they are longing for. Eystein Eggen gives in "The Boy from Gimle" a profound description of Norway's old cultural links to Germany. More than fifty years after the war, our old traditional families, together with the socially conscious Norway, shall be able to give our "German kids" a real home.
Approaching the third millennium, and over fifty years after the great European Civil War, we NS children are in the vertigo of our time's forces. Again tensions abound in our societies. A vacuum has been created after the trashing of the most pompous project in our century : the dictatorship of the proletariat. The counter-revolution breakes its way forward with historic necessity. The Whites have de facto won the century, and they are now facing the pale Reds. The Whites have no longer a military enemy. Culturally the battle is between Traditionalists and Modernists, the latters often called Liberalists and Social Democrats.
Under this double pressure many NS children necessarily carry unutterable deep depressions in their souls. The situation may be suicidal. The explanation is a life harassed by head-winds and spoiled by a chaotic quest for identity. We NS children should normally expect most help from our parents. But the well known generation gap cheats us. From the beginning of time it has been accepted as logical and right that children shall forcefully oppose their parents for in such way prove that they in due time are capable and worthy to take over the parents' position, power and authority. Sound competition seems, however, to have been replaced by one-sided contempt. All competition depends on dialogue. The gigantic defeat in 1945 has had traumatic effects on the natural opposition and succession of the generations.
When Eystein Eggen wrote his pioneer work "The Boy from Gimle" in 1993, this first autobiographical book of an NS war child in Europe, the author did not get one positive reaction from the parents' side. Nor did any member of our "Organization of Norwegian NS Children" - the first free organisation established by NS children alone - get any response from the INO or any other official veteran group. On the contrary, they have constantly intrigued against us. The remaining NS members have showed more interest for historians and skinheads than for historic explanations. In a nut shell : The Norwegian NS world is in 1998 much more similar to the SS than to the NS we remember from our own childhood. The young Waffen-SS soldiers still live, while the old NS landowners have passed away.
In May 1996 the INO tried to stop our independent organisation by gathering the NS children in the small town Arendal southwest of Oslo. The septagenarian youth agent Sæther found three NS children willing to cooperate in his plan to organize a children's league loyal to the parents. Those three should legitimate the meeting as a pure children's meeting. But they lacked adresses of other children, so they had to use the listings of the INO members. This resulted in the funny situation that the invitation to the meeting was spread by octogenarians or even older to kids passed the middle of their life. We kids should in no way feel independent ! The underlying message was clear : The NS children should not dare to think that they were something without the power and initiative of their parents. Here we reach to the core of defeat psychology : The parents want to be their children. They want to inhabit our souls like ghosts. Otherwise they ignore us. The strongminded are met with contempt.
The war is a volcano where myths force their way to eruption like the lava itself. The warriors' descendants have neither structure nor weight. And no power to parry the "real" warriors. But we NS children have fought a battle lasting forty five years more than our parents' war. This one lasted only five years. We have been in continous struggle with society, with our parents and with ourselves.
The gathering in Arendal on September 11 1996 resulted in a tremendous fiasco. After over eight months of preparations, the parents did not get hold on more than ten children. None of the INO members' own children appeared, but three from our independent "Organization of Norwegian NS Children" did. Apart from the three hosts only four NS children met. Four out of an estimated number of one hundred thousand !
Something deeply natural is happening in the relation between the NS members and their children. After fifty years, the sound energies in the generation struggle are winning over the war myths. The strategies for unnatural dominance with psychophatic overtones turn into old age caprices. The oldtimers can at last take their well-deserved rest. A new generation of the European conservative families are on their way to take control.
In the year of 1998, the peace is, however, not complete within the Nazi families. Many Nazi children all over the world have been bullied by elder siblings who transfer their anguish on the younger. This in-between generation, born in the 30s and with memories of the "great era", tries now, in their turn, to patronize us, like our parents once did. The in-between generation ignores our efforts to denominate our mental pains. They try to surpass their fathers' heroism when they lift their lance against world capitalism and Judaism. The in-between generation has aligned with some younger jew haters and runs an anachronistic nazi magazine from the once proud NS village of Elverum outside Oslo. Their high tempered world salvational enthusiasm, on the old war's premices, generates necessarily anguish.
Dust from the Second World War is being whirled up, on the European continent even more vigorously than in Norway. In Germany, the old war veterans have managed, in April 1998, to establish an alliance with the skinheads. Thanks to his influence through money and media, the German old-timer Gerhard Frey has organized the frustrated and identity seeking juveniles to carry the banners and flags from the past. The German Nazi children have become invisible in this war carnival. The black hole in German history, the Hitler era, which the "humanistic" historians have created, is taken over by the surviving Nazis, but is transformed into a sort of postnatal uterus for hiding their own kids. The carnival's aim is to make these children invisible. The intention of our Norwegian INO members, with their "child care", has been to found a party similar to "Deutsche Volksunion" - The Union of the German People - the increasing extreme right party in Germany consisting of skinheads carrying old days' banners. The veterans need us as a binding agent between themselves and the angry youngsters. Thanks to our organization they have not succeeded here in Norway. They do not get control over children who, after the awakening of our generation, claim a life of our own.
The battle against the INO members has been toughened by the fact that we have had few allies. Every time we have been interviewed by the media, we have noticed how journalists from the politically decayed Left pathetically imply that we the Nazi children, more than the old Nazi members, represent a problem. The leftists cling to the hope of a continuous spiritual hegemony after the collapse of the Communist empire, and it's just so comfortable to try to stumble on with the Nazi children being used as crutches, because "the Nazi children represent the worst threat against the Norwegian democracy today" - as one of our totally outburned leftists says.
Concurrently to these trouble makers we have our nearest family members. Arnljot Eggen, the uncle of Eystein Eggen, wrote in 1996 a counter book to "The Boy from Gimle", in which the history of the Eggens is totally fogged. (If you read Norwegian you can enjoy Eystein Eggen's essay in our Norwegian web site).
In addition to these hardships we have the historians, who, with more or less revisionist joy of being explorers, are writing over and over again what happened during the adolescence of our fathers. We have taken our precautions in the bylaws of our organization, by excluding researchers in contemporary history from our activities.
The need of transfering own Nazi anguish on the children is present in the cultural institutions. In the years before "The Boy from Gimle" appeared, the editor of Eystein Eggen published the old Norwegian Nazi members' central work : two thick volumes on Vidkun Quisling. A whole bunch of revisionist historians have, during decades, browsed on the sparse grazing land of the losers. A professional media caste has made itself exciting, interesting by carrying out our old parents' points of view. The historians have been a total fiasco. They have been politically rejected. They are intruders in our families. They revive old wounds, incapable of healing them.
The strong Norwegian opposition to the EU is a new challenge. The Agrarian Party goes for an indistinct nationalism, not clearly detached form the nationalism celebrated when the party had strong relations with the NS, relies now on the insignificant remains of Marxism. Eystein Eggen tried during 20 years to make a political alloy between the past and the present inside the Agrarian Party, with the NS-children as a catalyzer. The Agrarian Party profited enormously from Eggen's endeavors. This gave them courage to establish a government on the question of the EU. Since being in government, the Agrarian Party has shamelessly disregarded Eggen because he calls a spade a spade. Eystein Eggen has reacted by reenforcing his social commitment and his efforts for a general reconciliation, by becoming member of the Labor Party, the party which executed Vidkun Quisling.
- in the literature :
"And it is the shame of Germany, the big shame of the war generation, and it has descended by inheritance to the children and grandchildren of the postwar era, and this shame they are going to bring with themselves also into the next century and keep up like a mirror where the grimaces of the brutality and of the Nazism are distinct and easy to understand."
(From the Norwegian collection of essays "The Buried Light" by Oddmund Hagen, 1998)
- in the literary review :
"Perhaps the reactionary vulgarities and the horrible innocences of Hamsun is the closest we might reach the fictitious core of the arch-Norwegian, surrounded with pseudo-modern Old Germanism and conservative vanguardist revolution."
(From the review Agora, Editor Aschehoug, Oslo 1999)
Many European NS children come from Catholic environment. Some of us became Catholics when our fathers converted in the prison camps after 1945. Something has happened to the Catholic Church since then. "The NS children have no problems compared to those of the immigrants", is the common statement we are met with by the Catholic clergy. Today it suits the Church well that we are refugees in our own country. The Church tries to hide its former love for the diversity of peoples on the earth, its former practice of nationally founded catholisism. A new politically correct cover-up leads the international Catholic Church to something as absurd as to feed the conflicts between national and ethnic groups, not only over the national borders, but also over the continents. The formerly so proud Church tries miserably to act correctly towards the modernistic globalistic surroundings. Now the Church allows itself to support the liberation of the Catholic country East Timor. The Church should it not soon discover that the banner of the Tsars waives over the fallen Soviet Empire ? That a liberation concerns all peoples, the NS children and the Communist children included ? Obviously the Catholic Church does not see that we have any problems. We are the problem of the Church. The Catholic Church transfers its own Nazi anguish on us, the children, because the Church is too coward to work through its own Nazi past.
An international organization, such as the Catholic Church, is by definition based on the nations. A multicultural world society should be based on the cultures. Is it meant that the Human Rights, with the focus on the individual, shall dissolve these old beautiful structures, so that we get a terrestial ocean of individuals ? If so, which policy has decided this ? What about the right of belonging ? When the Marxists have lost the intellectual struggle of the century, is it then necessary for the Christians to follow in the footsteps of the losers ?
If it is correct that the Second Vatican Council was brought on by lay forces, it is also right to say that these forces carried forward the aspirations of the victors of the Second World War. The Nazi and Fascist families in Europe were specifically in the 60s defined as social nuclei of evilness. The losers harboured alone the guilt for the war and for the atrocities of the war. When the gassing of the 6 million Jews in the 60s got the name "Holocaust" and the most adamant expression of evilness of world history was centered, the Nazi families obtained a special role to play in the victor democracy. The families composed the social topography of evilness. They replaced the metaphysical Satan. The aspirations of the Nazi children to stay free from the satanization were not conveyed at the Council.
A lay dominated church council could not have picked a worse moment for accomplishing a church reform - to the extent that democratic government was the ideal. The Nazi and Fascist children together with the children of all the counter revolutionary supporters comprised half of the European post-war generation, the 2. generation of the war. Thanks to the Second Vatican Council the predicament of the Nazi children has become a non-existing item on the agenda of the Catholic Church.
The French Revolution's horizontal slogan "liberty, equality, brotherhood", still in vigour in the Western countries, has, through the tragic results of the past century's revolutionary strive, brought about indifference, coldness, hatred, among millions of Europeans. European youth, and the NS children, need a slogan of a quite warmer sound : "Faith, Love and Anchorage".
In 2000 we NS children know that our own crisis is deeply connected with a general European crisis of values. Focusing on human rights, antiracism and democracy can not on its own free the Europeans from the traumas of the great civil war. In the post-war era, the losers have been diabolized and oppressed, a process in which the losers themselves have participated. A democracy can not tolerate diabolizing and oppression. The NS children as a European taboo shows the limits of democracy. Utopian Leftists and oppressed NS children have the same ancestry. Reconciliation liberates civilizing forces. Irrational forces run away with Europe. We have to take the bull by the horns.
The counter-revolution must necessarily come in Norway as well as in the rest of Europe after fifty years with social-scientific level flattening and universalist-humanistic abstractions. And now when the main furnisher of ideas to the Western intellectuals - the Communist empire - has wrecked itself. Familiarity with our history, respect for our ancestors' long strife for ideals and life style, and, last but not the least, a renewed faith in the balance between society and nature, and balance between all cultures and peoples of our earth, will give to the youth something to believe in and something to fight for. Modernism has split the inhabitants of the West since the October Revolution in 1917. Genuine European rooted conservatism has been unjustly stigmatized since 1945. We NS children know what splitting and estrangement mean. We wish the youth a better way in the third millennium.
European Traditionalism and Conservatism can only be saved by the NS children's revolt against the same Traditionalism and Conservatism. This paradox has become more and more clear for us, not least in our fertile encounter with the Jewish Traditionalism.
Today the "Organization of Norwegian NS Children" has contact with around two hundred NS children.
The following persons form the board :
Bente Blehr, Asker
Terje Olav Rød, Oslo
Lorentz Diederich Klüwer, Oslo
Eystein Eggen, Oslo
Ole Wilhelm Klüwer, Oslo