Nazi-Occupied Norway Offers a Glimpse of What Hitler Wanted for the Entire World

[yortsed snacilbuper]

If the German occupiers, despite their ideology of Nordic brotherhood, kept themselves spatially and culturally apart as rulers, they promoted fraternization of another sort. Occupied Norway became a locus of the Lebensborn program, initiated in Germany by SS leader Heinrich Himmler in 1935 to encourage the birth of Aryan babies.

Intending to harvest the Norwegians’ supposedly superior genes to improve the racial health of the German population, the Nazis established more maternity centers in Norway than in any other country, including Germany. Treating these children like other natural resources in Norway that could benefit the Fatherland, the Nazis devised a pipeline that sent hundreds of babies from Norway to Germany during the war years.

While Norwegian babies flowed southward, Germans moved northward. Among other infrastructure projects, Hitler commissioned a superhighway that would have stretched from Trondheim to Berlin. Such transportation systems would have tethered the peripheries of Hitler’s European empire to its center, Berlin.

The superhighway to Trondheim was also designed to encourage German tourists, driving their Volkswagens, to familiarize themselves with the northern reaches of their empire. Hitler believed that, in the wake of his victorious armies, this type of road travel would help Germans identify with the new territories of the Greater German Reich, preparing them to fight to retain them in the future.

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[The Velveteen Ocelot]

1. Link to original article:

https://time.com/5885434/nazi-norway-history/

What the Nazis did in Norway is absolutely terrifying. They made a point of imprisoning and/or executing three main groups: journalists, teachers and clergy; there's a reason Norway is now on the top of the list of countries with the strongest press freedom traditions (the US isn't even in the top 11, https://rsf.org/en/ranking). There was an active underground press during the occupation, even though getting caught printing anti-Nazi materials got people executed.

[misanthrope]

3. Top 11? The U.S. isn't in the top 40.

It ranks at 45.

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

4. Yup, pretty sad.

[moondust]

2. "we should have more people from Norway."

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2018/01/12/577673191/trump-wishes-we-had-more-immigrants-from-norway-turns-out-we-once-did

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

5. At the time of most of the immigration to the US,

Norway actually was what Trump would call a shithole country except that its citizens are white. It was mostly very poor; most people relied on fishing or farming for their livelihoods, and these were not consistently reliable sources of income. Farming was especially tough because so much of the country is mountainous - there isn't a lot of good farmland. The custom of primogeniture, common in much of Europe, meant the oldest son got the farm (that way it wouldn't get divided up into smaller and smaller parcels), so the younger sons had to find work elsewhere and the daughters would try to find farm owners to marry. Eventually many of the younger sons immigrated to the US, but they were uneducated and broke, and had to find work as laborers and farmhands. Scandinavian immigrants, like the Irish before them, were also discriminated against initially because they were uneducated and couldn't speak English.

My own ancestors immigrated in the 1840 and 1850s, before the bigger wave a few decades later. Sometimes I wish they'd stayed. They were merchant seamen, mostly, but some were educated and managed to get a pretty good foothold, got jobs and bought property before their countrymen started arriving in large numbers. Immigration is a tough road no matter where you come from. Trump's mother came from a shithole part of Scotland and the family was as poor as dirt. I guess he'd rather not think about that.