Simply in love

This is what “X” wrote in a letter printed in the newspaper Arbeiderbladet on May 29 1945. In the weeks following the end of the German occupation on May 8, this anonymous writer was not the only one who wanted revenge on “tyskertøsene” (lit.: German’s sluts); Norwegian girls who had been or were thought to have been involved with German soldiers during the war.  

– These girls had committed the classic betrayal of sleeping with the enemy. Large groups felt a strong hatred against them and many people expected the girls to be punished, says Terje A. Pedersen, who has written the Master’s thesis Tyskerjentene i Norge. Reaksjoner og klippeaksjoner 1940–46.  (Girls involved with German soldiers in Norway. Reactions and attacks 1940–46).

The punishment

“(…) tyskertøsene, these crude, calculating, anti-social individuals who have lived large on the German war studs. (…) Who would be more fitting to clean up the dirt from the “masters” than these women who have slept with them, received money, food, beverages, and cigarettes from them?” (Arbeiderbladet June 27 1945) .

The suggestion from this reader was actually implemented some places. The around 100 000 girls who in some way had been involved with a German soldier suffered people’s anger in different ways. The most well-known type of assault was the hair-cutting, where the mob cut the hair off suspected girls, sometimes in public. But even if this has become the symbol of the retribution on these girls, only a small number of girls underwent this punishment, according to Pedersen’s calculations. 

– Probably less than five percent of the girls had their hair cut off. We remember this punishment due to its symbolic meaning, a kind of cleansing process, says Pedersen.

The hair-cutting was the revenge of the people. Officially the government washed its hands off it. But they also emphasized that the rage was “understandable”.

– Even when the assailants were brought to court, the verdict emphasized that the court understood how it could happen, says Pedersen.

The revenge of the government

“The women who don’t reject the Germans will pay a terrible price the rest of their lives,” Toralv Øksnevad, also known as “the voice from London”, warned on BBC Radio during the war. It was not an empty threat. Even though relationships between Norwegian girls and Germans were not forbidden, thousands of suspected girls, perhaps as many as 14 000, were locked up in internment camps between May 1945 and April 1946. Many of them spent months there. The girls were brought in on grounds of two temporary laws. One law permitted internment of people who needed protection from the mob. The other one allowed the use of internment to prevent transmission of sexual diseases.

– Officially and legally the internment was not a punishment. But there is no doubt that it was part of the revenge. The logs sometimes reveal this: The interned women are referred to as “prisoners” and the camps as “jails” or “prison camps”, says Pedersen.

– When I look at the specific cases it is obvious that the temporary laws were used as an excuse to arrest these girls, says Pedersen. He found very few instances where girls seemed to need protection.

Moral contamination

The fear of contagious diseases was also exaggerated. Only 20 percent of the women who arrived at the National Internment camp for women on Hovedøya had a sexually transmitted disease, although some of them had received treatment before they arrived. In the camp Hovelåsen 20 percent had a disease. Half of them had been infected in the last year.

– Merely being in a café with Germans could brand a girl as contagious. The fear of diseases sprung from an increase in STDs during the war, but the biggest fear seems to have been the moral contamination from “immoral” women, comments Pedersen.

– The disease control propaganda fitted the fabricated image of girls involved with Germans: That they were prostitutes and morally corrupt women.

It was also commonly assumed that the girls were stupid. Several experts actually supported this notion. Doctor Augusta Rasmussen, for instance, tested the intelligence of 310 women interned on Hovedøya. She concluded that around half of them could be considered backward and only eight had a normal level of intelligence. Chief Executive Ødegård at Gaustad Hospital claimed that a large number of the girls were backward, anti-social or mentally disordered.

– It was also said that the girls were ugly. Basically it was important to portray these girls as the “lowest of the low” among Norwegian women. It probably had to do with male pride and self-esteem: Norwegian men had suffered a military loss. That the Germans also had “taken their women” was another offence. Therefore it became important to point out that these were the kind of girls that Norwegians did not want, Pedersen suggests.

Love

But according to Pedersen, the image of the these girls as stupid, ugly, disease-ridden prostitutes was of great ideological importance in another sense.

– To the government it was crucial to brand these relationships as something other than love, even though many couples ended up getting married.

Pedersen has gone through readers’ letters, newspaper stories, and various memos from committees and ministries in addition to around 1000 police reports from the internment camp archives. Nowhere is the word “love” to be found.

– Admitting that these relationships merely could be love affairs between normal people would disrupt the black and white image of the Germans and the war. It would have normalized the relationship to Germany in a way that was completely unacceptable after the war, says Pedersen. He feels that it is time to demystify these girls and the choices they made.  

– Hundreds of thousands of young men came to Norway. Most of these were neither Nazis nor cruel assailants. Many of them stayed in one place over a long period of time and settled into the community. It is no wonder that love arose in this situation, Pedersen closes by saying.

  Translated by Vigdis Isachsen