This year is 2016 and this coming August marks the 80th anniversary of the Berlin Olympics of 1936 ... an Olympics that was supposed to be the hallmark of Aryan superiority but which became instead a showcase for a fast African American by the name of Jesse Owens. I suppose because it is Black History Month ... and because this year marks the 80th anniversary of Jesse Owens triumph, a new movie comes out today with the double entendre title of "Race".
I hope to see the movie soon and may have some comments about it. However, in light of our recent discussion about the "evils" of Hitler (and my remarks about the seeming yin-yang relationship between good and evil), for today, I note the coincidence that around the time that Jesse Owens won his medals, the first baby born under the Lebensborn program would have been born.
Founded on December 12, 1935, Lebensborn was designed to halt the high rate of abortions in Germany which rose as high as 800,000 a year in the inter-war years because of a chronic shortage of men to marry after World War I. Its aim was to prevent 100,000 abortions and its statute stated that it was to support "racially and genetically valuable families with many children."
The Lebensborn enabled unmarried pregnant women to avoid social stigma by giving birth anonymously away from their homes, often under the pretext of needing a long-term recuperation. About 60 percent of Lebensborn mothers were unmarried. Lebensborn ran children’s homes and an adoption service if the mother did not want to keep the child.
It even had its own registry office system to keep true identities secret. Most documents were burned at the end of the war. That, together with the refusal of many Lebensborn mothers to tell their children about the program, made it very difficult to find the truth. However, occasionally a story emerges that sheds "light" on certain dark secrets.
Frida Lyngstad was born on November 15, 1945, in Bjørkåsen, a little hamlet in Ballangen, northern Norway, to a young Norwegian girl and a German soldier, Alfred Haase just after the end of the Second World War and the German occupation of Norway.
Just like Frida, there were as many as 14,000 children borne out of liaisons between Nazi soldiers and Norwegian women. Offspring were produced by SS chief Heinrich Himmler’s Lebensborn (‘fountain of life’) plan to produce a race of blond-haired Aryans. Special homes were established throughout Germany and its occupied places in Europe, including Norway; where SS officers had intercourse with selected women.
In 1943, three years after Germany attacked Norway, a 24 year old Nazi sergeant Alfred Haase who was posted to Ballangen was taken by the sight of the beautiful 18 year old Synni Lyngstad. Ballangen is a little town, 20 miles from the Narvik Port, where the SS sanctioned Lebensborn home was built. While not necessarily being allowed inside the home, the "inspired" Haase found and wooed Lyngstad with a sack of potatoes that was scarce in wartime Norway. One thing led to the other, and the two became intimate and had a physical relationship.
Haase later told Synni that he was married. He later said in an interview, “’The war meant the conditions were different. For many of us, it was a matter of living for today – tomorrow we might be dead.” The affair lasted till 1945 and then Haase was asked to come back to Germany with a pregnant Synni remaining behind in Norway. They never met again.
Frida was born on November 15, 1945, but the birth was not accompanied by great joy. Because her father was only a sergeant and not an officer, Frida was not officially part of the Lebensborn program. But that seemed not to matter to the Norwegian people.
After the war had come to an end, the Norwegian people hated anything that had to do with Nazi Germany, including any one who had "collaborated" with the enemy, and any child that was born from such collaborations. Synni was subjected to persistent ridicule and insults for having slept with a German man. Overwhelmed by the taunts and abuse, Synni and her widowed mother Agny (Arntine Lyngstad ) decided to leave Norway to go to Sweden. Agny left first and Synni followed her mother two years later. Though Synni took the job of a waitress to take care of her family, she did not live long. The hard war years life and the post-war abuse had taken its toll. Synni died of kidney failure at the young age of 21, when Frida was just 2 years old.
Little Frida was brought up by her embittered grand mother and had a disturbed, lonely childhood. She recalls, “’I didn’t have many friends. I thought everything about me was wrong – that there was nothing about me that was worth loving.”
Musically inclined, but always a romantically vulnerable person like her mother, the dark haired beauty Frida, then 16, fell in love with Ragnar Fredriksson, a salesman and musician. At the age of 16, she found herself pregnant by Fredriksson. She gave birth to her child on January 26, 1963 and then married Fredriksson on April 3, 1963. Frida and Ragnar had two children Hans Ragnar (born January 26, 1963) and Ann Lise-Lotte (born February 25,1967). However, the marriage did not work and the couple separated in 1969. They were officially divorced on May 19, 1970. On that same day, Frida’s grand-mother Agny, passed away at the age of 71.
But tragic as has her life had been up to that point, Frida's circumstances began to change when, in February 1969, Frida met Benny Andersson. The pair had similar tastes in life and fell in love with each other. The couple were engaged in August of 1969 (before her official divorce), but did not marry until October 6,1978. Three years into the marriage, the couple separated in February 1981. They were officially divorced in November, the same year. That too is sad, but, for a while, Frida (born Anni-Frid Lyngstad) and Benny made musical magic... and for many fans, the sad lonely girl, became a pop icon. ... the perfect embodiment of the Dancing Queen
Peace,
Everett "Skip" Jenkins
P.S. See also
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