Scandinavian Children ”Out-of-Place”? Historical Perspectives on Contested Repatriations of Scandinavian Children Born of War

Abstract

Children born to enemy soldiers, so-called ”children born of war”, are vulnerable to displacement. The contested repatriations of the children of Scandinavian mothers and foreign fighters from Syria in the wake of the fall of ISIS in March 2019 represent a case in point. Norway, Denmark and Sweden initially delayed and then only hesitantly or selectively supported their return – just as Norway and Denmark had done with displaced Scandinavian children born to German soldiers after World War II. The contexts differ, but the echoes in the controversies regarding the respective children’s right to return ask us to look at the histories of Scandinavian-German children’s displacement in Allied-occupied Germany in new ways and to broaden our understanding of Scandinavian children ”out-of-place” today beyond security paradigms.

The main focus of this paper rests on the post-1945 Danish and, to a lesser degree, Norwegian cases of children’s displacement and repatriation from Germany. By analysing the International Refugee Organization’s meeting minutes, case files, correspondence and the documentation of two Danish repatriation family histories in the late 1940s, I trace how the specific perceptions of these children as ”children born of war” informed their national and familial affiliation, their access to IRO support as well as their final placement.

Building on existing scholarship on the contested repatriations of displaced Norwegian children from Germany after 1945, my analysis adds: 1) new archival research on Danish cases of displacement, and 2) a transnational perspective on how a parental enemy stigma shaped the negotiations on the children’s repatriations between IRO staff and family members in the absence of the state showing an interest in their return. These insights shed new light on the root causes behind the controversies around the national and familial belonging of Scandinavian children ”out-of-place” that apply to the post-45 generation but also affect the region’s children of ISIS foreign fighters as ”children born of war.” The results thus open up new lines of research for future comparative scholarship on the rights and inclusion of different groups and generations of displaced Scandinavian children.