11. Typical Tyskerbarnas: Kari Rosvall
While Tyskarbarnas Anni-Frid Lyngstad went on to find international fame and fortune as a pop star, most of her fellow Tyskerbarnas led more prosaic and obscure lives. A typical example was that of Kari Rosvall, whose life journey took her from Norway, where she was born, to Germany, where she was baptized, to Sweden, where she was raised, and finally to Ireland, where she settled.
Kari was a product of the Lebensborn program, her birth the result of a union between a Norwegian woman during the German occupation of Norway, and a Nazi. Soon after her birth, she was shipped to Germany, where she was baptized in one of the SS’ weird occult rituals, in which SS officials dedicated Lebensborn infants to lifelong loyalty to Hitler and to Nazi ideology.
After the war, the restored Norwegian government wanted nothing to do with Tyskerbarnas like Kari. In the euphoria and elevated passions following the liberation of Norway, her mother was beaten as a collaborator and “German whore”, and bore scars from the beating on her breasts to her dying day. The Red Cross eventually resettled the infant Kari in Sweden, where she was adopted by a Swedish couple.
She grew up assuming she was Swedish, but realized at a young age that she was different from the taunts of schoolmates and a teacher who referred to her as a bastard, and an awareness that adults often whispered about her. However, it was not until she was 21 that she discovered that she had been born in Norway, not Sweden. So she embarked on a journey of discovery that took her back to Norway, where she encountered her mother.
Results were mixed, as her reappearance in her biological mother’s life opened up old wounds. She eventually discovered that her biological father was a German Nazi official named Kurt Zeidler, whom Kari’s mother described as “not a nice man”. It was not until she was in her mid 60s, by which time she had settled in Dublin, Ireland, that Kari first saw a baby picture of herself in a Lebensborn facility.