Image copyright AFP Image caption Many of the women were expelled from the country with their children 
 
 Norway's Prime Minister Erna Solberg has issued an official government apology to Norwegian women who were mistreated over World War Two-era relationships with German soldiers. 
 
 Norway, a neutral country, was invaded by Nazi forces in April 1940. 
 
 Up to 50,000 Norwegian women are thought to have had intimate relationships with German soldiers. 
 
 The Germans were also encouraged to have children with them by SS leader Heinrich Himmler. 
 
 Himmler, one of the most powerful men under Adolf Hitler, favoured Norwegian women, hoping they could help promote the Nazi concept of an Aryan master race. 
 
 Many of the Norwegian-German children were born in the German-administered Lebensborn (Fountain of Life) maternity facilities set up from 1941 by the Nazis in the country. 
 
 Image copyright Getty Images Image caption A swastika in the Norwegian capital Oslo following the Nazi takeover 
 
 The women who had relationships with the soldiers became known by the nickname the "German Girls", and were targeted for reprisals in Norway when the war ended - standing accused of betraying the country. 
 
 Punishments included being deprived of civil rights, detained or expelled from the country to Germany along with their children. 
 
 'Undignified treatment' 
 
 "Young Norwegian girls and women who had relations with German soldiers or were suspected of having them, were victims of undignified treatment," Ms Solberg said at an event to mark the 70th anniversary of the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights on Wednesday. 
 
 "Our conclusion is that Norwegian authorities violated the rule fundamental principle that no citizen can be punished without trial or sentenced without law." 
 
 "For many, this was just a teenage love, for some, the love of their lives with an enemy soldier or an innocent flirt that left its mark for the rest of their lives. 
 
 "Today, in the name of the government, I want to offer my apologies." 
 
 Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Lebensborn facilities were set up in Germany and Nazi-conquered countries 
 
 The apology was based on a report about Norway's post-war actions published by the country's Centre for Holocaust and Minorities Studies. 
 
 More than seven decades on from the war, not many of the women directly affected are likely to still be alive to hear it. 
 
 "A good apology can have a lot of power. An apology can mean that groups receive answers to their treatment," Guri Hjeltnes the head of the centre said. 
 
 Reidar Gabler attended the event and told Norwegian media that the apology meant a lot to his family. 
 
 His mother, Else Huth from Sarpsborg was just 22 in 1944 when she fell in love with a 25-year-old German soldier. 
 
 "The people directly affected are no longer with us... but this also touches their families and the children," said Mr Gabler. 
 
 "We just had to come. This is amazing," he said, after meeting Ms Solberg. 
 
 Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Erna Solberg admitted Norwegian authorities had violated fundamental rights with their actions 
 
 About 10-12,000 children are thought to have been born as a result of relationships between Norwegian women and German soldiers. 
 
 Some of the children were also targeted for acts of revenge, given up to foster families or placed in institutions. 
 
 In 2007 a group of children took Norway to the European Court of Human Rights, but their case was ruled inadmissible because of the amount of time that had passed since the offences occurred. ||||| Solberg said the estimated 50,000 women labelled "German girls," who had or were suspected of having intimate wartime relations with Nazi troops, ended up marked "for the rest of their lives." 
 
 Seven decades later, most have since died. After Norway's liberation in 1945, reprisals inflicted included job dismissals, detentions, expulsions and removal of nationality. 
 
 "For many, this was just teenage love, for some, the love of their lives," said Solberg Wednesday, adding that their treatment breached the principle that no citizen should be punished outside the court system. 
 
 Read more: No compensation for 'stolen children' 
 
 The prime minister delivered the government apology at an event to mark the 70th anniversary of the UN's universal declaration of human rights. 
 
 German girls were treated shamefully, says Solberg 
 
 Neutral Norway was occupied from April 1940 by more than 300,000 German soldiers. 
 
 SS chief Heinrich Himmler encouraged German troops to partner and breed with local women. It was part of Nazi Germany's white supremacist agenda that also led to the establishment of a "Lebensborn" reproduction center in Norway in 1941. 
 
 In 2000, Norway formally apologized to the estimated 10,000 to 12,000 children who also suffered reprisals because they were the offspring of Norwegian mothers and German soldiers. 
 
 Many were placed in host families or special institutions and later battled for compensation. 
 
 Late but important 
 
 Reidar Gabler, the son of a Norwegian woman who was expelled in 1945 along with her German husband, told the Aftenposten newspaper that apology delivered by Solberg had come late but said it was" important for history." 
 
 "The people directly affected are no longer with us… but this also touches their families and the children," Gabler said. 
 
 Historian Guri Hjeltnes presented a study on Norway's post-war treatment of various groups. 
 
 None of the 28 Norwegian men married to German women during the war were subsequently expelled or deprived of their nationality, she said. 
 
 "We cannot say women who had personal relations with German soldiers were helping the German war effort," said Hjeltnes. "Their only crime was breaking the unwritten rules." 
 
 ipj/msh (AFP, AP) ||||| Dr. Beverley Chalmers’ latest book is not the kind people want to read. Yet, it’s one they should. 
 
 Titled, “Birth, Sex and Abuse: Women’s Voices Under Nazi Rule,” it is filled from cover to cover with horrifying accounts of countless Jewish and non-Jewish women being raped and brutalized, experimented upon, forced into prostitution or compelled to undergo sterilization or abortion against their will. Some German women successfully gave birth and had their babies taken away for adoption. Jewish women had theirs ripped away and murdered in front of them. 
 
 These actions were all part of the Nazi agenda to create a master race, but until Chalmers set about writing this book, no single work had thoroughly examined and comprehensively consolidated evidence of this aspect of the Holocaust. 
 
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 More than a decade of non-stop and singularly focused research on the subject took an emotional toll on Chalmers, a 65-year-old expert on pregnancy and birth in difficult social, political, economic and religious settings. She had previously published on women giving birth under Apartheid in South Africa and having babies in the former Soviet Union under Communism. Others of her books reported on women with prior experience of female genital mutilation giving birth in Canada, and on women giving birth in highly medicalized settings. 
 
 “It was emotionally draining. My children suggested I write about something happier, but I kept going because these stories needed to be told. These women’s experiences needed to be brought to light and honored,” the author told The Times of Israel in an interview from her home in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. 
 
 The time had arrived for this book 
 
 A professor at the University of Ottawa until a year ago, the South-African born and educated Chalmers read some 600 books and articles and combed the archives of Holocaust and World War II-related institutions in Israel, the US and the UK in search of documentary evidence and personal testimonies. 
 
 She wasn’t surprised to find that the memoirs and diaries from the war and the period immediately following were more open and blunt about what women endured in the ghettos, camps and elsewhere under Nazi occupation. However, hardly any attention was paid to these, because at the time, people didn’t want to hear this kind of testimony or couldn’t conceive of the extent of the atrocities that had been committed. It was also an era in which open discussions of sex and sexuality were still generally taboo. 
 
 Conversely, testimonies given decades later about what had happened during WWII were often sanitized. 
 
 Testimonies given decades after WWII were often sanitized 
 
 “Survivors didn’t talk about anything having to do with sex because they didn’t want their children and grandchildren to know what had happened to them,” Chalmers explained. 
 
 It wasn’t until the 1980s that Holocaust scholars even began taking interest specifically in the experiences of women under Nazi rule and during the war. Additionally, the emphasis at that point was on how women had kept their families together and functioning after their husbands and fathers had lost their jobs, been arrested, sent to concentration camps, or killed. 
 
 “I think there was also very little mentioned about birthing experiences because of the strong feminism and spotlight on women’s careers in the 198’s,” Chalmers noted. 
 
 All part of the Nazi agenda to create a master race 
 
 “Birth, Sex and Abuse” has two parts. The first deals with pregnancy and childbearing, while the second focuses on sexuality and sexualized abuse. In both parts, the author addresses the experience of both Jews and (non-Jewish) Germans. 
 
 “I knew that this was a rare and potentially controversial perspective to take. But I felt strongly that I had to look at the Aryan side of things, as well as the Jewish side because they fit together into the Nazi agenda to create a master race,” the author said. 
 
 350,000 to 400,000 German men and women were victims of compulsory sterilization at 250 centers 
 
 “There were hardships imposed on both sides, though the Jewish experience was far worse. The Jewish experience was horrifically unspeakable,” she added. 
 
 The Nazis implemented eugenic sterilization and euthanasia programs within six months of coming to power in 1933. Members of the medical professions were partners in this, having adopted the Nazi-introduced and Nazi-enforced concepts of Rassenkunde (the study of race and theories of racial superiority) and Rassenschande (racial pollution, race defilement, or racial treason). 
 
 Ultimately 350,000 to 400,000 German men and women were victims of compulsory sterilization at 250 centers devoted specifically to this purpose. They were sterilized either because they were “non-Aryan” or deemed to be mentally or physically unfit in some way. 
 
 On the other hand, tremendous pressure was put on German women of desirable racial background to bear many children for the Reich. The feminist movement was targeted and women were expected to stay at home and become baby machines. Aryan men whose wives could not or could no longer have children were encouraged to divorce them and take younger wives with which to procreate further. 
 
 Sex outside of marriage was encouraged and teens in the Nazi youth movement became sexually active at young ages. Illegitimate births were not frowned upon. At the same time, abortions for Aryan women were outlawed. 
 
 Reich Leader of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, introduced the Lebensborn Program in 1935 as a means of breeding the SS into a biological elite. It provided financial support for SS families and maternity care for unwed mothers. In some cases, pregnant women were forced into Lebensborn homes. In others, babies were judicially kidnapped from undesirable German families and given to Aryan parents. 
 
 German women and women from German-conquered territories were forced into prostitution to serve either German soldiers or foreign workers 
 
 German women and women from German-conquered territories were forced into prostitution to serve either German soldiers or foreign workers. There were even brothels inside concentration camps, including Auschwitz. In these camps, some of the prostitutes were selected from among the camp inmates. There is some controversy as to whether Jewish women were used as prostitutes. It was assumed that because of Rassenschande, Jewish women were not used, but some historians point to reports that Jewish women were used in brothels established by the Germans for all categories — military, SS, civilian population and foreign workers. 
 
 It should be noted that rape was never an official Nazi policy — hence the brothels. Yet, it was condoned after the fact. This was different from the Soviet-sanctioned mass rape of hundreds of thousands of women in Germany and Austria by soldiers of the triumphant Red Army in 1945. 
 
 ‘The Jewish experience was horrifically unspeakable’ 
 
 Chalmers goes into great detail about the experience of Jewish women in ghettos, hiding, and concentration and labor camps in terms of pregnancy and childbirth. In all these settings, women were forbidden from becoming pregnant on pain of death. Consequently, most — though not all — pregnant Jewish women underwent abortions (no matter how advanced the pregnancy) in dangerously unsanitary settings. 
 
 The author quotes Dr. Gisella Perl, a Jewish doctor in Auschwitz-Birkenau who testified in 1948 about how she aborted fetuses to save mothers’ lives: 
 
 ‘I delivered women in the eight, seventh, sixth and fifth month, always in a hurry, always with my five fingers, in the dark under terrible conditions’ 
 
 First I took the ninth-month pregnancies, I accelerated the birth by the rupture of the membranes, and usually within one or two days spontaneous birth took place without further intervention. Or I produced dilation with my fingers, inverted the embryo and this brought it to life… After the child had been delivered, I quickly bandaged the mother’s abdomen and sent her back to work. When possible, I placed her in my hospital, which was in reality just a grim joke… I delivered women in the eight, seventh, sixth and fifth month, always in a hurry, always with my five fingers, in the dark under terrible conditions… By a miracle, which to every doctor must sound like a fairy tale, every one of these women recovered and was able to work, which, at least for a while, saved her life. 
 
 All visibly pregnant women and mothers of babies and young children were sent to the gas chambers upon arrival at the various death camps. Here is how the infamously sadistic Dr. Josef Mengele rationalized this: 
 
 When a Jewish child is born, or a woman comes to camp with a child already… I don’t know what to do with the child. I can’t set the child free because there are no longer any Jews who live in freedom. I can’t let the child stay in the camp because there are no facilities… that would enable the child to develop normally. It would not be humanitarian to send a child to the ovens without permitting he mother to be there to witness the child’s death… That is why I send the mother and child to the gas overs together. 
 
 Mengele and other Nazi doctors performed all sorts of medical experiments on camp inmates. Many of them involved trying to determine ways of mass sterilization. Jewish women (and men) underwent tortuous experiments involving drugs, x-rays and chemicals. The human guinea pigs were often brutally cut open so doctors could examine the effects of the treatments on the reproductive organs. Not surprisingly, this more often than not led to death. 
 
 Chalmers quotes Aliza Barouch, who gave testimony about her being sterilized at Auschwitz. She was exposed to two different x-ray machines for 20 minutes at a time in three instances. She lost all her hair, her skin turned black, and she had blood in her stools. A Jewish prisoner doctor was ordered to do an ovariectomy on her. 
 
 The doctor removed only one ovary and and part of the uterus, which enabled Barouch to later have two children — though she also gave birth to four other babies who died within days of birth. The Jewish doctor was sent to the gas chambers after the Nazis discovered that he had been trying to protect Barouch and other girls. 
 
 According to Barouch, the stitches put into her abdomen did not hold because of the damage done to the skin by the radiation. She had a terrible infection, but all they did for her was put paper on her wounds, which they closed with a safety pin. 
 
 “Aliza lay there for 11 months in excruciating pain and with a terribly high fever. She did not know what they had done to her,” Chalmers quotes. 
 
 Other sections of the book deals with rape and sexualized brutality and include many graphic examples, such as a report from the Jewish underground newspaper Junge Stimme in October 1941 of Jewish women being dragged out of their apartments in Lvov with the help of Ukrainians. Some had their breasts cut off in the middle of the street, some were raped, and some had both done to them. 
 
 ‘We don’t have the right to say it’s too difficult to read’ 
 
 “Birth, Sex and Abuse” is filled with innumerable stomach-churning examples such as these. It is obviously not an easy book to read. 
 
 “The women who went through these experiences need to be honored by our having the courage to face their testimonies. We owe it to them. We don’t have the right to say it’s too difficult to read,” Chalmers said. 
 
 ‘Birth, Sex and Abuse’ is filled with innumerable stomach-churning examples 
 
 The author is proud of the awards the book has won since its publication, including the National Jewish Book Award and the Canadian Jewish Literary Award. 
 
 But it was only in recounting the reaction of an elderly Holocaust survivor to her book that her voice betrayed emotion. 
 
 “At a Canadian Jewish Literary Award event, a woman came up to me. She pulled back her sleeve and showed me the number tattooed on her arm. Then she said, ‘I can die in comfort now. My story has been told.'”
– When Germany invaded Norway in 1940, Nazi leader Heinrich Himmler endorsed the concept of German soldiers hooking up with Norwegian women, as that would help bring the Nazis closer to the Aryan master race they wished for. Per the BBC, about 50,000 Norwegian women ended up in relationships with the Germans, and they became known as the "German Girls"—a label that led to harsh punishments after WWII ended when their country turned on them for what was viewed as a betrayal. Now, Norway's prime minister is officially offering an apology to those women, calling them "victims of undignified treatment" and noting that Norwegian authorities back then acted outside of usual conventions in punishing these women and the children they bore. "For many, this was just a teenage love," Norwegian PM Erna Solberg said Wednesday at a UN human rights event. "For some, the love of their lives with an enemy soldier or an innocent flirt ... left its mark for the rest of their lives. Today, in the name of the government, I want to offer my apologies." Punishments included getting fired from their jobs, detentions, being stripped of their nationality, and even expulsions to Germany. Meanwhile, many of the more than 10,000 children who came out of these relationships were sent to foster homes or "special institutions," Deutsche Welle notes. A historian says that Norwegian men who married German women during the same period weren't similarly punished. "[The women's] only crime was breaking the unwritten rules," he says. (As one woman headed to the Auschwitz gas chamber, she wrote this.)