Kripos’ police inspector Odd Gripar stumbles upon a grim history and finds out, not only the truth behind three stuffed dead men, but also behind the man with the code name ‘Wolfsangel’, designer of judgment. This man, seemingly possessed by revenge, has many other human characteristics. These develop in intimate settings out of interaction of social factors, choices and illness. In this intriguing adventure Wolfsangel first looks like an apparent devilish ghoul who 'squeezes blood out of stone', leading Norway to a man who should never have been born, whose species used to be a recognized disease in Norway. The confessions of three stuffed dead in a bunker make clear how much his kind, the Lebensborn children, suffered. Lebensborn was a race improvement experiment by SS leader Heinrich Himmler. About 12000 children were born in Norway during WWII to a Norwegian mother and a German father, the most famous being ABBA singer Frida. After the war, many these children were declared mentally defective and hereditary weak by the Norwegian authorities. They ended up in institutions, were mistreated or worse. Wolfsangel ruthlessly grows to his Norwegian plan. In 2007, after the European court in Strasbourg considered the Lebensborn case as inadmissible, he forces his way to recognition and justice, learning the hard way how truth can be disturbing, but that also love can break stones.

Children and youth belong to one of the most vulnerable groups in societies. This was the case even before the current humanitarian crises around the world which led millions of people and families to flee from wars, terror, poverty and exploitation. Minors have been denied human rights such as access to education, food and health services. They have been kidnapped, sold, manipulated, mutilated, killed, and injured. This has been and continues to be the case in both developed and developing countries, and it does not look as if the situation will improve in the near future. Rather, current geopolitical developments, political and economic uncertainties and instabilities seem to be increasing the vulnerability of minors, especially in the wars and armed conflicts currently being waged not only in Europe, but on almost every continent. How can risks children and youth are exposed to in times of transition be reduced? Which role do state agencies, non-governmental organisations, as well as children's coping strategies play in mitigating the vulnerabilities of minors? This volume addresses risks to which children and young people are exposed, especially in times of transition. The focus is on different groups of children in the European wartime and post-war societies of the Second World War, 'occupation children' in Germany, teenage National Socialist collaborators in Norway, and more recent cases such as child soldiers, refugee children, and children of European "Islamic State" fighters. The contributions come from international scholars and different academic disciplines (educational and social sciences, humanities, law, and international peace and conflict studies) and are based on historical, quantitative, and/or qualitative analyses.

This book presents new developments in Scandinavian memory cultures related to World War II and the Holocaust by combining this focus with the perspective of history didactics. The theoretical framework of historical consciousness offers an approach linking individual and collective uses and re-uses of the past to the question how history can and should be taught. It also offers some examples of good practice in this field. The book promotes a teaching practice which, in taking the social constructivist notions of historical consciousness as a starting point, can contribute to self-reflecting and critical thinking - being fundamental for any democratic political culture.

An independent journalist documents the true stories of torture and psychological abuse endured by 14 Armenian soldiers and civilians who became POWs in Azerbaijan during the Forty-Four Day War in 2020 over the autonomous Republic of Artsakh.

This volume presents research from an international, interdisciplinary, and intersectoral research project in which 15 doctoral researchers explored a range of issues related to the life-course experiences of children born of war in 20th-century conflicts. Children Born of War (CBOW), children fathered by foreign soldiers and born to local mothers during and after armed conflicts, have long been neglected in the research of the social consequences of war. Based on research projects completed under the auspices of the Horizon2020-funded international and interdisciplinary research and training network CHIBOW (www.chibow.org), this book examines the psychological and social impact of war on these children. It focusses on three separate but interrelated themes: firstly, it explores methodological and ethical issues related to research with war-affected populations in general and children born of war in particular. Secondly, it presents innovative historical research focussing specifically on geopolitical areas that have hitherto been unexplored; and thirdly, it addresses, from a psychological and psychiatric perspective, the challenges faced by children born of war in post-conflict communities, including stigmatisation, discrimination, within the significant context of identity formation when faced with contested memories of volatile post-war experiences. The book offers an insight into the social consequences of war for those children associated with the ‘enemy’ by virtue of their direct biological link.

At the end of World War II, over 20,000 French people accused of collaboration with Germany endured a particularly humiliating act of revenge: their heads were shaved in public. Nearly all those punished were women. This episode in French history continues to provoke shame and unease and as a result has never been the subject of a thorough examination.This groundbreaking book by Fabrice Virgili throws new light on these acts of retribution and reveals that, contrary to popular belief, a vast number of those women accused were innocent of any sexual involvement with Germans. Further, this form of punishment was in evidence well before the Liberation and in fact occurred in most European countries both in the twentieth century and earlier.Why were these punishments largely directed at women? Was a relationship with a German emblematic of female collaboration and betrayal, or were contemporary feelings of violence towards the enemy subsequently re-directed? Answering these questions and many more, Virgili suggests that the punishment was not only meted out for 'horizontal collaboration' but also for many other forms of involvement, and that the act of shaving the head was itself a form of sexual punishment. For Virgili, the public nature of the punishment was a defence strategy, a response to the German Occupation and a reaction to the suffering and violence that had preceded the Liberation.This pioneering investigation of one of France's darkest moments will be fascinating reading for anyone interested in World War II, French history or women's studies.

This book provides a conceptual framework for understanding sexual violence in war, and its impact focussing in particular on the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. It situates Bosnian war-rape in relation to subsequent conflicts; outlines how sexual violence in war can be studied from a political psychological perspective; and examines the effect of war- rape on victims and communities in the aftermath of armed conflict.