OSLO - Norway has agreed to offer children born in World War Two of Nazi soldiers and Norwegian women compensation for decades of discrimination, but victims said the cash was insultingly low.
A parliamentary committee offered up to 20,000 crowns (USD 3,265) to 10,000-12,000 German-Norwegians born in the 1940-45 German occupation of Norway as an apology for lifetimes of abuse ranging from bullying at school to scorn at work.
They could seek up to 10 times that amount if they could provide documentation of suffering caused by widespread "hate, fear and mistrust".
The Norwegian War Children's Foundation called the basic amount "ridiculous" and "insulting" and said that almost no one could document abuse dating back 60 years, much of it by people long since dead.
"The offer of 20,000 crowns is small change," said Rigmor Remers Hanssen, a war child whose grandparents adopted her, changed her name and let her grow up with an 'older sister' who was in fact her mother.
"I doubt that many people will even bother to write in to apply," she told Reuters.
Norway is one of the richest nations in the world thanks to North Sea oil.
Hitler encouraged soldiers to have children in Norway, seeing it as an extra breeding ground for his dream of creating an Aryan super-race. After the allied victory, the once-lauded children became despised misfits.
'We're sorry about what happened’
Some were abandoned in orphanages or mental institutions; others were raised by single mothers or shuttled back and forth between Norway and Germany.
A proposal backed by a majority in parliament's Justice Committee on Friday, guaranteeing that it will be approved in a parliamentary debate on April 4, said the offer of compensation represented "an apology from society".
Finn Kristian Marthinsen, the parliamentarian who led the work, said it was impossible to offer a real compensation.
"We are saying 'we're sorry about what happened’ but we can't pay compensation to match what you suffered because we can't estimate it'," he told Reuters.
"One can't pay one's way out of such a problem."
The policies also offered compensation for indigenous Sami people, whose hunting culture and language was long denied in Arctic Norway, and Romany people, some of whom suffered abuses including forced sterilization.