After being imprisoned for a year following the Second World War for having pledged allegiance to Adolf Hitler and the Germans, the Danish SS soldier, Walther Frisch, became a sperm donor through fertility treatments at Karolinska hospital in Sweden.
So far there are 15 people from four different countries who, through DNA testing, have found out that their biological father was the Danish Nazi, Walther Frisch.
“How the hell can a Danish Waffen SS soldier be my biological father? It just doesn’t make sense,” said Thomas Rasmussen in the new documentary, The mystery of the Danish Nazi-donor, produced by DR, Denmark's oldest and largest public-service media enterprise.
Rasmussen has reached out to his Swedish half-brother, Mats Rydberg. They are both deeply astonished that a man in his late 40s, who was convicted for his pro-Nazi opinions, could end up being a sperm donor in Sweden.
“Heinrich Himmler said that each SS officer should have at least four children. Are we the result of this Nazi ideology?” Rydberg wonders. Heinrich Himmler was a powerful, leading member of the Nazi Party and a main architect of the Holocaust.
It’s currently impossible to say how many children Walther Frisch is the biological father to, since finding out would involve extensive DNA-testing. Through research for their documentary, DR knows of 15 children from Denmark, Sweden, Finland and Germany who share the same father.
“Only a small proportion of the population has taken a DNA-test, and there’s already 15 of us, so there could be far over 100 more,” said Rasmussen.
It is not only Walther Frisch's age and past that puzzle the donor children. There is no documentation about the sperm donations to be found, neither at Karolinska Hospital nor in the Swedish national and regional archives.
Karolinska Hospital did not wish to be interviewed, but have said that they have no information about Walther Frisch. The hospital says that it is “completely unacceptable and deeply unethical” if the choice of donor was ideologically motivated.
If you are based in Denmark, you can watch the Danish documentary on DRTV.