A rising tide of anger across Europe at 'Nazi’ social workers

Last weekend, hundreds of Norwegians and foreign parents marched on the parliament in Oslo to protest children being taken into 'care' by the state

Christopher Booker

Even I was rather surprised to see a newspaper headline reporting that the president of the Czech Republic had accused the social workers of another European country of acting “like Nazis”. As it happens, he was not talking about our own much-loved social workers but those of Norway, who four years ago took two little Czech boys into foster care, after one of them told a teacher at nursery school that his Daddy had “groped inside his pyjamas”.

Although no other evidence was given for removing the children, and the strain of the case eventually led their parents to divorce, the Norwegian authorities have refused to return the boys to their distraught mother, who has only been allowed to see them for 15 minutes twice a year and forbidden to speak with them in Czech. It was this which prompted the Czech president Milo Zeman to compare Norway’s child protection system to the Nazis’ Lebensborn forced adoption policy.