Blood out of Stone

Bram Verhoeff

Description

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.

Sujets

• Histoire
• History
• Lebensborn

Informations

• Publié par: AuthorHouse UK
• Date de parution: 13 septembre 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781728374390
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

BLOOD OUT OF STONE
WHAT HAPPENED TO THE NORWEGIAN ‘LEBENSBORN’ CHILDREN MUST BE TOLD. THE RELENTLESS STORYTELLER OF THIS TRUE STORY OF THESE CHILDREN OF SHAME REVEALS THE TRUTH BY GRIMLY SQUEEZING STONES OF DIFFERENT KINDS
BRAM VERHOEFF
WITH ROB VANSPRONSEN


AuthorHouse™ UK
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www.authorhouse.co.uk
Phone: UK TFN: 0800 0148641 (Toll Free inside the UK) UK Local: (02) 0369 56322 ([phone] from outside the UK)
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
© 2022 Bram Verhoeff. All rights reserved.
 
No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.
 
Published by AuthorHouse  09/12/2022
 
ISBN: 978-1-7283-7440-6 (sc)
ISBN: 978-1-7283-7441-3 (hc)
ISBN: 978-1-7283-7439-0 (e)
 
 
 
 
 
 
Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.
 
 
 
Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.
CONTENTS
Prologue
 
Part 1Nothing just happens
Part 2Back to the beginning of the present
Part 3The final week, Urk and the stone from Norway
 
Afterword
PROLOGUE
FRIDAY JUNE 25, 2010, HURDAL, NORWAY

Odd Gripar
The land that is now called Norway was His quintessence of creation: rain worn rocks, resilient bush and fertile misty greyness in all directions. For ever reborn after Ragnarök, like the sprouting of purple fireweed after forest fires, it was His universe and His dwelling place. The man in the truck observed it all with his green eyes, sensing the branches of the world-tree Yggdrasil, the tree of life, encircling all his surroundings. He rolled open a window and inhaled the fresh breath of God, like he was drinking mead. Yes, the world was moving on.
The sun had barely set during the night. Just south of him, the sun would be high above the sky and his world should be bathed in the bright sunlight. However, he had just driven into a dense fog that was rolling off Lake Hurdalsjøen. It created a heavy blanket that made driving a challenge. There was just enough visibility to see about thirty meters ahead. Up to this point, he was making good time and was expecting to arrive at his destination early. He glanced at the gauges. His clock told him he had been on the road for nearly ninety minutes and his speedometer told him he was going at a snail’s pace. Well, actually, it was registering just north of 75 km/h.
Good thing he wasn’t driving an ordinary Scandinavian pickup truck; Gripar was sitting high in his crimson-coloured Ford F650. Decked out with a chrome roll-bar, fog lights, and a winch, it was a formidable beast. Sure, he had to endure the harassment of his colleagues who teased him about having ‘small-penis syndrome’. The truth be told, Gripar was entirely comfortable with his masculinity. He knew it was possible to both own a big truck and have a big… Suddenly something darted onto the road. Cursing, he swung the steering wheel, nearly clipping a Red Deer that was intent on getting to the other side. He almost missed the sign declaring he had now entered the municipality of Hurdal.
Gripar wasn’t sure what to expect when he got there and he wasn’t sure why he was even involved. Was it because he was a police inspector in the Kripos, the Norwegian National Criminal Investigation Service? Without a doubt, a crime had been committed. But, strangely, for some reason yet unknown, he was specifically selected to be an integral part of the investigation. He glanced over at the passenger seat where several pictures lay. Earlier today, he had spent a considerable amount of time poring over these pictures. They were various shots of the same scene: three men sitting on a crudely constructed wooden bench. They were sitting upright; each one arranged in a different posture than the others. It didn’t take years of police training to figure out these men weren’t alive anymore. Gripar found an envelope with the pictures and letter in his postal box this morning. It had been delivered sometime during the night. When he checked the surveillance camera at his home, the camera caught a man with a short grey beard wearing a hoodie sweater and sporting a pair of aviator-style sunglasses. That this package was delivered to his home address rather than to his office suggested this was something personal.
The pictures were disturbing, for sure. Even more so because they didn’t depict a typical crime scene. There was no blood. The bodies looked pretty much unmolested. Somebody had taken great care to arrange the bodies of three dead men into a kind of montage. All three were sitting on what looked like a crudely constructed wooden bench - each uniquely arranged into a particular pose. Gripar noted their lifeless eyes were staring straight ahead. He couldn’t help but wonder what their dead eyes were fixated on. Who nailed their wooden seat together, and why? The photographer took various shots from different angles and different lighting. It occurred to Gripar, more than once, that these photographic scenes presented themselves like pieces of morbid art. Gripar wondered if the three men were randomly killed for this or if they were purposely selected. Was there a reason for three bodies? Lots of questions begging for answers, Gripar thought grimly to himself.
Then there was the letter that accompanied the photos. It comprised a single sheet of white paper. It had an artistic touch to it. The person who did this was concerned with presentation and style. About a quarter of the way down, centred, was typewritten in a bold and large font: “ Judge the living and the dead” . A couple of line spaces under that was also bolded and centred: “ The Three Witnesses”. The font size was larger than the first sentence. Then, underneath these two lines was a little rhyme: “Go find the three, their confessions are free, but you’ll have to kick in for the price of fame: the press will also be informed about this game.” At the bottom of the paper was a strange icon:

The letter was signed: The Wolfsangel.
On the back of the paper was a set of directions on how to locate the actual subjects of the photograph.
Gripar rubbed the back of his head in a vain attempt to get rid of a smouldering pain. The pain had been building up throughout the drive, likely because of the intense concentration required to navigate through the dense fog patches. He figured he should be making eyes on the first landmark described in the letter. Just as he was beginning to think he had missed it, Gripar breathed out a sigh of relief as he caught the faint sightlines of the elementary school.
The fog obfuscated the actual distance and he ended up driving past the turn-off. He stifled a curse, swerved onto the shoulder and hit the brakes. Throwing the transmission into reverse, he drove backwards until he reached the gravel road. He was relieved to find it was marked Odemarksvegen. Taking a deep breath, he swung the wheel and gunned forwards. The tires eventually gripped the road but not before spreading some gravel across the pavement.
After passing the elementary school on his left, Gripar began scanning upward, looking for the tell-tale of the power lines, which he soon spotted. He continued for a few minutes until he spied the trail, roughly the width of a small truck. Making another right, he navigated the narrow trail another three hundred meters or so, as per the instructions on the paper. He stopped and killed the engine. Gripar took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. His body was still tense from the drive, and now the anticipation of seeing in real what was foreshadowed by the photos.
He swung open his door and jumped out. He scanned the landscape to assess any potential hazards. The fog had pretty much lifted by now, but tiny vapour particles were still suspended in the air. This made the wooded hillside feel even more desolate. Suddenly, Gripar’s body shuddered. This startled him because he wasn’t usually prone to hypnic jerks. Gripar recalled his mother telling him as a boy that this feeling suddenly grabs you when you walk over somebody’s grave. I guess that’s a good sign that I am close, Gripar thought to himself. Nevertheless, he felt a general uneasiness at being directed out here by some stranger for some unknown reason. He concentrated on the surrounding area. The landscape was rather dull and unappealing; the power lines and trees seemed incongruent and the tracks below the lines were filled with rocks, stumps, and bits of concrete rubble. He looked up at the hills and spotted, not too far away, a stately white building. That must be the Hurdal Verk. During the War, it served as an orphanage for the Lebensborn children. Now, it was a collegiate.
Since that was the key landmark, he knew for certain he was in the right place. He made a slow but methodical search for the building structure that was described in the letter as a bunker, partly underground and partly above ground. After about fifteen minutes of rummaging through the low-lying shrubbery, Gripar was beginning to doubt that this structure even existed. Sweat was running down his back, gluing his shirt to his skin. He felt an insect climbing up one of his legs under his pant legs. When he stooped down to take care of the annoyance, he saw it. About ten meters ahead there was an unnatural elevation