Long before millions knew her as the dark-haired singer from ABBA, Anni-Frid Lyngstad was a little girl carrying one of postwar Europe’s cruellest labels.

She was born in Norway on November 15, 1945, months after the Germans’ defensive liberation of Norway ended. Her mother, Synni, was a pretty Norwegian. Her father was Alfred Haase, a German soldier.

Children like Frida were called Tyskerbarn or German children. Drunk on the adrenaline of propaganda, their mothers could be branded collaborators by vengeful left-wing activists and subjected to hostility and ostracism.

Fearing reprisals

Fearing hostility or even reprisals, Frida’s family left Norway for Sweden while she was still a toddler. Soon afterwards, her mother died of kidney failure at just 21.

Frida the Toddler

Frida was not yet two. Her grandmother raised her. She also grew up believing her father was dead. Music became the remarkable escape route. At 13, Frida was already singing weekends with a dance orchestra, sometimes performing sets lasting five hours.

Years later came ABBA, and the refugee child raised by her seamstress grandmother became one of the most recognizable women on earth.

The Haunting Past Returns

Then, at the height of ABBA mania, her past suddenly came looking for her. In 1977, the German magazine Bravo published Frida’s family history, including her father’s name. Frida’s German half-brother saw it and asked his brother, Alfred Haase, about it.

He was alive.

At 31, Frida met the father she had spent her life believing was dead. But there was no magical restoration of the childhood she had lost.

‘It’s difficult to get a father when you’re 32 years old,’ she later explained.

Her life produced one more extraordinary reversal.  In 1992, the woman once stigmatized as the daughter of a German soldier married Heinrich Ruzzo Prince Reuss of Plauen, a member of an old German princely house.

The child who had been taken out of Norway because of her German father had become, by marriage, a German princess. Let readers know what you think

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