Aspects of Identity

4 The history of Jewish presence in Norway has two main features: recent establishment and relative numerical size. Despite its liberal inspiration, the Constitution of 1814, which ended Danish rule and proclaimed independence, confirmed the official exclusion of Jews from the Lutheran kingdom (Article 2, called the ‘Jewish clause’). We must wait for the turn of the 1830s to see the presence of Jews gradually tolerated in Norway. The expansion of their rights of residence and establishment occurred only in 1851, after a lengthy parliamentary debate. [2] The relatively small numbers of the community is the first significant structural and permanent element that should be borne in mind, as it characterizes the Jewish presence in Norway even until today. The number of Jews increased steadily between 1880 and 1920. This period was marked by a wave of immigration from Tsarist Russia (particularly the Lithuanian and Polish provinces), in which repeated massacres had caused the departure of 2.5 million Jews. In Oslo (where in 1892, the first congregation was founded that is still active today, Det Mosaiske trossamfund) as in Trondheim, the first part of the twentieth century saw the flourishing of worship and charitable associations, sometimes Zionist in inspiration, or youth groups, such as the Scandinavian Jewish Youth Society. Until 1927, the Jewish community published two daily newspapers in Norwegian (Israelitten and Hatikwah).

5 In the same period, two synagogues were consecrated in Oslo (1920) then Trondheim (1925) and the Jewish community was accorded full rights of existence and expression. Their integration into Norwegian society was often remarkable; there are many examples of social success and manifest demonstrations of attachment to the host country. [3] However, this integration was not complete; the support that Norwegian Jews could count on outside the community was limited, and for most of them, once the war started isolation was the rule. During the inter-war years, Jewish immigration to Norway remained low, despite the rapid deterioration of living conditions for Jews in the territories controlled by the Reich. Until the outbreak of the war, the Norwegian kingdom practiced a much more restrictive immigration policy than its Danish and Swedish neighbours regarding Jewish refugees from territories under German domination, or gradually promised to the German government depending on the capitulations of European diplomacy (German Reich then Austria, the Sudetenland, Bohemia and Moravia). [4]

On the Eve of War, A Community at its Height

6 In April 1940, the Jewish population totalled about 2100 people, including 1600 Norwegian citizens. German occupation caught the Jews at the historical and demographic ‘peak’ of their presence in Norway. In the late 1930s, the visibility of the Jews was at its highest point and this coincided with a renewal of anti-Semitism in the Norwegian political landscape (in a bio-racial fashion directly inspired by the Nazi model). [5] The German invasion only gradually transformed Jewish conditions in Norway. To the Wehrmacht command, Norway and its occupation were primarily military and strategic issues. At Wannsee in January 1942, the service of the Reich in charge of the ‘comprehensive solution of the Jewish question’ in occupied Europe, the RSHA (Reichssicherheitshauptamt), conducted a thorough count of European Jews from Corfu to Tromsø. [6]

7 The Holocaust was a genocidal enterprise that was thought out on a continental scale, deployed throughout all of Europe that was occupied or at war. It was organized in a pyramidal fashion with a directorate headed by the RSHA. Its representatives in all the occupied capitals were charged with coordinating the resolution of the ‘Jewish question.’ Thus, the elaboration of genocide in Norway was consistent with the process masterfully described at the time by Raul Hilberg (identification, exclusion from civil society, confiscation of goods, concentration, deportation, extermination). [7] However, the unfolding of the Holocaust in Norway had unique characteristics and the timing of persecutions presents an interesting arrhythmia: the registration of the Jews was late in coming, yet seizing their property happened rapidly along with deportation. Precipitation in the unfolding of the different phases of genocide should not lead us to conclude that these actions were conducted in an improvised and disorderly fashion. Zealous, perfect and ‘exemplary’ collaboration between the top of the pyramid (the German authorities responsible for ‘security’ issues) and the Norwegian administrators and police involved in carrying out the Holocaust took shape. The effectiveness of this collaboration and the complementarity of these factors can be seen in the terrible record of deportations.

Principal Characteristics of the Holocaust in Norway

8 Intense debate exists on the chronology of the genocidal decision within Nazi leadership, fuelled by numerous scholarly publications. It is relevant to compare the Norwegian case with the conclusions of these works, both in terms of knowledge and in terms of method. [8] We must therefore probe criminal intent, estimate its translation into political terms in Norway, and analyze the three phases of any policy implementation: the ripening of the intention, making a decision, and the implementation of the latter. [9] We must first understand the nature of the environment that reigned at the time when the Holocaust was unleashed in this country. I shall first briefly review the symbolic and strategic role played by Norway after Operation Barbarossa (June 1941), and then more systematically focus on the connections between the conditions of the war in the East and the sudden acceleration of anti-Semitic persecution. [10]

9 The German occupation was the prerequisite for establishing mechanisms that presided over extermination, but without the cooperation of Norwegian authorities (administrative services, registration and transport services, police, paramilitary militias, camp guards), such an undertaking would have been difficult to achieve, if only because of the extreme geographical dispersion of the Jewish population in Norway. Despite the size of the German military presence in the country (400,000 men at the height of the war) police tasks did not rest exclusively with the occupation forces, whose raison d’être was primarily strategic. We must also keep in mind a geopolitical fact: the collaborationist government maintained its intent to reorganize the Norwegian zone, with the goal of a regenerated nation (one spoke at the time of a ‘new order’, nyordning) free from any plutocratic tendencies. In this sense, the Norwegian government took an active part in implementing the Holocaust. It gave meaning to the undertaking; it accompanied it and extended it. Although the order of deportation to the death camps in occupied Poland was undoubtedly German, the agents of the Holocaust themselves were almost exclusively Norwegian. German control over the operations ordered in Oslo and Trondheim was minimal and reflects the deep confidence between German officials and their Norwegian counterparts. The vague attempts at resistance from the ranks of the police were widely highlighted in the years following the war. However, at the time of the roundups, the cases where Jewish families had been warned about the scale of the raids, conveyed to safe places, or simply saved remain rare. Norwegian police above all demonstrated their rapidity. The NS [11] troopers unleashed their obscene violence, and the other Norwegian auxiliaries called upon during these days were enthusiastic. Disobedience, an alternative that was less impossible than has often been described, was the exception. [12]

Ripening Intention

10 In Norway, the Holocaust took place over a very short time. The phases that elsewhere – in France, Belgium or the Netherlands – led to the destruction of the Jewish community were telescoped here. This historical specificity says nothing of the actual experiences of anti-Semitic persecution, however. The ‘experience’ of Jews in Norway was quite different, and the relative brevity of the extermination process says nothing about the degree of violence that befell them. The accelerated pace of deportation tells us, above all, in terms of anti-Semitic policies, about the degree of involvement of the Norwegian state apparatus in the German project. Collaboration between the centres of German power in Norway (the Reichskommissar Josef Terboven (1898-1945), the Generaloberst Nikolaus von Falkenhorst (1885-1968), commander of the German armed forces in the region and the Sipo-SD) and what remained of the Norwegian executive and judicial powers, was set up on a ‘dual-mode of support and rivalry’ (Christian Ingrao). This complementarity, in fact, won the day, and is a traditional phenomenon in the Europe of the Third Reich, well described in a case study of ‘polycratic’ government and the analysis of relations between Berlin and its peripheries. [13]

11 The decision to deport the Norwegian Jews was German; the deportation order sent to the Norwegian authorities 24 October 1942 from the RSHA representative in Oslo leaves little doubt. Yet the RSHA was primarily an intelligence service, which attached great importance to the reports sent by its local representatives that informed them on the state of public opinion and the political context of the occupied areas. [14] It was the appreciation of this local situation (‘environment’) that ultimately determined the definitive schedule of the deportation of Jews from Norway in Berlin, besides the material capacity to support such an operation. The decision by the RSHA in Berlin only occurred once German logistics were able to ‘treat’ the Jews of Norway in the Polish death camps in the autumn of 1942.

12 Genocide was also a matter of representation, especially in the stage of ‘ripening’ the decision: representations of Jews, the object of hatred, and the mental representation of the territory in question where the Final Solution is applied. Norway had a high symbolic value in the intellectual world of the architects of the massacre of Jews. The primary role played by this country in the Nazi cosmogony must be emphasized. Sacralised by a supposedly common Germanic heritage and by the long attachment of elite Nazis to Norse mythology, [15] this space, the land connected to Thule, must not be tarnished or bastardized by a Jewish presence. In the minds of the men that made up the thinking elite of the RSHA, the Scandinavian north embodied a regenerative bio-racial area; for them, in a Europe dominated by Nazi Germany, Norway had an important future. This representation sealed the alliance between German and Norwegian Nazi elites. In the fall of 1942, the NS and SS shared a common view on the Jewish question. Facing the small numbers of Jews in Norway, the final goal was less to ‘cleanse’ the country of a Jewish presence that had supposedly infiltrated the dominant classes to the point of corrupting the ‘national spirit’ (as in France), than to get rid of the presence of a Jewish ‘island’ that was incongruous in a land at the very heart of German-ness. [16]

13 These representations shaped general mechanisms, but in practice, once triggered, the genocidal policy progressed according to the local rivalries and ambitions of ordinary people. As administrator of the Holocaust, the Norwegian state apparatus coordinated a multitude of agents mobilized for deportation, from simple local officials drawing up the lists of future deportees or affixing the J stamp, to police making use of physical force to rid Norway of its Jews. The intensity of anti-Semitic hatred was also dictated by the opportunities that this hunting of the Jews represented. The ‘law for confiscating property belonging to the Jews’ of 24 October 1942 freed up apartments and shops, to which must be added the different items, often ridiculously small, plundered during the round-ups, which the many direct and indirect beneficiaries of the Holocaust profited from (‘war profiteers,’ economic opportunists, organizers of the black market, buyers of the stock of confiscated Jewish shops, border couriers, NS leaders). The worsening conditions of life for Jews benefitted all Norwegian actors of the Holocaust, armed men as well as ‘paper executioners.’

14 The chronology commonly accepted in Norwegian research gives the idea of a sudden explosion of an exterminationist anti-Semitism, whose late arrival in the second half of 1942 seems to come ex nihilo from the vacuum caused by the war. This periodization needs to be reconsidered. Although the genocide was organized in a short period of time, anti-Semitic hatred had been established over the long-term in Norway; the preliminaries for the Holocaust are located well before the event itself. [17] Between 1933 and October 1940, there was a sort of gestation period of the Holocaust within the Norwegian political elite, a kind of setting up of mechanisms that would make genocide possible. This phase is characterized by a slow and gradual conversion of minds towards an obscene, populist anti-Semitism with the goal of eradication. This shift, beyond the narrow electoral bases of the NS, ended up infiltrating some segments that were conservative but not Nazi within the Norwegian political spectrum. In 1933, the year of the NS’ creation, the large daily newspaper Aftenposten, the herald of authoritarian tendencies in Norwegian politics, called for a boycott of commercial establishments owned by Jews. Throughout the 1930s, the NS and conservatives used anti-Semitic anathema to discredit their Liberal political opponents, called ‘spiritual Jews’ (åndelige jøder). [18] This anti-Semitism drew on a tradition that goes far beyond solely the NS. Strongly determined by an approach that was first religious and Lutheran, Norwegian anti-Semitism experienced some notable excesses of zeal, especially in the years following the October Revolution: the theme of Judeo-Bolshevism then took precedence over any other in the construction of the ‘imaginary Jew.’

15 Anti-Semitism with a political ambition was also fed by Norwegian popular culture that, from the mid-nineteenth century, conveyed a series of negative representations. Developed around a few major works that were widely read, a derogatory popular image of the Jew took shape that crystallized at the turn of the century. The Jews in illustrations by Gustaf Wahlbom (1824-1876) and Theodor Kittelsen (1857-1914) are opportunists, vagabonds and stateless persons. The book Jøder og Gojim [Jews and Goyas] (1910) by Eivind Saxlund (1858-1936), largely inspired by the German anti-Semitic polemicist Theodor Fritsch (1852-1933 ), sought to demonstrate that the Jews’ thought, which was Talmudic thought, was ruining the world. ‘They’ were leading a war to enslave the earth in the Jødenes krig (The Jewish War) by Halldis Østbye (1898-1960). In a vein that Toussenel would not have disowned, between 1916 and 1945, the indefatigable Mikal Sylten (1873-1964) – publisher of the Nationalt Tidsskrift (National Review) – repeatedly denounced Jews as ‘masters of the world’ and for his purposes revealed a list of Norwegian Jews and ‘hidden’ Jews (Hvem er hvem i jødeverdenen [Who’s who in the Jewish world], 1925). [19] At the same time, the Norwegian state apparatus was gradually won over by anti-Semitism. The work of criminologist Per Ole Johansen has revealed the importance of anti-Semitism in the development of migration policy. His analysis of the state bureaucracy in the 1930s (in particular the Naturalization department Centralpasskontoret) reveals the existence of a doctrine of ‘widespread and far-sighted suspicion of Jewish immigrants’ (mistankens skjerpende blikk). [20]

16 German presence and impetus served as a pretext for unleashing the latent anti-Semitic radicalism of Quisling and his entourage. [21] In March 1942, the reintroduction by Quisling’s office of the ‘Jewish clause’ (Article 2 of the Constitution of 1814 forbidding any Jew to settle in Norway) constitutes a strong sign. The ‘Confiscation of property belonging to the Jews’ law was drafted and promulgated on 24 October 1942, without the Reichskommissar Terboven even being aware of its existence. The proclamation of the decree came out just hours before the start of the first major general roundup, in an atmosphere of urgency and confusion. [22] The same precipitation can be seen in the desire clearly expressed by NS leaders alone that the compulsory registration lists be extended to include ‘half- Jews’ and ‘one-quarter Jews,’ without any German directive on this subject. Fierce Judeophobia is evident in the period that immediately followed the roundups. In January 1943, the Minister of the Interior, Albert Viljam Hagelin (1881-1946), submitted a series of bills to different ministries designed to dramatically worsen the condition of the Jews, although 532 of them had already been deported and flights to Sweden were increasing. [23] The goal was to make Norwegian law more in line with the spirit of the German Nuremberg Race Laws (1935). The proposed law provided for the prohibition of marriage between Jews and Aryans and many other harsh measures, including the prohibition to wear the national colours. Compared to the number of Jews actually then present in Norway, these projects reflect the virulence of anti-Semitic fantasies. [24]

From Low-Level Terror to Systematic Deportation

17 Between October 1940 and February 1942, the Holocaust in Norway completed a second step, the definition of the object of the massacre (the ‘identification rationale’), during which the Norwegian authorities, from a German directive but in a fully autonomous manner, put in place the legal arsenal that isolated Jews and excluded them from civil society. This desire to count, to identify and locate the Jews seemed to stimulate other initiatives. In October 1941, the head of the Sipo-SD in Norway, the SS-Oberführer und Oberst der Polizei Heinrich Fehlis (1906-1945), informed the Norwegian Minister of Police of need to have a J stamped on Jews’ identity documents. It was up to the Norwegian police to make these changes. The NS proposed adding to the J a ‘questionnaire for Jews in Norway,’ developed by the Statistics Bureau of the NS, which was eager to accumulate archives and map the Jewish ‘hold’ on economic life in Norway. The average assets held by Jewish people revealed a very average standard of living and this was very disappointing for propaganda. Yet, how could one be surprised? Most of the Jews were from extremely modest backgrounds, as the Jewish population was made up of many who were destitute from the Polish and Lithuanian campaigns, forced to leave by state anti-Semitism.

18 The suddenness of violence was probably the decisive factor in the success of operations initiated during the winter of 1942. The Norwegian police gave the pretext of a State of Emergency, decreed by the Gestapo for Trondheim from 6 to 12 October 1942, to proceed with the arrest of male Jews over 15 years of age in the city and in the central regions of the country. These men were concentrated in the camp Falstad. On 26 October, under orders communicated the day before by the head of the Stapo, Karl Marthinsen, to all police headquarters, the Norwegian authorities were required to arrest all male Jews over 15 and to bring them all to Oslo. The 336 men arrested were taken to the camp of Berg, administered by the Norwegian police. [25] November 19 marks the date of the first deportation of Jewish prisoners to death camps from Norway. The ship D/S Monte Rosa carried 19 men to Auschwitz-Birkenau via Århus (Denmark). On 24 November 1942, Marthinsen received from Wagner, the head of Jewish affairs for the Sipo-SD in Oslo, the order to evacuate from Norwegian territory any individual whose identity documents were marked with a J. The very next day, a new wave of arrests hit Bergen and Oslo, where old and sick Jews were evacuated from hospitals and asylums and then arrested. On November 26, police efforts focused on families who had hitherto escaped arrests in the capital. The roundup was carried out by employees of the statspolitiet [26] who were assisted by a hundred men from the security police (sikkerhetspolitiet), sixty officers of the Judicial Police (kriminalpolitiet), sixty members of the Hird (who each received 20 crowns for their assistance), and thirty representatives of the SS Norwegen battalion, 300 armed men in all. The Jews rounded up in the city were led directly to the quay of the port of Oslo.

19 Operations were conducted under the responsibility of Stapo inspector Knut Rød, in charge of arrests throughout the quarters of Oslo and its surroundings, and whose rigor and precision were praised by all his superiors. [27] At the same time, the authorities proceeded with a selection at the Berg camp, where police separated Jewish men and women married to Aryans from the mass of prisoners who were promised deportation. Following these operations, a total of 532 people were boarded onto the D / S Donau for Auschwitz. The same day, 26 Jews were led aboard the D / S Monte Rosa for Aarhus and Hamburg. Deportees then spent four atrocious days over a rough sea and frightening transport conditions. On 1 December 1942, the train carrying Jews from the D / S Donau from the town of Stettin arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau. A selection was made on the platform and the vast majority of these men, women and children of all ages were sent to the gas chambers. The 183 men spared for ‘work’ tried to survive their winter arrival. In Norway, the hunt for Jews and ‘cleansing’ operations continued with the goal of a second major deportation. On 10 December 1942, Jewish women married to Aryans fell into the category of persons who were to be deported. Jews rounded up in the cities of Trondheim, Kristiansund and Narvik were concentrated in Oslo and interned at the Bredtvet prison. Once German administration was able to transport new cargo, the 158 Jews (74 men and 84 women) of Bredtvet were loaded aboard the SS Gotenland towards Stettin (25 February 1943). On March 3, after a long detour through Berlin, the last convoy of Jews from Norway reached Auschwitz-Birkenau, where the first selection at their arrival resulted in the death of the vast majority. [28]

20 As elsewhere in Europe, excluding Jews from economic activities and the appropriation of their property preceded or accompanied genocide. Between October 1940 and the end of 1941, an increasing number of regulations and prohibitions limited or subjected to authorization the presence of Jews in certain professions. Economic plunder of Jewish property in occupied Norway became a ‘fact and a social practice’ in the words of Polish historian Jan Gross, and no longer only the aberrant behaviour of a group of depraved individuals. [29] But unlike the French or German cases where the process of Aryanisation pursued a sort of rationale, the confiscation of Jewish property in Norway was brutal and rapid, organized for the benefit of the State and a small circle of NS members, in particular former volunteers of the Waffen SS back from the Eastern front. Actual showrooms were organized by the NS for the dispersion of goods, clothing, and sometimes trivial personal effects that were sold for half their value. NS thugs seized what they could. The fact that the Reichskommissar Terboven was obliged to intervene in mid-November 1942 to force the Norwegian authorities to give back to the Sipo-SD the gold and the silver (and watches) taken from the Jews reveals the immediate material stakes that the liquidation of the Jews represented for these ‘ordinary people’ who were soldiers, police and part of the Norwegian bureaucracy. [30]

The Eastern Front and the Brutalisation of Norwegian Society (1941-1945)

21 The war that the Third Reich started with continental powers and then the USSR largely determined the rate of destruction of Jewish communities. The contribution of a segment of the Norwegian population – which the public is increasingly discovering thanks to historical research – in the anti-Soviet war effort was not without consequences for the conduct of the Holocaust in Norway. [31] Operation Barbarossa (22 June 1941) enabled the process of brutalisation, as defined by George Mosse, to cross a quantitative and qualitative threshold. [32] With the opening of the war in the East, ‘the horizon of possibilities’ widened considerably and the Reich was able to implement the racial and political solution devised for Europe. Anti-Bolshevik passion was, along with the anti-Semitic hatred, the common denominator shared by Holocaust actors in Norway, both German and Norwegian. [33] Two interconnected rationales, which precipitated the fate of Jews in Norway, are at this point clearly identifiable. From the invasion of the USSR in June 1941, Norway, which shares a common border with the USSR in the Finnmark, became a theatre of military operations, a strategic concern of the first order and an occupied territory in which German anti-Bolshevik war propaganda was unleashed. References to ‘international Jewry’ multiplied in the Norwegian press, where images of the Jew and the Bolshevik inevitably merged. More telling still is the example of the NS press that echoed, from August, the campaigns that the Wehrmacht undertook in Ukraine, and in particular the lack of attention towards Jewish civilians.

22 The first Norwegian volunteers that fought in the East in German uniforms provide clear evidence. [34] In January 1942, the Vestfold Press spared its readers no details of the taking of Lviv in Ukraine, where Norwegian soldiers massacred 12 Jews, ‘after having put them to work.’ In the purest tradition of Nazi anti-Jewish propaganda, supporters of a tougher State anti-Semitism seized upon the impressions and the images collected in the Soviet chaos of the first months of the war to present the ‘Jew in its entirety,’ as he ‘really is,’ devoid of his bourgeois costume, which in Norwegian cities, makes him seem so harmless in appearance. The ‘Jew of the East,’ the Ostjude, became the emblematic figure of the enemy. Bolshevism suited him, was his second nature, and he was at its very origins. These two images end up generating a single entity. [35] Hitler had made Norway a ‘zone of destiny’ (Schicksalszone) and heavy German military presence in the country meant that Norwegian territory was placed at the Germans’ disposal for the army’s strategic needs. Norwegian Finnmark was used by the German war machine to launch an offensive on the Kola Peninsula and the city of Murmansk (July 1941). The campaign failed and the blitzkrieg turned into long war on the front until the decisive Soviet counter-offensive on 25 October 1944. The brutalisation that followed the opening of the Eastern Front can also be seen in the concentration of about 100,000 Soviet prisoners of war in appalling conditions in camps in Beisfjord, Falstad, Sydspissen og Tromsdalen and Åneby, where conditions for survival were very difficult. [36]

23 The eagerness of NS officials to symbolically give meaning to the war against Bolshevism is a clear sign of Nazified Norway’s commitment alongside Germany for conquering the Lebensraum, profitable to the entire Aryan world. In the autumn of 1941, Jonas Lie, then Police Minister before taking over as head of a company of Waffen SS made up of Norwegian volunteers from the Norwegian Legion ( Den Norske Legion ), [37] went to the front and assisted in the operations of Einsatzgruppe D, headed by Otto Ohlendorf. The Minister’s correspondence is unequivocal about the nature of the operations. [38] Norwegian involvement was not limited to the Norske Legion. There were many frontkjemper [39] who, in various ways, joined the Waffen SS battalions under German command, including the Nordland Regiment (part of the SS-Panzer-Division Wiking), the Norges SS, created in May 1941 which brought together many members of the Hird who were later integrated into the Norske Legion; the Germanske SS Norge, founded in July 1942 on racial and political criteria – NS membership was compulsory – with relatively few members and no real military combat, the SS-skijegerkompani Norge, fighting on the Eastern front in spring 1944, and finally four companies of police. Among the Norwegian volunteers working under the banner of the Wiking Division, some were part of the infamous SS-Sturmbrigade ‘Dirlewanger,’ used to ‘hunt’ for the last Jews in Belarus and around Warsaw. [40] In total, an estimated 15,000 Norwegians joined the German military units; 5,000 of them were recruited. Losses amounted to 836 deaths for the entire duration of the war. [41] By comparison, Arve Kvaløy estimated that 255 Norwegian volunteers joined the ranks of the International Brigades who fought during the Spanish Civil War. [42] This comparison, although not entirely perfect, enables us to grasp the intensity of the fascist commitment in Norway. The NS even completed its anti-Bolshevik propaganda by launching a recruitment campaign to repopulate the agricultural lands of an ‘Aryanised’ Belarus. The head of the NS youth organization (NSUF) was invited to stay in the Germanized Wartheland and on this occasion visited the Lodz ghetto, at the height of Jewish suffering in Poland. [43]

24 Past the turning point of the summer of 1941, anti-Semitic hatred became the pivot around which the brutalisation of the Norwegian society and the Eastern Front crystallised. The war against the USSR, because it required significant collective mobilization, in return made some margins of the population more savage through a boomerang effect. [44] We must of course be careful not to indiscriminately use the concept of brutalization on very different national circumstances or to fail to differentiate between different times and contexts. Although the relevance of the concept of brutality is limited by the extent of the situation in Norway (a few thousand men), we can nevertheless speak of marginal and partial brutalisation that was nevertheless very real for Norwegian society during the war. What kind of discourse was held in the barracks and in families by Norwegian soldiers who witnessed or participated in the ‘Holocaust by bullets’ on the Eastern Front? The experiences of these young men (18 % under 20 years), the trivialization of massacre, the new kind of endemic violence deployed on the front, and the discourse of dehumanization of the Judeo- Bolshevik enemy contributed to a profound upheaval in the representation of the human being and his or her dignity. [45] NS elites were convinced they could take advantage of this and the Norwegian veterans of the Eastern Front were committed like no other in the hunt for Jews in Norway.

Exile and Resistance

25 In the fall of 1942, at the height of persecution, the Norwegian Resistance could provide only marginal assistance to members of the Jewish community. The main underground domestic network, the Milorg, was in the throes of reorganization after a series of failures and arrests. Transferring groups of families had to be done through the intermediary of newly created networks. [46] Some Jews, in spite of persecution and isolation, were directly involved in acts of resistance. Moreover, a spirit of resistance appeared even earlier and was quite widely developed among Jews of Norwegian nationality compared to their ‘ethnically’ Norwegian compatriots. [47] In any case, these acts of resistance, whether heroic or ordinary, should not obscure the fact that during the entire duration of the conflict, the process of destroying the Jewish community in Norway was at no time hindered or interrupted by this resistance. [48]

26 The question of exile obliges us to consider the attitude of Jews facing persecution, their analytical ability and resistance; but beyond that, it questions the specific relationship between an individual and the State in Scandinavia. This relationship is based on the contract, a flexible link between rights and obligations, that was completely broken by the legislative work of the Quisling office. In 1940, the Jews of Norway could not have predicted the scale and systematic nature of the exterminating project conceived by the ideologues of the Third Reich, and we must avoid any teleological temptation. Once the collaborationist office was established (September 1940) and at the height of anti-Semitic policies, the Jews of Norway continued to believe that obedience to the laws and measures taken against them was the best passage of safe-conduct. Community leaders also lacked understanding of the criminal intentionality of the Nazis and their Norwegian supporters. On 15 May 1940, the Prefecture of Police of Oslo required the central Congregation of Jews in Norway (Det Mosaiske trossamfund) to deliver a list of its members. The congregation obeyed. [49]

27 The entry of German troops in Oslo marked the beginning of a vast flight of Jews from Norway to Sweden and at the end of the war, 50% of the Jewish community had found refuge in that country (approximately 1,100 people). [50] The flow then decreased significantly between autumn 1940 and autumn 1942. Exile is an ordeal with an uncertain outcome. The ‘Regulation for the defence of Norwegian occupied territory,’ enacted by the Germans October 12, 1942, listed 38 charges carrying the death penalty, including flight from the country or assisting escape. The passage to Sweden involved bringing together conditions that were often difficult to meet: means to pay the transporters; excellent physical condition to make it through the heavily wooded paths; a place to stay in Sweden; and the ability to leave behind relatives who would likely end up hostages. Stories of the difficulties settling in Sweden were not likely to encourage others to leave. Finally, the Norwegian Jews thinking about fleeing also had to reckon with the evolution of Swedish diplomacy towards them. In the early years of the conflict, the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs had adopted a wait-and-see attitude, but once the deportation of Jews from Norway began in October 1942, it then adopted a more interventionist approach. From this date, the Swedish Under-Secretary of State for Immigration endeavoured to facilitate the conditions of Jews arriving in Sweden from Norway, who were given asylum. [51] Historians are still divided on the reasons behind these initiatives, between an obvious humanitarian sentiment and pragmatic calculation as to the outcome of the war. [52]

The Laborious Elaboration of the Memory of the Holocaust in Norway

28 After the war, 44.8% of Jews residing in Norway in 1940 had been exterminated. This figure places the country on the upper end of the scale, on par with Estonia, Belgium and Romania, well above that of France (22%), and incommensurate with its Scandinavian and Nordic neighbours (0.7 % in Denmark, 0.3% in Finland). In Western Europe, only Germany and the Netherlands are able to ‘match’ the Norwegian result. [53] At the end of the war and for many years after, the Jewish community was at its lowest point. The backbone of its religious life in Norway, the Det Mosaiske trossamfund, was on the brink of dissolution and a general sense of injustice and denial long took hold of its members. [54] The treatment of Jews during the war, their exclusion from civil society, the confiscation of their property to the benefit of the Norwegian State and their deportation ultimately, in the immediate post-war period, ended in strengthening their ‘foreignness’. Their representation as a foreign body in Norwegian society, as the object of a war waged by the German occupying forces in the name of its own objectives, was also consolidated. The Resistance-glorifying myth largely imposed by the Norwegian Resistance and its representatives did not leave any room for questions about the responsibilities of Norwegians in carrying out the Holocaust. It would take fifty years for an ‘activist’ [55] historiography to overturn the strongest dogmas and for the question of the role of the Norwegian State in destroying the Jewish community to be placed at the heart of public debate.