Norway had a small Jewish community of around 2,100 people in 1940. Around 770 of them were deported to Auschwitz. Most were murdered. The Norwegian death rate of around 36 per cent is high in absolute terms but is the result of a small community in a country that, geographically, gave the survivors a real route out: Sweden was a few miles away across an undefended forest border, and around 900 Norwegian Jews escaped that way. The Norwegian record is also notable for the active role of the wartime Quisling regime, which made the Holocaust in Norway the work of Norwegians as much as of Germans.
The community
Norwegian Jewry was small, recent and concentrated in Oslo and Trondheim. Most Norwegian Jews were the children or grandchildren of immigrants who had arrived from Russia and Lithuania in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in flight from Tsarist persecution. The community had been granted full Norwegian citizenship in 1851, after the removal of an earlier constitutional clause that had banned Jews from the country. Norwegian antisemitism was a marginal political force before 1940 but had a small ideological following in the inter-war Norwegian far right, particularly in Vidkun Quisling’s Nasjonal Samling party.
The German occupation and Quisling
Germany invaded Norway on 9 April 1940. Norwegian forces resisted for two months but were defeated. The Norwegian king and government escaped to London and continued the war from exile. The German occupation authority installed Vidkun Quisling, leader of Nasjonal Samling, as the head of a Norwegian collaborationist government in February 1942. Quisling’s regime had a particular ideological enthusiasm for the persecution of Jews that had no direct equivalent in any other Western European German-installed regime.
The first anti-Jewish measures came in late 1940 with restrictions on Jewish economic activity. Registration was introduced in early 1942. The Norwegian state police, the Statspolitiet, kept the lists. The legal framework was largely written by Norwegian officials acting on Quisling’s instructions, with German oversight but not German direction.
The deportations, 1942
The deportations of Norwegian Jews took place in two phases in late 1942. The first round-up, on 26 October 1942, arrested around 260 Jewish men, who were held at the Berg internment camp near Oslo. The second round-up, on 26 November 1942, arrested around 530 women, children and elderly. They were marched onto the German troopship Donau in Oslo harbour and shipped to Stettin, then transported by rail to Auschwitz. The arrests were carried out by Norwegian state police, with Quisling’s personal approval. Of the 770 Norwegian Jews deported on the Donau and subsequent transports, around 25 returned alive.
The remaining roughly 900 Norwegian Jews escaped to Sweden in the autumn and winter of 1942 and 1943. The escape was organised partly by the Norwegian resistance, particularly the Carl Fredriksens Transport network in Oslo, which moved Jewish refugees to the Swedish border in lorry convoys. Some Jews crossed the border independently. Sweden, neutral throughout the war, accepted them.
The post-war record
Quisling was arrested when Germany surrendered in May 1945, tried for treason and war crimes, and shot by firing squad in October 1945. Several other senior Norwegian collaborators were tried and convicted. The post-war Norwegian state was, by the standards of most occupied countries, comparatively prompt in pursuing collaborators. The role of Norwegian state police in the deportations was acknowledged in the immediate post-war period; Norwegian state apologies and reparations to the Jewish community were issued in 1996, with formal reparations paid by the Norwegian state in 1997 to surviving Norwegian Jews and to their descendants.
The Norwegian Jewish community today numbers around 1,500, the same size as before the war. The community has a synagogue in Oslo and a small museum and cultural centre. The deportation site at the Akershus fortress in Oslo, where the deportees were assembled before being marched to the Donau, is now a memorial.
Why the Norwegian record matters
Quisling’s name has, in English, become a generic word for a collaborator. The Norwegian case is the example for which the term was originally coined. It shows what an active collaborator regime, set up by a national fascist movement under German auspices, was prepared to do to its own Jewish minority. It also shows the limits of what such a regime could achieve in a country with a sympathetic population, an organised resistance, and a neutral neighbour a few miles across the border. The Norwegian Jewish community was attacked by its own state. More than half of it survived because Sweden took it in.
See also
Sources
- Samuel Abrahamsen, Norway’s Response to the Holocaust, Holocaust Library, 1991
- Kjersti Brathagen and Torgeir Saetre, De norske jodene under andre verdenskrig, Norwegian Center for Holocaust and Minority Studies, multiple papers
- USHMM: Norway