The Holocaust in Norway.

(This is the sixth of a series of posts on the Norwegian experience in the Second World War.)


During the Second World War, in a program that became known as the “Final Solution,” the Nazi regime attempted to murder the Jewish population of occupied Europe.


The Final Solution owed much to the popularity of so-called “scientific” racism in the early 1900s. Racial and religious bigotry had been around for millennia, but in the early twentieth century advocates of these doctrines did their best to make their prejudices seem scientific.  Proponents of “scientific” racism argued that humanity was divided into separate races, some of which were genetically superior to others.  The American author Madison Grant, for example, in his book The Passing of the Great Race, contended that Europe was inhabited by three different races: the Nordics, the Alpines, and the Mediterraneans, with the Nordics being, as he put it, “the white man par excellence,” with a capacity for leadership that other races lacked.  (For some reason, advocates of these theories invariably concluded that the race to which they personally supposedly belonged was one of the superior ones.)    Adolf Hitler, like Grant, felt that races were arranged in a hierarchy.  Hitler believed that that Germans were Nordics whose racial purity was threatened by peoples living to the east of Germany--Poles, Ukrainians, Russians--whom he thought belonged to a separate and inferior race.  Hitler's most obsessive fear, however, was of Jews, whom he regarded as lower than human.


Thus, in 1935, in the name of supposedly protecting Nordic purity, the Nazi regime outlawed marriage between Jews and non-Jews.  With the outbreak of war in 1939, Nazi racial policies became increasingly radical and violent.  In German-occupied Poland, Jews were arrested and were forced to live in extremely crowded urban ghettoes.  The residents of these ghettoes were deliberately denied adequate food rations, with the result that many soon starved to death.  Following the invasion of the Soviet Union in June of 1941, as the German army advanced into Ukraine and Russia, squads of the SS trailed behind, massacring large numbers of Jews.  In January 1942, a group of high-ranking Nazi officials, meeting in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee, adopted a plan for the systematic murder of European Jews.  The minutes of the meeting, known as the “Wannsee Protocol,” rely heavily on euphemisms to conceal the horrific nature of what was being advocated.  The mass execution of Jews was referred to as “the Final Solution of the Jewish Question,” as part of which Jews would “be transported to the east.”


What did the project described at Wannsee mean in reality?  In the Final Solution, Jews from throughout occupied Europe were arrested, often by local police forces, and were deported to concentration camps in eastern Europe where they were murdered with poison gas.  Some Jews were compelled to work in factories under conditions so barbaric that the vast majority soon died.  By the end of the war, six million Jews from countries across occupied Europe had been killed in what became known as the Holocaust.


In 1940, approximately 1,700 Jews lived in Norway.  Following the German invasion in April of that year, Norwegian Jews were subjected to an increasing degree of harassment.

From the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which provides the following caption: "On a Jewish-owned shop, Norwegian fascists painted the slogan: 'Palestine is calling. Jews are not tolerated in Norway.' Norway, after April 1940." http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/media_ph.php?ModuleId=10005460&MediaId=2185

In 1942 and 1943, the German occupation authority, working in close cooperation with local Norwegian police, arrested Jews and deported them to concentration camps.

The SS Donau, aboard which Jews were deported to Germany from Oslo in 1942.
Source: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/media_ph.php?ModuleId=10005460&MediaId=2187

About nine hundred Jews avoided deportation by escaping to Sweden.  Some Norwegians, such as social activist Sigrid Helliesen Lund, were secretly tipped off by government officials about the impending deportations beforehand and worked to help Jews evade arrest.  As scholar Per Ole Johansen notes, “Sigrid Helliesen Lund received early warnings from the Norwegian police on 25 October and 26 November 1942 and was able to alert probably more than 100 Norwegian Jews in Oslo.  J.F. Mykleburst, a policeman in Oslo, realized that the actions toward the Jews were a prelude to dreadful crimes. He accordingly warned Jews, as did colleagues throughout the country. ‘I just want you to know that we have orders from Oslo to arrest you,’ whispered Police Sergeant Anders Grut to Robert Savosnisk.”  The map below illustrates the paths used to escape to Sweden, as well as the route of the deportation ships from Oslo.

From the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/media_nm.php?ModuleId=10005460&MediaId=2178

The state-sponsored Lutheran church, along with other denominations, denounced the arrests.  In a letter of protest to Vidkun Quisling, church leaders declared that “according to God’s Word all people in principle have the same human worth and thereby the same human rights” and demanded, “Stop the persecution of Jews and stop the racial hatred that is being spread throughout our land!” (quoted in Hassing).


In the end, more than seven hundred Norwegian Jews were deported and killed in concentration camps.


Today in Oslo, a sculpture consisting of eight iron chairs in a field memorializes the deportations.

Photo from Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, University of Minnesota: http://www.chgs.umn.edu/museum/memorials/oslo/

Historians continue to work on uncovering the final solution in Norway.  Last year, a group of Norwegian scholars published a book entitled Jakten Etter Jødene På Agder: Fortellinger om de Sørlandske Holocaust, (which translates as The Hunt for Jews in Agder: Stories of the Southern Holocaust), which explores the arrests and deportations of Jews in southern Norway during the war.

Vidkun Quisling's wartime home now houses the Center for Holocaust Studies and Religious Minorities.
Photo from BBC: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/5282326.stm

Vidkun Quisling's wartime mansion in Oslo is now the home of the Center for Studies of Holocaust and Religious Minorities, which seeks to tell the story of the final solution in Norway and which also works to promote understanding and tolerance between cultures.




Sources:


Dawley, Alan.  Struggles for Justice: Social Responsibility and the Liberal State.  Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991.


Friedlander, Henry.  "Registering the Handicapped in Nazi Germany: A Case Study," Jewish History 11 (Fall 1997): 89-98.


Friedlander, Henry.  "Step by Step: The Expansion of Murder, 1939-1941." German Studies Review 17 (October 1994), 495-507.


Grant, Madison.  The Passing of the Great Race: Or, the Racial Basis of European History. 4th edition (originally published 1916) London: G. Bell and Sons, 1921.


Hassing, Arne.  “The Churches of Norway and the Jews, 1933-1943,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 26 (Summer 1989): 496-522.


HL-Senteret, Center for Studies of Holocaust and Religious Minorities: http://www.hlsenteret.no/Mapper/ENG/page/background.html


Johansen, Per Ole.  “Norway,” in The Holocaust Encyclopedia, edited by Walter Laqueur et. al., New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001.


Spiro, Jonathan Peter.  Defending the Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, and the Legacy of Madison Grant.  Burlington: University of Vermont Press, 2009.


Topography of Terror: Gestapo, SS and Reich Security Main Office on Wilhelm- and Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse.  A Documentation.  Berlin: Stiftung Topographie des Terrors, 2010.


United States Holocaust Memorial Museum entry for Norway: http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005460, accessed 20 May 2011.


Wannsee Protocol, January 20, 1942, in the Avalon Project of the Lillian Goldman Law Library at Yale Law School: http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/wannsee.asp