Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Norway at War
Norway chose a bad time to begin asserting its independence. The clouds of war were
gathering in Europe and by the early 1930s fascism had begun to spread throughout the
continent. Unlike during WWI, Norway found itself caught up in the violent convulsions
sweeping across Europe and in 1933 the former Norwegian defence minister Vidkun Quis-
ling formed a Norwegian fascist party, the
Nasjonal Samling
. The Germans invaded Nor-
way on 9 April 1940, prompting King Haakon and the royal family to flee into exile, while
British, French, Polish and Norwegian forces fought a desperate rearguard action.
Six southern towns were burnt out and despite some Allied gains the British, who were
out on a limb, abandoned Arctic Norway to its fate. In Oslo, the Germans established a
puppet government under Vidkun Quisling, whose name thereafter entered the lexicon as a
byword for those collaborators who betray their country.
Having spent centuries fighting for a country to call their own, the Norwegians didn't
take lightly to German occupation. In particular, the Norwegian Resistance network distin-
guished itself in sabotaging German designs, often through the assistance of daring Shet-
land fishermen who smuggled arms across the sea to western Norway. Among the most
memorable acts of defiance was the famous commando assault of February 1943 on the
heavy water plant at Vemork, which was involved in the German development of an atom-
ic bomb.
The Germans exacted bitter revenge on the local populace and among the civilian casu-
alties were 630 Norwegian Jews who were sent to central European concentration camps.
Serbian and Russian prisoners of war were coerced into slave labour on construction pro-
jects in Norway, and many perished from the cold and an inadequate diet. The high num-
ber of worker fatalities during the construction of the Arctic Highway through the Saltfjel-
let inspired its nickname, the
blodveien
(blood road).
Finnmark suffered particularly heavy destruction and casualties during the war. In
Altafjorden and elsewhere, the Germans constructed submarine bases, which were used to
attack convoys headed for Murmansk and Arkhangelsk in Russia, so as to disrupt the sup-
ply of armaments to the Russians.
In early 1945, with the Germans facing an escalating two-front war and seeking to delay
the Russian advance into Finnmark, the German forces adopted a scorched-earth policy
that devastated northern Norway, burning fields, forests, towns and villages. Shortly after
