How heroes outwitted collaborators in Nazi-occupied Norway - The Jewish Chronicle

When Germany invaded Norway in April 1940, the Jewish population was less than 2,000 people out of a total of nearly three million. This did not spare the Jews from being quickly targeted by the Nazi-supporting puppet government led by the infamous Vidkun Quisling, whose name was to become synonymous worldwide with the basest form of treason.

They were ordered to hand in their radios and register with the authorities, their identity cards stamped with “J”.

Many Jews saw the writing on the wall and escaped to neighbouring neutral Sweden or by sea to Britain

As Robert Ferguson explains in his meticulously documented history of Norway under Nazi occupation and its people’s courageous resistance, many Jews saw the writing on the wall and escaped to neighbouring neutral Sweden or by sea to Britain.

But the 1,536 who obediently registered stayed on in the hope that things wouldn’t get any worse, and for a couple of years that appeared to be the case.

In March 1942 Quisling’s administration started to tighten the screws by reinstating a paragraph of the constitution of 1814 prohibiting Jews from entering Norway, which had been rescinded in 1851. As Ferguson, a British author long resident in Norway, writes: “At a stroke the paragraph made the mere presence of Jews in Norway a criminal offence.”

The last nail in the coffin came in October 1942 with a failed attempt by resistance members to get a group of Jews out of Norway by train to Sweden that ended with a border policeman being shot dead. That provided the excuse to start rounding up all male Jews over the age of 15, swiftly followed by women, children, the sick and elderly. Nearly half of Norway’s Jews were deported by sea to Poland and Auschwitz.

But since the Nazis had occupied their country, many brave Norwegians had joined the resistance and two groups formed to try to rescue as many of the remaining Jews as possible and help them to flee the country. One group was known as Carl Fredriksens Transport, a name alluding to the exiled King Haakon VII, now in London, whose refusal to accept German rule had denied Quisling’s government authenticity in the eyes of the free world.

This group was led by Alf Petterson, a transport manager who used his fleet of lorries to drive hundreds of Jews to near the Swedish border where other resistance members took over to help them cross the frontier.

The operation lasted only six weeks before it was betrayed (Petterson and his wife managed to escape to Sweden too) but it achieved miracles.

A second group contained a high number of brave women, including Myrtle Wright, a Quaker from Cambridge who found herself trapped in Norway for four years after the invasion. This group hid more Jews, including many children, before managing to spirit them to Sweden.

Wright’s diary of her experiences is an invaluable record of the group’s work: she concealed it under the floor of a hencoop before it was moved to the Tibetan section of the National Library, which proved to be the ideal hiding place.

Another account of those terrible times came from Kai Feinberg, a young Jewish man arrested in Oslo in October 1942 and deported to Auschwitz where he was separated from his mother, sister and Austrian foster brother who were taken straight to the gas chambers.

Feinberg somehow survived and returned to Norway in late 1945 after an extraordinary odyssey. His memoir was published in 1995.

In 1999 the Norwegian parliament voted to pay the Jewish community restitution of 340 million kroner ($58 million at the time), part of which went to the conversion of a mansion into a Centre for Studies of the Holocaust and Religious Minorities.

The villa had been the home of Quisling, who was executed in 1945 after Norway’s liberation.

Norway’s War: A People’s Struggle Against Nazi Tyranny, 1940-45

By Robert Ferguson

Head of Zeus

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