Comments expresses the views of the writer.
During the war, thousands of Norwegians volunteered for the Gestapo or the Norwegian State Police to make suggestions on compatriots who had opposed the Norwegian occupying power or the board of the Norwegian NS in various ways.
Many were designated for active resistance work and a discreet tip to the secret police could trigger arrest and severe torture, which was often followed by further arrests. Finally, death sentences followed.
Deceived
The informants were often quite ordinary people, who for one reason or another believed that in this way they should serve the Nazi assailants. Some operated on a permanent basis and even received payment for their pig series.
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In the face of their surroundings, they often behaved like loyal resistance fighters, and in this way they managed to infiltrate the various groups – where they received information about who the leaders were and a whole host of other things that could be fatal in German hands .
As groups were torn apart, those responsible tortured and executed or sent to concentration camps, came calls for the traitors to be stopped by tangible means.
The marriage
A safe with many of the home front’s deepest secrets has been for decades – well guarded – at Norway’s home front museum in Oslo. Longtime filmmaker Arnfinn Moland was also careful not to glean information from there, when he was conducting research on the liquidations that took place from 1942 to 1945.
But when Eirik Veum requested access, he gave a thumbs up. In addition to the significant information from the “marriage”, the author also traced relevant information to, among others, the National Archives.
Grotesque details and descriptions of how over 80 Norwegians – including six women plus five Germans – had to play with their lives make for depressing reading.
Veum suffers many liquidations and clearly shows that many were beaten to death, strangled or shot for reasons that in peacetime would not be sufficient for a court to find guilty.
But at the time, it was the Home Front leadership – preferably with the approval of the Norwegian government in London – that made the decisions.
However, the material Veum uncovered shows that it was not uncommon for liquidations to be made where clearance was only granted later – and not always at a higher level than local or regional management.
War Heroes Against Id
The liquidation debate swept the country for at least two rounds in the 1990s. Arnfinn Moland demonstrated so many concrete errors in Egil Ulateig’s original book on the subject, that the publisher has chosen to withdraw it. Even a corrected edition was discontinued.
Veum does not hide that he uses Moland’s book as a starting point for his work and claims that Moland has indeed actively participated in the new investigation.
During the huge debates, Gunnar Sønsteby and several other war heroes also joined the conversation, and shot bitterly both at those who tried to spread the stories about what happened – and also wanted to reveal the names of those who committed murder in the name of the resistance movement.
They unanimously explained that those who killed at the time had been placed under a lifelong obligation of secrecy and that they also deserved anonymity for this form of resistance work.
Among the comrades of the resistance groups, those carrying out the liquidations were called “rat catchers”.
Fuel
Eirik Veum makes no secret of the fact that this is still a flammable topic across the country. When he called small Norwegian towns to check information on people whose names he found in the archives, he was often met with a wall of silence.
The descendants of the liquidated still have little desire to have new rounds of denunciation of the family’s misfortune. And even the grandchildren of the killer don’t want this to become an issue.
Asbjorn Svarstad
Asbjørn Svarstad started writing in the local newspaper Dagningen and was associated with VG for some years. Since 1987, he stringer of Dagbladet in Copenhagen. Since 1996 he has lived permanently in Berlin where he has worked for various Scandinavian media. He mainly works with historical articles, political commentary and is a licensed guide in Sachsenhausen.
The author has also received several reactions to descriptions of how some silencers were killed. The killings were supposed to take place in such a way that those around them would not be aware of what was happening, so that later it would be possible to escape without being seen.
The “silent killing” often occurred with a knife or pistol fitted with a silencer, if the victims were not simply strangled or beaten to death with an empty beer bottle.
Buried in rubble
If there were conditions for the bodies to disappear permanently, they were, for example, buried in a pile of stones or thrown into the sea.
Even after the war ended, it was difficult for those left behind to find out anything concrete about what had happened, let alone where the mortal remains had gone. If individual cases were brought forward for inquiries or investigations, they ended as well as ever with closure and dismissal.
With Eirik Veum’s obvious source hunting, it is also documented that the old Nazis waged a campaign of lies about the liquidations in all the years after the war. The aim was to demonstrate that the liquidations are contrary to international law.
Read more comments by Asbjørn Svarstad
But also the former NS and their “Folk og Land” made claims about the methods of murder that cast both the perpetrators and the resistance movement in a negative light.
With Veum’s book we know, for example, that the liquidated Raymond Colberg was by no means abused and castrated, before the body was dismembered, placed in a sack and thrown into the Oslofjord – as was repeatedly described by the Nazi magazine in over the years.
Colberg, on the other hand, was among other things responsible for the formation of a resistance group in Sandefjord and the subsequent execution of several members. Former smuggler Johannes Sigfred “Gulosten” Andersen shot the man twice in the head before the body was dumped in Akerselva.
The traffic boss and the royal heir
The affair had its grotesque aftermath, when the wife of “Gulosten”, convicted of a couple of petty thefts, ended up at Grini. There she was able to admit to her fellow prisoners that she had helped liquidate Colberg.
The result was that the other three accomplices – apart from “Gulosten”, who was in England – were identified, convicted – and all four executed.
Eirik Veum also found new information on the much-talked-about liquidation of Knut Knutsen Fiane (49). He was a NS enthusiast who was “traffic director” at the Telegraph Agency and thus the person in charge of all telephone traffic in the municipality of Oslo.
In 1943, the Home Front had received information that it was collaborating with the Gestapo – and there was great nervousness that Fiane might reveal how people from the resistance movement were actually able to intercept most of the traffic between, for example, the German and Norwegian police.
Those listening to the conversations could also quickly identify potential informants who turned to the Gestapo or the State Police to provide information. Therefore, it would be a disaster if this pattern were revealed.
Difficult task
In retrospect, it has often been stated – among others in Folk og Land – that his work had nothing to do with him being hacked down by several blows, when Knut Knutsen Fiane passed the tram stop at Majorstuveien 18 la morning of September 21, 1944.
Rumor has it that the shooter took the time to secure a file folder that Fiane was carrying. It is said to have contained piquant information that he – as a member of the ‘1943 Investigative Commission’ – had been in Copenhagen the day before and retrieved from normally closed archives.
These are the commentators of Nettavisen
A report by two German coroners is said to have concluded that Queen Maud – who died in 1938 – never fathered any children. Not she, but one of the queen’s sisters, was the carnal mother of Crown Prince Olav. The heir to the throne was therefore – according to the logic of the National Socialist people – absolutely not entitled to inherit the throne of Norway.
Eirik Veum points out that it must have been an arduous task to take the lives of defenseless people – and in such a way that the person in question has no chance to defend himself. He describes the details of such a bloody enterprise and has no doubt that the memories must have robbed many of them of their night’s sleep.
Current debate
But, as the author points out to this commentator, there have been wars and troubled times. In peacetime, it can be hard to imagine such brutal methods being used. The alternative, however, was to allow life-threatening informers to continue their deadly activities and cost the lives of several good Norwegians.
With the war in Ukraine in the background, the liquidation debate is sure to resurface. Almost daily we read of pro-Russian traitors who brutally lose their lives.
When the car with a local official flies into the air, it is not characterized nowadays as a “liquidation” – although we prefer to use this same term for similar events in our recent history.
Read more from the Norwegian debate
All are dead
And those who liquidated? Eirik Veum identifies the perpetrators in cases where he was able to disclose the names.
A couple of them had eight liquidations on their conscience. Most were killed in a shootout with the Germans or captured and executed.
Few of the survivors made military careers, but slipped into civilian life. Some of them have done well in business. But others have been haunted by the memories and/or have succumbed to various forms of abuse.
No one received awards for conducting liquidations.
– Now they are all dead, observes Eirik Veum.
