The Nazi occupation of Norway is one of the internationally lesser-known episodes of the second World War, despite it giving rise to one of the most enduring pieces of vernacular from the conflict. Vidkun Quisling, the leader of the far-right Nasjonal Samling (or National Unity) party and would-be native leader of Nazi Norway, lent his sonorously fitting name to a term for a craven traitor to one’s own country.
Robert Ferguson, in this invaluably comprehensive history of the five-year occupation, tells us the London Times had already converted Quisling’s name into a neologism just a week into his first abortive attempt to wrest power after the German invasion in April 1940. (Though he did manage to become the figurehead of the local administration, Quisling’s lack of popularity, even among his fellow fascists, meant Hitler’s Reichskomissar, Josef Terboven, wielded the real power in the country.)
But Quisling is only one of the remarkable stories of the occupation, which, as Ferguson, a British-born Norwegian translator and biographer of both Knut Hamsun and Henrik Ibsen, says, turned into a low-scale civil war within the greater war. The Nazis got their local lackeys to do the more inflammatory dirty work, which many Norwegian members of the Hird, the Nasjonal Samling’s paramilitary wing, willingly did, often with exceptional sadism. Norwegians, directed by their government in exile in England, resisted as best they could, and some of the key Resistance figures, such as the Christian activist Ingrid Bjerkås, the double agent and police prosecutor Gunnar Waaler, and the career criminal Johannes “Yellow Cheese” Andersen, who struck up an unlikely friendship with the exiled King Haakon VII, are worthy of book-length narratives on their own.
Perhaps the most notable thing about Ferguson’s masterly account is how a society that was probably more like a contemporary European liberal democracy than any other country the Nazis occupied (it was well to the left of most countries in Europe at the time) descended into darkness and yet resisted admirably, the Norwegians showing little interest in all the nonsensical Völkish Aryan trappings the Nazis, Heinrich Himmler in particular, were determined to dress them up in. Norway’s War is thoroughly recommended for anyone wishing to learn more about one of the more under-explored areas of the second World War.
