AT 4.30 ON THE MORNING OF 9 APRIL 1940, A FOURTEEN-year-old boy named Odd Hansen was woken at his home in Gylte, Halangspollen, two kilometres north of Drøbak, by an unearthly roaring. The sound seemed to come from the direction of the Oslo fjord. He sat up in bed. His younger sister Rigmor was still asleep beside him. In the dimness on the far side of the room he saw that his mother’s bed was empty. Odd slid out of bed and was about to put on his socks when the house was shaken by a huge crash that seemed to come from the kitchen, on the other side of the bedroom wall. Rigmor opened her eyes and screamed. Odd ran to the door and opened it. A stinking ball of gas rolled towards him. The kitchen window had been blown out. He ran barefoot across the shards of broken glass to where his mother’s body lay, almost cut in two at the waist by shrapnel.
Their father was away working nights at a tanker facility on the fjord, halfway between Drøbak and Oslo. Though he knew at once she was dead Odd still tried to lift his mother. Moments later, wearing just their nightclothes, the children were running through the night, heading for a house further up the road where an uncle lived. It was cold. Late snow lay thick and wet on the ground. Their uncle listened in silence to what the children told him. He then sent them back to the house with instructions to put on their warmest clothes and then make their way down to the boats as quickly as possible. Within a matter of minutes, the inhabitants of that tiny settlement were seated in four small boats and rowing northwards up the Oslo fjord.
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For a period of about two years, from 1987 to 1989, my wife and I lived in Maurbakken, a white wooden mansion on the sloping banks of the Oslo fjord at Drøbak that had been built to his own design in 1904 by Knut Hamsun. It was a rich man’s house, but the royalties that paid for it came not from Norway, where Hamsun was still regarded as an obscure and modern writer, but from the sales of his books in Germany, where Hunger, Mysteries and Pan had quickly been recognized as the work of a great writer.
Hamsun’s people were poor, his formal education no more than 252 days at the local travelling school. Certain of his own talent, at the age of nineteen he composed a self-consciously florid letter to Erasmus Zahl, the local squire, or matador, as such men were called in Nordland, in which he asked Zahl to back him in his dream of becoming a writer. Zahl summoned him to Kjerringøy for a personal interview and was sufficiently impressed with the youth’s strangely intense self-belief to give him enough money to live on for several months while he wrote his novel, and to travel to Copenhagen to get it published, where it would, according to the plan, make his name and earn him enough money to pay Zahl back.
The dream failed. Among many other things, Hunger, written ten years later, is Hamsun’s bleakly ironic account of what that failure felt like. But his dream of the style in which a rich man lives survived the rude disappointments recorded in Hunger, and this Drøbak mansion, with its chandeliers and its six pillars set into the walls of the main living room was a recreation of what he had seen during that brief visit to Zahl’s house up in remote Kjerringøy a quarter of a century earlier.
As things turned out, the house marked the end and not the beginning of his dream. In 1898 he had married Bergljot Bech, a wealthy upper-class divorcée, and in 1902 the couple had a daughter, Victoria. But already Hamsun had fallen out of love with Bergljot, and these three lived as a family in Maurbakken for no more than a few months before Hamsun left and moved into an apartment in Kristiania, as Oslo was still called at the time. His pencil drawings for the layout of the house, and notes on the intended uses for each room, survive in the Manuscript Collection of the National Library in Oslo. From these, which I photocopied, I saw that during the years in which my wife and I lived in Maurbakken, we slept in the same bedroom as the one in which Hamsun had slept. A connecting door – gone since his time – gave access to an adjoining bedroom which was marked ‘Bergljot’. And yet I never dreamt of him, nor even met his ghost, which is a shame, because I would have liked to have talked to him.
During our time in Drøbak, in the late 1980s, a peaceful little car ferry traversed the fjord to Hurumlandet at half-hourly intervals, until it was replaced, some years ago, by a dull tunnel. Seen through the window of our front room, the sight of this little black-and-white ferry slanting across the water filled me with an inexplicable pleasure. Often, if I could think of nothing better to do, or was satisfied that I had done enough work for the day, or had given up all hope of doing any work, I would walk down narrow, twisting Vestbyveien to the ferry terminal at the foot of the hill and take the ten-minute ride across the water to Hurumlandet. There was nothing to do on the other side, only drink a cup of coffee and eat a waffle with a slice of brown goat’s cheese in the almost invariably deserted terminal café. Often, seated by the window and looking back across the water at Drøbak from this unusual and distant angle, I would drift into a reverie, wondering who to thank for my fate so far, for my wife, my house, my home, for the simple fact of being alive in Norway, until it was time to go back.
Sometimes on those crossings, if the waters of the Oslo fjord were calm and the sunlight striking at the right angle, the ferry would pass through a region of oil patches in fantastic and ragged forms, like outlined countries on the map of a water world. Along with a few straggling lines of air bubbles, these patches of oil are all the visible remains of the Blücher, a German cruiser that was sunk by gunfire from the island fortress of Oscarsborg in the early hours of the morning of 9 April 1940 as it made its way up the fjord towards Oslo. On board were some 2,400 men, sailors and troops charged with the military subjugation of the capital as the first stage in the German occupation of Norway. Besides the Blücher, ‘Angriffsgruppe 5’ consisted of a second heavy cruiser (the Lützow), a light cruiser (the Emden), three torpedo boats (the Möwe, the Albatross and the Kondor), eight minesweepers and two supply ships for the minesweepers. Finished and launched in 1939, the Blücher displaced 12,200 tonnes, was 193 metres (633 feet) long and equipped with 40 cannons and 12 torpedo ramps. She was one of the most modern warships in the world, with her own calculating machine for its artillery and torpedo handlers, a forerunner of the modern computer.
The blacked-out flotilla, sailing without flags, had been observed entering the Oslo fjord through a misty drizzle at 23:15 the evening before by the captain of a coastal patrol boat, who radioed the information ahead to his colleagues further up the fjord. By the time the ships reached the narrow sound at Drøbak, the three cannons on the Oscarsborg fortress were all manned, as were the artillery and torpedo batteries on the eastern arm of the fjord, just past the town. At this point most of the Norwegians were convinced that these were ships that had been damaged in a sea battle and were simply taking refuge in the Oslo fjord. But as the flotilla penetrated ever further in the direction of Oslo this conviction wavered. The commander of the torpedo batteries at the northerly end of the island had been ordered to load his torpedo ramps with the detonators in place. He recalled having to pinch himself in the arm to make sure he wasn’t dreaming, then called the fortress commander, Birger Eriksen, to ask whether he should actually use the torpedoes once the ships were in sight. ‘Yes,’ Eriksen told him, ‘once they pass the fortress security line, you fire.’ At this point, as Eriksen noted later, none of them knew the identity of the intruders.
And when the Blücher did cross the line, the first shell fired from one of the three Oscarsborg cannons struck the command tower on the port side, toppling the state-of-the-art gun-control tower into the water and leaving the Blücher incapable of returning directed fire. The ship’s tower was hit by a second shell that took out its electrical system and destroyed the hangar and planes. Out of control, the blazing vessel drifted by the islands, guns blazing in all directions, lighting up the early morning mist with what one Norwegian gunner later likened to a horizontal snowstorm of glowing projectiles. By the light of this eerie blizzard, those on the island and those watching from the windows of their houses in Drøbak could see men on deck, and hear the terrible cries of the wounded and dying, surreally counterpointed by voices singing ‘Deutschland über alles’. Two torpedoes completed the damage, and two hours and one minute after the first shell was fired the Blücher’s propellers and stern reared sharply into the air, were held suspended for a few seconds, then slipped down beneath the water. Almost to the last, a solitary man could be seen by those watching from the town, standing with his arm outstretched in a Nazi salute as the great ship slid away.
The Blücher sinks in the Oslo fjord, Drøbak, on 9 April 1940. Wikimedia Commons.
Something like a thousand German invaders were killed by gunfire, burned to death or drowned on that first day of the war in Norway. Three Norwegians lost their lives. In addition to Marie Hansen from Gylte, a sixteen-year-old maid working at Reenskaug’s Hotel at the foot of Vestbyveien was hit as she ran up into the trees behind the hotel, and a man died in a fall from some steps in Akershusveien. A gunner in Oscarsborg sustained minor injuries.
The action had enduring consequences for Norwegian self-regard, but heroic as it was, it also had crucial consequences for the progress of the war in Norway and the nature of the German occupation. The thirty-hour delay in reaching Oslo enabled the Norwegian royal family and the government, under Prime Minister Johan Nygaardsvold, to leave the capital and start a hide-and-seek journey northwards, keeping always just a step ahead of the advancing German forces, stopping first at Hamar and then at Elverum, some 60 miles (96 km) north-east of Oslo. A motorcade carrying the nation’s gold reserves also left the capital that morning on the first leg of a long and hazardous journey that ended with the reserves being shipped intact to safety in the United States.
Like Denmark and Sweden, Norway had declared itself neutral on the outbreak of war in 1939, and although the government issued the order for a general mobilization there was little that could be done at such short notice to stem the German advance. Resistance was more sustained and effective in the north of the country, where a partial mobilization had been in force since early 1940 as a consequence of the outbreak of the Finnish–Russian War, and where, with the help of hastily assembled, but inadequate, British naval forces and French and Polish soldiers, the German advance was at least hindered at Narvik. Early in June, however, these forces had to be recalled to fight in France, and on 7 June the royal family and government gave up the unequal fight and sailed for England. By a resolution passed on 9 April 1940, they would remain, for the duration of the war, the legally constituted government of Norway.
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In the racial theories that underpinned the Nazi ideology formulated by geneticists like Alfred Rosenberg, Scandinavians were categorized as Homo Europaeus, popularly called ‘Aryans’. Within this highest racial category, the Danes, Swedes and Norwegians were regarded as the übergermanere, the purest of the Aryan peoples, with the inhabitants of remote and inaccessible Norway the purest of them all. But from the moment of the sinking of the Blücher and the escape of the king and cabinet onwards, there was never any question of a ‘model occupation’ of Norway. Possession of Norway was crucial to the German war effort. German munitions factories were reliant on the supply of iron ore from Kiruna and Malmberget in Sweden, and they needed to able to protect the ore as it was shipped down the west coast of Norway from the port of Narvik on its way to Germany. Narvik was an isolated northern town with no rail links to the rest of Norway; but it possessed a line that ran cross-country eastwards into Sweden, an arrangement that made it relatively easy to secure the transport of the ore on its way to Narvik. Control of the Norwegian coastline also gave the German armed forces a base for the submarine fleets operating in the North Atlantic and airbases that would be involved in the Battle of Britain, while the occupation of Norway and Denmark jointly gave them control over access to the Baltic, isolating Sweden and, for the first three years of the war at least, enabling Germany consistently to spin Swedish neutrality in their favour.
On the afternoon of the first day of the occupation, Vidkun Quisling, leader of Nasjonal Samling (NS: National Unity), the Norwegian Nazi Party he had started in 1933, went into the studios of Norwegian State Broadcasting at Marienlyst in Oslo and announced the formation of a new government, with himself as its head. It was Quisling’s infamous response to the German invasion that led to his name being, for several decades, a synonym for ‘traitor’. The bleak neologism appeared for the first time in an editorial in The Times on the morning of 19 April 1940: ‘We should all be profoundly grateful to Major Quisling,’ it began. ‘He has added a new word to the English language.’ The writer went on to give his reasoning in detail:
To journalists and other writers, weary of racking their brains or raking the well-thumbed pages of Roget in search of alternatives, the word Quisling is a gift from the gods. If they had been ordered to invent a new word for ‘traitor’ and given carte blanche with the alphabet, they would hardly have hit upon a more brilliant combination of letters. Aurally, it contrives to suggest something at once slippery and tortuous. Visually, it has the supreme merit of beginning with a ‘Q’, which (with one august exception) had long seemed to the British mind to be a crooked, uncertain and slightly disreputable letter, suggestive of the questionable, the querulous, the quavering, of quaking quagmires and quivering quicksands, of quibbles and quarrels, of queasiness, quackery, qualms and Quilp. Quisling, then, so be it. We welcome the word as sincerely as we detest the qualities which it connotes.
The day after the invasion, Quisling rescinded the order for a general mobilization issued by the Nygaardsvold government. Five days later, the Germans established an administrative council to run the country’s affairs and Quisling resigned. In the autumn of 1940, Josef Terboven, the Nazi Reichskommissar for Norway, dissolved the council and appointed individual ministers to run the country’s internal affairs. All political activity and all parties except Quisling’s Nasjonal Samling were banned.
With the keen participation of Quisling, the Nazis then set about establishing a new order for Norway. When NS interfered with the activities of the courts by trying to control the makeup of the benches, members of the Norwegian Supreme Court resigned en masse in December 1940, to be replaced by other judges willing to dispense the laws introduced by the new regime. All wireless sets were confiscated in August 1941. Strikes were outlawed, incurring severe penalties: on 8 September 1941, deliveries of milk to a number of work-places in Oslo were not made, and the following day some 25,000 workers in the Oslo region went on strike; two of the union leaders held responsible for the strike, Viggo Hansteen and Rolf Wickström, were arrested, tried and executed before the sun went down on 10 September. Appointees from NS were put in charge of both the Union of Employers, and the Landsorganisasjonen, the Norwegian Trades Union Congress.
German soldiers marching on Karl Johans gate, Oslo after the invasion of Norway on 9 April 1940. The palace is in the background, the old university to the right in the picture. Universal History Archive/UIG/Getty Images.
Early in 1942 Vidkun Quisling returned to power as Norway’s Minister-President, answerable to Terboven, who despised him. He established a Teachers Union which would work to bring about the new order. Membership was compulsory. A local version of the Hitler Youth was established and Norwegian schoolchildren obliged to enrol. The teachers protested, and in March 1300 were arrested and over 600 deported to Kirkenes, on the Russian border in the far north. In the same spirit of protest Norwegian priests resigned from their posts and were likewise deported from the capital. After a campaign of sabotage and acts of direct military confrontation carried out by resistance fighters from Company Linge, a unit named after its early leader Martin Linge, which had been specially trained in Britain, Terboven declared a state of emergency in Trondheim in October. Ten leading citizens – who had nothing to do with the resistance – were executed as a warning, and death sentences on twenty-four partisans carried out. During the months of October and November members of Norway’s pitifully small community of Jews were arrested and deported. One ship – the Donau – and one trip were all that was required. Five hundred and forty Jews were taken to Stettin, thence by train to Auschwitz. Only nine of them survived the war. Following a series of student arrests at the University of Oslo in 1943 protestors started a fire in the Aula. The Germans closed the university and arrested twelve hundred students and thirty teachers. Some three hundred of the most active were deported on the Donau to the camp at Sennheim for instruction in civic responsibilities from SS officers. Another large group were sent to Buchenwald where they received a similar education.
Norwegian children celebrating the liberation of the country, 8 May 1945.
With signs of a German defeat becoming ever clearer from the middle of 1943 onwards, the brutality of the German occupiers and their Norwegian puppets increased. When Karl Marthinsen, the Norwegian head of state security and a prime mover behind the deportation of Norway’s Jews, was assassinated in his car on 8 February 1945 in an Oslo suburb by members of Milorg, the resistance movement, twenty-nine Norwegians were shot in revenge.
The Norwegians had a hard war. Oslo was the last occupied capital in Europe to be liberated. On 8 May the Germans formally surrendered and Milorg assumed temporary control of the country until members of the government in exile returned on 13 May. King Håkon himself delayed his return until 7 June, choosing the date on which Norway had declared itself independent of Sweden forty years earlier.
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In Denmark the constitutional position and nature of the subsequent occupation was different. Alone among the Scandinavian countries, Denmark had signed a non-aggression pact with Germany, in May 1939, and on the basis of that had reduced the size of the Danish Army from 36,000 to 14,000 by the time of the invasion. Sharing a border with Germany on the Jutland peninsula, the Danes did not enjoy the same geographical advantages in self-defence as did Norway, and in order to avoid senseless loss of life the Danish government surrendered after a few hours of scant resistance, in which just sixteen Danes were killed.
In a vividly prophetic display of Newspeak the Germans then announced they would be respecting Danish neutrality, observing a policy of non-interference in Denmark’s internal affairs and allowing the king to remain in office. After a period of initial manoeuvrings and resignations a coalition of the four main Danish political parties took office in July 1940 and continued to run the country’s domestic affairs for the next three and a half years. The Danes’ reward for their peaceful acceptance of the occupation was to be allowed to continue as a constitutional democracy, albeit with a number of crucial restrictions. Some, such as the closing of the embassies of the Allied powers in Copenhagen and an embargo on trade relations with Britain and its Allies, created difficulties that became ever more burdensome as the war progressed. Other moves, like the outlawing of the Danish Communist Party in November 1941 which legitimized a mass arrest of party members, chimed with Danish national sentiment and were accepted without much protest.
In other crucial areas, however, Danish sympathies remained resolutely unsynchronized with the ideals of German Nazism. Of the 200 Danish ships at sea when the invasion took place, over three-quarters defied instructions from home to sail to ports outside the zone of conflict and instead headed for ports under Allied control. The overwhelming majority of Danish seamen put their services at the disposal of countries with which Germany was at war.
The government rejected all attempts by the Germans to secure representation in the Cabinet for Nazis, as it did any attempt to introduce the kind of anti-Semitic measures that were a central part of Nazi ideology. Sephardic Jews had been living in parts of Holstein since 1622 and, despite intermittent discrimination, they had been increasingly accepted as part of the native population, with all remaining discriminations removed by the constitution of 1849. Abraham Pais the biographer of Niels Bohr, describes an episode in the autumn of 1942 that shows just how foreign the notion of Jews as aliens was to the average Dane. Reacting to rumours that Bohr was among the favourites to be the new Rector of the University of Copenhagen, a Nazi-run Danish newspaper ran an article opposing his appointment, complaining that Bohr was a Jew, that the age of the Jew was over, and asking was it not possible to find a Dane to occupy the post? But, ‘If Bohr is not Danish then who is?’ asked another newspaper, ridiculing the presumption behind the italicization. As Pais points out, such a reaction would have been unthinkable in any other Nazi-occupied country.
German indulgence of Denmark’s democratic traditions allowed a remarkably free General Election to take place in March 1943. All save communist parties were allowed to participate; but unease at the general level of accommodation offered to the occupiers was growing and it reached a turning-point in the autumn of that year. German military setbacks had started to cast doubt on the once widely held assumption that German victory in the war was inevitable, and as this doubt increased so did Danish resistance to the occupiers. Acts of sabotage proliferated, from ten in 1940 to more than a hundred in 1942, and to over a thousand in 1943. The occupiers demanded a ban on strikes and the execution of convicted saboteurs. When parliament declined, the Germans imposed a state of martial law on 29 August 1943, occupied military installations and interned Danish officers. The Danish government resigned, and the Germans, under Werner Best, assumed direct control of the internal affairs of the country.
These increased tensions turned out to be an immediate prelude to an attempt to deport the Danish Jews. So far they had enjoyed the same benefits of the ‘model occupation’ as any other Danes. Uniquely among Jews in occupied territories, they had been allowed to continue in their jobs; their civil rights were guaranteed under Danish law; and they remained free to conduct religious services. The eerie comfort of all this changed on 28 September with the issuing of an order that all Jews in Denmark were to be rounded up for deportation. The procedure was due to start three days later, on 1 October, at 9 o’clock in the evening.
On the day the order arrived, however, one of Best’s closest associates, a German shipping attaché named Georg Ferdinand Duckwitz, took it upon himself to pass the date and time on to two leading Danish politicians, who in turn ensured that as many as possible of the country’s 7,500-strong Jewish community were alerted to the danger. Two German freighters had arrived in Copenhagen on 29 September to transport the Jews to concentration camps, but by the time the round-up started on the evening of 1 October, only 284 were taken into detention. The rest had already fled their homes and taken up offers of help from ordinary Danes, going into hiding in private houses, churches and hospitals. Many were surprised to be approached by strangers in the streets offering them the keys to their apartments or their country cottages. The final number deported to the camp at Theresienstadt, in Bohemia, was only 474. What remained for the 7,000 who had gone into hiding was evacuation over the water to safety in Sweden, a drama that involved members of the Danish resistance, dozens of small fishing vessels, and the connivance of the German port commander in Copenhagen, who kept his fleet of patrol vessels resolutely in dock at a time when traffic across the sound to Sweden was at its most intense, on the pretext that his ships were unseaworthy and in need of repair.
Gestures of civil disobedience, combined with a growing realization on the part of the native population that Germany was not, after all, going to win the war meant that over the remaining eighteen months of the occupation of Denmark the last vestiges of its relatively civilized nature rapidly disappeared. Tensions between the German military and the Danish police increased. Through the early part of 1944, Nazis murdered a number of critical voices whose sudden and violent silencing was supposed to have a salutary function. The victims included Kaj Munk, a priest also famous as the leading Danish dramatist of his generation, taken from his vicarage home in Vedersø on the night of 4 January 1944 and, after a cursory hearing, shot by Danish Nazis of the so-called Schalburg Corps, who dumped his body in a roadside ditch 6 miles (10 km) away. Two days later, a doctor and local politician named Willy Vigholt was shot in his own consulting room in Slagelse. For each killing attributed to the resistance, another of these so-called ‘clearing murders’ would be the response. The Germans insisted that newspapers carry reports of the two incidents on adjacent pages so that the connection would be unmistakeable to readers. More than a hundred revenge murders were carried out in this way. The Germans presently turned to a more terrifying form of revenge killing, in which a pedestrian or cyclist might be shot at random in the street.
This campaign to subdue a growing and active hostility to the occupation led to one of the most well-remembered episodes in Danish war history. At 5.30 on the morning of 26 May 1944, the Gestapo knocked on the door of a house in Gråsten that was the home of Colonel Svend Paludan-Müller. Paludan-Müller was head of the Danish gendarmerie, whose duty it was to patrol the Danish–German border on the east of the Jutland peninsula, and a man whose distaste for the compromises of the occupation had led to his involvement in plans for an active military engagement against the Germans. His early-morning visitors announced that they wanted to speak to him. He replied that in that case they must return at 10 o’clock and the interview might be conducted during normal office hours. When the colonel persisted in his refusal to open his door, the Germans blew it open and entered the house. Paludan-Müller immediately shot dead the first military policeman. The Germans withdrew to gather at a safe distance and the colonel barricaded the door. What happened then is extraordinarily reminiscent of the last hours of Gunnar of Hlíðarendi, the great and noble friend of Njal in Njal’s Saga, trapped by enemies in his own house and fighting on against overwhelming odds to the very end.
While the Germans discussed how to deal with the situation, the gendarme made it clear to his wife that he would not allow himself to be taken alive. He led her and their daughter Ragny and a housemaid down to the safety of the cellar and awaited developments. Once the Germans had taken up their positions around the small house, and with heavier artillery already on its way from Åbenrå, the local priest was given permission to try to persuade the beleaguered man to surrender. He arranged for safe passage from the house for the three women, but Paludan-Müller could not be persuaded to surrender. The priest, a man named Holst, later described the cool and fatalistic resolution with which Paludan-Müller rejected his arguments and accepted the inevitability of his death, kneeling calmly as he asked Holst to bless him in God’s name.
At the head of the cellar stairs he took his leave of his wife and daughter, kissing them both and saying ‘Goodbye, and God be with you.’ It was then simply a matter of time. Two hours, as it turned out, during which he held out against fifty men armed with fire-bombs, hand grenades and machine-guns. By 8.30am the house was aflame and Paludan-Müller was dead, along with five German soldiers. It was late afternoon before his body was recovered from the ashes. Afraid that a local funeral might give rise to disturbances, the Germans refused to allow the ceremony to take place in Southern Jutland, and Paludan-Müller was buried in the parish church in Snesere, his childhood home. Estimates put the number of mourners in attendance at 2,500, all of them present in direct contravention of an official proclamation that the burial was illegal and prohibited.
In mid-September 1944, some 300 of a total force of 337 of Paludan-Müller’s gendarmes were arrested. Most were sent to Neuengamme, an extermination-through-labour camp housing thousands, on the outskirts of Hamburg. Survivors described how the camps shower-rooms also doubled as gas-chambers, although ‘only’ Soviet prisoners-of-war were murdered in this way. Executions by hanging had to be carried out by the prisoners themselves, a second man hanging the first, the third the second, the fourth the third, and so on. As part of the same purge, 2,000 regular Danish policemen were arrested and sent to Buchenwald.
Despite the protests in the Danish press, Bohr did not get the job as Rector of the University of Copenhagen. Instead, he was one of the 7,000 Danish Jews who had been so effectively warned of the impending round-up. By the time it took place, Bohr, along with most of the other Jewish refugees, was in Stockholm. He and his wife Margrethe had been among a party who had gathered clandestinely at a small garden-cabin in a Copenhagen suburb, which they left late at night, at times instructed to crawl on all fours on their way to the beach, to the embarrassment of Bohr who felt all this might be a little over the top.
On the beach they were picked up by a small fishing-boat that took them out into the Öresund, where they transferred to a trawler that docked in the Swedish harbour of Limhamn in the early hours of the morning. Later that day Bohr was taken by train to Stockholm, Margrethe staying behind to await other family members who were travelling in a separate group. Bohr – being the immensely delicate and valuable package of intelligence that he was – was informed that the British wanted him delivered at once. A de Havilland Mosquito, an unarmed and very fast type of bomber converted to carry passengers, stood ready to fly him over from Stockholm’s Bromma airport. A number of delays ensued, however, and it was 5 October 1943 before the plane finally took off.
During the Nuremberg Trials after the war it emerged that the Nazis had originally planned to arrest Bohr and take him to Germany shortly after the declaration of martial law on 29 August but had decided instead to disguise his arrest as part of the next month’s general detention of all Danish Jews. Bohr’s biographer, Abraham Pais, provides several cheerfully surreal anecdotes of this dark and dangerous period of Bohr’s life. In one, Captain Gyth, who took it upon himself to be Bohr’s personal bodyguard at the private house where he was staying on the night before he was due to fly to Scotland, is sitting up in Bohr’s Stockholm room in the early hours when he hears soft sounds approaching; he pulls out his host’s old service revolver in one hand, picks up a heavy candlestick in the other, and tenses himself. The soft steps approach the door. The letter-box opens and a morning newspaper drops onto the carpet. Captain Gyth peers out the window a few moments later and sees the old newspaper lady shuffling away in her felt mustn’t-wake-people-up outdoor slippers.
During the flight itself, later that day, the Mosquito climbed as it flew over occupied Denmark, and Bohr was told through the intercom to turn on his oxygen. As there was no response from the bomb bay at the back where Bohr was lying, the pilot saw no alternative but to descend to near sea-level for the remainder of the flight. When they landed in Scotland early on the morning of 6 October, Bohr announced that he had slept most of the way and was feeling fine. It emerged later that he had been talking the entire time he was being given his safety briefing at Bromma and, having failed to grasp the importance of what the pilot was telling him, had lapsed into unconsciousness from lack of oxygen soon after take-off.
Another former pupil of Bohr’s, the physicist George Gamow, recalled how Bohr liked to relax after a day’s work at the physics institute by going to a Western. The plots of these always seemed so complicated to him that he had to take one or two students along to explain things for him. After one such evening at the cinema, a discussion ensued on the relative advantages of being the good guy and the bad guy in a shootout. Bohr’s view was that the edge lay with the good guy: he knows he can never shoot first, and this puts all the pressure of deciding when to draw on the bad guy. All the hero has to do is wait to see his opponent’s hand move, and a conditioned reflex will ensure that his own hand moves faster. The students disagreed, and to settle the matter Gamow visited a toyshop the following morning and bought two toy guns. In a series of shootouts that followed, Bohr, as the good guy, emerged victorious every time.
One can’t help wondering whether Bohr ever recalled that afternoon of harmless fun once he reached England and realized just how far advanced the Allies were in their preparations for making an atomic bomb; and whether in due course he ever felt that the pre-emptive use of it on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 invalidated his theory or not. As things turned out, Bohr took little active part in the work on the bomb project, although the presence of such a towering genius among the younger physicists of the British Tube Alloys nuclear weapons development team and the Americans in Los Alamos, New Mexico, where the bomb was being designed and built, must have been inspiring.
His real value to them lay in his knowledge of how far the Germans, whom they knew to be working on a similar bomb, had got in their efforts. To this end, Bohr’s account of his wartime meeting with Werner Heisenberg, head of the German research team, became of crucial importance. Heisenberg had arrived in Copenhagen in the autumn of 1941 to attend a conference organized by the occupying power at the German Institute in Copenhagen. Danish physicists from Bohr’s own Institute of Theoretical Physics boycotted it, obliging Heisenberg to pay a visit to the Danish institute himself in order to see Bohr, an old friend and colleague whom he greatly liked and admired. Bohr gave his account of the meeting, and based on what Heisenberg told him presumably also offered an assessment of how far the Germans had got. He would also have told the Allies what he knew of German efforts to increase the supply of heavy water being made at the Norsk Hydro plant in Rjukan, Telemark, in central Norway, following a number of sabotage actions by British and Norwegian commando units. Although his informant told him that the treated water was for ‘industrial purposes only’, Bohr had by this time learned to distrust such assertions. The Allies would have made particular note of Bohr’s report that Heisenberg told him he had been working ‘exclusively’ for the previous two years on the problem of the release of atomic energy, and of Heisenberg’s conviction that if the Germans, against all expectations, failed to win the war by conventional military means and it turned into a long-drawn-out affair, then its outcome would probably be settled by the use of an atom bomb.
One of the central witnesses used by the Austrian writer Robert Jungk in his 1958 Brighter Than a Thousand Suns, the first published account of the Manhattan Project and the German atomic bomb projects, was Werner Heisenberg. Bohr read Jungk’s book in its Danish translation a couple of years later and took issue with most of what Heisenberg told Jungk. ‘I have a completely different perception of what took place during the visit from the one that you express in your contribution to Jungk’s book,’ he wrote in response. Bohr was upset on two counts. One was professional. In the book Heisenberg recalled the silence with which Bohr greeted the news of the project he was working on, and implied that it expressed Bohr’s scientific doubt that the thing was in fact possible at all. Not so, objected Bohr. His silence was the silence of horror.
The other count was personal. Reading Jungk he became aware that Heisenberg had allowed the years to corrupt his memory of what was actually said during their conversation to present his role in a more favourable historical light. He objected particularly to Heisenberg’s claim to have hinted strongly to Bohr that his German team were discreetly working to hinder the successful outcome of the fateful research. Bohr countered that he could recall the ‘quite extraordinary impression’ Heisenberg’s visit had made, and that he ‘carefully noted every word uttered in our conversation, during which I, constantly spied upon as we were by German Police, was obliged to maintain an extreme reserve’. Under the circumstances he could not recall Heisenberg having made any reference, veiled or otherwise, to attempts to sabotage the German atom bomb project. All of these revelations are contained in a series of eleven draft letters released to the public by the Bohr Archive in 2002. None were ever sent. Bohr, a fabulously decent man, seems to have decided to let a sleeping dog lie.
*
The Swedish declaration of neutrality was the only one respected by the Nazis, marking a further extension of the position adopted by Sweden at the conclusion of the Napoleonic wars. In view of this historical association it seems paradoxical that one of Sweden’s most notable sons over the hundred-and-thirty-year period was Alfred Nobel, a man who made an unearthly fortune as the inventor of dynamite. Nobel’s life contrasts in many ways with that of Niels Bohr. Bohr was a happily married man and father to six children. He was open, spontaneous, warm and vague. In his youth, he kept goal for Copenhagen’s Akademisk Boldklub. Nobel’s health was always poor and he never married. In 1876, at the age of forty-three, he met Bertha Kinsky, a writer and peace activist and fell in love with her. He asked if ‘her heart is free’. It was not, and to prove it she married a young baron, Arthur von Suttner, in the summer of the same year. That same autumn Nobel began a long and resigned career as sugar daddy to Sofie Hess, a shop assistant twenty-three years his junior. A teetotaller and non-smoker, and a man who, according to one Swedish biographer, was never heard to laugh, Nobel once described his existence as a ‘pathetic half-life’. He was terrified of being buried alive. The last paragraph of his will contained instructions that his veins be opened after his death, ‘and when this has been done and competent Doctors have confirmed clear signs of death, my remains shall be cremated in a so-called crematorium’.
Nobel’s will included a bequest to Sofie Hess; but the document was most notable for dedicating his huge fortune to the setting up of the Nobel Prizes. With particular reference to the most celebrated of them all, the Peace Prize, many found it hard over the years to divorce the philanthropic gesture from the notion that it was dictated by a guilty conscience over a lifetime spent and a fortune amassed in the pursuit of ever more efficient means of waging war and destroying human life on the grand scale. Bohr’s contemporary Albert Einstein was in no doubt about the relationship between Nobel’s bequest and his work: ‘He invented an explosive that was stronger than any known before – an exceedingly efficient means of destruction. In order to calm his conscience he created his Nobel Prizes.’ In his ‘Speech to the Swedish Nation’ in 1910, August Strindberg referred to the prize money as something morally tainted: ‘Nobel money – some call it dynamite money.’ Ludwig Wittgenstein, looking for somewhere remote in which to explore the mysteries of logic in peace, found the perfect site in Norway on a promontory overlooking Lake Eidsvatnet in Skjolden. He had a house built there to his specifications, and probably to the great annoyance and inconvenience of the local builders insisted they use gunpowder only in blasting the foundations, citing as his reason a moral disapproval of Nobel’s invention and of the vast amounts of money being made from it.
Nobel himself was well aware there were moral aspects to his innovations. Indeed they fascinated him. His assistant, Ragnar Sohlmann, recalled a conversation with him: ‘Once, when we were discussing experiments with explosive armour-breaking hand grenades that would succeed in penetrating plate and exploding behind it, he said: “Well, you know, we are actually dealing with rather demonic devices. But as problems, they are so interesting, purely as technical problems – financial or commercial considerations aside – and for that reason alone worth pursuing.”’ And to Bertha Kinsky, now Bertha von Suttner and in 1905 the first female recipient of a Peace Prize, Nobel once volunteered: ‘I should like to be able to create a substance or a machine with such a horrific capacity for mass annihilation that wars would become impossible forever.’
It seems almost as though the atom bomb, which owed so much to Niels Bohr’s discoveries, was the creation Nobel had been dreaming of. For Bohr saw it in the same light, as an opportunity to make war history. The Soviet Union was aware of the goal of the Manhattan Project. Determined not to be left behind, the Soviets joined in the macabre courtship of Bohr’s mind in hopes of winning it for themselves. In April 1944, several months after arriving in Britain, he received a long-delayed letter inviting him to come to the Soviet Union. Bohr gave a non-committal response, but the invitation confirmed his sense that the invention of the atomic bomb, or ‘atomic bum’ as his Danish pronunciation always rendered it, had changed the world forever. As Nobel had done, Bohr felt instinctively that a ‘balance of terror’ was the best guarantee of world peace. To this end, he suggested during a meeting with Winston Churchill, in May 1944, that a mutual openness with the Soviets was the best policy, a view Churchill found so alien that in a letter to a third party he wrote that Bohr ‘ought to be confined or at any rate made to see that he is very near the edge of mortal crimes’. Bohr then proposed the same idea to President Roosevelt, who could only suggest that Bohr go back to England to try to win British approval.
The upshot of this bizarre ping-pong was that, at a meeting between Churchill and Roosevelt at the latter’s Hyde Park residence, New York, in September 1944, they decided to keep the project secret. An informal note added to the record of their conversation advised that ‘enquiries should be made regarding the activities of Professor Bohr and steps taken to ensure that he is responsible for no leakage of information, particularly to the Russians’. In June 1950, with the Korean War looming, Bohr addressed an open letter to the United Nations: ‘The development of technology has now reached a stage where the facilities for communication have provided the means for making all mankind a co-operating unit,’ he told them:
And where at the same time fatal consequences to civilization may ensue unless international divergences are considered as issues to be settled by consultation based on free access to all relevant information. The very fact that knowledge is in itself the basis for civilization points directly to openness as the way to overcome the present crisis. Whatever judicial and administrative international authorities may eventually have to be created in order to stabilize world affairs, it must be realized that full mutual openness, only, can effectively promote confidence and guarantee common security.
Bohr’s natural optimism is still a beautiful thing. Once, when a friend asked why he had a pair of deer’s antlers mounted above the door to his study, he replied that it was for good luck. Teased about this, he admitted he didn’t believe in such things, but added, with a wondering smile, that apparently they worked even if you didn’t believe in them.
*
Almost inevitably, the membership of Norway’s Nasjonal Samling had rocketed after the occupation of the country. There was hardly anything sinister in this – if anything, it shows how fundamentally indifferent most people are to political ideologies – for membership of the party gave better access to sugar, butter, clothing, leather shoes and the numerous other everyday commodities that were in short supply.
Knut Hamsun, Norway’s pride and joy, in the opinion of Isaac Bashevis Singer the literary genius from whose coat all twentieth- century writing in the Western world was cut, was a lifelong lover of Germany as well as a committed Anglophobe who had been among the 5 per cent or so of Norwegians who supported the Germans during the First World War. To the great disappointment of his fellow-countrymen Hamsun saw no reason to change sides when the second war came along. The Germans were delighted to have him on board again, and in the course of the war invited him to Germany, where he met, among others, Josef Goebbels, a genuine lover of his novels, and Adolf Hitler, who seems to have been not much interested in them but glad of someone marginally more respectable as literary sympathizer than Louis-Ferdinand Céline and Ezra Pound to confound the Allies’ propaganda machine. The Norwegians, shuffling about the streets of Oslo in their homemade fish-skin shoes, joked about it. Have you heard the news? they said. The Nazis are splitting Hamsun’s authorship into two. The Germans are getting The Growth of the Soil and we’re getting Hunger.
Membership of the NS had been criminalized by the government-in-exile, and with the legislation considered retrospective, more than 90,000 cases were tried after the war. So extreme was the loathing of Quisling and his team of collaborating politicians, civil servants and judges that the government feared lynch-mobs would take over if it didn’t bring back the death penalty, and for the first time since 1876 judicial killings took place in Norway. Reidar Haaland and Arne Braa Saatvedt, Norwegian torturers who had worked with the Gestapo, were the first to go, executed before the winter of 1945 had set in. Vidkun Quisling, sitting in his cell in Møllergata 19 after his trial and awaiting execution, spent his last hours trying to give shape to a manuscript expounding his customized mongrel philosophy, Universismen. A gifted mathematician in his youth, Quisling overstretched himself now with the announcement that he was the first person able to provide mathematical proof of the existence of God. In some ways a pitiful figure in his catastrophic foolishness, he was shot by firing squad at 2.40 on the morning of 24 October 1945, a sheet of A4 paper pinned to his chest to help the soldiers focus their aim. His last request, not to wear a blindfold, had been rejected.
In all thirty men received the death sentence. Four were pardoned, one died in jail. The last judicial killing was that of Ragnar Skancke, Quisling’s Minister for Educational and Religious Affairs, shot by firing squad in August 1948. After that, the mood of rage faded. Men who had been given life sentences found themselves free again by the early 1950s. People wanted to get on with enjoying and rebuilding their lives. The Norwegians had been an independent people for only thirty-five years before independence was so rudely taken away from them. One striking effect of the five years of German occupation was to reinforce Norwegian nationalism, a rare cocktail of passionate patriotism, pride, openness and decency that today expresses itself in the joyful and decidedly non-military celebrations of National Day, on 17 May, when the entire country seems suddenly awash with processions of small children waving flags.
The Danes too, having managed to keep a substantial hold on their democratic and institutional structures for so much of the war, could allow themselves to feel after liberation that they had at least not dishonoured those lines of the poet H.P. Holst that had been adopted almost as a national motto after Denmark’s defeat in the war of 1864 and the loss of Slesvig-Holsten to Prussia, hvad udad tabes, det maa indad vindes,* the idea that that something lost without must be restored within, a powerfully effective mantra for national self-improvement. But in Denmark, too, a degenerate hardening of the occupying forces and those who had chosen the ‘wrong’ side as they began to sense their own defeat after the reversals at Stalingrad in 1943 ensured a bitter reckoning once the war came to an end. Forty thousand were arrested on suspicion of collaboration, of whom about one-third received some form of punishment, in most cases a prison sentence of under four years. As in Norway, the dormant death sentence was revived and seventy-eight collaborators were sentenced to death. Forty-six sentences were carried out, the remainder commuted to terms of imprisonment.
One of the very few directly political statements in Quisling’s Universismen is an expression of military regret that the Nazis had not completed the occupation of Scandinavia and overrun Sweden as well. It’s hard to see what the advantages might have been. With Norway and Denmark occupied, Germany victorious in France and Great Britain, the Swedes, under siege, were effectively isolated. Needing food, fuel and raw materials, they were in no position to prevent the Germans defining the terms of their neutrality, and for the first three years of the war that is exactly what the Germans did. A Transit Agreement signed in July 1940 allowed German soldiers – described as medical staff – to use the Swedish rail network to move men and supplies in and out of Norway to Baltic ports; it was a flagrant breach of neutrality. In 1941, the Swedes were pressured into allowing troop divisions from Norway to pass through Sweden on their way to take part in the war in Finland. Consignments of iron ore from Kiruna and Malmberget passed across the top of the Scandinavian peninsula on their way to Narvik as Sweden promised to maintain supplies at pre-war levels, and did so for three years.
As elsewhere, Stalingrad marked the watershed. The Transit Agreement was revoked by Sweden in August 1943, and when Quisling and Hitler’s other willing helpers began the arrest and deportation of Scandinavian Jews in October Sweden gave refuge to some 5,000 who made the dangerous border crossing to safety. As the balance swung ever further away from Germany, pressure from Britain and the United States began to spin Swedish neutrality their way. Deliveries to Germany of ball-bearings and other important commodities were reduced, and in the final months of the war all trade with Germany came to a standstill.
Elsewhere in occupied Europe, during the final few weeks of the war, desperate SS officers were trying to cover up the evidence of the Nazi camps and what had taken place in them. At Ravensbrück, 50 miles (80 km) north of Berlin, 6,000 women were gassed, and many more lives would have been lost had it not been for a very particular Swedish effort, the famous fleet of ‘White Buses’, so-called because they were painted white to distinguish them from military vehicles. These set out from Sweden on 15 March and began their tour of German concentration camps, picking up Danish and Norwegian inmates and delivering them to safety in Sweden. French, Polish and Dutch were also among the rescued. As dangerous as it undoubtedly was, the operation was only possible with the co-operation of the Germans.
On a similar errand, and under considerably more hazardous circumstances, Raoul Wallenberg, one of the great humanitarian heroes of modern Sweden, is credited with saving the lives of 120,000 Hungarian Jews in Budapest. He arrived in the city for the specific purpose of doing so in June 1944, issuing some Jews with specially designed Swedish passports and persuading the SS general in charge to spare the lives of others with the threat that the man would be held personally responsible for any final massacre of Jews in the city’s ghetto and tried as a war criminal.
The mystery of Wallenberg’s disappearance early in 1945 has only increased his legend. Leaving Budapest on 17 January with a Red Army escort, on his way to meet members of the Hungarian provisional government, he vanished and was not heard from again. It seems that he was arrested almost immediately on leaving Budapest and accused by the Soviets of being an American spy. A document released by the Soviet authorities on 6 February 1957, but dated 17 July 1947, asserts that he died of heart failure in the KGB’s Lubianka prison in Moscow a short time previously. Other sources suggest that he was executed, by poisoning say some, shot by firing squad according to others.
*
The three very different ways in which each Scandinavian country experienced the war had repercussions once it came to an end. Sweden was inclined to turn inward and urged Denmark and Norway to join it in a defensive union of the Nordic countries. The Danes and Norwegians, with first-hand experience of how little declarations of neutrality might mean, preferred to entrust themselves to the strong arms of NATO. Sweden’s partiality to Nazi Germany during the early phase of the war – the iron ore transports, troop movements and fraternizations particularly – had been a bitter disappointment to many. In wartime exile, Norway’s Prime Minister Nygaardsvold had written a furious letter from London to his attaché in Stockholm instructing him to convey his anger to the Swedish prime minister: ‘Greet him from me. Tell him there are two things I want: one is to see the Germans driven out of Norway; two, that I live long enough to let him and his entire government know exactly what I think of them.’ ‘There is nothing,’ Nygaardsvold went on, ‘nothing, nothing, nothing I hate with such passion and such abandon as Sweden.’ To this day, some Norwegians believe that Sweden’s role as a humanitarian superpower is driven by guilt over the country’s conduct during the war, and for every refugee that arrives in Sweden the Swedes cross one more name from the list of German soldiers who had crossed the border between Norway and Sweden between 1940 and 1944.
*
Back in 2006, my wife and I drove along the coast to see a rare screening of Viktor Sjøstrøm’s 1916 silent film of Ibsen’s Terje Vigen at Fjæreheia, the vast open-air quarry theatre just outside Grimstad. ‘Enslaved’, one of the world’s top death-metal bands, had been commissioned to create a soundtrack for the film. The performance began at 11 o’clock. It was a warm windy August night. As the film crackled into life on the huge screen, the four young men, posing dramatically in front of it in their ankle-length black leather coats, waist-length hair lifting in the breeze against the darkening sky, set up a dense wall of sound and kept it up for the duration. Their ‘Goth’ aesthetic of pale skin and dark make-up reflected eerily the heavy white facial make-up and black eye shading used by the actors in the film to compensate for the failings of the primitive cine-cameras.
Sjøstrøm, who as well as directing the film also played the part of Terje, was Ingmar Bergman’s great idol and inspiration. Decades later, when Sjøstrøm was seventy-eight years old, Bergman wrote the part of Dr Borg in Smulltronstället (Wild Strawberries) for him. Sitting there in that slightly surreal setting, watching Ibsen’s tale of the sufferings of the Norwegian people during the Napoleonic Wars, the craggy walls of the theatre flickeringly lit by the action on the screen as the guitar riffs swirled around them, I found myself thinking about the place’s history, how this quarry was the result of Albert Speer’s plan to use its stone to build an enormous stadium on the site of the old Zeppelin dock in Nuremberg, with seating for 400,000 people: a suitable venue for every future Olympic Games that would be held there, once the Pan-Germanic Empire was established. During the war, huge quantities of Fjæreheia stone were piled up on the docks at Grimstad, ready for shipment to Germany and Nuremberg. And with the failure of the new order there they stayed, moss grown and studded with pale lichen, a massive and useless monument to this absurd and cruel dream. Although not quite useless, I reflected: the hole they made had become the theatre I was sitting in.
* For the meaning of this phrase, see the discussion on page 123.