Norway in the Second World War

The German invasion of Norway was supposed to have been accomplished in a matter of days. Unfortunately, German military command didn't take into account the headstrong, stubborn nature of Norwegians when they encounter something that rubs them the wrong way. Unlike the Danes, who had shied away from a fight, and the Swedes, who had happily wrapped themselves in the protective cloak of 'neutrality', the Norwegians were not about to let someone take their independence away from them yet again. They'd had too much of that already. This time they would go down fighting. Thus, the three day plan of invasion stretched into a three-month struggle to invade a surprisingly resistant nation.

Unfortunately, the Norwegians could only hold out for so long. When they could no longer hold back the superior German forces, the government was evacuated to London, where it would form a government-in-exile. Crown Prince Olaf offered to stay behind and act as a hostage on behalf of his people, but the people themselves refused to allow this. They sent him packing off to London along with the rest of the royal family. The Norwegian people themselves would hold down the fort for as long as it took to regain their freedom.

The young men of fighting age took to the woods, where they formed resistance groups. Those who wanted to leave the country made their way to the west coast, and escaped to the U.K. from there. Most of the young men who made that journey ended up joining special Norwegian resistance units that operated under the auspices of the British army.

Life was hard for the young men of the Norwegian resistance. Out in the wilderness, they had no access to normal comforts. The RAF tried to help them out by organizing supply drops, however these were often ill-coordinated. On one occasion, a drop landed flat on the roof of a building located on the property of a local Nasjional Samling representative. Other drops landed where there was no one to collect them.

No matter how proud and stubborn a nation, there are always people who collaborate with the enemy. One night, a young man who'd been roughing it in the woods for weeks on end decided he wanted to spend the night - just one night - at home with his wife. When he showed up on his own doorstep, his wife refused to let him in. Her gut instincts told her it was a bad idea. The young man pleaded with his wife to let him stay, just for that night, but she adamantly refused. Feeling utterly dejected, the young man returned to the woods.

That same night, the local authorities surrounded the house. They'd been tipped off that the young man would be there, and had come to arrest him. Had it not been for his wife's refusal to let him stay, he would have been taken, and most likely executed. Thanks to her cool head, the young man survived that night. In fact, he made it through the entire war, emerging from the woods at the end of it, to finally rejoin his wife and build a family. Decades later, his grandson would pass the story of his grandmother's amazing foresight to an interested listener, who was looking for such stories to add to her collection.

As also often happens in war-zones, Norwegian women sometimes fell for members of the occupying forces. They married them, or they had affairs with them, and children were born from some of these affairs. After the war, the women who had fraternized with 'the enemy' were spat upon and ostracized, if not worse. The children of these unions were not spared, either. Anni-Frid (Frida) Lyngstad, of the pop band ABBA, was the child of one such union. Her mother, a Norwegian, became involved with a soldier from the German Wehrmacht. When the Germans retreated, the young sergeant was evacuated along with his unit, never to be heard from again. Fearing for the safety of young Frida, and the possibility that the child might be forcibly separated from its mother by the post-war authorities, Frida's maternal grandmother took the girl to safety in Sweden. Eventually, Frida's mother would cross the border and join them.

When the Germans were finally defeated in Scandinavia, it was by the Russians, not the US, as is often claimed. As the Russians forced the Germans back southwards, the Germans decided to implement a scorched earth policy. They burned everything down behind them. There were fears of what would happen when the retreat finally hit the more densely populated areas in the south. Thankfully, German policy changed before those population areas were reached, and the horror of major cities being burned to the ground, along with the resources of the nation, never came to pass.

It was only now, when Germans were already defeated and evacuating, that the US army jumped in behind the Russians, and claimed the liberation of Norway as its own. It wasn't, and the Norwegians knew it. In honor of their Russian liberators, Norwegian families began bestowing Russian names upon their sons and daughters. This is how, decades afterwards, Anja is still a common name for girls in Norway.

image: pixabay ... by the way, she looks a lot like Odette, but that is a different story....