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Stalin's Secret Wars in Norway
by Eric Lee
Copyright 1996 by Eric Lee
CONTENTS:
Germany Invades /
The NKP Collaborates /
The NKP Paralyzed /
Resistance Begins
A Two-Front War /
Stalin Liberates Finnmark /
History and the Memory Hole
Appendix: Norwegian Communist Electoral Performance /
Bibliography
What most people remember about
the Soviet role in the Second World War is the heroism of Stalingrad
and the Red Army's victorious march on Berlin. And as for the
Communists of Nazi-occupied Europe, they are usually remembered as
resistance fighters of the first rank. But when we examine closely the
war as it was fought in Norway, a different picture emerges -- a
picture of Joseph Stalin's secret wars.
To understand Stalin's Norwegian policies, one must begin by
remembering that the Soviet Union's strategic assets included not only
its own armed forces, diplomats and intelligence services, but also the
support of local agents around the world in the national sections of
the Communist International (Comintern). The Norwegian section of the
Comintern, the Norwegian Communist Party (NKP), was one of several
tools at the disposal of the Kremlin during the wars of 1939-45.
Our story properly begins on August 23, 1939 when Hitler and Stalin
stunned the world with the announcement of their non-aggression pact.
On the left, and even among many Communists, this was seen as a
betrayal of the struggle against Nazism; thousands abandoned the
Communist parties.
But in Norway, the small and declining NKP hailed the pact as a
masterpiece of Soviet diplomacy. Most Norwegians were appalled at the
Berlin-Moscow axis, and the NKP's slavish adherence to the Comintern
line did little to boost its fortunes.
The constant changes in the Party line had already reduced the NKP from
a peak of 14,000 members to perhaps one-tenth that number. They had
also permanently embittered the much larger social democratic Norwegian
Labor Party (DNA), which was one day be denounced as "social fascists"
and the next day embraced as "class brothers" by the Communists.
The immediate result of the signing of the Hitler-Stalin pact was the
beginning of the Second World War in Europe, with Hitler's invasion of
Poland -- and Stalin's attack on Finland. The Norwegians were
sympathetic to the Finns, who were also a Nordic people. Though Finland
came out of its bloody civil war in the early 1920s with a right-wing
government in power, by 1939, the Finnish Social Democrats were already
part of the ruling coalition. The DNA, in power since 1935, was
therefore doubly sympathetic to the embattled Finns.
But the Norwegian Stalinists, following Comintern instructions, cheered
on the Soviet invaders, thereby isolating themselves even further from
public opinion. In the Party's main daily newspaper, Arbeideren [The
Worker], they wrote that "while Mannerheim Finland collapses, the
Norwegian people want to live in peace." The NKP not only campaigned
against the British, who were blamed for the outbreak of the world war,
but also against plans for a military alliance between the Scandinavian
countries.
Meanwhile, on October 3, 1939, barely a month after the invasion of
Poland, the German Naval War Staff (Seekriegsleitung) recommended the
investigation of the possibility of joint German-Soviet pressure on
Norway to obtain much-needed naval bases facing the North Atlantic. A
week later, Admiral Raeder brought this proposal to Hitler's personal
attention. Six months before the actual German invasion of Norway, it
was already being visualized by some in Berlin as a joint venture which
would certainly have Moscow's backing.
The German invasion of Norway and Denmark began on
April 9, 1940. Though Denmark surrendered immediately, the Norwegians
mounted a resistance of sorts, fighting and retreating north for
several weeks. During this period, the Soviets played no overt role in
the fighting but three days after the invasion, their Norwegian agents,
the NKP, issued an appeal to the workers blaming Great Britain for the
"imperialist war" and calling for the end to hostilities. One historian
has categorized the NKP approach in the first days of the occupation as
"benevolent neutrality, even collaboration." Meanwhile the departure of
most DNA leaders from Oslo to unoccupied parts of the country (where
they were the first to call for armed resistance to the invaders)
created a vacuum which the Communists attempted to fill.
The Comintern line at this time was clear, and all
Stalinist parties everywhere adhered to it: the war between Germany and
the western allies was, like the first world war, a war over colonial
booty and one in which working people had no interest. The war was
caused by the British, not by the Axis powers. The social democrats
were lackeys of the imperialists and must be excised from the working
class organizations. Peace with Germany served the interests of the
working people.
All this would change the moment the Germans invaded
Russia, but that would not happen for the first two years of the
fighting. Communists who did not feel comfortable with this position
had little say in the matter; many left the parties.
Meanwhile, the Norwegian armed resistance had begun.
A day after the NKP called for a cessation of hostilities, the first
great act of sabotage (though it lacked any military significance) took
place: the bombing of Lysaker Bridge linking Oslo to its airport in
Fornebu. The Communist daily Arbeideren responded by warning against
"all forms of sabotage and acts of destruction."
The Norwegian King Haakon VII and his Labor
government, fleeing before advancing German troops, refused to cave in
to Nazi demands. In Oslo, only the Communists and the followers of
Vidkun Quisling (the former Defense Minister and leader of the local
Nazi party, the NS), called for a capitulation to the invaders.
In the confusion of the early days of the fighting,
there were some cases of Communists getting their signals crossed. A
week after the invasion, in the still-unoccupied town of Troms, the
local NKP published an article entitled "Communists are Norwegians!"
calling for support to the government and army. But this would soon be
corrected. As the Germans established control over the country, the
NKP, which remained legal and active, took up a clear anti-war
position, spearheaded by Arbeideren, whose editor was Henry W.
Kristiansen, the NKP general secretary.
On May 15, the NKP leadership once again called for
peace -- and added an appeal for increased trade with Germany.
Recognizing that a New Order was emerging in Europe, with Germany at
its center, the Norwegian Stalinists were making the case that it was
in the best interests of the workers to stay at their jobs, to cease
fighting, and to link Norway's economic fortunes to those of greater
Germany.
While Arbeideren was preaching this line, the Nazis
were issuing orders to Norway's small Jewish community to turn over its
membership lists. Jews were also ordered to surrender their radio sets
to the authorities. But this had no effect on the Communists; they were
not very interested in the anti-Semitic persecutions which began only
days after the German invasion.
After two months of sporadic fighting, and following
the allied decision to pull troops out of the country, Norway's King
and its Labor government fled by ship to England, where they continued
the war effort. Following the withdrawal of allied troops to fight on
the more important French front, Norway capitulated on June 10. The
reaction of the Stalinists was, amazingly, to denounce the King and his
government-in-exile for having "left Norway in the lurch." By June 20,
the NKP was demanding the formation of a new government which would
make peace with Germany.
Meanwhile, resistance groups were forming. In the
summer of 1940 the first underground newspapers began to appear. The
Communists did not have to publish underground papers; their organs
were legal and continued to appear daily. In 1940, under German
occupation, the NKP continued to publish newspapers in Oslo, Bergen,
Odda, Nordland and Finnmark.
The Stalinists allied themselves with those,
spearheaded by Quisling, who were demanding that the King abdicate. By
the end of June, under intense German pressure, the Praesidium of the
Norwegian Parliament (the Storting) issued just such a call -- which
the King instantly rejected.
In August 1940, the first detentions of Norwegian
Jews took place. And in England, the Norwegian Independent Company No.
1 (the famous "Linge Company") was formed. Repression and resistance
were growing at the same time.
That month, a conference of the Left parties was held
in Oslo, in which the NKP representatives participated. They rejected
the proposal to end party agitation in the interests of national unity
until the end of the war. Instead, the Communists called for a
conciliatory approach toward the German authorities.
But their friendliness toward the Nazi invaders was
not reciprocated. In August 16, 1940 the NKP was the first of the
Norwegian political parties to be outlawed by the authorities. Their
newspaper Arbeideren was finally suppressed. Leaders of the Party were
arrested -- though they were promptly released. The Germans soon banned
all political parties except for Quisling's NS. There is some reason to
believe that the Communists suffered because, though completely loyal
to the German-Soviet alliance, they had run articles attacking the
local Norwegian Nazis.
Curiously, the Danish Communists did not suffer the
same fate. They were left at peace by the Nazi occupiers until after
the actual invasion of the Soviet Union, finally being banned only in
August 1941.
The Norwegian Communists were compelled to go
underground, a possibility they had long considered but were hardly
prepared for. They engaged in frantic activity in their efforts to
create an illegal party; meanwhile the social democratic DNA, harrassed
by the Germans from the very first day of the invasion, had already
established a functioning illegal apparatus.
From August 1940 until June 1941, now illegal but
unable for political reasons to engage in resistance to the Nazis, the
Communists were largely inactive and confused. Six months after the
German invasion, a curious picture began to emerge of developments
within the NKP.
On the one hand, the Party, though formally
illegal, continued to cooperate with the occupation regime, especially
in its bid to take over the powerful Norwegian trade union federation
(LO). The Communists teamed up with Quisling in what has been called
"an aggressive, loud-voiced faction" known as the Trade Union
Opposition. According to one report, "individuals belonging to this
faction had close links with the Gestapo and the Reichskommissariat,
which could use them to keep track of the trade union leaders." One
Communist became the personal secretary to the new head of the LO trade
union federation, who overnight joined the NKP himself. He chose a
Communist to serve as his press secretary. A biographer of Quisling
attributed trade union restraint in the first year of Nazi rule "to the
power of the Communist Party in the unions."
On the other hand, veteran Communist leader Peder
Furubotn, who had returned to Bergen after a long stay in the USSR,
wrote a letter in the fall of 1941 to Arbeideren editor Kristiansen in
Oslo, criticizing the party line. He called for an end to collaboration
with the Germans, rejected the Oslo leadership and its decisions, and
criticized both German and British imperialism. In July 1940, Bergen's
Communists had participated in a conference of western Norwegians which
did call for resistance to the Nazis.
Some historians have interpreted this to mean that
Furubotn and the Bergen Communists were already involved in the
resistance, and were therefore acting independently of Stalin and the
Comintern, but others claim that this was never the case. Furubotn was
a most loyal Stalinist, having lived for years in the USSR. The whole
issue of Furubotn's conduct came up again years later, after the war,
when in the anti-Tito campaign of Stalin's twilight years, leading
Communists throughout Europe were purged for "nationalist deviations".
In other words, Furubotn would eventually be accused by Stalin of
having been excessively anti-Nazi.
If there were Communists anywhere in Norway who
were active in the resistance before June 1941, they could be found in
the northernmost provinces of the country. We have already mentioned
the reaction of the Party members in Troms ("Communists are
Norwegians!"). The fact is that these provinces, thanks to Soviet
success in the winter war with Finland, now shared a border with the
USSR. They were also traditional strongholds of the NKP, as was
Furubotn's Bergen. As a result, the Soviets maintained an underground
network of Communists and non-Communists which allowed Moscow to pursue
what one historian has called "a flexible policy" in this part of
Norway.
It must be emphasized that the Norwegian
Stalinists were not acting independently, but under direct Comintern
orders. The Executive Committee of the Communist International, meeting
in Moscow on June 28, 1940, gave the NKP explicit instructions on how
to behave under the German occupation. And just prior to the German
invasion, Comintern representatives visited Oslo and gave out orders to
the Party leadership. During the war years, contacts were kept up
through the Norwegian emigres and the Soviet embassy in neutral
Stockholm. Couriers kept up the link between the NKP headquarters in
Slidre, in the mountains of south-central Norway, and the Comintern
representatives in Sweden. And of course the Communists in Finnmark and
other northern provinces got their orders from across the border, which
was constantly being crossed by Soviet and Communist agents.
Meanwhile, German repression intensified. The
first to suffer were Norway's Jews. In April 1941, Norwegian
communities were compelled to produce surveys of the number of "pure
Jews" in the country. On April 21, German troops forced their way into
the synagogue in Trondheim, one of only two in the country, desecrating
it and converting it into a dwelling for German troops in transit.
Resistance began to grow rapidly, spearheaded by
the resignation of Norway's Supreme Court judges in December 1940 and
the famous pastoral letter issued by the Norwegian churches in February
1941. In London, the King broadcast messages of resistance. British SOE
commandos, including Norwegian troops, made raids on coastal towns. The
armed Norwegian resistance known as "Milorg" was launched.
But the Hitler-Stalin pact was still in force, and
would remain so until Hitler broke it. In May 1941, a month before the
German invasion of the USSR, Stalin had himself proclaimed Prime
Minister of the Soviet Union, taking over the reigns of both government
and Party. His first act as head of the Soviet state was to ask the
Norwegian envoy to close his embassy in Moscow and to leave Russia.
Stalin told him that his government had ceased to exist.
This must have been a difficult period for the
Norwegian Stalinists. The Communists were not involved in and could not
be involved in resistance activity before June 22, 1941, when Germany
invaded the Soviet Union. But from that moment on, the Comintern
ordered a one hundred and eighty degree turn in the party line. The
"imperialist war" had suddenly become a "great patriotic war".
In most countries this came as a boon to the
beleagured Communists, who had been compelled to support the highly
unpopular position of the Hitler-Stalin pact years. There were
exceptions; the Indian Communists did rather well with the
anti-British, pro-German line of 1939-41, and lost support when they
were obliged to back the Allies in the war. But the Norwegian
Stalinists were, like most Communist Parties, no doubt overjoyed at
being released from the embarrassing position of collaboration with the
German occupation authorities.
For more than fourteen months, the Norwegian
Communists had found themselves allied to the increasingly unpopular
and repressive occupying regime headed up by Reichskommissar Terboven
and his Quisling stooges. Now they were free to fight the Nazis as
allies of the Red Army.
They took up the resistance cause with a
vengeance -- perhaps to compensate for their earlier support of
capitulation to the Germans and their many months of overt and covert
collaboration. At a secret session of the NKP Central Committee held on
the last day of 1941, Furubotn was appointed chairman of the Party. In
a Party resolution adopted that day, it was stressed that "history
itself has put the task of national liberation before the NKP on June
22, 1941" -- in other words, it was not Hitler's invasion of Norway on
April 9, 1940, but his attack on the Soviet Union, which brought the
Norwegian Communists into the resistance. This revealing statement was
later used by non-Communists, especially the DNA, in propaganda battles
after the liberation.
The Communist role in the resistance, which
continued for nearly four years, is a subject of some dispute. Party
historians have naturally painted a picture of a militant vanguard,
fighting both the Germans and the excessively-cautious home front
leadership. There is no doubt that Communists staged spectacular acts
of sabotage, including blowing up one of the offices of the Nazi
national labor effort in February 1943, scattering registration cards
to the winds. In October of that year, Communist partisans derailed a
German troop transport train, leading the Germans to pass death
sentences on five hostages. In November 1944, a Communist-led group
sank or heavily damaged about 50,000 tons of shipping in Oslo harbor.
They also put out of action the only loading crane in the country
capable of handling heavy tanks and artillery pieces.
At the same time, they ruthlessly attacked the
existing leadership of the resistance, who feared that too much
sabotage would bring massive repression to bear on the Norwegian
people. It must be recalled that the Nazis considered the Norwegians to
be an Aryan people; repressions in Norway, while often severe, could
not compare to the treatment of Poles or Russians, who were viewed as
sub-humans.
The resistance leadership encouraged sustained mass
actions of protest and disobedience rather than sporadic acts of
sabotage and terror. This was only natural considering the
highly-organized nature of Norwegian society, with its trade unions,
sports clubs, cultural associations, and the like. Perhaps the most
famous case was the massive resistance campaign of the teachers, which
was met by German brutality.
The Communists played no role in this side of the
resistance, concentrating instead only on its military side. Their
undisciplined militance led to confrontations with the resistance
leadership, and prompted a letter sent on November 15, 1943, from the
resistance to the government in London drawing their attention to
irresponsible Communist activity.
Within the resistance there was discussion of
involving the Communists, but suspicion lingered from the period of
collaboration with the Nazis. And irresponsible Communist sabotage
activity afterwards did not help to restore trust in the "new" Party.
The social democratic DNA -- and not the capitalist parties --
spearheaded the opposition to the Communists.
As the war continued, Communist hostility to the
DNA and LO intensified. The Communists accused the social democrats and
labor leaders of cowardice and collaboration, and simultaneously tried
to recruit new supporters from the ranks of these much larger
organizations. A separate Communist trade union center in opposition to
the underground LO was established.
An example of the Communists' two front war against
Nazi Germany and against the existing leadership of the Norwegian labor
movement may be found in a scathing article which appeared in one of
the NKP's underground newspapers, castigating Willy Brandt, the future
West German prime minister, as a German and a splitter. Brandt was, in
fact, a Norwegian citizen, working for the DNA and LO Stockholm office,
and his "crime" had been to mention that several underground structures
in Norway were Communist-dominated.
Looking back, we can see that Communist sabotage
activity did little to hurt the German war effort. In fact, Norway's
main contribution to the war was that it tied down hundreds of
thousands of German troops who were basically doing nothing, waiting
for an Anglo-American invasion which never came. It was not the
Norwegian resistance which tied them down, but rather the fear that the
Allied "second front" would open up in Norway.
Communist militance did win the Party some prestige
and new members. Even such an avowed opponent of the NKP as DNA leader
Haakon Lie pointed to the extensive Communist underground press as one
source of its strength during and after the war. (Among NKP newspapers
were Friheten, Radio-NYTT, Bonden and Hjemmefronten.) On the other
hand, the collaborationist NKP press of 1940-41 had a circulation of
less than 2,000; few were alive in 1945 who remembered (or cared) what
had been written in its pages back then. And the merciless Nazi
persecution of Norwegian Communists which began in June 1941 also won
the Party some sympathy. Finally, widespread Norwegian admiration for
the Soviets, who appeared to be carrying the brunt of the fighting,
also helped restore the credibility of the local Communists.
Stalin delivered the NKP a real prize when he
ordered the October 1944 invasion of Norway's northernmost province,
Finnmark. By this stage in the war, with Germany's defeat now
inevitable, Finland switched sides and the German forces based there
(some 200,000 men) retreated into northern Norway. The Red Army
followed them in hot pursuit, eventually taking over part of Finnmark
(the Varanger peninsula) and its major town, Kirkenes, on October 24.
The Germans continued to retreat south to Lyngen, but the Soviets
remained where they were, never going past the river Tana, in the
eastern part of Finnmark. A vast no man's land hundreds of miles long
opened up between the two armies.
The Russians agreed to the presence of a
hastily-organized contingent of Norwegian troops in Finnmark, thus
reassuring the suspicious Norwegians that Stalin had no territorial
ambitions in their country. (Though the NKP generously offered the
Soviets access to ice-free harbors in Finnmark.) When the war ended,
Stalin promptly ordered the withdrawal of all Red Army forces from
Norway.
In Norway, as in most occupied countries, heated
public debate followed the liberation about what to do with the
collaborators. The Communists pushed hard for severe punishment for
those who had aided the Germans. Few Norwegians remembered, or cared to
remember, that a mere four years earlier, the Communists too had worked
closely with the German invaders. And those Communists whose
collaboration was too blatant to ignore, for example, Arbeideren editor
Kristiansen, had been killed during the war. (Kristiansen died in the
spring of 1942 in a German concentration camp; the NKP underground
press attempted to portray him as a national fighter in an effort not
so much to clear his name but the Party's.)
The war ended with the Norwegian Communists at the
peak of their popularity. Since late 1941, under Furubotn's leadership,
they had fought vigorously in the resistance, and they bragged about
their efforts incessantly. The prestige of the Red Army had its effect.
And Stalin's raid on Finnmark, making it the first Norwegian territory
liberated from Nazi rule, played its part. The result was a briefly
reinvigorated NKP, which did surprisingly well in post-war elections --
and best of all in Finnmark province, where it obtained about 20% of
the vote.
Overall the Communist vote rose from a meagre 4,376
in 1936 to 177,000 -- nearly 12% -- in the first postwar election in
1945. Two Communists were included in the new national government.
Furubotn's moment of glory did not, however, last
long. Though elected to the post of Party general secretary in 1946,
some of his closest collaborators were even then expelled from the NKP.
Following the Party's first electoral defeat in 1949, the Party's great
underground leader was expelled with his adherents, accused of
Trotskyism, nationalism, and Titoism. Furubotn was even accused of
having been an agent of the Gestapo.
Party leader Emil Lovlien began once again to
rewrite history, claiming that the NKP had been following the correct
line before Furubotn took over in 1941 -- from the very first days of
the occupation. Loyal Party members searched libraries throughout the
country for their collections of NKP newspapers from 1940-41 and tore
out offensive pages and articles, in an attempt to relegate that
embarrassing history to what George Orwell would call the "memory hole."
Under the impact of the cold war, during which
Norway abandoned its traditional posture of neutrality and joined NATO,
the NKP resumed its historic decline, eventually disappearing
completely.
But the issue of the role played by the Norwegian
Communists during the Second World War did not disappear. In 1974,
following attacks on the DNA by far leftists (including the NKP), in
which the social democrats were accused of being untrustworthy, Haakon
Lie published a small book entitled Who Can We Trust? on the NKP's role
during the Hitler-Stalin pact years. In it, he reproduced front pages
and articles from Arbeideren during the dark days of NKP-Nazi
collaboration.
Lie summarized the role of the NKP during the war by
repeating what had been said of the Finnish Communists during the
"winter war" with the Soviet Union; they were called "Russians who
spoke Finnish." It may be said of the NKP that they were "Russians who
spoke Norwegian."
What appears to outsiders as a confusing series of
sharp turns in the Communist line was entirely consistent for a Party
whose main purpose was to uphold Russian interests. Whether the NKP
collaborated or resisted, it was always loyal to Stalin and the Soviet
Union.
Appendix: Norwegian Communist Electoral Performance
| 1924 | 6.1%
| 1927 | 4.0%
| 1930 | 1.7%
| 1933 | 1.8%
| 1936 | 0.3%
| 1945 | 11.9%
| 1949 | 6%
| 1953 | 5%
| 1961 | 3%
| 1965 | 1.4%
| 1969 | 1%
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