Una cosa che odiavo delle mie lezioni di storia era quanto fosse assente la Norvegia nei libri di testo e nelle discussioni sulla Seconda Guerra Mondiale. Oltre a leggere i commenti di "storici" Voglio sentire dalla gente reale della Norvegia com’era la vita in quel periodo.
Se avete parenti o storie che potete condividere, fatemelo sapere!
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di batukaming
16 commenti
What I’ve heard apart from the resistance work, things went along kind of like normal. There were rations though, hard to get enough supplies. I believe people for instance held pigs in the city, for food.
Scary if you were in the same area as Henry oliver Rinnan
Pretty much how it was before the occupation unless you were in the resistance.
My grandfather used to tell me it wasn’t really that bad (he was a child though so will likely have been oblivious) he did however get run over by a German truck and broke both his legs, the German infantry drove to the local hospital straight away and he made a full recovery. He did tell me after the war he was playing in a local park and found a K98 rifle buried in the mud, took it to his older brother who was in the norwegian army and got chastised by him, turned out it was still loaded, he marched them down to Stavanger harbour and threw it into the water, its probablly still down there over by the ferry terminal.
For being occupied, it wasn’t that bad for most people. Norwegian were not seen as an enemy race, an culture wise, we weren’t too different from them. German was the lingua franca in Norway before the war.
It was war an occupation, plus minority prosecution, and all the bad stuff that went on in the third reich, so it was pretty bad. But compared to places like Poland, or USSR, it was more a society full of restrictions, and very strict rules, rather then sheer terror.
People mostly had food, and was left alone.
Depends on what part of Norway and when. Northern part of Norway, mainly Finnmark were totally burned down and destroyed in the end parts of the war.. other parts of norway didn’t experienced that much of the war just carried on with their life. For the german soldiers in ww2, coming to norway was like holiday.. many of them finding norwegian girlfriends, learning to ski and other stuff.. you can find a several picture of it in the [digitalmuseum-site](https://digitaltmuseum.no/search?topic=%22Tysk+soldat%22).. Keep in mind that norway were initially neutral in ww2 and were racially seen as favourable.
My father’s parents lived in Bergen, second largest city in Norway. They had shortages and lack of food. Nazis took everything for themselves. Nazis built military fortified installations next to civilian infrastructure like schools and residential buildings so when the allied bombed those they bombed us.
My grandfather on my mother’s side sailed in the merchant fleet so he spent the war in Britain when he was not on a ship in the Atlantic being hunted by nazi submarines. Insanely lucky man. The ships he was on got torpedoed three times, each time he was on shoreleave and survived.
My wife’s grandparents lived in the countryside outside of Bergen. And they were used to starving. Not much of interest where they lived so they grew potatoes and did fishing and lived off the land as they had always done.
Apparently in 1944, Edvard Munch died holed up in his flat in Oslo surrounded by his works, terrified.
He had been touted as an exemplar of Aryan artistry, but he wanted nothing to do with them. Poor guy.
I asked the old folks.
We were very very suspicious of other people. One could not know who was a nazi and would turn you in. We all kept very quiet.
The germans came to the farm and made records, so they could come back and confiscate the produce later. We hid away as much as we could, one time we hid some of the the calves in the silo.
They wanted to know tho owned the fishing boat. We told them the truth it was gunnar’s boat and gave them the address to the graveyard where he lies. The rouse kept fish on our table.
Eli was a nurse, she was forced to tend to wounded enemies. She remembered treating one officer and one private in particular.
«They would share the food when i did not look, the officers got better foodrations. I watered down the morphine for their surgeries. I was so angry with them.»
I can of course not speak on behalf of anyone (as I was not alive(I am in my 20’s), but I will share what I have been told from my great grandmother (she is still alive). Some she told me from her own experience as a child, some is what she was told by her family later in life. I am busy right now, but I want to and will write about it here when I have time😊
In a strange way, we came out of it with less debt (I wonder why aswell) and healthier. Apparently we are a lot of fish.
It varied greatly from place to place. For instance my great grand father grew up during the war and was about 12 or 13 when it ended. He was from a small island up north that as of now have 500 inhabitants, and there the germans were nice.
They went around and took any things that resembled an eagle, but other than that they played with the local kids, gave them candy and my grandfather sold them crabs
My late grandfather’s age was in the latter half of the single digits when the nazis occupied Norway, and according to him daily life went on pretty much as usual. That said, he did hate Germany until his last day, so I have a feeling there were things he learned after the fact and/or things he didn’t want to talk about.
Aside from him, I also remember older people from the area around his village talking about this and that person during the war, and which people they remembered being “a little striped” (a low-level collaborator) and one of them suddenly exclaiming with utter venom in her voice “On the contrary, <name I don’t remember> was a goddamn *Quisling*!”
Mostly boring, with some drama from time to time. My grandfather lived in Tretten. His direct experiences with the nazis were when they came to seize their farm animals.
He had to eat bark bread and could forget about any luxuries such as coffee or tobacco. He heard about people being arrested and tortured/killed, but no one talked about who were in the resistance. When the war was coming to a halt, a nazi informant was shot and killed in front of his wife, who never told the authorities who had killed him. A «tyskertøs» reported her husband to the nazis, who interned and tortured him, while she spent the rest of the war in a relationship with a German officer. After the war, she went back into relationship with her husband.
They were busy with getting by with what little they had, and stay away from trouble, as internment of someone wouldn’t just affect themselves but also their family, who relied on them.
My grandpa was a very strict and serious man. Listening to his wise words truly vaccinated me against Nazism.
My family in Trondheim and Frosta has some stories. Too many to recount here in detail but they range from resistance (there was a bombing at the nazi office), to survival (borrowing clothes to steal petrol and supplies), to Mr Churchill’s Easter eggs (depth charges dropped on Easter Sunday into fjord waters to target a German sub stationed nearby), to compassion for the teenage soldiers who were stationed in their homes (they were basically home sick teenager soldiers given a heavy task).
My grandfather had a general store back then.
He mostly complained about how hard it was to get goods, and how hard it was to get fuel for the fishing boats.
There wasn’t much specific to complain about, anyway. War is war, and it sucks for everyone, but it sucked significantly less here than in other places. There was one incident where a German soldier shot someone over a misunderstanding, but that soldier got transferred away right quick. No idea what happened to him, but hopefully they sent him somewhere he got to meet other trigger happy soldiers. There wasn’t much to bomb, so they just didn’t. Nobody could really escape anywhere, so the garrison wasn’t very big.
Since the fisheries were pretty good here, nobody really went hungry. The Germans paid well enough for what they took. Or perhaps they were cheap, but people weren’t used to seeing much money at the time, but they thought it was good enough payment to not complain.
Some Englishmen came and took the Germans away at the end of the war, and that was that.