Norway's War

In the early morning of 9 April 1940, a fleet of German battleships entered the Oslofjord. Norwegian artillery delayed them long enough for King Haakon VII and his cabinet to escape to England, but there was no stopping the Nazi Blitzkrieg. Norway stood on the cusp of a traumatic five-year occupation whose aftershocks would continue to trouble its national consciousness long after the defeated Germans departed in May 1945.

Robert Ferguson tells the extraordinary – and relatively little-known – story of the occupation and its judicial aftermath. He focuses in particular on German attempts to use a Norwegian Nazi administration under Vidkun Quisling to impose a National Socialist revolution on the country, and on the many brave and ingenious ways in which the Norwegians resisted.

Ferguson describes the occupation in all its aspects – from Nazi terror to non-violent resistance, from censorship to sabotage – via a series of heterogeneous but interlinked narratives. Key players in the occupation and its wider story – including the pitiless Reichskommissar Josef Terboven, the Norwegian crime writer-turned-SS-strongman Jonas Lie, the principled Lutheran bishop Eivind Berggrav, and the enigmatic double agent Gunnar Waaler – are drawn in memorably vivid colours.

A riveting account of the Second World War’s forgotten occupation, Norway’s War evokes in moving fashion the moral and physical courage of a people who, faced with the brutal tyranny of a totalitarian invader, refused to be cowed.