Resisting the Nazification of the Church of Norway

On April 9, 1940, slightly more than seven months after the outbreak of World War II, German forces occupied Norway. The Norwegian defenses offered only temporary resistance to the vastly superior power of Hitler’s Wehrmacht. Within two months, after scattered confrontations, the approximately three million people of Norway had to accept subjugation to the German commissariat headed by Josef Terboven. As part of the German efforts to keep the Norwegian public administration functioning, on September 25, Terboven appointed constituent state departments. Most of the men leading them were members of the small—and only tolerated—political party, the National Assembly, the Nasjonal Samling (NS), that Vidkun Quisling founded in 1933 and continued to lead since its inception. His political objective was to give Norway a relatively autonomous position through a peace treaty with Germany. However, the attainment of such an accord depended on convincing the Norwegian people to have confidence in his NS as well as in the national socialist ideology and politics of the Third Reich. He therefore aimed to bring about a “national revolution.”1 The possibility of doing so seemed to unfold when on February 1, 1942, Quisling became prime minister of occupied Norway in accordance with a treaty with Adolf Hitler in 1940. Quisling then formed a national government primarily concerned with domestic issues. However, his government depended on the support of the German occupying authorities, which remained in the country and maintained supreme political and military power. Nevertheless, “The New Order” in Norway was unique in the history of the Third Reich’s hegemony in Europe. As historian Ole Kristian Grimnes has pointed out, “among the countries occupied by Germany, Norway was the only one in which a domestic national socialist party had political power and, with the aid of the state authorities, sought to realize its revolution.”2

Archaeology · Economic history · German · Ideology · Nazism · Norwegian · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · Sociology · State (computer science) · Treaty · World War II · European history and politics · Historical Geopolitical and Social Dynamics · History · Law · Religion, Theology, History, Judaism, Christianity