Five years of occupation told in a stone building beside the yard where the collaborators were shot.
Norges Hjemmefrontmuseum sits inside Akershus Fortress, a few metres from the wall where members of the resistance were shot and from the courtyard where Vidkun Quisling was executed in 1945.
The location is the argument. This is not a museum about the occupation placed somewhere convenient; it is on the ground where it happened.
9 April 1940
Germany invaded on the morning of 9 April 1940. Norway had declared neutrality and had an army that had not been meaningfully funded in twenty years.
At Oscarsborg, an obsolete fortress in a narrow part of the Oslofjord, the commander Birger Eriksen — without orders, and against fifty-year-old guns — opened fire on an unidentified warship approaching in the dark and sank the heavy cruiser Blücher.
Around a thousand men died, including much of the Gestapo and administrative staff intended to take over Oslo. The delay of a few hours let the King, the government and the gold reserves get out of the city on a train.
That single decision is why Norway had a government in exile and a legitimate king in London rather than a surrender signed on day one.
The occupation
Quisling proclaimed himself head of government on the radio that same day — a coup so premature that the Germans initially set it aside. He got his puppet administration in 1942 and his name got into the English dictionary.
The museum covers the whole five years: the Nasjonal Samling party, censorship, the teachers’ strike, the deportation of Norway’s Jews — around 770 people, of whom fewer than forty survived — the forced labour, and the Soviet and Yugoslav prisoners of war who died in camps in the north.
It also covers the Milorg underground army, the illegal press, the escape routes to Sweden, and the intelligence traffic to London.
The heavy water raid
The best-known operation and the one people come for.
The Vemork hydroelectric plant at Rjukan produced heavy water, needed for a nuclear reactor. In February 1943, a party of Norwegian commandos parachuted onto the Hardangervidda plateau, skied in, entered the plant through a cable duct, destroyed the electrolysis cells and skied out.
Nobody was killed on either side. Several of them skied several hundred kilometres to Sweden afterwards.
A later attempt to move the remaining stock ended with the ferry Hydro being sunk on Lake Tinn with Norwegian civilians aboard — which the museum includes, because it was a real cost and the men who made the decision knew it.
Practical
Charged, and modestly. Hours are shorter in winter and it closes some days — check.
The displays are text-heavy and old-fashioned, with original documents, weapons, radio sets and clothing rather than interactive screens. That is a deliberate choice by the people who founded it and it repays patience.
The 22 July Centre in the government quarter is the other place in Oslo where the country examines an attack on itself, and the contrast between how the two are handled is worth thinking about.
