Hitler’s Northern Utopia

Building the New Order in Occupied Norway

Despina Stratigakos

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780691210902
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World War II
• Index: History

The fascinating untold story of how Nazi architects and planners envisioned and began to build a model "Aryan" society in Norway during World War II Between 1940 and 1945, German occupiers transformed Norway into a vast construction zone. This remarkable building campaign, largely unknown today, was designed to extend the Greater German Reich beyond the Arctic Circle and turn the Scandinavian country into a racial utopia. From ideal new cities to a scenic superhighway stretching from Berlin to northern Norway, plans to remake the country into a model "Aryan" society fired the imaginations of Hitler, his architect Albert Speer, and other Nazi leaders. In Hitler's Northern Utopia, Despina Stratigakos provides the first major history of Nazi efforts to build a Nordic empire—one that they believed would improve their genetic stock and confirm their destiny as a new order of Vikings.Drawing on extraordinary unpublished diaries, photographs, and maps, as well as newspapers from the period, Hitler's Northern Utopia tells the story of a broad range of completed and unrealized architectural and infrastructure projects far beyond the well-known German military defenses built on Norway's Atlantic coast. These ventures included maternity centers, cultural and recreational facilities for German soldiers, and a plan to create quintessential National Socialist communities out of twenty-three towns damaged in the German invasion, an overhaul Norwegian architects were expected to lead. The most ambitious scheme—a German cultural capital and naval base—remained a closely guarded secret for fear of provoking Norwegian resistance.A gripping account of the rise of a Nazi landscape in occupied Norway, Hitler's Northern Utopia reveals a haunting vision of what might have been—a world colonized under the swastika.

1 Romanticizing
the North

German Press Accounts
of Norway under the Nazis

In September 1940, Nazi journalist and cultural critic Bruno Roemisch sat in the orchestra section of the National Theater in Oslo reminiscing about the German invasion of Norway five months earlier. He had stood outside the same building on the afternoon of April 10 as German troops, which had entered the capital the previous day, hauled loads of hay into the theater to create provisional bedding for themselves. Amid a group of Norwegian onlookers, Roemisch overheard one “fat bourgeoise” grumble, “Just look at those damn Germans! First they chase away our king and then they turn our beautiful National Theater into a barn.”¹

Inside the now pristine theater, Roemisch could only marvel at “what has become of this barn in the short time since.” The anger expressed by the Norwegian bystander seemed to belong to “another world.” Time, the “great quick-change artist,” had swept it away, replacing the “throaty snores” of the soldiers with “the delicate violin notes of Lehár’s The Merry Widow,” Hitler’s favorite operetta. The National Theater’s rebirth, Roemisch maintained, was representative of the capital as a whole and of Norway more broadly. Economic recovery, happiness, and optimism flourished everywhere. Roemisch saw the metamorphosis in the busy port, where unemployment had been banished, and along Karl Johans Street, where stylish women carrying shopping parcels smiled easy, uncomplicated smiles. Their mood, Roemisch asserted, was contagious: all of Oslo was in good spirits. Having experienced a “fall upwards” with the German occupation, life in Norway was better than ever.²

Roemisch’s account of the country’s resurgence, published in the Krakauer Zeitung (Kraków Newspaper), the Nazi newspaper of occupied Poland, is easy to dismiss as just more fervid propaganda meant to bolster support for Hitler’s New Order, the radical and massive reorganization of Europe. What suggests that such narratives deserve more serious attention, however, is their pervasiveness in the Nazi-controlled German-language press of Europe. German readers from Kirkenes to Vienna and Brussels to Riga consumed thousands of positive stories regarding Norway’s progress under the occupation.³ Taken as a whole, this literature represents a type of collective wish fulfillment: the creation on the page of the North as a vast space of possibility, where Hitler’s racial utopia could be imagined and carried out. But more than just fantasy, the articles also captured the crafting and implementation of policies designed to bring about Europe’s transformation in the wake of Hitler’s victorious armies. An examination of these articles reveals how Norway emerged in the eyes of Germans as a testing ground for a new racial empire based on the collaboration of Nordic peoples.

Beginning soon after the invasion, stories about Norway produced by the Nazi-controlled press introduced German readers to Hitler’s northernmost acquisition through accounts of its towns, people, and resources. Whereas substantial propaganda had prepared Germans for the Nazi occupation of the Sudetenland and the war with Poland, there had been little warning that Hitler would open a northern front. The occupying armed forces in Norway were exceptionally large; as a consequence, many Germans had family or friends stationed there. Press coverage about this foreign country suddenly under German control sought to assuage anxiety and satisfy curiosity among readers at home. With almost 450,000 German soldiers and civilians living in Norway during the height of the occupation, there was also a built-in audience for new German-language newspapers and journals published there. In May 1940, even before Norwegian forces capitulated, Nazi publisher Max Amann launched Deutsche Zeitung in Norwegen (German Newspaper in Norway), an Oslo-based daily with a large circulation. Beginning in October 1940, the Wehrmacht in Norway published its own newspaper, Wacht im Norden (Northern Watch), which it distributed free of charge to German soldiers. Terboven’s commissariat inaugurated Deutsche Monatshefte in Norwegen (German Monthly in Norway), a richly illustrated magazine focused on social and cultural issues, in November 1940 (see plate 1).⁴ These publications provide extensive information on the occupation, but always filtered through the lens of military censorship and the press limitations on what and how journalists could report imposed by the Reich Commissariat’s Department of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda.

Accounts of Wehrmacht soldiers contributing to Norway’s improvement undoubtedly fostered among German readers a sense of their own role in a broader racial mission, tying efforts abroad to those on the home front. On April 9, 1941, an article on the anniversary of the Norwegian invasion that emphasized the hard work being carried out by German soldiers in the far north appeared in the Straubinger Tagblatt (Straubing Daily News).⁵ The newspaper served the residents of Straubing, a small town in Lower Bavaria on the Danube with a long and brutal history of pogroms dating back to the fourteenth century. When Hitler seized power in 1933, the small community of Straubing Jews became targets of violence, including murder. After the town synagogue was ransacked during the national November pogrom of 1938 known as Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass, most were forced to emigrate. Those left behind because of age or poverty were almost all deported to the east in 1942 in the pursuit of making Straubing judenfrei, free of Jews.⁶

It is in this context that townsfolk picked up their local newspaper and read the words of Colonel General Nikolaus von Falkenhorst, Wehrmacht commander in Norway, lauding the men of the northern watch. Falkenhorst emphasized that Germany had been forced to occupy Norway to defend against British interference. Even so, he insisted, his armies were not conquerors but rather friendly peacekeepers and nation builders, constructing new roads, railways, bridges, and other infrastructure that would allow Norway to develop economically and participate fully in the New Order. These projects had eradicated unemployment, and the introduction of German technology, German labor, and a “German tempo” had given Norway’s people the stimulus and knowledge they needed to modernize their nation. Falkenhorst also praised the benefits the civilian population derived from the Wehr-macht’s “spiritual care work,” which allowed the Norwegians “to experience the tremendous rhythm of German cultural activity, which does not rest even in wartime.” Thus, he concluded, German armed forces, through their pioneering work in Norway, were forging “a new era for the Norwegian people in a pacified Europe.”⁷

Race defined the new era imagined by the German occupiers and tied the “work” of the Wehrmacht soldiers in Norway to that of the townsfolk in Straubing. Hitler’s vision of a Germanic empire that would unite all of Europe under the rule of a superior Germanic race depended on a mystical faith in the power of Nordic blood. As Hitler claimed in Mein Kampf, Nordic blood could be “poisoned” by reproducing with inferior races. This adulteration, in his view, explained the decline of the great civilizations of the ancient world, particularly Greece and Rome, which he believed to be Nordic—a blond, blue-eyed Aryan race—in origin.⁸ Conversely, blood could be strengthened through breeding with better genetic stock, and none had purer Nordic blood, according to Nazi eugenicists, than Norwegians. The Nazis’ desire to protect Nordic blood justified mass genocide on the one hand and pronatalist measures on the other.

The notion of a racial hierarchy with Norwegians at its apex had already been popularized in Germany in the 1920s through the work of Hans Friedrich Karl Günther, a German nationalist and right-wing ideologue who wrote popular books on racial theory for the general public. Günther, who married a Norwegian woman and lived for a time in Norway, exalted the Norwegians. He believed that they had preserved the genetic superiority and nobility of the Nordic race because of their geographical isolation from the Continent and through their ongoing connection with rural culture.⁹ In his best-selling 1922 book Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes (Racial Studies of the German People), Günther ascribed to the Nordic man a sense of adventurousness, truthfulness, and justice; a strong feeling for landscape; a heroic and creative temperament; iron willpower and good judgment; and, importantly, an exceptional ability to conquer and lead.¹⁰ That very ability to subjugate other peoples, however, had also diminished the Nordic man through intermarriage. Günther estimated that Norwegians possessed more than 70 to 80 percent pure Nordic blood, while Germans themselves retained only 50 to 60 percent in their veins.¹¹ In his 1925 book Der Nordische Gedanke unter den Deutschen (The Nordic Idea among the Germans), he promoted selective breeding in order to genetically improve the German population through “Aufnordung” (re-nordification), augmenting its Nordic elements.¹² Günther’s theories deeply influenced Heinrich Himmler, who made Nordische Gedanke required reading for his SS members, all of whom claimed a Nordic/Aryan lineage “untainted” by Jewish blood.¹³

Günther used photography to create a “visual code” that concretized his racial ideas and made them more accessible to a wide audience.¹⁴ The idealized Nordic type that he presented to readers had a tall and slender build, blond hair, light rosy skin, long skull, thin face, narrow nose, and light blue or gray eyes.¹⁵ In the 1930s and ’40s, Erna Lendvai-Dircksen, a National Socialist photographer for the eugenicist journal Volk und Rasse (People and Race), issued a popular series of photobooks under the titles Das deutsche Volksgesicht (The Face of the German People) and Das germanische Volksgesicht (The Face of the Germanic People) that sought to capture the essential physiognomies of Nordic peoples in Germany and beyond. The 1942 volume on Norway, with its black-and-white pictures of people, architecture, and landscapes, further romanticized Günther’s theory of the formative connection between race and environment.¹⁶

Lendvai-Dircksen framed her human subjects to convey a sense of dignity. The images of natural landscapes and villages also included in the book embedded the people in a timeless rural context; cities and urban dwellers were nowhere to be seen (figs. 1.1–1.4). Photographs of a medieval sun-cross gravestone and a stave wooden church reminded viewers of the subjects’ Viking roots, a past also romanticized in Lendvai-Dirksen’s foreword.¹⁷ She painted a vision in highly nostalgic terms of a primitive but noble existence on the land that was threatened by emigration and the loss of the “best valorous blood” of the race. She wrote, “Norway’s greatest wealth lies precisely in the purity of its Germanic blood.” That blood, she contended, lived on in the landowning peasants who were still bound to the soil and thus protected from the damaging “influences of Anglo-American civilization.”¹⁸

In this narrative of endangered Nordic blood, Norway’s German occupiers emerged as guardians of a vitally precious life source needed for the renewal of the Nordic race. Like warrior knights, they had come to protect the racial Holy Grail. And while the perceived threats came from many quarters, the most culpable and dangerous agents in the plot to destroy Nordic blood were the Jews and the Marxists, the same enemies Hitler had long demonized in Germany. In the November 1941 issue of Deutsche Monatshefte in Norwegen, Heinrich Meyer, a member of Dresden’s Genetic Health Appellate Court (which heard appeals of compulsory sterilization orders), published an article with the sensationalist title “Norway’s People on the Brink of Extinction?” There, he blamed the twentieth-century decrease in Norway’s birthrate on “foreign elements, especially Jewish-influenced propaganda, that for decades have been free to try to coldly annihilate the Norwegian Volk by propagating small families through so-called sex education, by ridiculing an abundance of children, and by preventing effective measures to encourage child-rich families.” The family planning clinics established across Norway in the 1920s and ’30s by birth-control advocate Katti Anker Møller particularly drew his ire. He claimed that “Marxist organizations” controlled them, a reference to the support that MØller had received from Norway’s socialist and communist parties in her efforts to help poor women control their fertility and thus better care for themselves and their children.¹⁹ In April 1941, the Reich Commissariat closed the family planning clinics in Norway, just as Hitler had done in Germany in 1933, also alleging the need to protect the Volk from “Jewish-Bolshevist” sex reform.²⁰

1.1. Erna Lendvai-Dircksen’s Das germanische Volksgesicht: Norwegen offered a highly romanticized vision of Norway and its people, in tune with National Socialist ideals. This photograph, which appeared in the book opposite the man in 1.2, shows the farmstead above the Gudbrand Valley where, according to legend, the real-life model for Ibsen’s Peer Gynt lived.

1.2. Erna Lendvai-Dircksen, photograph with the caption “Farmer from the kin of Peer Gynt.”

1.3. Erna Lendvai-Dircksen, photograph of Setesdal, a valley in southern Norway.

But Meyer, who wrote positively about the changes happening in Nazi Germany, also blamed Norwegians for their lack of racial consciousness. The declining birthrates across Western Europe were connected, he maintained, to a widespread mental and spiritual deterioration. Healthy nations did not want for babies. “In the end,” he wrote, “this is about Weltanschauung and Lebenswillen [worldview and will to live]. Increasing the birthrate of a Volk means increasing their vitality.” Germany, which was experiencing an upswing in the number of births, was proof, Meyer believed, that spiritual recovery bolstered the people’s will for life and for children.²¹ ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Hitler in the Fjords
• 1. Romanticizing the North: German Press Accounts of Norway under the Nazis
• 2. Norway in the New Order: Infrastructure Building from Superhighways to Superbabies
• 3. Islands of Germanness: Soldiers’ Homes in Occupied Norway
• 4. The Nazification of Norway’s Towns: Shaping Urban Life and Environments during Wartime
• Plates
• 5. A German City in the Fjords: Hitler’s Plans for New Trondheim
• Conclusion: Ghosts in the Landscape
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index
• Photo Credits