User:Eli185/Aryanization in Norway

Aryanization in Norway describes the process of eliminating Jews from economic life in Norway during the German occupation from 1940. The Jews were deprived of their opportunities to work and their assets.

Background
Years before the outbreak of World War II, lists of Jewish companies in Norway were created in Germany using magazines and information secretly obtained from credit reporting agencies and Norwegian National Socialists. It recorded whether a company was wholly or partially owned by Jews and how large the Jewish and Aryan workforce was.

When Germany invaded Norway on April 9, 1940, around 2,100 Jews were living in Norway, some of whom had fled to Norway before the National Socialists or who were of Norwegian nationality. Under German occupation, a National Socialist collaboration government was set up under Vidkun Quisling and the German Reich Commissioner for the Occupied Norwegian Territories, Josef Terboven. At first this did not take open action against Jews, since the primary German interest lay in industrial war production and fishery products. The persecution of the Jews was divided into three phases:


 * Until January 1942, during an indecisive phase, there was only information gathering and individual actions by subordinate bodies. From January 1942 to October 1942, decisive preparations were made for radical action. From October 1942 to February 1943, the deportations and the Aryanization of the property were carried out in rapid, systematic steps by Norwegian and German forces. Unlike in the other occupied Western European countries, a Jewish star was not introduced.

Events
On May 10, 1940, Detective Inspector Wilhelm Esser ordered the Oslo police to confiscate the radios belonging to the Jewish Norwegians. The occupation authorities obtained an initial overview of the Jewish population; more precise figures and rough estimates of the “Jewish capital” were compiled in June 1941. In the spring, some shops and offices in Kristiansand, Moss and Fredrikstad were marked as Jewish with bilingual signs. After protests from the population, the signs were removed again. On April 21, 1941, the synagogue in Trondheim was occupied by German troops and from then on it was used to accommodate troops passing through. When the local anti-Semitic Gestapo commander Gerhard Flesch was transferred from Bergen to Trondheim in autumn 1941, one Jewish shop after another was confiscated there and some owners were arrested and taken to the Falstad prison camp. In Oslo, there was graffiti on shop windows due to anti-Semitic propaganda.

In the autumn of 1941, Justice Minister Sverre Riisnæs requested the local authorities to list all Jewish property and issued a ban on Jewish lawyers and the dismissal of Jewish employees from the public sector. On October 10, 1941, the police were instructed by the head of the German security police to mark the ID cards of Jews with a red “J”; this was made mandatory on March 1, 1942.

When a Norwegian National Socialist militiaman from the Hird was killed on October 22, 1942 and a group of Jews wanted to flee to Sweden, Section 39 of the criminal law was extended to Jews the next day. On October 25, the local police received an order to arrest all male Jews aged 15 and over the following day and to confiscate their property. During the seizure, particular attention was to be paid to securities, holdings, jewels and money. Bank accounts were blocked and lockers emptied. For the companies of the imprisoned or fled Jews, Aryan administrators were appointed and placed under a Norwegian liquidation office. The Norwegian government wanted to prevent the assets from being confiscated by the Germans. These had previously introduced such an administrative body in northern Norway since 1941. On October 26, 1942, a law was subsequently passed that legalized the Norwegian approach. Gold, silver, jewels and watches still had to be handed over to the Germans. Some of the property was saved from state access by Norwegians who were friends with Jews, which threatened prison sentences of 6 years.

The Norwegian Bureau for the Liquidation of Jewish Assets sold some of the Jewish assets relatively cheaply to members of the Norwegian National Socialist movement. The liquidation was not over by the end of the war.

Restitution
After the war, Jews and non-Jews who had been deprived of property had equal rights to compensation against the Norwegian state. Due to the tight finances, progressive discounts were made on the asset and a reconstruction component burdened families who had lost relatives because they would no longer work on the reconstruction. This put a particular strain on the Jewish survivors, who also had great difficulty in proving the death of their relatives and the succession. The reimbursements dragged on until 1987 and the total expense for the Jews was higher than the total reimbursement.

In March 1996, the Ministry of Justice set up a committee to review the matter. While the majority of five members in the final report of June 1997 were satisfied with the examination of the accounting documents, a minority vote was given by the psychologist Berit Reisel and the historian Bjarte Bruland. On the basis of this vote, the government under Prime Minister Torbjørn Jagland carried out a further extensive compensation of 450 million Norwegian kroner and officially apologized to the Jewish community. The chosen procedure served as a model in other European countries and the Norwegian government received the Raoul Wallenberg Prize in 1999.

Literature

 * Bjarte Bruland: Norway's Role in the Holocaust. In: The Routledge History of the Holocaust, Hrsg.: Jonathan C. Friedman, Routledge 2011, ISBN 978-0-415-77956-2, S. 232 ff.
 * Bjørn Fure: Antisemitism in Norway. Background Paper. Juni 2003
 * Oskar Mendelsohn: The Persecution of the Norwegian Jews in WW II. Norges Hjemmefrontmuseum, ISBN 82-91107-00-9.