Memorial to the Victims of the Holocaust in Norway, Helsfyr Jewish Cemetery
Minnestøtten for ofrene for Holocaust i Norge
In 1948, a memorial to the murdered Jews of Oslo and southern Norway was set up on the Jewish cemetery in the Helsfyr district of Oslo.
History
In April 1940, the German Wehrmacht occupied hitherto neutral Norway. At the time, most of the approximately 1,300 Norwegian Jews lived in the cities of Oslo and Trondheim. In addition, about 600 Jews from other European countries had sought refuge in Norway. In September, the German occupying forces under Reichskommissar Josef Terboven (1898–1945) installed a collaborating government in Norway. From June 1941 on, the German occupiers and Norwegian nationalists radicalised the exclusion of Jews. After their wealth had been for the most part confiscated, all Jews in Norway were arrested in October 1942.
In November 1942 and February 1943, the SS deported 690 Jews from Norway, most of them to the Auschwitz extermination camp. A further 80 Jews were deported in the course of other »Aktionen«. Only 30 of those deported survived. 21 Jews died in Norway itself. Around 900 Jews from Norway had been able to flee to Sweden. In all, around 765 Jews from Norway were murdered between 1940 and 1945, over 40 per cent of the country's Jewish population.
Most of Norway's Holocaust victims came from Oslo and southern Norway, 620 in total.
Victims
The memorial is dedicated to the approximately 620 murdered Jews from Oslo and southern Norway.
In April 1940 the German Wehrmacht occupied the Kingdom of Norway following weeks of fighting. At the time, over 1,300 Norwegian Jews and around 600 Jewish refugees were living in the country, mainly in Oslo and Trondheim. The majority of the Norwegians were opposed to the Germans. Prior to the German invasion public support was also lacking for the anti-Jewish stance of the Norwegian party »Nasjonal Samling« (National Unity), founded in 1933 and led by Vidkun Quisling (1887–1945). From June 1941, the German occupying forces and Quisling’s nationalists pursued an increasingly radical policy of excluding the Jews and persecuting opponents of the regime. In February 1942, a collaboration government was established with Quisling as Prime Minister. This government, which was under the control of the German Reich Commissar Josef Terboven (1898–1945), further stepped up the terror measures, especially against Jews. All of the Jews in Norway were arrested in October 1942. At the end of November 1942 and the end of February 1943 the SS deported 690 of these Jewish men, women and children by boat to Stettin in Pomerania (now Poland). From here they were deported to Auschwitz, either directly or via Berlin. At least 765 Jews from Norway became victims of the mass murder, over forty percent of the Jewish population of the country.
A number of resistance groups were formed in Norway, which practised civil disobedience and carried out acts of sabotage. Arrested members of the resistance were deported to the concentration camps at Natzweiler-Struthof, Neuengamme and Sachsenhausen. Many villages and industrial plants in the north of the country were razed to the ground during the Wehrmacht’s withdrawal from Norway in spring 1945. Quisling was arrested on 8 May 1945 and executed in the Akershus fortress in Oslo on 24 October 1945. In many languages the name Quisling stands for collaboration and treachery. Around 45,000 Norwegians had joined his party by 1945. Norway’s national Resistance Museum was opened in Akershus in 1970 along with a monument for the Norwegian patriots shot at the fortress during the Second World War. A number of Holocaust memorials have been established in Trondheim and Oslo since the 1990s. The Centre for Studies of Holocaust and Religious Minorities was founded in 2005 in Quisling’s former offices (»Villa Grande«) in Oslo. The Norwegian royal family headed by King Haakon VII (1872–1957) became a symbol of the Norwegian resistance and post-war democracy. The king and crown prince both refused to capitulate and went into exile in Britain. A »Peace Grove« was opened in 1997 near a birch tree where they had sought refuge in April 1940. The aim is to encourage people to engage in the »continuing struggle for freedom, peace and human dignity both today and in the future«. Many Norwegian sites of memory are oriented to the present and future and focus on education in peace and human rights. Since the 1980s, a critical confrontation with collaboration and everyday life under the German occupation has also been a feature of the Norwegian culture of memory.
Remembrance
In 1947, the re-established Jewish community of Oslo decided to set up a memorial to the murdered Jews from Oslo and southern Norway. The memorial - designed by Danish-Jewish sculptor Harald Isenstein - was dedicated on November 1, 1948, on the Helsfyr Jewish Cemetery in the presence of the crown prince. Shaped like a Star of David, there is a column in the middle on which a menorah and an inscription are engraved. Inscribed on the walls around the memorial are the names of the 620 murdered Jews from southern Norway.
Open
The memorial can be visited during the opening hours of the cemetery.
