Norway's War

<p><b>In the early morning of 9 April 1940, </b><b>a fleet of German battleships entered the Oslofjord.</b><br>Norwegian artillery delayed them long enough for King Haakon VII and his cabinet to escape to England, but there was no stopping the Nazi <i>Blitzkrieg</i>. Norway stood on the cusp of a traumatic five-year occupation whose aftershocks would continue to trouble its national consciousness long after the defeated Germans departed in May 1945.<br><br>Robert Ferguson tells the extraordinary – and relatively little-known – story of the occupation and its judicial aftermath. He focuses in particular on German attempts to use a Norwegian Nazi administration under Vidkun Quisling to impose a National Socialist revolution on the country, and on the many brave and ingenious ways in which the Norwegians resisted.<br><br>Ferguson describes the occupation in all its aspects – from Nazi terror to non-violent resistance, from censorship to sabotage – via a series of heterogeneous but interlinked narratives. Key players in the occupation and its wider story – including the pitiless <i>Reichskommissar </i>Josef Terboven, the Norwegian crime writer-turned-SS-strongman Jonas Lie, the principled Lutheran bishop Eivind Berggrav and the enigmatic double agent Gunnar Waaler – are drawn in memorably vivid colours.<br><br>A riveting account of the Second World War’s forgotten occupation, <i>Norway’s War </i>evokes in moving fashion the moral and physical courage of a people who, faced with the brutal tyranny of a totalitarian invader, refused to be cowed.</p>