From: user@computer.uio.no (PC Jorgensen)
Subject: Re: Re^2: Jews and Germans
Followup-To: soc.culture.jewish
Organization: UiO
Date: Sat, 23 Jan 1993 13:03:08 GMT

In article <4397@novavax.UUCP>, bramson@novavax.UUCP (Jennifer Bramson)
wrote:
> And noone KNEW????

I'm not an expert on WW2 history, but I think it could be safely said that
a lot of people knew that very evil things were going on. But on the other
hand it seems that even those who knew often didn't know the full extent
of the genocide (apart from those directly involved as butchers and
victims,
of course).

One small piece of data: this Christmas I finished reading the second
volume of Dahl's big Quisling biography. One of Quisling's most important
"ministers"
in the traitorous collaborationist Norwegian government, was a man called
F. Prytz (he was a pro-Big Business man, anti-democratic to a large extent,
deeply conservative/reactionary, bot a 'soft' anti-semite/racialist). You
remember that the official party line (party line can here be taken both
as a figure of speech and literally) in the beginning/middle of the war was
that the Jews were being rounded up a) to be placed in a 'homeland'
somewhere
in the East (i.e., the Ukraine) or b) to be shipped to Madagascar. Prytz
was
probably among those who believed that the "Jewish problem" mainly was the
lack of a homeland, leading to the Jews 'polluting' the nation-states of
Europe, which, of course, should be racially pure. Reprehensible as this
view may be, Prytz still reacted with horror when he learned about the
death camps from a young Norwegian Nazi who had visited the Ukraine. Prytz
wrote to his daughter, who was married to a German official in Poland,
some-
thing on the lines of: "They are _not_ given land. They are being KILLED"

He and other Norwegian collaborationists expressed their growing doubts to
among others Quisling himself, but he had after some qualms "bought the
whole
package" of Nazi ideology, and expressed strong anti-semitism in two
infamous speeches, and in one of them he even referred to the Jews as "the
Children
of Loke, the Midgard Worm and the Fenris Wolf" [Monsters from Norse
mythology] - And anyway, most European collaborationists had very little
leverage with the German government.

Norwegian Nazis and nazified Norwegian Police rounded up most Norw. Jews
in 1943, and afterwards Quisling and his cabinet declared them in effect
stateless, by renewing an old constitution paragraph about Jews, Monks and
Jesuits not being tolerated inside the borders. This even meant that Norw.
Jews had even less protection in the camps than Jews from some other
Western
European occupied countries, which had collaboration goverments that to
some extent cared even for their "third-class citizens".

The point here is that Prytz and other Norwegian Nazis _knew_, and people
on the other side also knew, but not all Norwegians were in a position to
go to
the Ukraine or Poland and see the plight of Jewry for themselves, of
course.

Prytz, by the way, died of cancer in -44. Quisling was arrested, tried and
shot in 1945. His part in actions against Jews contributed to his being
given the death sentence.


PC



----------------------------
PC Jorgensen
graduate student
Department of East European and Oriental Studies
University of Oslo
Norway
 
Newsgroups: soc.culture.jewish