page_title: Kai Holst
section_title: Peace and death
hierarchical_section_title: Kai Holst / Peace and death
caption_attribution_description: Kai Holsts gravsted på Vestre gravlund i Oslo / Gravestone of Kai Holst
context_page_description: Kai Christian Middelthon Holst was a Norwegian seaman, fur farmer and resistance fighter during World War II. When the leadership of Milorg was torn up by the Gestapo in 1942, he acquired a leading role in the organisation and participated in re-establishing the central leadership of Milorg together with Jens Christian Hauge. Holst had to flee Norway in the autumn of 1943 and stayed in Sweden until the liberation of Norway in 1945.
  Holst is remembered both for his work with the Norwegian resistance and for the circumstances surrounding his death in Stockholm in 1945. Holst's demise was so much talked of at the time that the Milorg leadership issued a statement in the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten in July 1945. Swedish and Norwegian authorities officially concluded that Holst committed suicide, but his family and many of his friends and colleagues were of the opinion that Holst was murdered.
context_section_description: After the German capitulation in May 1945, Holst was working on closing the various storage bases that Norwegian resistance fighters had established on Swedish soil, and travelling back and forth between Sweden and Norway. On 23 June, he arrived in Norway by car from Stockholm and early in the morning of 26 June he accompanied British and Norwegian forces in searches carried out at German military camps at the Wehrmacht headquarters in Lillehammer.
  The same day he unexpectedly travelled back to Stockholm and on the morning of 27 June was found dead at the top of the staircase in an apartment building at Rindögatan 42 on Gärdet. He was found by the porter's wife, shot in the right side of the head, lying in a pool of blood at the top of the staircase, outside the door to the elevator room. Some hours earlier she had found his rucksack and travel bag outside the entrance. The body was found with 1,200 NOK, a large sum at that time (equal to more than 20,000 NOK, or over $3,000 in 2012), something that seemed to rule out robbery as a motive for murdering him.
  According to the Swedish police Holst had rung the doorbell and had been let in by one of the tenants, but had not then visited that apartment. The policeman who first saw the body reported that the pistol (Holst's own, a Spanish Llama Colt 9mm) was in Holst's right hand, with his finger on the trigger. The gun was removed by the police officer before the criminal police came. There is no photograph or sketch of the body at the site, only photographs from the autopsy.
  Even though the case was investigated as a possible murder, the Swedish police quickly concluded that it was suicide. The criminal technicians test fired the weapon found in Holst's hand and found that it was the same as the one that fired the bullet found in the staircase where Holst had been found dead. Of the 28 tenants in the building, only three were questioned by the police during the investigation. In addition to limited questioning of possible witnesses, there were several other deficiencies in the investigation; there was no detailed description of the place he was found and information that was routinely collected during murder investigations was not recorded.
  Kai Christian Middelthon Holst was buried at Vestre gravlund in Oslo. The grave is marked with a simple headstone on which his name, birth and death are carved.
caption: Kai Holst's grave in Vestre gravlund in Oslo
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