Norway's War

In the early morning of 9 April 1940, a fleet of German battleships entered the Oslofjord. Norwegian artillery delayed them long enough for King Haakon VII and his cabinet to escape to England, but there was no stopping the Nazi Blitzkrieg. 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.

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.