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To: ProudNorseman
I guess you never heard of Quisling and the thousands of Norwegians who volunteered to fight for the Nazis. There are even postage stamps to verify this fact. As for what I said, it is the truth -- The British offered aid to help Norway before the Nazi take over -- which Quisling and his co-Norwegians set up. Today Norway won't even allow the capture of former SS guards who helped run the NAZI concentration camps. Norway has a horrible record of hatred toward the Jews.
31 posted on 11/26/2006 6:07:26 AM PST by GaryMontana (islam, the Nazis of today must either be destroyed -- or the human race will perish)
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To: GaryMontana
To presume that a Norwegian is unfamiliar with Quisling is a bit ridiculous. I even posted an article on the man, which might alleviate your own apparent ignorance on the subject.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/1704952/posts?page=4#4

The British offered aid to help Norway before the Nazi take over

I have never heard of this, so you'll have to be more specific. Perhaps you are thinking of the British and French request to send an expeditionary force of 15,000 through Norway and Sweden to aid Finland against the Soviet Union. This was declined by Norway and Sweden on March 2, as the countries wanted to stay formally neutral. However, Norway secretly sent its own supplies of ammo and artillery to help the Finns, weakening its capacity to resist the German invasion.

The failure to foresee the latter is regrettable, but hindsight is 20/20. Even British intelligence was unable to predict it as late as the evening of April 8, when the German fleet was in motion for Operation Weserübung. Your claim that Britain had offered to land troops in Norway to rebuff a German invasion, besides being unmentioned by any other source I've ever seen, is implausible for this reason alone.

Someone else who was caught by surprise on April 9. was Quisling. He had not been notified about the German plan, in part because he was a non-entity at the time and in larger part because Berlin didn't trust him. The historians are unanimous on this point: although Quisling had proposed a German intervention in Berlin in December 1939, Hitler left him out of the planning (and in fact, did not decide on the invasion until after the Altmark incident of February 16). In their turn, the Germans were unprepared for Quisling's opportunistic coup d'état by radio after the King, Parliament, and Government had left the capital.

So much for your claim that "Quisling and his co-Norwegians set up" the German invasion. And pray tell, what do you mean by his "co-Norwegians"? Are you unaware of the elementary fact that Quisling was acting in his private capacity without any political office whatsoever, having repeatedly failed to win a seat in Parliament for his tiny fascist party, whose best result in a national election was two -- 2 -- percent? Two percent is also the proportion of Norwegians who joined his party during the occupation, when it was the only one allowed and a must for making any sort of career. How does that fit your ill-informed (if not just dishonest) attempt to paint the Norwegian people as glowing Nazis?

Don't you know that Quisling was hated outright by the vast majority of Norwegians to such an extent that he positively boosted the resistance, and that his execution in October 1945 was an occasion of national celebrationO? Or that, even in his capacity as "Minister President" from 1942, he was a mere figurehead for the terroristic occupational government of Reichskommissar Joseph Terboven?

You seem to be under the impression that Norway's legitimate government during the occupation was pro-German. That must be why you are making song and dance about the stamps being issued to honor Norwegian SS recruits. If you really didn't know that the King and Government evacuated to London in June 1940, whence they led the resistance as a recognized full ally, they you really ought to shut up about all this. (Incidentally, the Crown Princess virtually lived in the White House with her children -- including the current king, Harald V -- as guests of President Roosevelt).

While it's true that several thousand Norwegians joined the Waffen SS, it's misleading to suggest that most of these were ideological Nazis. Research has shown that the majority were anti-communists who joined to fight against the Soviet Union rather than for Germany. Additionally, many had joined to fight in and for Finland in keeping with a pre-existing mercenary tradition, but found themselves deployed to the Eastern Front in spite of promises made. All survivors were tried and punished upon liberation.

The Norwegian anti-Nazi effort, which you perversely leave out of your specious argument, was rather more significant to the outcome of World War II. If Norway was so sympathetic to the Nazi German cause, perhaps you might explain why none -- 0 -- of Norwegian merchant ships obeyed the order from the occupational gov't to seek neutral or German harbor. All of the more than 1,000 ships (26 million metric tons brutto, 26,000 crewmen) went into Allied service.

This merchant fleet, the most modern in the world and the 4th largest, took part in virtually every Allied naval operation worldwide from the Murmask convoys to Malta, Egypt, South-America and Australia, as well as the invasions of Sicily, the Pacific Islands, Morocco, and Normandie. In 1941-42 it delivered 30-40 percent of all oil to Britain, and was appraised by a British military journal to have the equivalent value to a million troops. The losses it incurred amounted to 40 percent of the pre-war tonnage and inflicted on Norway a higher per capita death toll than the USA.

The proceeds allowed the government-in-exile to reconstruct a navy and air force, based in Canada and Britain. Although small in number, these forces participated in a long list of operations from sinking the battle cruiser Scharnhorst, via bombing raids in Germany, to D-day. Other Norwegian contributions include the commando operations against the heavy water facility in Telemark, which British SOE called the most successful act of sabotage in WWII, and the military intelligence network XU whose spies, such as Sverre Bergh, kept the Allies posted on the most important German weapons programmes including V1-V2 and Wasserfall, the world's first ground-to-air missile. The highest decorated Allied naval officer of WWII was one Commander Leif Larsen, whose crew operated a near-suicidal ferry line between Western Norway and Shetland, supplying Norwegian partisans (some 50,000 strong) at daunting odds.

It seems the particular axe you are grinding concerns Norwegian (and Swedish) treatment of Jews. I'll deal with your preposterous allegations on that score in a later comment, if time permits. But I think it should be clear enough already that your accusation, "Norway [was] OPENLY sympathetic to the NAZIS, even today," is a disgraceful lie. Indeed, the decent course would be to apologize.

32 posted on 11/26/2006 9:57:53 AM PST by ProudNorseman
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