Deutsche Presse-Agentur
December 27, 2004, Monday
02:05:07 Central European Time

Villa of Norway’s Nazi leader to open as Holocaust museum

By Thomas Borchert, dpa

Oslo

The former mansion of Norwegian Nazi politician and occupation leader
Vidkun Quisling is due to be opened as a centre for Holocaust studies
in January. Following extensive building works, 25 historians and
other scientists are waiting to move into the huge villa which once
boasted 3,000 square metres of living space high above the Oslo
Fjord. The residence, in which Quisling – infamous for his
deferential collaboration with the Nazis between 1941 and 1945 –
mocked the lifestyle of his idolized Fuehrer, is scheduled to be
opened in September 2006 with a permanent exhibition about the
Holocaust. A series of other genocides will also be featured in the
exhibition, among them the 1905 killing of the Herero in South West
Africa, as well as the genocides in Armenia (1915), Cambodia (1975)
Rwanda (1994), and the Balkans (1995). “I am afraid that we might
have to include Darfur in Sudan, too,” says the centre’s director
Odd-Bjorn Fure. The 62-year old historian from Bergen plans to “bring
the Holocaust back into the entirety of history” with the exhibition.
He also refers to the fate of 15 million civilian forced labourers,
and that of the Sinti and Roma, homosexuals and Jehovah’s Witnesses
under the Nazi regime. Including these groups and other genocides
into the perspective of the exhibition is morally correct and the
only way to point out the specific features of the Holocaust,
according to the historian, whose previous academic postings include
Zurich and Berlin. Fure’s position is supported by Oslo’s Jewish
community, which represents half of the board of the “Centre for the
Study of the Holocaust and the Position of Minority Belief Groups in
Norway”. In total, 735 Norwegian Jews were killed in the German
Holocaust, while only 50 survived. It was a former detainee of the
Sachsenhausen concentration camp, retired General Bjorn Egge, who
first suggested to turn Quisling’s former villa into a centre to
commemorate the Holocaust. The building, which resembles the massive
structures of Nazi architecture outside and inside, is beautifully
located on the Bygdoy Peninsula on the Western side of the Oslo
Fjord. Other popular tourist destinations on the peninsula are the
Kon- Tiki Museum of explorer Thor Heyerdahl, the Fram Museum, which
commemorates the achievements of Polar explorers such as Fridtjof
Nansen and Roald Amundsen, as well as Viking and maritime museums.
Neo-Nazis searching for traces of Quisling, however, will not find
much in the centre, even though the oak-furnished study of the former
Minister President of Norway’s Nazi occupation government has been
preserved, as well as the so-called jewellery room of Quisling’s wife
Maria. Visitors of the exhibition will only have access to his
furnished underground bunker which has been preserved the way it was
at the end of the Nazi regime in Norway, when Quisling was arrested
at the villa on May 9, 1945. The man, who had formed Norway’s fascist
Nasjonal Samling party in May 1933 and whose name eventually became a
synonym for traitor, was tried and executed by a firing squad on
October 24, 1945. Far from allowing history to be taken over by
sentiment, the new centre’s director emphasizes: “Here, we do not
want to appeal to feelings above all, as is the case at the Holocaust
Museum in Washington.” “We place much greater emphasis on rational
understanding and the question how similar events can be prevented in
the future,” he adds. dpa tb emc sc