Life in Norway during the Second World War

Someone on Reddit asked a simple question: what was life like in Norway during WW2?

The answers ran to hundreds of comments so I cannot verify them individually, but what people describe, aligns closely with the history of the Norwegian occupation. History that survives in family memory is not the same as history that survives in archives, but I tend to value it more.

Grandchildren remembering what grandparents had told them - fragments of stories, that make up the kind of history that never makes it into books because no one thought to write it down.

In the answers, one person shared a diary entry of their grandfather, who had written it to his newborn son, in Oslo, in September 1942. The Nazi occupation of Norway was in its third year and Stalingrad was still under siege. The father had spent most of the day searching the city for a pacifier.

"The joy of your birth is great and all-conquering, but is sometimes divided by the thought of what the future will bring. Even daily needs cause difficulties and worries. None of what you as a newborn should and must have can be bought in the ordinary way."

He wrote about milk rations, about the cold, and how Allied planes had bombed the city that afternoon, and how people were in a strange mood; part fear, part grim satisfaction. He noted that the baby now had bread cards and meat cards, which was more than most.

The Norwegian occupation lasted five years, from April 1940 to May 1945. It touched every part of the country differently. What the Reddit comments make clear is how much the experience varied depending on where you lived, how old you were, and how visible you made yourself.

In the cities, the shortages were constant; food was rationed, leather disappeared and things that had always been made from it like wallets and shoes, started being made from fish leather instead. In one comment, a mother remembered her daughter getting a new jacket for her birthday, wearing it proudly to school, and watching it dissolve in the rain on the way home. It had been made of paper. A grandmother was told by her doctor, after the liberation, to drink cream to put some fat back on her body.

In the countryside, people tried to hide what they had before the Germans could record and confiscate it. Calves were concealed in silos. The Sami in the north faced a particular cruelty. Reindeer herding families were ordered to bring their animals to Helligskogen so the herds could be slaughtered to feed the German army. Many families went into hiding rather than comply, keeping their fires low so the smoke wouldn't give them away, and spreading the animals so they wouldn't look like they were being tended.

Fear ran through everything - fear of saying the wrong thing, of being overheard, or of not knowing who among your neighbours might report you.

"We were very very suspicious of other people. One could not know who was a nazi and would turn you in. We all kept very quiet."

Hidden radios were common. People gathered in basements and barns to listen to broadcasts from the government in exile, despite knowing that getting caught meant arrest or worse. One comment mentions how a grandfather spent the rest of his life flinching at the sound of aircraft overhead. His dementia, decades later, would send him to the phone in the night to warn the police that the Nazis were at the port.

The cost of resistance was not borne individually. Families understood that if one person was arrested, everyone who depended on them paid the price. That calculation, to stay quiet, keep your head down, protect the people around you, shaped millions of small decisions across the five years of occupation.

Despite this, many comments mention how people pushed back, in ways that were sometimes brave and sometimes just quietly satisfying.

A grandmother in Oslo played mocking march tunes on the piano in time to the boots of German soldiers passing her basement window. A woman whose house the Germans wanted to requisition for soldiers brought them inside, showed them a family of eleven sharing three beds, and watched them leave. Another woman, when ordered to darken her windows during a curfew, pointed at the German command centre nearby, which was fully lit, and said "you first", then closed the door.

A grandfather regularly forged the food records at the local commission for the poor, stealing supplies from German stocks to feed the elderly and the poor, then rowing them across the fjord in the dead of night to the poorhouse. A nurse, forced to treat wounded German officers, watered down their morphine before surgery. Boys threw pebbles at German soldiers. A grandmother tossed a pan of dirty dishwater out of the kitchen window onto a soldier who had been keeping his motorcycle started beneath it and stinking up the street.

The worst of it happened in the north. Several comments come from families in Finnmark. In 1944, as the German army retreated, it implemented a scorched earth policy across the north of Troms and the entire Finnmark county. Everything was burned. Families were forced out at gunpoint, loaded onto buses, their livestock shot in front of them. One grandfather had gold buried in the ground; when his family returned, it was gone. A great-uncle died as a child just before the Germans burned the family's house. They hadn't been able to bury him yet. The body was stored in an outhouse. The Germans burned that too. Years later, a great-aunt published an account of how she had placed her brother's remains into a small coffin so that he could finally be buried.

A grandmother from that region, still alive, remembered hiding in the bottom of a boat as a child while her family fled. She said the worst part was that people in the south didn't believe how bad it had been up north.

The thread also contains the stories that are harder to tell. A woman who spent the war in a relationship with a German officer, then went back to her husband when it was over. Girls who accepted dresses and perfumes and nights out on the town from German soldiers while everyone around them went hungry — and who were, one grandmother recalled with hostility eighty years later, smug about it. A community that remembered, precisely and permanently, who had been "a little striped" (a low level collaborator) and who had been, in a phrase said by one elderly woman as quoted in the thread, "a goddamn Quisling."

The father who wrote the diary in September 1942 did not know how much longer it would last. He didn't know that his son would grow up in a free country, or that the diary would eventually end up on the internet for strangers to read. He was just trying to account for the world his child had been born into.