In the early days of World War II, as Nazi Germany brutally invaded and occupied neighboring countries around Europe, hundreds of Norwegian police officers were commanded to carry out the orders of the Nazi occupiers of their homeland - Norway. They refused. Even under threat of death, they refused. Their refusal led to their imprisonment and their removal from Norway, ultimately to KZ-Stutthof in eastern Poland, where an elaborate network of concentration and death camps had been created mainly for Jews and Poles. Author Tore Jørgensen's father was one of those police officers.
Stutthof Diaries Collection: For Truth & Honor (FriesenPress, 2022) is a recounting of these heroes' experiences, both in trying to maintain national pride and order in Norway before their expulsion and in trying to stay alive and outlast mental and physical exhaustion while in detainment. Over the last 22 years, as a labor of love and duty to preserve, Jørgensen gathered a large number of diaries and memoirs in which the police, true to their training, recorded the details of their experiences. These articulate witness accounts have provided a record that is exceptional - a treasure trove of anecdotes describing how personal sacrifice can triumph over purposeless greed and violence.
The story of these Norwegian police officers is a story that celebrates the redemptive force of conscious choice against evil, of how love and compassion can help people through some of the darkest periods of their lives. Through their stories, the Norwegian police officers, loyal to their country and each other while reaching out to aid their fellow sufferers at the same time that they struggled for their own survival, urge readers to not repeat the history and the myth of racial superiority that led to the rise of Nazism.
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Tore Jørgensen, "Stutthof Diaries Collection: For Truth & Honor" (FriesenPress, 2022) | New Books in German Studies podcast - Listen or read transcript on Metacast
