The following memoir, which is published here for the first time, is by Nils Dahl, who celebrated his eightieth birthday earlier this year.
Comrade Dahl is an activist, who was for a time Trotsky's bodyguard in Norway, and he has previously made available to us all his material on the sad fate of Walter Held -- for which see Revolutionary History Volume I , No 2, Summer 1988, pp 9-11, and Volume I, No 4, Winter 1988-89, pp 39-43.
This personal account throws some unfamiliar light on Trotsky's views and personality and the response of the Scandinavian Trotskyism to the Finnish War. It is also a fascinating account of early Norwegian Trotskyism with which most readers will be unfamiliar.
I first became acquainted with the labour movement and with politics generally because I came from a family that had been deeply involved in politics since 1814, when Norway was liberated from Denmark by Marshal Bernadotte, a former French revolutionary. My father's brother was a parliamentary member for the Conservative Party between 1920 and 1927, and their grandfather was in Eidsvoll in 1814.[1] During the war of 1814 he was the host of Bernadotte as the mayor of a city called Halden which was close to the Swedish border. The town was taken over by Bernadotte and used as his military headquarters during this war. When I was a student in 1927 there was a very violent political discussion and an economic crisis, especially in the countryside. In 1928-29 I did my compulsory military service as a reserve officer, and in 1929 I went into a political student organisation called Mot-Dag, led by a man called Erling Falk. Mot-Dag means 'Towards Daybreak'. Falk had come back from the USA in 1920 where he had been involved with the 'Wobblies'.[2] Being an accountant, he knew very well how big business was organised, and he organised Mot-Dag, mainly a students' organisation, using the same organisational methods as big business. It was a very effective organisation. He played a leading role in the events of 1923, when the Norwegian Labour Party broke with the Comintern, and he was responsible for making the declaration which was carried in the Labour Party by two votes. There was a violent row between him and Radek. Radek said that the Norwegian Labour Party had to choose between Falk and the Comintern. Later Falk was manoeuvred out of the Labour Party (in 1924) and took his organisation with him. He was slung out because of the antimilitarist, pacifist position that he held. In 1926 he applied for membership of the Communist Party and this was refused by the Communist Party Central Committee in Norway, but the Russians had a commissar in Norway and Falk went along to see this commissar and got his support. So Mot-Dag was co-opted into the Communist Party by the vote of this Russian commissar, in spite of the antagonism of the Norwegian Communist Party. That is a rather surprising story, even in the Stalinist movement.
Mot-Dag did educational work among the students, scientists and literary people. When Stalin set up the Lenin school a few Mot-Dag members went there as teachers and students. Three of them, Uhle, Erle and Falk were greatly influenced by Stalinism. Because of this, as long as Erling Falk dominated the organisation, it was not a danger to the Stalinists. His health started to go in 1933-34 and he was expelled from his own organisation in 1936. I had only just joined the Communist Party in 1929, when I was expelled as an oppositionist in Trondheim. That was my first experience of expulsion. After the expulsion Mot-Dag expanded and took over the student organisation at Oslo University, and partly in the Technical High School in Trondheim.
After I had finished my technical education in Trondheim, the third city in Norway, I took further studies in photogrammetry in Berlin, in the technical high school. My father had a big surveying office in Norway, and photogrammetry was the up and coming thing. In the autumn of 1932 I got involved in the German Communist movement because after the expulsions of 1928-29, Mot-Dag as an organisation was heavily involved with the Communist Opposition in Berlin. The organisation was called the Communist Party (Opposition) (KPO) which was the centre of an international organisation (IVKO -- International Verein Kommunistische Opposition) under the leadership of Heinrich Brandler and Fenner Brockway. When I went there they were publishing a paper called Gegen den Strom (Against the Stream). I gave them a report about the dispute between Denmark and Norway over Greenland. I went on the editorial board in the autumn of 1932 as a representative from Mot-Dag. I also went to some lectures by Brandler and Thalheimer on general politics. Brandler and Thalheimer never slept two nights in the same place. They were always on the move. The meetings of the editorial board could no longer be held in the evening. We would meet in the business quarter in the day time, as that was the best camouflage. I do not know what they planned to do in the event of a Nazi takeover. They thought that the political future was obvious. There was great optimism in the autumn of 1932 because there was the new general election in November, and in this election Hitler lost two million votes. I had some discussions with a Liberal and he said 'Now Hitler is finished!' and I said:'You are wrong, because even now they have great influence in the trade union movement, and the leader of theirs in the Ruhr district has virtually taken over the trade union, which is much more important from a revolutionary point of view than losing two million votes'.
Then, just before Hitler came to power, I fell sick and went back to Norway at Christmas 1932. Hitler took over in January, a week or two after I left. As a Norwegian national I do not think I was in any danger, and I went back in 1936 without any difficulty.
Earlier the situation was really dangerous. I lived in the working class Altmoabit district, the eastern part of Berlin, and once I was nearly killed because I wore a brown cap that was regarded as Nazi. I have never seen such a situation before, where people were sleeping in the streets, and people were throwing themselves in front of railways and trams, and so on. You could not walk in the streets without women hanging on to you. The only way to get rid of them was to say 'Rein gelt', 'No money'. The housing situation was curious, since young people did not have the money to hire the usual flats, so they lived in cellars and attics whilst the rest of the house stood empty. That was one of the things that Hitler did when he came to power -- he got the rents down, so people could live, and he earned a lot of sympathy because of this. In Berlin it was a left-wing Nazi who was in charge, Gregor Strasser, and he was only less radical in words than a Trotskyist. He had three main slogans:'Get the fat bureaucrats!', 'Get the Bolsheviks!' and if anybody asked him the practical difficulty of carrying out some policy or other, 'The Führer will manage that!'
It was in September or October or November that we had a transport strike. All the trams and buses stopped, and in Prussia there was a Labour government which sent troops against the strikers. The Nazis joined the strike, and as a result two Nazis were killed by soldiers or by the patriotic police. That made a very great impression on the workers in Norway.
Mot-Dag made attempts to get Jewish women out of Germany. A number of our people went to Germany and married them. In some cases it became a business racket, and some did it in return for paying off their student loans. These were not the political people.
When I arrived back in Norway in 1933, I did not get any technical employment, so I worked for Mot-Dag from 1933-34. After we were thrown out of the Comintern, Mot-Dag was independent (1929-36). The main theoretical work had been to get a translation of Karl Marx's Capital published. This project was led by Falk. There were about a hundred, mainly intellectual, members in the organisation in those days, in different kinds of professions -- lawyers, historians, and so on. Those people were able to make the Erst encyclopaedia based on Marxism and working class politics ever published outside Russia. The money was given by a big Labour weekly which was going well. The three main sources of income in those days were the publication of a big monthly paper, Mot-Dag, the translation of Capital and a series of pamphlets on the sexual question. These last were a tremendous success, which earned our organisation a lot of money. The translation of Capital sold quite nicely and we could make our political points in the discussions with the help of Karl Marx's Capital and 'Theory of Crises'. The encyclopaedia came out in six volumes. Only the first and second volumes of Capital had been translated by 1936 when Mot-Dag joined the Labour Party and Falk was thrown out.
In Mot-Dag I had a sub-editorial job and had to do the lay-out of the monthly paper and collect the manuscripts from people on time.
In 1934-35 I held small jobs on building sites in Oslo, and I was able to join the building workers' union. In 1936 I got a job as a surveyor, working for the union of unskilled building workers in Oslo. That was the biggest trade union in Oslo with 6000 members. We controlled all building work in Oslo and in many sites outside Oslo, such as those for hydroelectrical power stations, roads, and so on. All work had to be paid according to a certain price list. Ah work was piece work, which had to be measured, and the money was paid out under union control. I and between five and ten technicians had to survey all the different jobs that were on that list. My job was to see to it that every worker got his pay. By that system the job of foreman, the capitalists' representative on the floor, was reduced to getting the necessary materials to the workers. I was the first person with a higher technical education who was attached to a local trade union as an employee. Before me there had been two lawyers on the highest level of the union. Trygve Lie[3] was the first who joined the trade union organisation. After him was Wiggo Hansteen, [4] who was shot by the Germans in 1941. I had an interesting job dealing with the wage rates for different jobs, and I developed considerable standing in the union between 1936-40. That was more or less my background in politics and trade union matters, from which I discussed a number of different questions with Trotsky.
In 1929 someone in Berlin had written to the leader of the Norwegian Labour Party asking for asylum for Trotsky in Norway, and the Labour Party Group took it up and put forward a motion in Parliament that he should be allowed to live there. The Liberals were bitterly against it, but the whole Labour Party voted unanimously to accept him in Norway. That was the background, so everybody knew that the Labour Party was committed on that. Falk managed to reverse the Liberal Party's previous decision against accepting Trotsky, though Trotsky was not told of this. A Stalinist faction took over the student group and was against inviting him. One of their Committee was Gerhardsen.[5]
Falk was very impressed by Trotsky. He went to Copenhagen in 1932 to try to get Trotsky to speak to the Norwegian student organisation. Trotsky was suspicious of him because of his Stalinist past, and the Trotskyists kept the whole thing very quiet. Norway had a Liberal government in 1932, but the Liberal government refused a visa except for a short visit.
Later, in 1935, there was a great change in Norway as the Labour Party got the chance of taking over the government, though it was not the majority. The general election of 1935 gave them the majority, and some went into the government. At the same time Trotsky's case came up. Trotsky was invited at the beginning of July. He was not at all keen to go. Three people took up the task of getting him to Norway. They were Waiter Held, Scheflo, [6] who was the former leader of the Communist Party, and Falk, who was the leader of Mot-Dag. Held wrote to him asking him to come on 27 March 1935. The first plan was that he would come into the country as a tourist, would stay with Scheflo in the south of Norway, and from there should apply for an extension of his stay. Trotsky said that he would not use that method -- he had to do it openly, and he insisted upon that. Nygaardsvold [7] was asked, and he said:'Cannot you wait until the Parliamentary recess in the summer?' Then the situation got worse for Trotsky in France, so that he had to leave there. He said to me:'It seemed that I had a choice as between Madagascar and Oslo, and I think Norway is preferable. So he got a telegram from his son saying that it was to be Norway in April. He went to Paris and then he stayed in Chamonix and was only allowed to be there for 24 hours. It was a really difficult situation at the beginning of June, and from 1 June to 12 June there was a lot of work for Held in persuading the government to let him in. The Norwegian state bureaucracy put up every obstacle in Held's way, but finally Trotsky was allowed in.
I met Trotsky some time after he arrived in Norway in the middle of June 1935. I was a political and personal friend of Waiter Held, who was Trotsky's representative in Norway. In those days I was a regular reader of the German Trotskyist paper Unser Wort. I met Trotsky as soon as he had settled down in HC)nefoss, which is a little town about an hour's drive from Oslo. In those days I had a car at my disposal and on many occasions took Waiter Held over to see Trotsky.
I stayed with Trotsky for two periods of time, each lasting for a number of days. One was in September 1935, and one was at Christmas 1935 and early 1936. In between, and later, I went only on day trips to Honefoss, and in 1936 I remember we mainly discussed the situation in the Norwegian trade unions. I tried to explain my two longer visits with Trotsky to Deutscher, but he got it wrong. Trotsky had a pleasant time in 1935. No-one bothered him except for some articles in the Agrarian Party papers, and even the Communists kept quiet in 1935 so that he had a good opportunity to do some work. However, in the summer of 1935 Trotsky had been sick. The leading Mot-Dag doctor, Karl Evang, saw to it that he was sent to hospital for investigations and tried to find out what was wrong. According to his report to Mot-Dag neither Socialist nor capitalist doctors could find out what was wrong with him. It could have been nervous strain, and he was discharged from hospital in August. I think he recovered well by September 1935. At the end of August, Konrad Knudsen, Trotsky's host, asked me if I knew a place where Trotsky could have a peaceful rest out of reach of people. At that time we used a big house, in a lonely park in a forest in Andorsrud in Skoger as a resort for holidays. Once upon a time Andorsrud had been a large property which had gone broke. In 1935 it was owned by a bank, but the old woman who was the former owner of the house still lived there and kept it in good order, and we used to go there for weekends. So I was able to arrange it.
Sköger is 90 kilometres south-west of Oslo and about an hour and a half's drive from Hönefoss. I had a car at my disposal in those days because I was in charge of an aeroplane firm's section for photogrammetry for map-making. We met secretly in Drammen, midway between Skogen and Oslo. Trotsky arrived with Natalia, Konrad Knudsen and Jean van Heijenoort, who was his secretary then, together with my wife and I. I took this opportunity of taking the week off to get married, and the week we spent together with Trotsky was also my honeymoon. Waiter Held also married at this time. It was a very quiet and peaceful time and we had a lot of discussions in front of the fireplace in the evenings, or when we were walking. That was my main period with Trotsky. My wife spoke fluent French because she had been in France as an au pair; also she was a nurse, and Natalia, who spoke very good French, was then suffering with some stomach ailment, so they spent a lot of time together. My wife looked after Trotsky's health, and she was astonished at the sort of pills he needed for digestion, and so on. 1 was not able to communicate very much with Natalia because she only spoke French. With Trotsky it was much easier, because I spoke German well, and he did too. It was only occasionally that I was able to communicate with Natalia, but for my wife it was the other way round. After that week I met Trotsky time and again. In December 1935 I was mobilised by Konrad Knudsen asking me to come to help because Trotsky had gone for a vacation in Knudsen's hut in the wooded district east of Hönefoss, and there had been a very heavy snowfall and Trotsky had been snowed in. I immediately went there. In the neighbourhood there was a hotel. When I arrived Trotsky had been able to get out of the hut on his own. He and Natalia had succeeded in getting down to the valley without our help, so we only went to the hut to clear up and put it back in some order. (It was a difficult time with storms and heavy snow falls in December 1935. It would have been impossible for Piatakov to have visited Trotsky then, as Vyshinsky claimed during the second Moscow Trial.) I was able to ski to the hut and down to the valley, although the snow was knee deep. I spent Christmas Eve together with Trotsky. I remember that there were a number of people and some local kids, and Trotsky was pressurised to walk around the Christmas tree, but he refused to go along with this custom of walking around the tree.
He needed a new milieu in winter time, and he got it in the hut. He said later on that he was too old for the exercise of being snowed in and getting out. It seemed to me that the shock brought back his working abilities. He worked very hard during the spring of 1936. Konrad Knudsen told me that Trotsky used to get up at 5 o'clock in the morning, get himself some tea or bread, and then work on his own until 8 o'clock in the morning, when he would go down for his usual breakfast meal. Then he would carry on working all day. There were times when his secretaries complained that even they could not stick to the eight hours work, either.
In 1936 I left my business job and went into the trade union movement and got a professional job there. I remember that I discussed the Norwegian trade union movement with Trotsky in 1936, but I was not really very much involved with him that year. He was busy in the spring of 1936 writing The Revolution Betrayed, and I have not now any remembrance of our being together during this period. When he was arrested in August 1936, he had been in the southern part of Norway together with Scheflo, who was a political friend of his and the leader of the Norwegian Communist Party from 1923 until he was expelled or left in 1928 (as were most of our friends from the Comintern).
In 1935 there had been a lot of difficulty before the Norwegian Labour government, as a minority government, dared to give him a visa. Obviously they regretted it in 1936, and left the dirty work to Trygve Lie. He had Trotsky cut off from the outside world so he could not comment on the Moscow Trials. The pressure on Trotsky's friends in 1936 was very strong. Indeed, in the first Moscow Trial Stalin threatened the Norwegian Trotskyists around Scheflo with elimination. Falk fell ill in 1936 and was never again what he had been before. He died in 1940. Scheflo was ill too, and had to resign as editor in Kristiansand. When Norway was occupied he was too ill to be brought to Sweden. He died in hospital in 1943.
The reason for Trotsky's expulsion from Norway in 1936, as far as governmental opinions and facts are concerned, have now been published in a book in Norway, written by a Liberal researcher named Yngvar Ustvedt. He had the opportunity of going through the wartime files of documents of the Nazi organisation and the documents in the Norwegian Foreign Office. The book is more or less a compilation from these documents. The research for the book has been done rather hurriedly, and has been published under the title of The World Revolution from Hönefoss. This book gives the answers to most of the questions concerning the facts and the forces behind the official actions.
There are plenty of interviews and quotations from eyewitnesses. Documents exist giving the official accounts and explanations. The attacks on Trotsky were made as a combined operation by very different groups. It is very difficult to divide them because they were so interconnected. Many things happened at the same time. So many incidents happened on different planes.
As soon as the Revolution Betrayed was finished he went down to Scheflo and spent the whole summer there. He was immediately attacked by forces in Germany who acted with the help of gangs of Norwegian followers of Quisling. The German attack was followed by a Russian attack in connection with the first Moscow Trial in the middle of August. The Labour minority government which had given Trotsky asylum came under heavy attack from internal forces, the Liberals and reactionary politicians as well as Nazi-sympathising bureaucrats.
This was during the first Moscow Trial, and he defended himself vigorously, and gave press conferences, and so on. This was noticed in the Norwegian Parliament and because of Russian pressure he was interned. A certain Major Attlee, who was Prime Minister of Britain after the war, sent a private letter to Nygaardsvold. Attlee pointed out that this treatment of Trotsky was a very bad precedent for all refugees. I asked here where one could find a copy of this letter, but I have not been able to find out. It was a private letter. The security forces were called out and it was obvious that his life was in danger. Later two Nazis admitted in court that they had conspired to kill him. One of them tried to burgle his house, and the burglar said in a book that when he met Trotsky the latter spoke fluently in German and stated that the Nazi was helping Stalin and Stalin's politics. That made an impression on the Nazi, who sat down, thought it over and decided he did not want to help Stalin. As a result the man was reprimanded by his Nazi superior, and accused of losing his Nazi ideology. Later when Trotsky went to Scheflo he was followed by a gang of Nazis, one of whom had a room at the hotel, and he had an automatic pistol pointed at him, so he immediately dashed round the corner. His life was really in danger. Although I could see that he was very angry at being interned and kept there, yet I think that this actually saved his life.
The Labour politicians feared they might lose their governmental position. They got panicky, and Trygve Lie resorted to brutality towards Trotsky. Trotsky was condemned to death in Moscow as an international terrorist on 24 August. On 25 August he was put under arrest by a decision of the Norwegian Labour government. So he was interned and placed under the surveillance of the state police and cut off from the world. He was deprived of the possibility of defending himself and of criticising the Trial. The state police were led by a man who committed suicide in 1945 shortly before he could have been arrested by the liberation movement. His name was Jonas Lie. During the war he was the leader of the Norwegian internal police fighting against the resistance movement, 1942-45. But in 1936 he and Trygve Lie collaborated, and had Trotsky interned in a place called Sundby in Hurum, between Oslo and Skoger. That was the first, up to now the only, concentration camp that there ever was in Norway, and it was established in September-October 1936. I was again mobilised in December 1936 by Waiter Held and Konrad Knudsen, who asked me to be prepared to be a bodyguard for Trotsky, who was going to go through France. His friends there had obtained a transit visa for him. I got in contact with a well-known French lawyer, Gerard Rosenthal, who had come to Norway. Shortly before Christmas we discussed how we were going to contact Trotsky and arrange the journey to France. We applied to Trygve Lie but only got an evasive answer. Just before Christmas it was announced that Trotsky had left Norway some weeks before, although they had still kept a police guard around the place to prevent the Communist Party and others from intervening. So he had been deported secretly on a Norwegian vessel under the control of Jonas Lie. He was sent to a Norwegian concentration camp in September, but he was not handed over to Russian justice, thanks mainly to that letter from Attlee to the Norwegian Labour government. Under police guard, he and Natalia were sent to Mexico on 8 January, where he regained his freedom. To avoid being attacked on the open sea, the vessel took detours on the way to Mexico. The ship had been ordered to maintain radio silence, but the Stalinists seem to have learned of the wavelength and code, and they sent a message: 'New orders. Go to the Baltic'. The captain was clever enough not to reply and to carry on to Mexico. For Held, myself and the French lawyer Gerard Rosenthal, it was a bitter disappointment that Trotsky had left us. It was almost Christmas 1936. The idea that Mexico would regard it as an honour to give Trotsky unconditional asylum came from Aras, the Turkish foreign minister. The Russian Ambassador sent Trygve Lie flowers when Trotsky was sent to Mexico.
There is a problem about the real causes as to why Trotsky was first invited and then was expelled from Norway. It is rather a long story and to answer it would depend upon your point of view. Trotsky explained his view in a book published in Switzerland: Stalin's Verbrechen (The Crimes of Stalin). I tried to investigate which forces in the labour movement were behind Trygve Lie in his work of expelling Trotsky. Soon after Trotsky was expelled I, together with Konrad Knudsen, went to meet the right wing leader of the Norwegian labour movement. The labour movement had been split in three in 1923, a right wing Social Democrat Party, a centrist party led by Tranmael [8], and a Communist Party round Scheflo. When I met the right wing leader, Magnus Nilssen, [9] in 1937 I asked him if he felt like a victor now that Trotsky had been expelled from Norway. He got a bit touchy and said that I was quite wrong. It was not the right wing Social Democrats who stood behind Trygve Lie, it was their opponents. The people around Trygve Lie who pushed him were the people who, in the old days, had been 'so unbelievably revolutionary', as Nilssen expressed it. After later investigation I found that that he was correct. It was wavering centrists around Tranmael who were the driving forces behind Trygve Lie, and the best helpers of Stalin in his bloody work.
The basic reason for Trotsky's expulsion was the pressure from Germany and Russia from the outside, and from the Norwegian Nazis from the inside. This sketch only gives a bare and incomplete picture about what happened to Trotsky in the second half of 1936. I intend to add a further report when I return to Norway and have studied the recently published book World Revolution from Hönefoss, and have looked into my own archives.
Northern Norway: I had done my military service in the northern part of Norway, Finnmark, in 1929. When I first met Trotsky I had just been up there for a big manoeuvre in 1935. The first Labour Minister of Defence, Monsen, who had been a Communist between 1923 and 1928, had been in northern Norway to see for himself what the situation was really like. The Finns had a Fascist movement which thought that the northern part of Norway should belong to Finland. The Finnish 'danger' came in addition to the Russian 'danger'. I raised the question, and I asked Trotsky what was the policy of Russia on the northern part of Scandinavia. He evaded the direct question by saying that the Russian policy there nowadays had more or less to resemble the old Czarist politics. Czarist expansionist politics had been defensive in the north and offensive in the south. That was because of their resources and geography. What we had, he said, were vast numbers of people who could not be used in the northern part because of the topography. It is impossible to use a great number of people there. That was a general point in the Czarist policies, and he said that such things as resources and topography were more important for strategic considerations of expansion than whether the society was Socialist or Communist or capitalist.
Berlin experience: Trotsky was obviously most interested in my report from Berlin and how the Nazis took over the trade unions. I told him quite a lot about the 'Verkehr' strike (buses and tram cars) in the autumn of 1932, and how the Communists and Nazis fought together during the strike against a police force built by Social Democratic ministers. Two Nazis were shot. The left wing of the Nazi party, which dominated the Nazi organisation in eastern Berlin, was inspired by Gregor Strasser, the so-called 'Schwartze Front' (the 'Black Front'). They were violently anti-capitalistic from 1932 until they were liquidated by Hitler. In addition, Trotsky was interested in the outlook of the people around Brandler. I asked him what he thought about the organisation and the KPO people. He used the expression that they were 'verkapte Trotskyisten' (in Trotsky's clothes or cap). I mentioned this later to some of the KPO people in Oslo and they were rather pleased by the characterisation. I told Trotsky about my studies, and about Brandler and Thalheimer: they believed that Trotsky had been right in his criticism of Stalin in all political matters, but in economic matters they thought Stalin was right against Trotsky. To that Trotsky remarked: 'Well, there is a certain interconnection between economics and politics'.
I never liked Brandler. It was not just because he was a big bricklayer and I had a lot of trouble organising brickies in my union! My view of him is tainted by the fact that he half believed the accusations in the first Moscow Trial. I do not think that Brandler ever in spirit really left the Communist Party, and deep down he remained a Stalinist. Many of the refugees in Norway were like that. I was impressed by Thalheimer. He was a really good professor, and he knew his stuff. He was the real brain behind the Brandler organisation.
Comments on the Seventh Comintern Congress and on the United Front: In August 1935 the last conference of the Third International was held. After a seven year hate campaign against the Social Democrats, the Communists were ordered to collaborate with 'all progressive forces'. That was the new name for the liberal and capitalistic forces. From the discussions in September 1936, I remember that Trotsky said it would not be easy to carry through the new line in China, where the Communists had fought a bloody war against the 'progressive forces' inside the Kuomintang. What we did not realise in those days was that, behind Stalin's collaborationist line was the intention to be admitted to the salons of the capitalists as an ally, thus preventing independent revolutionary actions by the workers. To obtain that, he first characterised workers' internationalism as a 'tragi-comic misunderstanding'. So in Spain Stalin acted as a 'bloodhound' against workers and leaders suspected of thinking in the same way in 1937 as Lenin had done in April 1917.
In connection with the discussion in 1935 when the Communists were advised to go together with all progressive people in a People's Front, Trotsky had been sceptical about the possibility of getting that line through in China, and I asked him if it was not allowed for revolutionaries to join together with other groups in the labour and radical movement. He said of course it is, there are times when we have to go part of the road together with others, but there are two conditions. Firstly, you must never leave your own followers in doubt about what your partners really represent; and secondly, you must keep your own organisation separate from theirs.
Trotsky's comments on the Norwegian trade union organisation: Trotsky was also interested in the Norwegian labour and trade union organisation. As I was inside it, I could give him quite a lot of information about this, and he was deeply impressed by the organisation behind the trade union movement. The trade union movement in Norway was built up by revolutionary syndicalists along IWW lines, but with limited power at the top of the organisation. The real power at the top was held by 20 groups of unions mostly industrial unions.
It also combined the workers in all the districts in Norway horizontally: 'samorganisations' -- combined district organisations. There was close cooperation between unions in all the districts or parts of Norway. It was also a syndicalist idea for trade unions to group together all unions in a district and in the cities, even in peaceful periods in the class war, mainly for educational purposes. Trotsky said he thought that the Norwegian trade union organisation was more representative of the workers of Norway than the Soviets of 1917, especially in relation to the building trades workers and the land workers. It was much, much better because those groups did not have much representation in the Soviet. So he said that according to his view, to get Socialism in Norway would be very easy. All one had to do was call a 'trade union congress in permanence', if you keep the workers representing the collectives, their clubs and trade unions, and let them be elected or called back at any time. Each congress would, in reality, be a parliament, and much more fitted to keep the industry of Norway running than a parliament based on constituencies localities). In reality, later the development of the top trade union organisation in Norway was built up with sections for international connections, with statistics, research sections, with a section for lawmaking, etc. Since the war, the lawyers in LO (Norwegian equivalent of the TUG) have had a powerful position during the 30 years that Labour was in government. So, from that point of view, to get Socialism in Norway should have been very easy if it was only a question of organisation. However, in a letter to Held, Trotsky analysed the developments in the Norwegian labour movement in 1935-36. His conclusion was that the Labour Party would have a poor future and Mot-Dag would have no future. That might be a better assessment of his view.
On Bolshevik internationalism and free discussion: In connection with our work in Mot-Dag and our attempts to build a revolutionary organisation and to study the Russian experience, we had done some research and studies of Marxism in Russia. I asked Trotsky why the Russian Revolution was the only revolution in the world that had been able to develop thoroughly internationally orientated cadres, whilst most of the labour cadres in other countries were stuck deep in nationalism. How had it been possible, not only to develop some deep going studies in Marxist theory, but also to get acquainted with the situation of the labour movement in many other countries, including quite primitive ones? He said that this cadre development was due to Czarism:
'Czarism gave us good working conditions; in Siberia where there were a number of collectives, we were able to make our own papers up there and send them to other groups, and make thorough criticisms of other groups. In addition, the Russian revolutionary students in Siberia learned about different political conditions all over the globe. Thanks to Czarism we went around the globe in the opposite direction to the sun: many of us went to Japan and China and further on to America, and then to Europe and back to Russia again; and some of us journeyed around the globe twice; and it was obvious when you work your way round the globe you become acquainted with a number of new situations, and so it becomes easier to be an internationalist.
In addition I asked him what really happened when Lenin set up his first revolutionary government. It was not only a government of the Bolshevik Party, since it included other organisations, such as the Social Revolutionaries, and other people, some of whom had rather Anarchistic leanings. He said that the first government, the government that took power on behalf of the Soviet Congress, was picked out from among people many of whom had never seen each other before. Those who were put in positions of authority had known so little of each other that they did not say 'you'[10] to each other. This was an expression of the personal relationships in that government.
Lenin had always regarded criticism as valuable. When he had to expel his main enemy on the theoretical plane, Martov, to Switzerland, and Martov had some financial difficulties in building up a newspaper in Switzerland, Lenin let him have money secretly so that Martov could continue to make criticisms.[11]
On the future of capitalism: We had a lot of discussions about whether it was possible for capitalism to find an equilibrium and stabilise itself, and we took this problem up in an inner study circle and went through what Rosa Luxemburg had written about it. The Russians had hypothesised that a steady advance might be a theoretical possibility, but there were so many practical difficulties that it could not be achieved. It could happen if you balance the production of commodities for production with those for consumption. Trotsky said that he would like to join the study group, but he did not have the necessary material! The only time I found him without an answer was when we spoke of Bruno Rizzi's book and I took it up with him. He evaded the question and said that if that is correct we will have to alter all our opinions. Rizzi stated that Stalinism and National Socialism would grow closer and closer together. I do not know if we read Rizzi's book in manuscript. We heard an Austrian speak to us on this called Bruno. I thought that it was Rizzi.[12] We got all these things from Waiter Held, who had an enormous correspondence.
Sending Trotskyist material to Russia: Held once told me that Trotsky had instructed him to get the newspaper stalls near to the Russian Embassy to put his Russian Bulletin on sale.
Some impressions of Trotsky as a person: These were among some of the important political questions which we discussed. Now I will also say something about my personal impressions of Trotsky. Because it was my honeymoon in September 1935, I had taken with me to Skoger some lobster and wine. That was unsuccessful because Trotsky did not drink, and we did not have the necessary gadgets to eat the lobster properly. When Trotsky refused to take a drink I said to him:'I agree that in principle people shouldn't drink, it's not healthy, but as a personal pleasure I like to take a drink'. He answered that he had met a lot of people who were revolutionary in principle and theory, and in practice were reformists. I retorted by asking if he had always been on the radical side of everything throughout his life. He said:
'No, I admit that once when I was a youngster walking in the Alps, I got terrible toothache, so I had to go to Munich to have it seen to. I found out that among the dentists there were two schools: the conservative dentist, who believed in conserving the tooth, and the other revolutionary or radical dentist who thought the only decent thing to do was to get rid of it. I admit I went with my tooth to the conservative.'
He was able to give and take teasing.
The situation among the immigrant and political refugees 1933-39: When I came back from Germany and was quite involved in politics at Mot-Dag's headquarters, many immigrants arrived from Germany. Mot-Dag built up separate sections for Germans. In Norway different types of people belonging to different German organisations were able to meet and discuss. There was the KPO section, which was led by a man called Strobel. He has been Minister of Justice in the Munich Republic and had been imprisoned for seven years. I had met him in Berlin previously, and, to start with, I was mainly involved with the KPO people. In addition there was also a group of Germans thrown out of the Social Democratic Party as left wingers. In that group (SAP Socialiste Arbeiter Partie), Frölich and Walcher (originally KPO) were the leading members. Willy Brandt [13] had been the leader of SAP's youth organisation. One of my jobs in the summer of 1934 was to give Willy Brandt some training in Marxism. I did not succeed. In addition to that there was the Trotskyist position formulated in Unser Wort and led by Waiter Held. That was his pen name; his real name was Helm Epe, and he was very well acquainted with politics, and was a very good writer with a leaning towards literature, too. In 1933-34, being on good terms with Falk, he was allowed to use Mot-Dag's secretariat as his forwarding address. When I was in this aeroplane firm in 1935, his wife was my secretary. (See Revolutionary History, Volume 1, No 2)
I did a great deal of work with immigrants in 1936-39. I was occupied in the trade union movement. My job was helping to get some of them placed in Norwegian industry. Most of them spoke only German. I was the only one of us who spoke German, which was not really common in the trade union movement in those days. The immigration into Norway then was most interesting because many of the internationalist-minded people thought that Norway would be kept out of the war as in the First World War. From there they could maintain contact with Central Europe. Some people on the periphery of Trotskyism came to Norway when Czechoslovakia was invaded. One of the most important immigrants was Alois Neurath; who was a founder of the Czechoslovak Communist Party and the General Secretary of the Comintern between the Third and the Fourth world congresses, when he ranked above, or was superior to Stalin, from an organisational point of view. He was expelled, but he arrived in Norway some time in 1936. He was a good writer. When he was expelled from the Communist Party in Czechoslovakia, his position had been taken over by a man called Guttman. Guttman arrived in Norway some weeks later and met Neurath in my house. Later, Guttman went to America. Neurath was in a curious situation, as he left Norway when Germany invaded it and went to Sweden. Neurath returned to Czechoslovakia after the Second World War and was expelled for the second time in 1948. Then suddenly in 1948 he popped up in my house again and said 'Here I am for a second time, thanks to the Czechoslovak Stalinists!' He died in Sweden. I tried to persuade him to write his memoirs, but I did not succeed.
In addition to the Czechoslovaks, Guerin came to Norway the day after war broke out, together with three Frenchmen from Pivert's group. Guerin belonged to my group in Oslo. He was very well informed, and his book about Nazism, Fascism and Big Business, is one of the best there is. He spent nearly the whole war in Norway. Guerin lived for a long time in Oslo. It was not easy, and a man had to take great precautions to live there in the war if the Gestapo were after him. He had some trouble after the war because he had worked and settled here then. When he went back to France he was accused of having been in the service of the Nazis. I turned out a declaration saying that Daniel Guerin had sold fruit and chocolate at the railway station in Oslo at the beginning of the war. He lived with Jorgen Fenelson -- his first wife. He phoned me one morning after the war and said 'Can you help me?', I said, 'Alright'. It came down to this. He said:'I have a little trouble. They regard me as a deserter from the French army.' When Guerin was called up he was a reserve officer, and he was a bit afraid of his captain. Now he was negotiating with a minister whom he told that he was in Norway the night that war broke out. The minister said: 'Alright, I will drop the case if you can prove that you were in Norway.' So he went to me and, since the police forces had been taken over by Mot-Dag people after the war, I was able to phone up a leading policeman who said:'I remember it, because I saw the document when he came to Norway.' I asked the policeman to send it to him, but he replied that Guerin was French and the document was in Norwegian. I said:'It does not matter. He speaks better Norwegian than you!' The matter could not wait, as French governments were constantly changing, and a new minister might not have agreed. Guerin succeeded in getting off the charge of desertion.
Oslo was very lively in those days, and we had a number of psychologists and psychoanalyists there, such as Wilhelm Reich. Of course we in Mot-Dag knew of Reich and his work. Reich lived in Norway for many years. He was interested mainly in psyche-analysis and the sexual question, and in this he was to the left of Mot-Dag. Wilhelm Reich had his own organisation in Norway which tried to combine Freud and Marx. Reich's articles in 1932 or 1933 were very good, and miles ahead of the Norwegian psychologists. Mot-Dag's activities in this respect were led by Karl Evang and a group of Socialist doctors, who concentrated upon freeing people from prejudice and superstition in sexual matters. Evang's point of view was more liberal than Marxist. My interest was mainly political theory and trade union organisation.
I can also remember a man from Danzig (Gdansk) who visited Trotsky. Trotsky was very interested in the situation in Danzig. In 1938 the Trotskyist group there was quite strong, with excellent members, and leaders who knew how to take advantage of the League of Nations rule in Danzig as a Free City, and there may have been some connection between them and the Polish Bund. The visit of the Danziger may have been the reason why the Germans sent a Norwegian SA member to Honefoss to tap his phone and burgle his study. Some people from Danzig wrote a very good book about Marxism.'[14] Trotsky wrote articles in the Dantigers' defence when they were tried after attempting to prevent arms being shipped to Spain from their city. Some Frenchmen also came to see him.
Like the government and royal family, some of the left wingers and revolutionaries used the last opportunity to get out by ship from western Norway when the Nazis invaded. Some went to America.
Defenders of Trotsky and Trotskyism 1937-39: Erwin Wolf was Trotsky's secretary in 1936. He fell in love with Hjordis, the daughter of Konrad Knudsen. After their arrest by the state police, Jonas Lie decided to put Wolf and Jean van Heijenoort on a ship bound for Hamburg, which would have been the same as killing them. As soon as they got in contact, one of the Labour Party journalists, Finn Moe,[15] intervened. It was then decided that the ship should first go to Copenhagen, and then it would be up to the Danish police to decide further. As a matter of fact there was no charge against them, and they had legal passports. The Danish police decided that they had to be expelled from Demark too. They were eventually put on a plane for Morocco so far as I know, and they succeeded in coming back to Europe from there. Hjordis Knudsen went to see Erwin Wolf in Paris, and together they went to Spain. I do not know if they did it on their own or organisationally, but Hjordis Knudsen told me afterwards they got a warning that they were going to be arrested by the GPU. She succeeded in escaping. Erwin Wolf disappeared.[16]
Hjordis went later to the United Nations and there worked for Trygve Lie in a secretarial capacity. She married a very important and wealthy civil engineer.[17] I met her again when her father, Konrad Knudsen, died. After the war he brought out a book by the Mexican police chief Salazar.[18] He used his influence in a publishing firm to get it translated into Norwegian. A short time later he died in peculiar circumstances, and no-one knew what had happened. It is said that he was working on his car and he was killed when it rolled over him -- most peculiar, and two others of my friends were killed in car accidents -- rather too many to be a coincidence.
Trotskyist politics in Norway: After Trotsky's expulsion, Waiter Held had contact with two of the most important Norwegian writers who had defended Trotsky in 1936, Helge Krog and Sigund Heel. Sigund Heel was the first (1920) editor of Mot-Dag. Helge Krog took up the defence of the Trotsky case against Trygve Lie and the Norwegian Labour Party on a legal basis. He was a first class author who wrote plays in defence of the feminists and their organisation in Norway. He was also a first class polemicist. We decided in spring 1937 to carry on the defence of Trotsky and to publish a paper defending Trotskyism. I was at the first editorial board meeting with Helge Krog and Heel during the spring of 1937, after Trotsky was expelled at the end of 1936. We tried to collect people who belonged to, or leaned towards, the Trotskyist position. The editorship was taken over by Jeanette Olsen. She had been on the Central Committee of the Communist Party from 1923-28 as secretary in charge of work amongst women. She had left the Communist Party in 1926 when most of the important members of different Communist Parties had been expelled because of their being to the 'right' in 1928. She took over the editorial work, and this Trotskyist paper, Oktober, came out until the outbreak of the Second World War. There were up to 10 issues every year. They produced a pamphlet, Is Trotsky an Enemy of the Labour Government?. 'Trotskyism -- a Poisonous Plant' was the title of a Labour Party article denouncing the paper. In addition to the Oslo organisation there was a group of people on the western coast in Sarda under the leadership of Jens Solli. He had been one of the legendary trade union bosses on the work sites around Norway -- people whom we called Veralle (you would call them navvies). They had quite a lot of importance, since they were Syndicalist or Anarcho-Syndicalist, and were violently opposed to all politicians. Solli was originally an Anarcho-Syndicalist. He had been able to teach himself French, and he had therefore been able to follow the literature of the opposition and the international discussions for many years. He played a certain role in 1934 and 1935 in Sarda in a group which was more or less dominated by Communist Party sympathisers on the west coast.
In 1934-32 there was an international appeal to collect money to get Ciliga and Victor Serge and a third man, whose name I have forgotten, from Moscow, from Russia. The three were more or less interned there. In 1934 there was a certain weakening of Stalin's position in Russia before the deepening purges in 1936-39. In 1934 it was still possible to get people out. Solli began to collect money by telling the Communists that the money was to help out interned Communists, without saying that they were interned in Russia. He collected a lot of money on the west coast for the International Relief Committee. That is how the Committee succeeded in getting those three people out of Russia, but after that Solli was not very popular in the Communist Party. His son, Ragnar, was one of the leading 'dynamiters' ('dynamitardes') during the occupation. He was arrested and should have been shot, but in May 1945 he was found alive in prison, so he was spared. In reality Trotsky's followers were split into three groups: there was some interconnection on a personal plane but no organised working together. Scheflo and his collaborators in Kristiansand were hard pressed. The group in Sarda fell apart. Because Scheflo in his paper compared the Catalan rising with Lenin's April Theses, Solli came to Oslo. The main force was obviously the editorial board in Oslo, and from there we had quite a number of important people coming in to help us from Central Europe.
We had a little group inside Mot-Dag of two or three people connected with Trotsky, and five to ten with the KPO. Those groups were close to Falk in 1934-35. In 1936 he was pushed out, and in the summer the organisation went into the Labour party under the leadership of Hegna, a man with Stalinistic views. In the spring of 1936 the two groups were regarded as factions having 'enemy' connections. I was expelled from the organisation at the last meeting. The expulsion took the form of the secretariat refusing to make application for my membership of the Labour Party. At that time I had got an important job in the biggest trade union in Oslo. As soon as I joined the Labour Party Group inside the union I was sent to the party's political high school in the summer, and was elected as a delegate to the party's Oslo council in the autumn. It was the central committee for Oslo city with something like 500 members behind it. I also took a membership card in the youth organisation, but I was asked to get out because of pressure from Mot-Dag. When I threatened to appeal to a higher authority if I was expelled, the case was dropped. Waiter Held was expelled from the biggest Labour organisation in Oslo, and so was Mot-Dag when it tried to defend him. I was called up before them, and I said that I was a member, but they could not expel me, unlike Held, and I would appeal to higher party bodies, so they backed off. After I had written an analysis of the Moscow Trials in Oktober some bureaucrats tried to get me off the party's board, without success; but I had to find a new pen name. In 1939 Falk said that if he had known that the opposition within Mot-Dag had been so strong, he would have fought against the secretariat.
The Finnish War: The whole group in Norway unanimously opposed the line of Trotsky on the Finnish War, and wrote a letter containing their position to the International Secretariat in Paris. [19] Trotsky had said that one should not oppose the Russians militarily, but simply keep one's distance from the occupying forces if they invaded a capitalist country where Trotskyists operated. We believed that this would be a sentence of death on every one of us if this was applied to a small country like Norway, where everybody knew everybody else, and even more so in Finland. However, within the labour movement, we fought against any bans or proscriptions on members of the Communist Party. Though Held was horrified by Mannerheim's politics, we had studied Finnish history and felt that their right to nationhood was justified.
We remembered that, in Norway in 1935, Trotsky had been asked by a journalist whether the Russian, like the French Revolution, had not devoured its own children. He replied that it had, but that the world had moved on since the eighteenth century. No longer were oppositionists sent to the guillotine, but they were simply imprisoned, because society as a whole was more humane. This was only a year before the Moscow Trials! Thus we felt his opinion about the Russian regime was naive.[20]
We had some contact with the four Finnish Deputies who refused to vote for the war credits when the Russians invaded. They were imprisoned during the war and immediately afterwards they were, rather cruelly, released and given consular appointments in the ex-Baltic states to give them first-hand experience of Russian rule. That broke them.
My role in war and Resistance: When the Germans had invaded there was considerable confusion. I fought in the war against them. We had no time to discuss the question of revolutionary defeatism in relation to a non-imperialist country invaded by the Nazis and where the proclamation of the Quisling government gave the war the aspect of a civil war against the Fascist right, as well as an international war on the side of British imperialism. In fact, we did not even know if the British had come in on the Norwegian side for at least two or three days, and an immediate decision had to be made. Some of us just got across the but I joined up. The government decided to resist, against the advice of the officer corps. Some soldiers in the army remonstrated with them and asked Trygve Lie to take the lead, and they were given a new leader in General Ruge. The confused irregular warfare gave time for the regular army to be mobilised. I got hold of a lot of documents about the Norwegian government, which had nearly capitulated to the German attempts to Nazify Norway, as I had gone up to Klealum, just north of Oslo, where the government was. There I met Knudsen and Hjordis and her brother, and I recruited them to my staff. In addition there were seven wireless experts, and two Germans with experience of the Spanish Civil War, and that was the nucleus that we made into two companies of volunteers. I did not have a higher command than a company to coordinate, so we had to get people who would run the two companies.
I was a captain, then a chief of staff, to a force of 3000 men and nine guns which included an anti-tank gun. We formed a front and withdrew through the valleys of Central Norway whenever we were outflanked. The Germans only had three little tankettes on our front and never broke through, as our artillery held them off. Their bombing was very ineffective, though we were never attacked by accurate Stuka dive bombers. The deep snow blanketed the bomb explosions in a most remarkable way, so that one bomb fell within ten metres of me with little effect. The British troops who finally appeared were very badly equipped, even worse than ourselves. Later, when the British on our left had withdrawn, we were forced into a valley with no way out and had to negotiate a surrender. The colonel commanding was a distant relative of mine called Dahl. I negotiated the surrender so the document had the signature of two Dahls on it. However, I took those 11 members of my staff who would have been shot by the Germans as franc-tireurs, so there were 12 of us, with 100 Norwegian crowns each from the regimental chest, and skied off into the mountains where we found an isolated farmhouse, buried our uniforms and documents and, after three days, came down into another valley, which was still unoccupied by the invaders, in civilian clothes. There we got a car and, as if we were refugees from the fighting who had been ordered by the Germans to return home, drove back to Honefoss. The documents that we had buried included a detailed account, which I had dictated to Hjordis during intervals of the fighting, of what I had seen and heard at Klealum, when many Labour Party elements, and most sections of the state machine, had wanted to do a deal with the Germans.
From Oslo I tried to get out to Sweden. I went to Halden on the frontier, where I had done trade union work, and asked my contacts if they knew any smugglers who could help me. Eventually I got across, with a smuggler's help and, since I had a cousin of my father's who was in the Embassy in Stockholm, I persuaded the local Swedish authorities to let me in on business. In Stockholm in May I gave a talk to the Swedish General Staff on some technical aspects of the fighting in Norway. Then I went to north Sweden and took the railway to Narvik that was still in German hands and where British, French, Norwegian and Polish troops were fighting. I got off the train at the last station in Sweden on 17 May and, with despatches from people in Oslo, skied north over the mountains to avoid the German lines. Eventually I got to Tromso, where the government had taken refuge. As an artillery expert I was put in charge of a battery of mountain guns to train some recruits for a fortnight. Then I was posted as a liaison officer to the French Chasseurs Alpins regiment. Already, however, the Allies had decided to leave Norway without telling the Norwegians and, on 7 June 1940, they evacuated their troops, leaving us in the lurch.
Two amusing and bizarre things happened to me. First, a day after the Allied evacuation, I encountered seven or eight extreme right wing Norwegian nationalists, whom I had known during my student days. The day after their own country had been conquered, they were getting hold of a boat with three machine guns to go off and conquer Greenland, then a colony of Demark, against which Norway had irredentist claims since 1908! They wanted a colony to rule, though their own land was almost a colony of the Germans! Secondly, I met this Norwegian officer who, like me, had fought in the south and then come north, but unlike me he had surrendered to the Germans and thus had broken his parole to do so. He was a Fascist from the Nasionale Samling. He was very distressed, as the Wehrmacht would certainly shoot him if they found him, and they were entitled to do so. I said:'There is only one thing for it, you must have a nervous breakdown and enter a lunatic asylum for the duration of the war.' I dealt with the paperwork, and after happily incarcerating the Fascist in the asylum, I took off my uniform for a second time. The German command had ordered all refugees to go back to their homes, so I pretended to be a civilian refugee and filled up a boat with refugees and some officers in civilian clothes and sailed south to Trondheimfiord. I thought we might be arrested if the German fleet was there, and I wished to check on that, so I stopped at Namsos and persuaded the local German commander to give me a pass to Trondheim. We got into Trondheim after some difficulty and I went back to Oslo from there.
In Oslo I was told that the police were after me, since I was rumoured to have embezzled half the funds of the Norwegian army! This turned out to be the 100 Kroner I had taken for my staff, which my father happily paid, but I was also told I had requisitioned large quantities of goods for our brigade and had not kept any proper paperwork or accounts during the fighting. I pretended to be very angry and offered to go over the entire area of the fighting in central Norway and agree all the requisitioning matters with the local people, from whom we had taken food, fuel and transport in the campaign, and then render proper accounts. This I did and thus was enabled, without any suspicion, to pick up all the documents, uniforms, pistols and so forth that we had buried, and to hide them in other more convenient places, and afterwards to take the documents to Sweden.
I published my account of the negotiations within the Norwegian government during April 1940 and their waverings in face of the Nazi threat in a Swedish trade union paper, while I was a serving officer in England in 1943. I was threatened with a court-martial for giving away state secrets, but they finally did not dare because of the publicity that would have been focused on their own behaviour.
So I had a lot of interesting experiences, and later I wrote a book in Norwegian about them. [21]
The early days of the Occupation: Waiter Held had gone straight to Sweden when the Germans invaded, but Scheflo's son, who also went there, travelled back to Norway, as did most of the Labour Party people who had crossed at the outbreak of war. By the autumn nearly all the Norwegian labour movement refugees had gone back to Norway, or had been sent back by the Norwegian Embassy. This was in part because of the crushing moral effect of the fall of France. I was furious that the Embassy had sent back a friend of mine who was a trained pilot. I regarded talk that Hitler would win the war and soon be in Stockholm as simply evidence of defeatism and low morale, but I had not been in Stockholm and experienced the panic there in June 1940 when France collapsed.
So after my active part in the two months' war in Norway, we had some discussion in my trade union in Oslo about the future. After my experience of Berlin in 1932-33 I was in no doubt that it was only a question of time before the Nazis treated the Norwegian Labour leaders and movement as they had treated the German. According to German propaganda they had come to Norway to guard the Norwegians against attacks from the Western powers. In the first stages of the occupation that hampered them, and though they began to make a register of the active labour leaders, it prevented them from using violent measures against a resistance of workers and war veterans. It was a difficult situation, because the top Labour parliamentarian politicians and the left wing of the Labour Party, led by Haakon Meyer, competed to collaborate with the Germans. It was during the period of the Stalin-Hitler Pact. I know that the Germans collaborated with a group of Communist trade unionists to get the trade unions under their control. In my trade union, which was dominated by the Syndicalists, the first arrests were made in the summer of 1940; there were no collaboration problems at all. The union leaders were distrustful of all politicians, especially the Stalinists, but they had used the Stalinists for trade union purposes in the fight against the employers, and they had worked together with the Labour Party politicians. I was in Stockholm when Germany attacked Russia and so Norway and Russia became allies. Only then, as elsewhere, did the Communists become part of the Resistance, and only then did the Germans start to shoot labour movement leaders.
Though the records of the Gestapo and their personnel went down with the Blücher, a heavy cruiser torpedoed in Oslo fiord, it only postponed the rounding up. Though they occupied Norway in April the Germans did not move against Norwegian labour until a year and a half later. They had all the original documents in Hamburg. They used the Gestapo to try to pump Norwegians, and though they got very little help, there is nothing that is really a secret in a country like Norway, where everybody knows everyone else and is related to everyone else. At the time of the Hitler-Stalin Pact the Norwegian Communists were not too unfriendly to them and gave them a little help. Otherwise there were not many informers. They were killed afterwards, and it was not easy to be an informer in Norway during the war. The whole population was against the Germans and were very careful not to mix with Nazi Norwegians, who were totally isolated. Even they were not entirely happy with the Germans. They thought that the Reich should rule Norway in a big Federal European state, but that Hitler was centralising everything. It is true that they made up a battalion of some 600 men to fight on the German side. We reckoned that 20 per cent of the Norwegian Nazis were idealists -- the rest were in it as a job. However I knew many non-Nazi people who were sincerely against Russia and Socialism.
I knew that the labour movement would be crushed within a certain time, and it was a question of using that time for building up the resistance in my construction workers' union. It was decided that we would try and make a centre in Stockholm. I went back to Sweden on a legal passport in October 1940 before the Germans were in full control. I was met on the railway station in Stockholm by Trannael, the editor who had protected Held. He had contacts there, and when I went up to his office it was in a trade union building which was helping him by letting him use it. There I met Scheflo's son and Waiter Held, and it was we three people from the Trotskyist movement who really maintained the trade unions and Norwegian Labour Party in 1940. At that period of the war the Labour Party did not really have any representatives at a political level except us. There was some conflict between us and the representatives of the exile government in Stockholm.
Held and the Reason Why he Left: The question as to why Held left Sweden and took the fatal road through Russia has been nagging my mind for years. After all, his family and his best friends were in Stockholm, and he had better opportunities there to make a living from his pen than in America. In addition Stockholm was a most interesting place during the Second World War. So why did he not stay, like Willy Brandt? What pressures made him choose to go through Russia? One clue may be that the day after France fell in 1940 the Swedish government received a telegram from their ambassador in London with a message from Lord Halifax and RA Butler asking Sweden to help them negotiate a compromise peace with Germany. Hitler's Reichstag speech that offered peace to Britain seems to have been a direct response to Butler's message.[22] One of the ministers in the exile Norwegian government, Frihagen, was stationed in Stockholm and was informed of the telegram. Frihagen was a friend of Held's, and he might in confidence have told him of the telegram and, if Britain had made a peace with Germany, the Swedes would have done what they were told with German Trotskyist exiles. (Just before Held left Sweden on his last journey Frihagen had lent him 500 Kroner in return for an IOU from Held which stated that he would get the money back from the fees paid by a Swedish labour newspaper for which Held was going to write articles in America.) Despite the continuation of the war into 1941 -- and Held set out then he may well have thought that there were far stronger political tendencies in the British ruling class that wanted a peace than was in fact the case, a view shared by Hitler and for the same reason. Certainly the telegram had a crushing moral effect on those who knew about it. There was an extradition agreement for criminal offences between Germany and Sweden, the definition of criminal being decided by the court of the country demanding the extradition. There had already been a long drawn out case of one of the leaders of the German navy mutiny of 1918 who was arrested in Sweden just after the war began. To avoid handing him over to the Germans he was put in a Swedish mental hospital, which broke him. That, too, may have been what Held feared.
My Experiences during the Rest of the War: In the 1940-41 period I built up an escape route by car from Norway for supplying the Swedish High Command with intelligence about the Germans, though we had to keep the operation secret from the Swedish police. We had everything prepared to get out Scheflo, but he was too ill to travel and died in hospital in 1942.
I stayed in Sweden until I was flown out to England in 1943. Before that, in the spring of 1941, while the Germans and the Soviet Union were still at peace, the Russians had refused permission for me to travel through Russia to Britain, though whether it was because they knew of my Trotskyist links or because I was a serving officer and quite well known after my talk to the Swedish General Staff, I do not know. When in England I was asked, with five other officers, to go to Russia in 1944 to liaise with the Russian army that was invading the extreme north of Norway, the province of Finnmark. The other five were given visas, but not me. That was fortunate, as I had no intention of going to Russia after what had happened to Held. Later three of the five who were sent were returned by the Russians. When the Norwegians complained that this sort of behaviour was no way to treat an ally, the Russian commander replied that he was sorry, but all this kind of thing was ordered from higher up.
When I got back to Norway after the war I found that most of my old comrades were useless for political work. The long years working in the underground under the Nazi terror had rendered them incapable of looking outwards politically in more normal times.
Nils Kaare Dahl
1. The Norwegian Constitution was adopted in Eidsvoll in Eastern Norway, 80km north of Oslo, on 17 May 1814. The 'Men of Eidsvoll' play a role in the Norwegian national mythology analogous to the signatories to the proclamation of Irish in dependence of 1916 in Irish history. See KT Derry, A History of Modern Norway, 1973, Chapter 1 for the details of this period.
2. Erling Falk (1887-1940) had earlier combined a career as a cost accountant in Chicago with the 'Wobblies', the nickname of the IWW -- International Workers of the World.
3. Trygve Lie (1896-1968). Legal adviser to the Trade Union Federation, 1922-35; an active chairman of the Workers' Sports Association, 1931-35; Minister of Justice 1935-39; Minister of Trade and Supply 1939-40; Minister of Foreign Affairs November 1940-February 1946. General Secretary of the United Nations 1946-53; County Governor of Oslo 1955-63; Minister of Industry 1963, and of Trade 1963-65. An illuminating portrait of Lie appears in Isaac Deutscher, Marxism, War and Revolution, London, 1984, pp169-177.
4. Wiggo Hansteen (1900-41). Previously in Mot-Dag but in 1941 a CP member who nevertheless opposed the CP line which supported Hitler's New Order up to July 1941. After the invasion of Russia there was a strike by 15 000 engineers in Oslo against the removal of their free milk supply at their place of work. Hansteen had opposed the action as tactically rash, but he and a young shop steward, Wickstrom, were shot.
5. Einar Gerhardsen (1897- ). The son of an Oslo road worker who, to start with, himself worked on the roads. He had been a strong supporter of Trannael and a class war prisoner for agitation among soldiers, who was released by the first Labour Government in 1928 that had only lasted a fortnight. In 1941 he was the secretary of the Labour Party. Prime Minister 1945-51, Leader of the Labour Party in the Storting 1951-55, Prime Minister 1955-63 and Prime Minister 1963-65. He was something of an elder statesman by the 'seventies.
6. Olav Scheflo (1883-1942). A carter's son who had been to sea; an early associate of Tranmael in Trondheim; editor of Social Demokraten 1918-21; the main leader of the Norwegian Communist Party 1921-28.
7. Nygaardsvold (1879-1952). A husmann's son employed in a sawmill at twelve, and as a forest and railway construction worker in Canada and the USA, 1902-07; member of the Storting, 1916-49; Minister of Agriculture 1928; Premier 1935-45 -- five years of this in the London government-in exile. After the war he was held partly responsible for the inadequate defence preparations.
8. Martin Trannael (1869-1967). Journeyman painter in the USA 1900-02 and 1903-05. Secretary of the Norwegian Labour Party 1918 and editor of its principal newspaper 1921-49. An agitator of great power who led the Labour Party into and out of the Third International, but wished for no public office. He played a part in the patriotic resistance in Stockholm during the war. According to Dahl it was his influence that prevented the deportation of Held in the period before the war.
9. Magnus Nilssen (1871-1947). A journeyman goldsmith who later started his own business. Labour Party Secretary 1901; Member of the Storting, 1906-21 and 1927-45; Minister of Labour 1938; Vice President of the Storting 1935-40.
10. The familiar form of 'you' used to relatives and friends in many languages.
11. This piece of information also comes in dependently to us from Lenin through Fritz Platten to Mr Don Bateman, a veteran of the ILP. There can be no doubt about its authenticity.
12. Bruno Rizzi did not have his book, The Bureaucratisation of the World, published until 1939, in Paris. But he had already published Where is the USSR Going? in 1937, of which the first two chapters set forth his ideas. It is probably this book to which comrade Nils is referring. (cf The Bureaucrotisation of the World, ed A Westoby, London, 1985, pp 6-7.)
13. After the war Brandt became better known as the Chancellor of the German Federal Republic. He does not seem to have made any enquiries of the Russians of his old acquaintance Waiter Held when he was in a position to do so. (See Revolutionary History, Volume 1, no 4, pp 39-43). Of Mot-Dag he later said it was one of the 'ivory towers where intellectual cliques practise spiritual inbreeding'. (Min Yiei Til Berlin, p 50, published 1960, cited in T K Derry, A History of Modern Norway 1814-1972, pp 315 and 464.)
14. Franz Jakubowski, Ideology and Superstructure, London, 1976. Jakubowski came from Danzig. Nils Dahl does not think that it was he who came to Norway.
15. Finn Moe (1902-69) represented the NAP at a Youth Conference in Holland and then in Belgium in February 1934. He went on to become foreign editor of Arbeiderbladet and a leader of the Second International. See Writings of Leon Trotsky: Supplement (1934-1940), New York, 1979, pp 895-6.
16. In a future issue Revolutionary History hopes to publish a short biographical note on Erwin Wolf by Pierre Broue taken from the Cahiers Leon Trotsky.
17. Hjordis Holt (nee Knudsen) died about 10 years ago. They quit politics when they left Sweden in 1941. Information in a letter to us from Harrison Salisbury, who got in touch with her widower.
18. LA Sanchez Salazar (with the collaboration of J Gorkin) Murder in Mexico, London,1950. (English translation)
19. The editors of Revolutionary History are not aware of this document, which un doubtedly exists. If a reader could provide us with a copy, or inform us where it could be found, we would be very happy to publish it.
20. Arbeiderbladet, 26 July 1935, in Writings of Leon Trotsky 1936-38, 2nd edition, New York, 1977, p 55.
21. Harald K Johensen, Den Norske Tragedin, Federation Forlag, Bet Stockholm, 1943. Johensen was Dahl's pseudonym.
22. There is brief and misleading reference to this in Cecil Parrot, The Tightrope, Faber, 1975, p 158:
'At this juncture a telegram arrived from Prytz, the Swedish Minister in London, reporting certain remarks by Halifax which he had construed as indicating Britain's desire for a compromise peace, an interpretation later stated to be incorrect by the Foreign Office. But Gunther's reference to the telegram -- he read it out to the Foreign Affairs Committee -- had its effect on those present, the effect indeed that he wanted to produce.
Parrot is, of course, a diplomat and is behaving professionally here. There is also a fuller, if equally misleading account, in Anthony Howard, RAB: The Biography of RA Butler, Cape, 1987. But see Allman Forlaget, Svensk Utrikespolitik 1939-45, Stockholm, 1973, pp 193-297. Revolutionary History hopes to take up the details of this well-hidden ruling class faction fight at some future date.
All the notes to this article were inserted by the editors of Revolutionary History to help readers unfamiliar with the history and personalities of Norway and the Norwegian labour movement. The standard work in English by a bourgeois historian is KT Derry, A History of Modern Norway, 1814-1972, OUP, 1973. Derry also wrote the Official History of the Norwegian Campaign, HMSO, and thus must have diplomatic and security clearance and connections.