World Wars and Interwar Period (1918–1945)

The diversity of RWE in the Nordic countries is one of RWE’s dominant features and has always been such. This applies both to their modes of organizing activities, as well as their ideologies, ideas, and the arenas they are active at. Looking at the whole Nordic extreme right scene, differing historical paths also contribute to this diversity, and the effects of this historical diversity are, to some extent, still visible today (see, e.g., Bjørgo, 1995; Sallamaa & Malkki, 2022). Years of occupation characterize the Norwegian and Danish research, whereas in Finland, its distinctive role as a German ally also appears in topic selection. The Finnish Civil War in 1918 also affected the formation of RWE. Attempts to overcome the diversity had also been made regularly, including initiatives for building a pan-Nordic milieu. These initiatives were partly hampered by differing nationalist interests, including an anti-Swedish attitude of a large part of the Finnish RWE milieu. On the other hand, especially in the new nation-states Norway and Finland, anticommunism united RWE groups in their transnational endeavors, most important of which was the formation of Waffen-SS volunteer troops. Continuities and ruptures extend beyond this historical period. For example, certain local strongholds of extreme right groups that formed in 1930s hold importance as centers of activism today (Mattsson and Johansson 2019).

In this chapter, covering period from early twentieth century until the end of the Second World War in 1945, we first produce an overview of the earliest period of the RWE scenes in different Nordic countries, proceeding country-wise and then reviewing and analyzing the available literature from the perspective of pan-Nordic cooperation and entangled histories. The chapter gives an up-to-date overview of research exploring the historical dimension of the interconnectedness of right-wing extremist milieus in the Nordics, showing which aspects are missing, need reviewing or updating, and areas for further research.

Danish right-wing extremist groups did not appear considerably successful in the pre-1945 period. Nevertheless, during the period of 1929–45, no less than 29 party organizations sprung up, and many of these splinter parties pre-existed the occupation. Out of these, only the National Socialist Workers’ Party of Denmark (Danmarks National-Socialistiske Arbejderparti, DNSAP) managed to gain seats in parliament. Their vote share was not impressive either. In the elections in 1939, they got less than 2% of the votes and three seats in parliament. They managed to repeat this modest achievement in the 1943 election.

Typical for the smaller parties was that they were very fragmented, constantly splitting up. Before Hitler’s rise to power, minor local groups mostly imitated Italian fascism. After Mussolini’s fascist takeover in Italy in 1922, a number of small fascist groups became more visible. Targeting social democrats and labor unions, they received a lot attention in the press, though they otherwise lacked any political significance or influence. Among the most notable groups was the National Corps (Nationalkorps), established in 1925, which had a strong focus on protecting “fascist mothers.” These minor groups disappeared by the end of the 1920s.

At the wake of the success of the national socialists in Germany, the Danish right-wing extremists re-emerged in the political field. The first national socialist organization, the Danish National Socialist Party (Dansk Nationalsocialistisk Parti), was nevertheless established already in 1928 by Ejnar Vaaben, who also had contacts with his ideological counterparts in Germany. However, the DNSAP was the first formal national socialist party organization. The party was founded by Cay Lembcke in 1930, who was replaced by Frits Clausen 1933. The party mimicked the German Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP) in many respects, including taking the Swastika as the party symbol and having the right arm raised in a traditional Nazi salute.

Unlike in Norway, the years of German occupation in Denmark between 1940 and 1945 were not characterized by a growing influence of domestic national socialist groups. Until 1942, the Danish government was led by social democrat Thorvald Stauning and after him by Erik Scavenius, representing Danish Social Liberal Party (Radikale Venstre). Although the governments were built as national coalitions, initiating cooperation with the occupiers and including all the major parties, DNSAP was left outside the cabinet alongside the outlawed Communist Party.

Although not reaching its goal, a Danish Nazi government, DNSAP, played central role in forming the Danish volunteer unit of the Waffen-SS in 1941, which consisted around 6,000 men and was in operation until 1943. One quarter of men belonged to the German minority in Denmark. It has been estimated that around 50% of the volunteers were members of the DNSAP, and many of the rest also were national socialists but not party members. After the war, most of the surviving volunteers served prison terms for their collaboration with their Nazi occupiers.

The Finnish Civil War in 1918 was an overwhelmingly important formative experience for Finnish RWE. The field of battle offered a concrete arena for violent struggle, and the reprisals and purges following the war gave an opportunity to try to create a new society through redemptive violence. The career and writings of such right-wing authors as Kyösti Wilkuna (1879–1922) or Martti Pihkala (1882–1966) offer clear examples of proto-fascist thought in the making.

With the victory of the Whites, the right-wing extremists in their ranks were, in many instances, able to move on to governmental and administrative positions of the new state. Another of the legacies of the Finnish Civil War—and a conspicuous feature of the interwar Finnish society—was that the white militias, the Civic Guards raised for the war, were not disbanded. They continued in existence alongside the armed forces as paramilitary auxiliaries that could be mobilized in support of the army. The right-wing extremists of the period invariably were overwhelmingly members of the Civic Guards and saw the organization as their powerbase.

Throughout the first decade of the country’s independence, the political right was particularly unhappy of the continuing ability of the left, including the Finnish communists, to continue their political activities through the party system and trade unions. A counterstrike materialized in late 1920s through the introduction of strike-breaker organizations to combat the trade unions, here through the country-wide organization of white veterans of the Finnish Civil War (Vapaussodan Rintamamiesten Liitto, Frihetskrigets Frontmannaförbund) and finally through the organization of a popular movement against communism.

The Lapua (Swe. Lappo) movement gained mass support by a simple anticommunist appeal, but its background was more complex. The leadership and support groups included fascist and right-wing extremists and prominent trade and industry magnates. At its core, the movement claimed to be a “Christian and moral” movement aiming to defeat socialism and lead Finland to new period of harmony. Its heyday came in the summer of 1930 as thousands of movement supporters from the countryside marched to Helsinki in imitation of Mussolini’s March on Rome. The government defused the potentially threatening situation by making political concessions. Contemporary publicity abroad also noted the Lapua movement across Scandinavia and Germany.

By late 1930, the escalating violence, kidnappings, beatings, and homicides of the Lapua movement began to erode their mass support, and the movement slid into a crisis. Its final culmination came in early 1932 when part of the leadership was able to incite a partial rebellion among the Civic Guards. After a few days of tense standoff between the mutinous guardsmen and government troops, the situation was brought under control and the mutiny quashed. The Lapua movement was thereafter banned. Its loyalists formed a political party, IKL (Isänmaallinen Kansanliike, translated into Patriotic Movement), and continued their activities in a parliamentary setting.

Among the right-wing extremists not active within the state apparatus, there were a few noteworthy attempts to organize themselves during the 1920s. Mussolini set an example for Finnish RWE, with the idea of a forceful takeover of power through a march to Helsinki being its most lasting legacy. After Hitler’s accession to power in 1933, Hitler soon superseded Mussolini as the image of a successful fascist leader, and national socialism, instead of fascism, became the preferred label of self-identification used by Finnish RWE.

Overall, RWE was almost entirely contained in the existing, legal organizations of the first republic during the interwar years. This had a calming effect because motivation for campaigns of violence or coups remained weak. As a result, the interwar period coup plots hatched among the ultranationalist circles, usually involving a march on Helsinki in some form, invariably came to lack mass support.

The period of the Second World War (1939–1945) opened with a shock for the right-wing extremists. The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact in August 1939 was a clear signal that Hitler’s Germany would not take on the role of a guarantor of Finland’s independence. The Finnish right-wing extremists were thrown into confusion, and several Finnish national socialists traveled to Germany to seek clarification and support from the Nazi’s top hierarchy. This clarity would not be found. Also, during the Finnish–German alliance against the Soviet Union in 1941–1944, Hitler’s Germany preferred to deal with Finland’s existing government and authorities and not support the plans for a political revolution circulating within the right-wing extremist groups. It was only in the very last stage of the German–Finnish alliance that Germany made an effort to mobilize the right-wing extremist circles into a resistance movement operating both outside and inside Finland to continue the war against the Soviet Union and, in time, to gaining political control in Finland.

The armistice accords between Finland and the Soviet Union called for Finland to disband all “Fascist-natured” organizations. From late 1944 onwards, all the conspicuously right-wing extremist organizations, such as the numerous small Finnish national socialist and the Finnish Waffen-SS veteran’s organization, but also broad umbrella organizations such as Frihetskrigets Frontmannaförbund and the Civic Guards in their entirety, were dissolved, and their public activities were terminated.

In the period between national independence in 1905 and beginning of World War I, the Norwegian nation state had emerged as a relatively consolidated unit, one characterized by liberal and democratic nationalism. After World War I and the subsequent economic crisis and political polarization, Norwegian nationalism shifted more toward the radical right. The perceived threat of a communist revolution spurred the establishment of several counterrevolutionary and paramilitary organizations, and a new right-wing activism emerged in the form of groups calling for a national, bourgeois unity against the radicalized labor movement, which the nationalists claimed put the very existence of the new nation state in jeopardy. The Fatherland League (Fedrelandslaget), cofounded in 1925 by national hero Fridtjof Nansen and with over 100,000 members around 1930, became the main organizational expression of this right-wing activism. By the end of the 1920s, the lack of active support from the traditional bourgeois parties drove many right-wing activists toward fascism. The attempt of establishing a self-proclaimed fascist movement in Norway in 1927, however, failed.

Vidkun Quisling achieved national notoriety in 1932 when he, as the minister of defense, launched a massive attack on the social democrats and communists. This made him the rallying figure of the right-wing activists and furthered plans of him heading a new, radical nationalist and antisocialist party. This party, Nasjonal Samling, was established in May 1933. From the onset, it was a fragile alliance, encompassing both right-wing authoritarians calling for a strong, autocratic government directed against the labor movement, paternalistic Christians calling for a “national revival” against the moral and cultural decay of modernity, and radical national socialists calling for an all-encompassing, national, and racial revolution.

Nasjonal Samling came too late to substantially capitalize on the now waning wave of right-wing nationalism. Hence, the party did not manage to establish itself properly within Norwegian political life, and it never gained parliamentary representation and no more than about 2% electoral support. Because of this failure, the political tensions, which the party harbored from the onset, flared up in open conflict. This resulted in a subsequent split, where Nasjonal Samling lost a large number of its members. The decline and marginalization of Nasjonal Samling continued during the last years of the 1930s, and by 1940, the party was reduced to a minuscule sect around Vidkun Quisling, with no political impact in Norwegian society. The only reason for its later rise to prominence and Quisling to international infamy as the archetypical traitor was the occupation of the Norway by Nazi Germany and the subsequent decision by Hitler to appoint Nasjonal Samling as his formal collaborationist partner.

On April 9, 1940, Nazi Germany invaded Norway. The main objective was to establish a military stronghold and secure control at the lowest possible costs. Otherwise, as much as possible of the daily administration of the country should be left to the Norwegians. Because of the military resistance and the flight of the Norwegian king and government to England, this arrangement, much in line with what Hitler had achieved in Denmark, failed. Because the Norwegian population, according to Nazi racial ideology, was considered of almost pure “Nordic” stock, the occupation conditions differed widely from those in most other German-occupied countries. Consequently, Hitler placed Josef Terboven as Reichskommissar in Norway with instructions to “win the Norwegians over to me.”

By the summer of 1940, Terboven’s endeavor to establish a semilegal Norwegian collaborationist government had failed. This prompted Hitler to empower Nasjonal Samling as his Norwegian partner. This unique arrangement granted Quisling and his party more political influence and power than that of any other local fascist party in the occupied “Germanic” countries. When the so-called “New Order” was established on September 25, 1940, the Nazification of Norwegian society became the main task of Nasjonal Samling, by now the only legal party. As a result, Nasjonal Samling received some support from Norwegians motivated by sympathy for national socialism or by more pragmatic and self-serving interests.

In April 1940, the party probably had only a few hundred members. By November 1943, its numbers topped out at 43,400 members. Assuming that Nasjonal Samling would convince most Norwegians to embrace national socialism, Hitler underestimated the popular resistance to the “traitor” party and deeply embedded democratic sentiment within the large majority of the population. Nasjonal Samling lacked all legal legitimacy, and most Norwegians considered membership in the party to be treasonous. 

The Swedish national socialists never won any parliamentary seats, nor did they play a central role in Swedish politics. Nevertheless, they were a constant part of the political life of the 1930s, and they came because of their relatively many municipal mandates to have some influence at the local level. The Swedish national socialist and fascist parties were also divided for most of the interwar period. It was only between the years 1930 and 1933 that it was possible to speak of a united milieu.

In 1924, the veterinarian Birger Furugård formed Sweden’s first national socialist party, Swedish National Socialist Freedom Association (Svenska Nationalsocialistiska Frihetsförbundet). In 1929, the party changed its name to the Swedish National Socialist Peasant and Workers’ Association (Svenska Nationalsocialistiska Bonde- och Arbetarpartiet). During the 1920s, the Swedish Fascist Fighting Organization (1926) (Sveriges Fascistiska Kamporganisation) was also formed. In 1930, the first attempt was made to create a united movement, when the New Sweden National Socialist Party (Nysvenska nationalsocialistiska förbundet) was formed through a merger of the above-mentioned organizations. The national leader for the new organization was Birger Furugård. In 1932, the party ran in a parliamentary election for the first time and won 15,188 votes. In 1932, an ideological and personal conflict arose within the party’s leadership, which, in 1933, resulted in the party splitting and a breakaway group led by Sven Olof Lindholm founding the National Socialist Workers’ Party (Nationalsocialistiska arbetarepartiet). In 1933, a third national socialist party was founded—the National Socialist Bloc (Nationalsocialistiska Blocket)—under the leadership of Colonel Martin Ekström. The bloc disappeared from the political scene after the 1936 election to reappear for a short period at the beginning of the Second World War. In the 1936 parliamentary election, Ekström’s and Furugård’s parties formed an electoral alliance yet lost most of their support, and Furugård decided to close down his party.

Until 1936, Lindholm’s party’s leadership was dominated by the party’s left wing, which advocated a more socialist policy. After the 1936 election, which was regarded by the left phalanx within the party leadership as a major defeat, several left or were purged. This was the start of a long series of internal conflicts and an orientation to the right. When the municipal elections of 1938 were also disappointing, Lindholm began to consider a change in the party’s political profile. In October 1938, the party changed its name to the Swedish Socialist Assembly (Svensk socialistisk samling) (SSS), and the Swastika disappeared as a party symbol and was replaced by Wasakärven. After the name and symbol change, which did not involve any ideological change in the party’s policy, small groups left the party in protest and formed their own more militant organizations. Lindholm’s activity during the war years was limited both in terms of public and internal activities. The people of Lindholm ran in the parliamentary elections in 1944, even though the planned electoral coalition with the Swedish National Union and the Swedish Socialist Party (Svenska Socialistiska partiet)—which had switched to national socialism—broke down. The election result was a disaster for the party, which, by the end of the Second World War, had lost most of its members and sympathizers.

After 1938, several attempts were again made to create a national unity movement. However, none of these succeeded. The reasons for a large number of groups and organizations were many. There was a fundamental conflict between left- and right-wing organizations, and the relationship with Nazi Germany was another stumbling block, along with continuous rivalry for leadership.

The Swedish national socialists were, as has been seen, divided into a large number of different parties, associations, and small groups. The number of organizations and the fact that certain groups of members and sympathizers often changed parties makes it difficult to determine exactly how many members and sympathizers the different orientations had. It is estimated, however, that the national socialist parties in the mid-1930s had about 30,000 members.

The studies on RWE in general and on fascism and national socialism more specifically started to appear sporadically in the Nordic countries in the 1960s; however, based on our literature review, serious scholarly attention started to grow more only during the 1980s. The growing availability of the archival material considerably contributed to the growth of research. However, here, too, the Nordic countries differ from one to the other. Norway has produced more literature than the other Nordic countries regarding this period. In Finland and Denmark, the topic has been taken up by only a few scholars, which has somewhat also shown in the lack of continuity in research efforts. For example, in Finland, four important studies (Alapuro, 1973; Ekberg, 1991; Nygård, 1982; Siltala, 1985) on pre-1945 RWE in Finland were published as dissertations between the 1970s and early 1990s. Most of these scholars did not, however, continue with the topic or specialize in it, even though they studied the same historical period in their subsequent works. In Sweden and Norway, the situation has not been that regrettable and more scholarly work has been conducted on this topic.

Furthermore, methodological nationalism has been a prevailing aspect of research in all Nordic countries, with most of the studies stemming from national concerns and settings. The lack of cross-border archival collaboration has certainly contributed to the lack of comparative or transnational studies. Considering the number of publications with some elements of pan-Nordicism or transnationalism, either from an entangled history perspective or comparative analysis, Denmark and Finland have produced less than 10 publications each. A review of the literature on Sweden and Norway, on the other hand, identified more than 30 such publications for this period. Despite growing research efforts, other gaps in the literature still exist, as well in all countries, affecting our understanding of the pan-Nordic aspects of RWE. The history of German occupation has overshadowed some minor groups and parties in Norway and Denmark, which have only been studied recently, to some extent. The lack of local studies is also considerable in all countries.

Compared with the other Nordic countries, the research on Danish RWE before 1945 has been relatively limited. The research has been primarily concerned with the years of occupation, 1940–45, and regarding the national perspective, most research was conducted within the bounds of political history. The predominant field of research was related to the DNSAP, the only Danish Nazi party to acquire seats in parliament.

The first fascist movements emerged in the 1920s and were markedly influenced by the political situation in Italy. However, research into the early fascist movement has been practically nonexistent. It is limited to one scholarly work which, anyhow, does not deal with Nordic matters. The character of the early Danish fascists’ interactions with similar movements in other Nordic countries remains unresearched.

In Denmark, in modern times, no period receives more public attention than the years of occupation, hence the great volume of publications. Many of these have included discussions on the Danish national socialists, although from a national perspective. The bulk of Danish RWE research has focused on these five years. In the late 1990s, a new generation of occupation researchers began scrutinizing the collaborators, including the Nazis and volunteers of the SS.

One chief work of Danish RWE research was Henning Poulsen’s doctoral dissertation, published in 1970, concerning the DNSAP’s political role during the years of occupation, with emphasis on the year of 1940, when a power takeover like the one that happened in Norway appeared realistic. His dissertation, however, included a chapter on the interwar years—characteristically of the trend—entitled “Before the Occupation.” It contained some comparative observations on voter support in the other Nordic countries and on mutual meetings between the Nasjonal Samling in Norway, SSS in Sweden, and DNSAP in Denmark (Poulsen 1970).

Also, the historian Malene Djursaa used a comparative approach in her thesis on the make-up of DNSAP members from 1930 to 1945. Primarily, her examination was based on statistics providing insights into the membership over time. One chapter was dedicated a comparative analysis of NS in Norway and the DNSAP in Denmark, focusing on gender, age, and occupation. The author concluded that before, as well as during, the Second World War, there was a marked difference between the two parties concerning social structure and the country-versus-town geographical centers of gravity (Djursaa, 1981).

The reasons behind a national lack of success of RWE in the Nordic countries was the theme of a discussion in a comparative study by Henning Poulsen, in which he criticized antimodern theory as an explanation for the lack of political clout in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. He concluded that the primary challenge was not that RWE was linked to antimodernism. As a counterargument, he emphasized that, after 1933, many saw Germany as a modern society and that the explanation for the absence of success was rather that the Nordic national socialists were seen as an imitation of the German phenomenon in the respective countries (Poulsen, 1987).

During the interwar years, the leader of the national socialist Dansk Socialistisk Parti, Wilfred Petersen, developed an ideology with an emphasis on a pan-Nordic perception, and a monograph on his endeavors had elements of both comparative and entangled approaches on similar groups in Sweden and Norway. His party, the Danish Socialist Party, was to become the only real challenger to the DNSAP, and it was notorious for its activism and its criminal methods. This party had a marked revolutionary appearance and was inspired by both Norwegian and Swedish Nazis. It had concrete cooperation with Sven Lindholm’s party in Sweden (Christensen, 2022).

As far as the research on Danish fascism is concerned, so far, Rebecca Wennberg’s unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, “National Socialist Discourse among Nazi Intellectuals in Scandinavia” has demonstrated the most consistently transnational and comparative approach. She did this through a survey of a number of trendsetting Danish national socialists of the interwar years. These individuals never represented more than a few miniature parties, but they established an ideological pan-Nordic trend opposing the DNSAP and Germany. She designated them as Nazi heretics and placed them on par with similar groups in Norway (Wennberg, 2016).

Historian John T. Lauridsen’s magnum opus on Danish Nazism from 1930 to 1945 was a broadly founded analysis placing itself at the cross-section of political and cultural history. The focus of his monograph was the DNSAP, but here and there, it dealt with the contacts with the other Nordic parties, including the DNSAP’s national congress, where representatives of the other parties were also present. In the book’s abstract, there was a comparative analysis concerning other European countries including Norway (Lauridsen, 2002).

After the turn of millennia, more examinations of the DNSAP party organizations appeared, including a monograph on the party’s youth division. Here, during the interwar years, contacts with Nazi youth organizations in Sweden and Norway were extant, resulting in mutual visits at camps and other gatherings (Kirkebæk, 2004). In a biography on the DNSAP leader, Frits Clausen, there was also a comprehensive description of his relationship with Vidkun Quisling, but apart from that, no transnational or comprehensive approach on the Nordic aspect can be found (Ravn, 2007).

The transnational aspect of these studies has been obvious, even though they dealt with Germany rather than the Nordic countries. Because there was a considerable over-representation of Nazis in the voluntary corps and because the DNSAP took care of recruitment for the SS, there is reason to consider these endeavors as fascism research. A few of the studies showed a pan-Nordic dimension, though this was not their primary focus. The Nordic aspect was most pronounced in the examinations of the volunteers of the Waffen-SS signing up for the war on the eastern front. More studies of the Danish volunteers of the Waffen-SS have had a comparative aspect vis-à-vis Norwegian, Swedish, and Finnish soldiers (Christensen et al., 1998, 2014, 2017). A study of the Dano-German auxiliary police provided a comparison with the police in Norway (Lundtofte, 2014).

The studies of the DNSAP have had an obvious focus on Germano–Danish relations. One exception was an examination of the occupation policy in Denmark and Norway, where the NS and DNSAP were treated in parallel (Dahl et al., 2010).

In Finland, the most attention in postwar scholarship has been dedicated to interwar RWE and the Lapua movement. The earliest work was Marvin Rintala’s (1962) study of interwar Finnish RWE, followed by Lauri Hyvämäki’s (1971) essays on the Swedish-speaking Finnish far right and Risto Alapuro’s (1973) doctoral dissertation on the ultranationalist, expansionist, and pro-Finnish (äktfinsk) student society Akateeminen Karjala-Seura (Academic Karelia Society, AKS).

The 1980s also saw the publication of Toivo Nygård’s (1982) doctoral dissertation on interwar Finnish right-wing extremist movements, as well as Mikko Uola’s studies of IKL (Uola, 1982) and the Frihetskrigets Frontmannaförbund (Uola, 1988). The Lapua movement remains the most studied interwar right-wing extremist movement, of which Juha Siltala’s (1985) doctoral dissertation still is the most authoritative work. A growing body of literature has been partly related to the opening of the security police archives for research purposes in the early 1990s, although the number of active researchers has remained rather low.

A milestone was Henrik Ekberg’s (1991) doctoral dissertation on Finnish interwar national socialist groups. The original work came out in Swedish in 1991 but did never receive a Finnish translation. The most recent studies of Finnish RWE, either on the interwar or wartime periods, have been Oula Silvennoinen, Marko Tikka, and Aapo Roselius’s (2018) study on Finnish fascism in 1918–1945 and Aarni Virtanen’s (2015) doctoral dissertation on the thematical evolution of Vihtori Kosola’s speeches.

Biographical studies on the key figures of right-wing extremist movements and groups have included a recent study of Elias Simoki, leader of the fascist youth organization Blue-Blacks (Siironen, 2017), and of Vilho Helanen, the leader of the Akateeminen Karjala-Seura (Roiko-Jokela & Seppänen, 1997). In these studies, as well as the majority of other studies focusing on this period, the approach has been mostly national, without explicitly emphasized Nordic or international aspects. However, links to Germany have been referred to in several works.

Ekberg’s study (1991) can be seen as standing out among early studies in its explicitly transnational and partly also Nordic approach regarding theoretical framework and literature used. In his analysis of the Samfundet Folkgemeskap, a right-wing extremist group founded by Swedish-speaking Finns in 1940, Nordicism was shown as a founding principle and was combined with practical level cooperation with Swedish activists, along with Viking symbolism. Samfundet Folksgemenskap belonged also to one of the organizers of the Finnish Waffen-SS volunteers, whose ideological backgrounds were recently studied by André Swanström (2018).

Although building largely upon previous studies, Markku Jokisipilä and Janne Könönen (2013) explored the Finno–German relationship during Hitler’s regime, also including a short analysis of the Nordische Gesellschaft and racial ideas of common Nordic heritage shared by its Finnish members. Silvennoinen, Tikka, and Roselius (2018) set the Finnish movement into a historical continuum of fascist movements, tracing the ideological evolution starting from the nineteenth century.

The amount of literature on the history of domestic fascism and radical right has been far larger in Norway than in any other Scandinavian country, as historian Hans Fredrik Dahl (2004) concluded in his research overview. This has held true even to the present day. The obvious reason for this is that Hitler decided to put a local fascist party in power as a collaboration partner. This unique arrangement has spurred a large amount of research dealing with the history, ideology, and social composition of the “traitor party” Nasjonal Samling.

Hence, historical research on fascism and the radical right in Norway in the interwar period has mainly focused on the history of this future collaboration party and its leadership. Not much attention has been paid to other Norwegian fascist and radical right organizations, which usually only are mentioned as part of the prewar history of Nasjonal Samling. The connections between Nasjonal Samling and other fascist organizations in the Nordic countries in this period have also usually only been mentioned in passing, often in biographies on leading Norwegian national socialists. Prominent examples have included Hans Fredrik Dahl’s (1991) first volume on Vidkun Quisling, and Ivo de Figureido’s (2002) biography on the former deputy leader of Nasjonal Samling, Johan B. Hjort. Dahl (2015) later collected his main findings regarding Quisling’s networks in a monograph.

In addition, Ida Blom’s (1976) anthology chapter on young Norwegian conservatives’ sympathies for fascism can be mentioned. Even though this chapter had no transnational or entangled approach, it named early contacts between these conservatives and international fascists in the 1930s.

Fascism studies were first introduced as an academic discipline in Norway in 1966 with a special issue of the journal Kontrast, where fascism as a broader phenomenon in Norwegian history—not only limited to Nasjonal Samling—was established as a subject for research. This was followed up by several studies on the radical right and contra-revolutionary and paramilitary organizations in the 1920s. At the same time, the radical conservative Fatherland League was the focus of one monography. However, because none of these studies included transnational, Nordic perspectives, we did not include them in our report.

The first attempt of employing a comparative approach to Norwegian fascism appeared in the pioneering international study Who Were the Fascists, which aimed at exploring “comparative European fascism.” Here, Stein Ugelvik Larsen’s (1980) introduction to the section on fascism in the Nordic countries must be mentioned. Ugelvik Larsen (1990) later also contributed with a comparative anthology chapter on fascism and the radical right in the Nordic countries.

For a long time, other self-proclaimed fascist and national socialist organizations and milieus in the interwar years were not a subject for specific studies. However, in recent years, the research in this field has developed. Here, Terje Emberland’s (2003, 2004) works on national socialist milieus in opposition to Nasjonal Samling in the 1930s (Emberland, 2015), and a recent study (Emberland, 2022) of Norway’s National Socialist Workers’ Party (Norges Nasjonalsosialistiske Arbeiderparti) can be mentioned. All these studies included sections with comparative, transnational, and entangled perspectives, encompassing both Germany and the Nordic countries.

In addition, a pioneering work regarding the networks between Norwegian and German national socialists and the völkisch–Nordic movement in the interwar years was completed in the last decade by Nicola Karcher (2012). She also contributed with several academic articles on the entangled and transnational history of Norwegian–German fascism and the radical right before and during the Second World War (Karcher, 2009, 2011, 2012, 2014, 2019).

International contacts of Norwegian national socialists were also mentioned in Kenneth Kreppen’s (2015) master’s thesis. However, his main focus was on the political strategies of his protagonists, not on their cooperation outside Norway. The involvement of Norwegians in the Finnish Winter War has been little investigated so far, with one monograph in this field by Torstein Strømsøe (2000), published at the University of Trondheim. Beside studies on fascism, there exist a few studies on the development of race research as an academic discipline in Norway. Jon Kyllingstad (2004), Nicola Karcher (2009), and Torgeir Skorgen (2002) have taken into account the transnational “scientific” exchange that took place but did not have a specific focus on Nordic cooperation in this discipline.

In general, the studies focusing specifically on Norwegian fascist and far-right cooperation with movements in the other Nordic countries have been missing and not identified as an important field of research. It is significant that Dahl’s historiographical overview from 2004 called for more comparative research employing theoretical insights from international fascist studies but did not mention transnational and entangled studies on Nordic fascism as a research deficit. This is particularly noteworthy in view of the fact that previous research conducted in both Norway and Sweden by, for example, Heléne Lööw (1990), Terje Emberland (2003), Matthew Kott (Emberland & Kott, 2012), and Nicola Karcher (2012) has shown that these networks existed during the interwar period.

Virtually, all works dealing with the period of the German occupation of Norway have employed a somewhat transnational perspective, in so far as dealing with the relationship between the Nazi leadership in Berlin, the local German rulers under Reichkommissar Terboven, and Nasjonal Samling. Here, Hans Fredrik Dahl’s (1992) second Quisling volume must be mentioned, as well as Tore Pryser’s (2001) study on Norwegian national socialists working as agents for the German SD (Sicherheitsdienst/Security Service of the SS), along with Øystein Sørensen’s (1989) study on ideological conflicts in Nasjonal Samling during the German occupation period.

In recent years, two research projects were started at the University of Trondheim and University of Tromsø. Although the first one had its main focus on Organisation Todt and published some of its findings in a special issue (Historisk tidsskrift, 2018), the second mainly focused on the occupation history in Northern Norway.

One of the most comprehensive studies on the Norwegian occupation regime was written outside Norway by the German historian Robert Bohn (2000). In addition, Tore Rem’s (2015) work on the relationship between Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun and Hitler offered an interesting perspective. However, none of these studies investigated transnational or entangled Nordic cooperation.

Terje Emberland and Matthew Kott’s study (2012) on the SS’s role during the occupation of Norway offered transnational and entangled parts on SS activities in Scandinavia before the war. This aspect has also been thematized by Emberland (2009a, 2009b) in two anthology chapters. The history of the pan-Germanic thought in Norway, which partly also became relevant for the SS—even though a transnational or entangled perspective is lacking—has been described by Øystein Sørensen (2009) in a chapter in the same anthology. Sigurd Sørlie’s (2015) study on the recruitment of Norwegian volunteers to the Waffen-SS included comparative sections on the recruitment in Denmark and in the Netherlands.

To understand the specific character of the German occupation regime in Norway, in recent years, more attention has been paid to a comparative perspective, in particular mapping out the differences and similarities between the situation in Norway and Denmark. However, the foremost work on this subject—an anthology published by Norwegian and Danish researchers and edited by Hans Fredrik Dahl et al. (2010)—contained no systematic comparative studies, only parallel treatments of subjects from a Danish and Norwegian perspective.

Regarding the character of the German occupation regime and relations to its collaboration partners, for example, local fascist parties and leaders and the domestic police force, a comparison with the Netherlands was also highly relevant and partly conducted by Nicola Karcher (2018) in a scientific monograph, Øystein Hetland (2020) in his PhD thesis, and more concretely by Sindre Mensink (2020) in his master’s thesis.

In the analysis of the Swedish literature on fascism and national socialism before 1945, 38 publications concerning the interwar and war years were identified. With very few exceptions (most notably Lindström, 1985; Lööw, 1990; Wärenstam, 1970), most works analyzed for this review date after 1990, and most were published after 2000. This partly reflects the more relaxed archival policies of the authorities, as well as the growing research interest in the early years of these ideologies.

Most of the works were conducted from national perspective, and only 12 of these publications had a Nordic dimension. However, the Nordic perspective was present to a lesser degree among several other studies as well. In these studies, contacts between different movements in the Nordic countries were mentioned but rarely studied in more detail. One of the monographs, Ulf Lindström’s doctoral dissertation from 1985 fascism in Scandinavia 1920–1940, was a comparative study of the Scandinavian countries. The study mainly consisted of an analysis of voter patterns to identify regions in each country where fascism had a foothold.

The predominant part of the research consisted of studies of various national socialist, fascist, and antidemocratic right-wing nationalist parties and groups, that borders to national socialism (Berggren, 2014b; Hagtvet, 1980; Lööw 1990, 2004; Lundberg, 2014; Wärenstam, 1970). In these studies, with a focus ranging from 1920s to the 1940s, Nordic contacts and collaborations were sometimes discussed but not touched on in detail.

Another part of the research consisted of studies of idea organizations, prominent national socialists and fascists, and so-called one-man activists who mainly worked as publicists (Berggren, 1999; Berggren, 2014a; Blomkvist, 1999; Lööw, 2004, 2021; Stenfeldt 2019). Some of these activists were also very much focused on building international networks, though these became more notable in the post-WWII period. In these works, certain Nordic contacts and collaborations come to the fore as well. Some research also concerned the surrounding society’s reaction to the national socialist and fascist challenge (Flyghed, 1992; Lööw, 1990, 2004).

In 1996, Sverker Oredsson’s book on Lund University during the interwar period and Second World War was published and can be seen as a very important contribution to the understanding of Swedish anti-Semitism, racism, and the history of national socialism because it touches on a part that has been mostly unexplored: the Swedish academics’ position. Their relation to national socialism and Nazi Germany has also been analyzed in the anthology De intellektuellas förräderi (Björkman et al., 2016). Although Swedish national socialists never got broke through at the national level, they may have been an essential part of the local political life (Lööw, 2015). However, the local aspect was still understudied, but in recent years, some local history research has been added (see, e.g., Dammberg, 2009). Nevertheless, this research has concerned the pan-Nordic dimension but to a very limited extent.

The studies on the subjects were overwhelmingly historical studies based on archival materials such as movement, private, and police archives. The primary data collection method has been archival research, with occasional utilization of interview material and analyses of movement literature, newspapers, leaflets, and magazines. Official data have also been used for, among other things, study voting patterns.

Today, most of police and military material is available for research at both the national and local levels. In the case of private archives, there may be restrictions in some cases. It should be emphasized that archival material from national socialist, fascist movements, activists, publicists, and cultural associations are very fragmentarily preserved. There are no collective party archives, whether at a local or national level. Membership registers are very fragmentarily preserved. The material is also found in many different archives, and there is no national compilation of the archive material.

Initially, this literature review was planned with three periods in mind covering first the “proto-fascism” period until Hitler came to power in 1933, then the period of Nazism before the Second World War, and finally “fascism in power,” 1940–1945. However, as soon became obvious, this division did not apply evenly between countries, especially regarding the initial period, which lacks almost any research, for example, in Denmark. The focus has been mostly on the third period, which is also reflected in a selection of the research themes. Most of the studies have been based on archival research and archival material, with only a few exceptions. Especially the earlier studies have also often been conducted from a strictly national perspective, and in only a few analyses has comparative setting also been utilized. A transnational or entangled approach has been rarely used until recently. In some countries, the problem has also been a lack of continuity, causing, along with the absence of cross-national archival collaboration, somewhat sporadic and fragmented research.

The Finnish studies on the subjects have been overwhelmingly historical studies based on archival materials. The primary data collection method has been archival research, with occasional utilization of interview material. Works of this period until the collapse of the Soviet Union can generally be characterized by a preponderance to theoretical reflection and categorization regarding the proper place of Finnish far-right movements regarding transnational fascism. This also reflects the state of contemporary international theoretical debate among historians on the nature of fascism and the far right.

The fact that, up to 1944, there was room for RWE, also within the state and administrative apparatus, the armed forces, and the Civic Guards, has made it difficult for scholars to differentiate and recognize RWE when it has been acting under state authorization. For instance, in 1941–1944, the security police and army counterintelligence were engaged in close cooperation with the German security police, which culminated in Finnish participation in the activities of the Einsatzgruppen der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD (Silvennoinen, 2010).

The opening of the Finnish security police archives for public use in the early 1990s has meant a great step forward for the research on the interwar and wartime RWE in Finland. On the materials level, this has made an inter-Nordic viewpoint a natural one because the Säkerhetspolisens arkiv under the Riksarkivet in Sweden formed an obvious counterpoint to the Finnish material. The same individuals were often monitored by the authorities on both sides of the Gulf of Bothnia, and both the Swedish and Finnish authorities were accustomed to seeking each other’s help.

As in Finland, most studies on fascism and the radical right in Norway in the interwar and war years have been mostly historical studies based on archival material and with a national perspective. Especially the older generation of Norwegian researchers showed little interest in theoretical reflections, mainly focusing on empirical investigations and built on sources collected at the Norwegian national archive (Riksarkivet, RA) and the archive of Norway’s Resistance Museum (Norges Hjemmefrontmuseum, NHM). Sources from outside Norway were only used to a negligible extent.

The main topics had been the history and development of Nasjonal Samling before and during the war, with a major focus on the party’s collaboration during the German occupation, and the role and activities of the Norwegian resistance movement, with several studies produced by former resistant fighters. The emphasis had only a few modifications until the 1990s, with the Holocaust in Norway being one of the topics gradually moving from the periphery into the center of academic interest.

Starting in the 2000s, Terje Emberland and later Nicola Karcher conducted studies, taking into account fascist and far-right groups beside and/or in opposition to Nasjonal Samling. These two scholars were also the first who employed transnational and entangled perspectives. Archives outside Norway such as the German national archive (Bundesarchiv, BA) have been used to a larger extent in recent years. However, a lack of language skills has often constituted a problem for younger scholars working in the field of occupation history.

In line with the research in other Nordic countries, most works on Danish groups and actors have approached the topic from the perspective of political history and been based on archival studies, drawing material both from public and private archives. However, in some studies, the research data used comprised statistics, interviews, and surveys. Certain studies, such as John T. Lauridsen’s work on Danish Nazism 1930–1945 included elements from cultural history as well. Historical studies have typically been written from a national perspective, a transnational angle can be seen, for example, in comparative settings, as well as in few cases, where a more entangled history approach was present. In the latter cases, for example, in Rebecca Wennberg’s PhD thesis, the pan-Nordic elements were explored (see also Christensen, 2022). Thematically, the focus of research that included transnational viewpoints has especially been in the only Danish Nazi party elected to the parliament, DNSAP, as well as in years of occupation and the Danish volunteers of the SS.

Swedish research has had its focus especially on various groups and movements, reflecting also the diversity of the field of RWE itself. There has not been any single group dominating the field or research efforts to a similar extent as in Norway or Denmark. During the early years, it was also impossible to speak of any unified movement, despite the fact that, by the mid-1930s, national socialist parties had more than 30,000 members. Another research trend, also partly echoing the diversity of the target of research, has been the studies of individual activists and ideological leaders. Along with these, a handful of scholarly works have also explored societal responses to the RWE milieu, though typically only as parts of some larger studies. The research methods have been more or less similar as in other Nordic countries, with the focus being on archival studies, occasionally also employing interview and statistical methods.

Many of the works mentioned in the present study have come from scholars of an older generation, who often have already retired or did not continue with the topic later in their careers. Among the active researchers on the field in Sweden can be counted Heléne Lööw, Victor Lundberg, Johan Stenfeldt, Lars M. Andersson, and Lena Berggren. Regarding Finland, among the active researchers in the field are Juha Siltala, Oula Silvennoinen, Marko Tikka, Aapo Roselius, and Aarni Virtanen. The group of active researchers in the field of the history of Norwegian fascism and occupation history is large, consisting of both scholars belonging to the older generation and younger researchers. The group of scholars who investigated transnational perspectives and pan-Nordic approaches covering the first, second, and third periods is, however, much smaller, with Terje Emberland and Nicola Karcher as the main contributors. In Denmark, active researchers publishing studies include Sofie Lene Bak and Claus Bundgård Christensen.

In Sweden there has been, with two exceptions (Hagtvet, 1980; Lindström, 1985) a lack of more systematic comparative studies that place the Swedish milieu in both a Nordic and transnational perspective. This reflects the overall situation with the current research in other Nordic countries. Some of the reasons are methodological, some to scattered and unconnected archival sources, and some the differing national histories. Regarding archives, the material has been fragmented also on a national level, and no compilation of the archive material has been done on a national, let alone pan-Nordic, level. Thus, any pan-Nordic approach would depend on the initiatives of individual researchers.

Although also scarce, comparative approaches still have much more common than transnational or entangled one, but even these have been partly methodically underdeveloped. The national empirical approach has still been the dominating method. In Finland, the postwar isolated and strategically vulnerable position of country encouraged a tendency to inspect Finnish matters from a narrowly nationalist viewpoint. A particular difficulty, here accentuated as long as the Soviet Union was in existence, has been the classification of Finnish RWE and its proportioning to its transnational points of comparison. Therefore, the works cited here do not reflect a theoretically or terminologically uniform approach to their subjects, nor has pan-Nordicism been a natural starting point for pre-1990s studies.

A notable exception to this tendency can be found in the 1980 anthology Who Were the Fascists, written by an international group of scholars and in which an attempt to put also the Lapua movement into the transnational picture was made (Heinonen, 1980). The anthology can be seen as holding relevance also for other Nordic countries. Ideological similarities between RWE in Finland and elsewhere in Europe came up in the aforementioned books by Silvennoinen et al. (2018) and Virtanen (2015). Silvennoinen et al. also placed the development of fascist movement in Finland into a larger European context by connecting it to the shared experiences and sentiments among those who witnessed the battlefields of the First World War.

In Norwegian and Danish research, here stemming from their historical experiences of occupation during the Second World War, the transnational aspect has largely focused on contacts with German national socialists and collaborationist individuals and parties, as well as volunteers of the Waffen-SS. Some of the scholarly works extended beyond Nordic national boundaries but were mostly comparative by nature or only parallel studies.

So far, studies with a pan-Nordic transnational or entangled dimension as a main approach do not exist. However, the recently published anthology edited by Nicola Karcher and Markus Lundström (2022) on Nordic fascism, conducted by the Network for Nordic Fascism Studies (NORFAS), offers a collection of empirical research chapters dealing with both transnational and entangled perspectives of the period discussed in this chapter. Thus, this anthology constitutes a first Nordic step away from the dominant methodological nationalism, instead moving toward joint Nordic research.