Norwegian anti-Semitism. Two lectures. The first is by historian Bjørn Westlie about his two books “Det norske jødehatet” and “Mørke år”, followed by a lecture by Ingeborg Solbrekken about her book “Jøden og jorden”.

Bjørn Petter Westlie is a journalist, author and historian with a doctorate in history.

He defended his doctorate on 24 September 2018 with the dissertation NSB, prisoners of war and the Second World War. The thesis deals with, among other things, NSB’s use of Soviet prisoners of war for the development of railway lines in Norway. Westlie later worked as a journalist in the newspaper Dagens Næringsliv, where he was also a correspondent in Stockholm for a period.

The mother Agnes was a friend of Ruth Maier who had fled from the Nazis in Austria and was deported to Auschwitz by the German occupying power in collaboration with the Norwegian authorities. The father was a volunteer front-line fighter in SS uniform during the Second World War. The parents married during the war. According to Westlie, he defended for the rest of his life that he had taken part in the war against the Soviet Union, while the treatment of the Jews bothered him. Westlie believes that his father and his comrades killed Jews, but that they had no pleasure in it.

In an article in Dagens Næringsliv 27. In May 1995, Westlie revealed how Norwegian Jews were financially looted by Norwegians during the Second World War and compensation was never given.

The newspaper article is referred to as the most important about the Holocaust in Norway until then. The article was published on the newspaper’s front page with the headline “The Norwegian Jew Robbery”. In 1945, the so-called liquidation board had eight million kroner in its account. These were values confiscated from the 2,200 Jews in Norway. Westlie’s article described, among other things, what happened to Bernhard Plesansky and his family in Tønsberg. This revelation, together with Bjarte Bruland’s main thesis in history, formed the basis for the establishment of the Skarpnes committee, which was to investigate compensation for Norwegian Jews who lost their valuables and property during the war.

In the spring of 2012, Bjørn Westlie quit as a journalist in Dagens Næringsliv and took up a position as senior lecturer at Oslo and Akershus University College. Westlie has published a number of books, most of them about the Second World War and anti-Semitism in Norway. In Fars krig, he tells about the relationship with his father, Petter Westlie, who was a Nazi and a front-line fighter during the war. In 2008, Fars krig received the Brage prize in the category non-fiction/non-fiction. “Father’s War” was released in Ukraine in 2015 and in the United States in 2023.

In his lecture during the festival, Bjørn Westlie will take his two latest books as a starting point:

The Norwegian hatred of Jews – propaganda and press during the occupation from 2019 and

Dark years. Norway and the Jews in the 1930s from 2022.