Norway holds many “gravlunder” or graveyards.
Other lands that’ve been populated by us for a long while have plenty of such sites, too. However, a few of Norway’s cemeteries display elements that seem especially impressive.
Out of some grave mounds, for example, Norwegians have plucked full-size Viking longboats with Shield Maiden leaders buried aboard—presumably to enjoy a last long voyage of exploration into distant fringes of the Cosmos.
I love that. But my most fervent admiration is reserved for a much more recent site for Norse heroes, one lying just to the north of Oslo’s main airport. This cemetery seems unique in that it contains no buried bodies at all, and it also boasts not a single tombstone—only a few bare crosses that jut up beside numbered rocks. Rather than the ordinary graveyard elements and adornments, the place provides a simple vista that ends up far more spectral and sobering.
A REMOTE SCENE FOR TRAGIC DEEDS
Trandumskogen memorializes the spot of a lengthy and coldblooded horror. It aims to remind us of brutal measures inflicted by Germany during its invasion and occupation of Norway in World War II.
Its Norwegian moniker translates as The Trandum Woods. Which could suggest a bland landscape, and well, that’s what it primarily is: a scrub pine forest of no remarkable height or density. Its most striking visual aspect is a surreal series of battered and (now) spalling concrete arches, some 10 meters high on a course 300 meters long, built and used by the German army as a firing range and training ground for its Panzer tank crews.
That such a huge and expensive facility was erected here stands as bold proof that Hitler wasn’t joking about his scheme to transform this country into Fortress Norway. First and foremost, this was to be done in order to secure his Reich’s northern flank. Yet he also wanted to see if he could unite Norway’s citizens with his own people in order to create a somewhat vaster and more blond set of fully Aryan Volk.
The Wehrmacht consequently acted as if it meant to move in and stay for a while, perhaps to fulfill the Reich’s vision of a thousand-year run.
THOSE ARCHES OF UNTRIUMPH
Just to the east of their massive construction project—which now appears heavily eroded by the impact of many artillery shells plus 80 years of Scandinavian weather—a forest trail winds through the sparse trees, brush and weeds. This path periodically brings a wandering pedestrian to a number of blank stone crosses. The crosses mark sites where firing squads executed blindfolded Resistance fighters and reprisal hostages. At these spots, those unlucky souls briefly stood with their toes at the edge of their own graves, awaiting the shots that would finally and fatally send them off.
The Nazi bosses intended that this site and what happened here would forever remain secret. Amid the general boom of tank guns and other types of range practice occurring in the area, a few random bursts of rifle fire would likely go unremarked. Then all dead prisoners would continue to lay concealed in the hidden pits, with rural residents in the region turning none the wiser. Official news of this operation was apparently also concealed from collaborators in Nasjonal Samling (NS), the Norwegian fascist movement.
Eventually, 194 victims of execution would be interred here, in pits dug at 18 different spots. Those condemned, shot and buried mainly consisted of 173 Norwegians, but also included 21 massacred British and Soviet soldiers.
LONG-GONE MARTYRS & HEROES
One might think the Germans would reserve such a fate for their most dread enemies. Some of their victims were indeed formidable adversaries—such as Arne Laudal, 51, a major in Norway’s army. He’d initially fought against the German invasion in 1940, then forged on to organize armed resistance in the country’s southern regions. Laudal was an early leader of “Milorg,” a clandestine force that would eventually play a pivotal role in rendering Norway’s liberation largely calm and peaceful after the war ground to an end.
But long before that happy day, Laudal was arrested along with other comrades in Milorg, to be held with them at Grini concentration camp near Oslo for over a year before being led out to Trandum Woods.
Elimination of some of the other Trandum victims makes far less tactical or strategic sense.
Lars Sandvik, age 24, got arrested for merely helping publish and distribute an underground newspaper, then attempting to flee the country. Before he stood at the edge of a pit at Trandum, he was held at a jail run by Norway’s state police, then one run by NS, next at the notorious Møllergata 19 prison (operated by agencies of the SS), and finally at Grini, too. Thus, the young journalist had to endure the whole gantlet of almost every possible form of official abuse before finding himself blasted to shreds by a firing squad at Trandum.
A further 18 Norwegian victims were already being held for varied offenses at a camp near Trandum when Reichskommissar Josef Terboven abruptly ordered them all shot as a reprisal for the slaying of a pair of Gestapo agents by British-trained commandos at Telavåg—a tiny fishing town utilized as a port by Resistance smugglers, far out on Norway’s western coast.
RAGES OF THE REICHSKOMMISSAR
Josef Terboven, assigned early on as Hitler’s viceroy to inflict Teutonic order on occupied Norway, was no shrinking violet when it came to deploying violence to underscore his main points. But a case might easily be made that his stern measures did much more to inspire, strengthen and stiffen the native Resistance than they did to constrain or intimidate it.
When I visit a place like Trandum Woods, and I seek to comprehend evil performed in such a callous manner, I find myself in danger of being overwhelmed by emotion. I need to sit, simply breathe for a while, collect myself, examine my thoughts and feelings, and coax them back in some sort of order to some to enable me to keep going. In fact, prior to my visit to Trandum, the last time I remember being so distraught was two decades earlier, when I forced myself to examine an exhibit of actual torture devices deployed by the Spanish Inquisition.
AN AFTERLIFE IN HONOR
What renders Trandum a truly remarkable site is not just the evidence of how much wanton mayhem the SS Sonderkommando team of executioners (plus a few German regulars) inflicted on their prey, but how nobly those vulnerable Norwegians responded. One memorial sign says, “After the war, German witnesses said that the condemned stood tall and proud and faced death with dignity.”
That’s a rather bare, stark summary. Yet it does suggest the presence of a possible grand triumph, not only for Norway’s patriots, but for our human spirits in general. What occurred here was a massive and clear retort made by unconquered minds to the bootheels of oppression. I’d put the message this way: You might stomp our bodies down but our souls shall remain utterly free of you. Those, we refuse to let you so much as touch!
After being notified of his sentence, Sandvik wrote a last letter to his fiancé, attempting to console her. It said, “…for my own part, I must say that it has been so blessed to notice that the fear of death has completely disappeared…”
And Major Laudal wrote in a letter from Grini to his former commander in battle, General Otto Ruge, “I shall try to conduct myself as a worthy representative to the end.”
As he and his comrades were taken to the truck that would transport them to Trandum, Laudal said, “For Norway, our dear fatherland, no sacrifice is too great. Thus, it is not even too much of a burden to lose our lives.” And at the very edge of the pit, he shouted out, “We shall all die standing, boys!”
A HAUPTSTURMFÜHRER’S STROLL IN THE WOODS
The reason why the earth at Trandum no longer holds any bodies at all is because as the war lurched to a halt, thousands of Milorg soldiers and British troops swept through the whole country to regain control. One war criminal they rapidly nabbed was Oskar Hans, the SS leader of Trandum’s Sonderkommando unit. He sought to flee justice by disguising himself as an ordinary soldier. It was exactly the same craven maneuver that his boss, Heinrich Himmler, had tried at about the same time back in Germany—also to no avail.
A shackled Hans was then forced to go out and walk the woods to locate the unmarked grave pits. Next, members of the NS and other Norwegian collaborators and German POWs got hauled to the site, where they were forced to dig up all the bodies. These were brought back to morgues to be laboriously identified, primarily via dental records, items of clothing, and other clues such as unique watches and finger rings. Cremated remains of these martyrs and heroes then were awarded far more honorable burials.
In 1954, a granite memorial was dedicated at Trandum Woods by Crown Prince Olav, who’d helped his dad, King Haakon VII, direct Norway’s government-in-exile from London amid the war—as well as advise and supply much of the Resistance activity. Then in 2020 Norway formally declared Trandumskogen a national culture heritage site. These days a visitor is greeted by Olav’s original memorial, those crosses, and a reasonably good array of multi-lingual signs. Plus, you’re also awarded a quite fulsome chance to ponder some of the tragic vicissitudes of human history that impress one as astoundingly recent.
Measures taken at Trandum might all seem like brutal barbarisms from a much more primitive age. And yet, they’re not. Unhinged atavism seems much nearer to us than we prefer to think.
I went there in August to enrich my knowledge of Norway’s wartime troubles and mighty ripostes. Published last year, my newest novel “Splinter” explored the launch of that string of events, beginning in 1940 with the rise of the Resistance there. I’m now mostly through composing a sequel, a second story with the same main characters that’s set in 1943. I expect “Splinter” to become a trilogy before this writing project is done. (“Splinter,” my first entry in the series, was named a finalist for the 2024 Silver Falchion award in the Action & Adventure category.)
And beyond searching out facts and themes for my “Splinter” novels, I feel that two additional harvests were acquired by me at The Trandum Woods.
One is a better understanding of what might be required nowadays for beleaguered Ukraine citizens to continue to stand up to Russia’s egregiously grotesque assault, more than two years on. And just to remind you: Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine in much the same way and for many of the same reasons that Hitler once attacked Norway.
Another takeaway would be a much more heartfelt condemnation of the Trump campaign team’s violation of protocol, proper respect, and even good taste as well as common sense, when that undistinguished candidate intruded upon America’s own sacred ground of Arlington, Virginia. For Trump to pose with a thumbs-up and his vapid, goofy, weird, clueless grin at the edge of gravesites of heroes who made the ultimate sacrifice for our nation’s most sacred values, I would term his display: a total and absolute fucking travesty.
No other phrase I can devise at the moment seems to quite describe Trump’s cultural faceplant. I might try at some point to summarize it again, though I assume I could once more find myself at a near-total loss for words.
Which, I have to say, is rare.
