Norwegian Nurses in the Service of the Third Reich: A Criminological Study of Atrocity Perpetration and Claims to Victimhood
Talk with Lilli Wolland Blomberg, PhD Law, University of Edinburgh.
Women who volunteered to serve as nurses in the German Red Cross (DRK) from 1942-1945, were prosecuted and sentenced in the Norwegian treason trials (1945-1957), one of the most comprehensive criminal justice processes in Europe after the Second World War. The group was prosecuted for having ‘aided the enemy’ through the DRK, but my research aims to display the complexities of the group by exploring the various other accounts of treason: Nazi Party membership, German work, and informant work. Many were sentenced with time in prison, loss of civil rights, and fines. In addition, highlight the extrajudicial and gendered forms of punishment nurses experienced. The purpose of this project is to study a group in Norwegian post-war memory, answering the main research question of ‘what explains Norwegian nurses’ contribution to Nazi atrocity crime in their role as part of the German Red Cross’? While the group is debated in terms of Norway’s post-war memory, there remains many knowledge gaps and puzzles about their claims to victimhood and complicity in Nazi crime.
In response, this qualitative and interdisciplinary research applies criminological theory and conceptual tools (victimology, perpetrator studies, memory studies), critically engages with historical literature, and collects primary data mainly from the Treason Trial Archive at the National Archive of Norway. By utilising archival material few have seen and accessed before, and forming an original combination of source material, this project offers new empirical findings about the nurses’ experiences of punishment and claims to victimhood. Theoretically, the study applies conceptual tools which enables us to move beyond the dichotomous understanding of them as either victims or complicit, towards recognising the groups' many complexities. More broadly, the study engages with the need to epistemologically challenge post-war knowledge of the group by looking at when, how, and by whom this knowledge is produced.