– The postwar legal purge is known for its gender bias, in that women and men were treated differently, Pål Csaszni Halvorsen explains.

– Women often received lighter sentences than men for comparable offences.

He refers to the 2023 documentary De siste dødsdømte, about Norwegians executed for treason, which tells the stories of, among others, Eilif Pisani and Aud Maggi Andersen. 

– Both informed on Norwegians to the Germans during the occupation. He was sentenced to death, she was spared.

Halvorsen is an associate professor at the Department of Archivistics, Library and Information Science at OsloMet and has recently published a book about the 38 writers who were investigated during the postwar purge of traitors. Three were women: Marie Hamsun, Eli Quisling Nordvik and Cally Monrad.

– I’m a sociologist, not a literary scholar, so I don’t comment on the quality of their literature. I’m primarily interested in their attitudes towards the occupation and the extent to which it influenced the field of literature, he says.

– One of the things I investigated was whether male and female writers were treated differently in the postwar legal purge, which, I found, they were.

Not everyone was investigated

The writers investigated in the postwar legal purge had two things in common: they had published at least one book before the German occupation and continued writing during the war. The vast majority of them were members of the Norwegian Authors’ Union (DnF) and the Norwegian fascist party Nasjonal Samling (NS), according to Halvorsen.

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– Many writers could have been prosecuted for their actions during the war but were never investigated. As a result, we don’t even know whether they were members of the NS. Many of them were women, he says.

– Take Gudrun Holter, who was married to Karl Holter. They were both writers and he was convicted of treason. She presumably shared his views – and may even have been a member of NS. But she published nothing during the war.

Other female writers conspicuously absent from the list of those charged in the postwar legal purge include Nanna Schwengaard and Mita Hartmann, according to Halvorsen.

– Schwengaard wrote explicitly pro-Nazi poems during the war. She died before the postwar trials began, but some people were investigated even after their deaths, he adds.

– Hartmann was married to the NS mayor of Kragerø. She published Nazi propaganda through Kamban forlag, and both their sons were members of the SS. She must have been an NS member, but since she wasn’t investigated, we can’t know for certain. We have, for example, a letter from her husband to the Ministry of Culture and Enlightenment in which he asks that his wife be awarded a grant. She also wrote a controversial novel, Hallo Moskva, under the pseudonym Rigo van Assendelft.

Overall, quite a few women escaped investigation because their husbands had already been arrested.

Pål Csaszni Halvorsen

Were the women underestimated?

Halvorsen believes it is reasonable to assume that they escaped investigation simply because they were women: they were seen as their husbands’ wives rather than as individuals in their own right.

– Would these women have been arrested if they were men? Overall, quite a few women weren’t investigated because their husbands had already been arrested, he says.

– If, for example, they lived on a farm and had children, someone had to keep the farm running. As for the three female writers who were charged and convicted, they received lighter sentences than the men for the same offences, he says.

Another theory, according to Halvorsen, is that women were not regarded as equals capable of making decisions. 

– They were seen as victims under the influence of the men in their families and could therefore not be blamed or held accountable for their own actions, he explains.

– The documents contain numerous indications of gender bias, which I intend to examine in more detail. Eli Quisling Nordvik was reportedly under her cousin’s influence, to the extent that her legal capacity was partially called into question.

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Impossible to ignore

However, the three women discussed in this chapter of Halvorsen’s book were by no means simply acting under the influence of the men in their lives.

– They were extremely visible in their support for the Nazis during the war, making it impossible for the authorities not to investigate them, says Halvorsen.

– Marie Hamsun and Cally Monrad, in particular, were prominent public figures, while Eli Quisling Nordvik was head of propaganda for the NS relief fund, and shared the Quisling name with her cousin Vidkun Quisling.

– Why did you decide to devote a separate chapter to women rather than discuss them thematically, alongside the other writers?

– Overall, the 38 writers in the book are a diverse group, with little in common beyond being writers and members of NS, he explains. 

– Some are grouped based on the charges brought against them. In the case of the women, however, I wanted to examine whether gender played a role in how they were treated. The leading women in the NS women’s branch, for example, were treated on a par with men. The same may have been true of the female writers. But with so few cases, it’s difficult to draw any firm conclusions. 

One striking thing the three women had in common was their upper-class backgrounds, Halvorsen points out. 

– Few of the other people in the material came from this background, which could have provided another basis for grouping them. All three also had links to popular fiction.

Nordvik, Hamsun and Monrad

Otherwise, the three women were very different from one another.

– Cally Monrad and Marie Hamsun came from the literary world and were members of the Norwegian Authors’ Union while Eli Quisling Nordvik was an author of children’s and young adult literature and was primarily convicted for her active involvement in the NS, he says. 

– Nordvik initially led the småhirden youth groups in Lillehammer before becoming head of propaganda for the NS relief organisation. But her writing never reached as wide an audience as Monrad’s and Hamsun’s.

Eli Quisling Nordvik studied at the Norwegian National Academy of Craft and Art Industry. She made her debut in 1932 with a book about animals, published by Cappelen, and went on to write several more books for children and young adults, some under a male pseudonym.

– She married Jørgen Nordvik, and both joined the NS in 1933. Jørgen was appointed Director of Public Prosecutions under the Quisling government. The couple divorced in 1941. Eli continued writing until 1942, when she became head of propaganda for the NS relief organisation,” Halvorsen explains. 

Marie Hamsun was also known for her acting career and her marriage to the writer Knut Hamsun.

– Marie joined the national theatre, Nationaltheatret, in 1906. She met Knut Hamsun in 1908 and gave up acting shortly afterwards,” Halvorsen explains. 

– She made her debut as an author in 1922 with Smaadikte, and went on to publish several children’s books, which proved particularly popular in Germany, where they were reprinted in several editions.

Marie Hamsun joined the NS in 1940 and visited Germany several times during the war.

– After the war, she said that her visits to Germany had been to see her daughter, who lived there. But she also visited Goebbels’s wife at their country home outside Berlin, Halvorsen says.

Cally Monrad was already an internationally renowned opera singer when she made her debut as a novelist with Petju in 1922. She went on to publish several collections of poetry.

– Monrad lived in Berlin in the 1920s, she was married to a German and was strongly influenced by German cultural and intellectual life, says Halvorsen.

– She went on to receive a lifetime grant for artists, and was appointed artistic director of Det Norske Teatret during the occupation. She also wrote several personal letters to Quisling.

Being both a writer and a traitor to your country was seen as an especially grave betrayal.  

Pål Csaszni Halvorsen

When writers turned traitor

Eli Quisling Nordvik was sentenced to two years and six months in prison. Marie Hamsun received a three-year sentence of hard labour and a fine of NOK 75,000. Cally Monrad was sentenced to one year in prison. As in most treason cases, all three were also stripped of their civil rights for ten years. In practice, however, these penalties, like the prison sentences themselves, were rarely enforced. 

According to Halvorsen, Nordvik was convicted primarily for her involvement with the NS, while Monrad and Hamsun were judged by the same criteria as other writers convicted of treason.

– To be both a writer and a traitor to your country was seen as a particularly serious betrayal. Writers had a gift that could have been used to fight for Norway and rally readers against Nazi ideology, rather than promote it.

Halvorsen points out that many people convicted of treason in other professions got off more lightly.

– Take police officers and newspaper editors, for example. Many escaped punishment on the grounds that they had been following orders from their superiors. Writers, by contrast, were their own masters – independent artists with no one telling them what to write.

– The ‘German whores’ were a tragic exception

“The postwar purge has been widely criticised. It was also unique to Norway because we had a ruling party, the NS, which collaborated directly with Hitler,” says Halvorsen. 

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– This meant that Norway ended up with a relatively mild, but very extensive, reckoning, unlike most other countries, he says. 

– One of the main aims of the postwar reckoning was to prevent people from taking the law into their own hands. For the most part, this was avoided. The tragic exception was the treatment of the so-called ‘German whores’ – Norwegian women who had relationships with German soldiers during the occupation. Although they had committed no crime and were never put on trial, they were nevertheless severely punished.

Stian Bones, a professor of modern history at UiT, agrees that the postwar purge was marked by gender bias. He argues that this was particularly evident in the informal reckoning that took place in the aftermath of the war. 

– In other words, the reckoning that took place among ordinary people, he says. 

– Women who had relationships with German soldiers faced public humiliation and social ostracism, with consequences that often extended to their children. Some had their heads shaved in public, while others had their tenancies terminated.

But they were also targeted by the authorities, including the police, despite having broken no laws by associating with German soldiers, he explains. 

– After the liberation, for example, some women were interned or detained for periods of time. One such camp was on Hovedøya, where around 1,100 women suspected of having had relationships with German soldiers were held.