söndag 17 mars 2024

Stein Barth-Heyerdahl: Lecturer in Norse Culture and Language at the Nordisches Institut in Greifswald and Editor of Nasjonalsocialisten

Young years
At home in Sandnessjøen, Barth-Heyerdahl was a scout leader, and as a young man he became chairman of the local Fedreland team. At the age of fifteen, he was sent to Hamar to attend the national high school. There he became an ardent supporter of the Winsnese racial ideology. In Hamar, he also became friends with the young Per Imerslund. He took his master's degree in 1930.

National Socialism
Around 1930, Barth-Heyerdahl moved to Oslo to study law. There were few studies, all the more café life and politics. The combative and talkative northerner quickly became a central figure in the environment around Eugen Nielsen and a regular writer in his mouthpiece Fronten. Already at this time he was a convinced neo-pagan and anti-Christian, and in 1933 he resigned from the state church.

Barth-Heyerdahl became an early member of NNSAP. Here he proved to be a more talented speaker and agitator than the party's leader, Adolf "Lille-Adolf" Egeberg jr. Among them, he was one of the figures who led the crowd in the so-called Forum battle in the center of Oslo, when 200 young Norwegian National Socialists barked together with communists in the student community, before marching down to the Storting with shrill cries of "Hail". Barth-Heyerdahl made several impromptu and successful appeals to the crowd, proclaiming that it would not be the last time the Oslo SA (Sturmabteilung) marched.

Invited by Adolf Egeberg jr. On 9 May 1933, he attended the founding meeting of the Nasjonal Samling. Barth-Heyerdahl was one of three who co-authored the first draft of the party's programme. But Barth-Heyerdal's radical anti-Christian and race-oriented attitudes led from the outset to conflict with Quisling, and in the autumn of 1934 he resigned from NS. From 1934 to 1936, he concentrated his political involvement on NNSAP, and then especially the editor's job in the party organ Nasjonalsocialisten.

From 1934-35 he worked as a lecturer in Norse culture and language at the Nordisches Institut in Greifswald, an institute which since the 1920s had been characterized by völkische racial ideologies.

In the winter and spring of 1934-35, Barth-Heyerdahl took part in the meetings that led to the establishment of the journal Ragnarok. After his return from Germany in the autumn of 1935, he wrote diligently in the journal, in which he attacked the Jews and the spiritual decline of the times by the intellectualists who "do not understand the spiritual core of National Socialism".

When the internal conflicts in NS culminated after the 1936 election, Barth-Heyerdahl eagerly participated in the Ragnarok circle's intrigues against the party leadership. Among other things, he supplemented Eugen Nielsen with information about the conflict, and he was behind the Front's call to disillusioned NS members to establish an independent network of national groups.

When this never came to fruition, Barth-Heyerdahl focused his energy on the Voluntary Workers' Service, where he was a member of the national board from the start.

World War II
At the outbreak of war in Norway, Barth-Heyerdahl was on a literary lecture tour in Germany. He immediately traveled to Berlin, and when Quisling's coup d'état was a fact, he contacted his old German connections to warn against NS, Quisling and the Freemasons.

Until 1943, he stayed mostly in Germany, where he primarily carried out journalistic work. He contributed diligently to the magazine Ragnarok, became a regular supplier to the Norwegian-language propaganda magazine Utsyn and in 1943, editor of the magazine. In 1941, he bit the sour apple and joined NS. The following year, he was appointed press manager at the party's German department.

Barth-Heyerdahl translated Wulff Sørensen's controversial book Forfedrenes Stemme, which was published by Hans S. Jacobsen's publisher Kamban, caused a great stir and contributed to the conflict between the church and NS.

Barth-Heyerdahl was deeply affected by the unexpected death of his comrade Per Imerslund. In the last years of the war, he isolated himself in a cabin on Imerslund's widow's property in Eggedal, where he immersed himself in religious speculation, Norse studies, poetry and art painting. Barth-Heyerdahl produced a number of paintings, including romantic nature pictures with motifs from the Nordland of his childhood.

After the war
After the war, an investigation was launched. In 1948, the national treason case was dismissed, after the police doctor concluded that "the character deviations of the accused are so pronounced that one finds reason to harbor doubts about his state of mind".

For a period, Barth-Heyerdahl lived with friends, including Hans S. Jacobsen and Ernst A. Schirmer in Bygdøy, before he moved back to Eggedal in 1947 where he continued his hermit life and artistic activity until his death in 1972.




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Sverre Henschien: Leader of the Førerguard (1944-1945)

Born 29 July 1897 in Levanger, Nord-Trøndelag, Norway. Sverre Henschien was the Leader of the Førerguard from 1944 to 1945.