Norway's Resistance Museum

The museum sits inside the fortress where the things it documents actually happened. During the German occupation from 1940 to 1945, Akershus Fortress was a prison and torture center. Forty-two Norwegian resistance fighters were executed in the courtyard adjacent to what is now the museum entrance. You walk past the execution site to get in. There is no comfortable distance between the exhibits and the events.

The museum opened in May 1970, established as a foundation in 1966 and inaugurated by Crown Prince Harald on the twenty-fifth anniversary of Norwegian liberation. The collection spans the entire five-year occupation: from the shock of April 9, 1940 — when German forces invaded a country that had been neutral and unprepared — through the underground resistance networks, the deportation of Norway's Jewish population, and the jubilation of liberation in May 1945.

Among the most remarkable exhibits is one of the original heavy-water production cells from the Vemork plant in Telemark, allegedly the only surviving example. The Germans needed heavy water for their nuclear weapons program, and the Norwegian sabotage operations that destroyed the supply — later dramatized in "The Heroes of Telemark" — were among the most important covert operations of the war. The actual British radio transmitter used to coordinate the sabotage is here too.

A scale model of Auschwitz with the "Arbeit macht frei" gate documents the fate of deported Norwegian Jews. Approximately 50,000 Norwegians were arrested, deported, or sent to the front during the occupation — staggering for a country with a population of only three million. The thick brick walls with no natural light create a dungeon-like atmosphere that the curators didn't need to manufacture. The building provides it for free.