On this date in 1948 at stately Akershus Fortress, a firing squad carried out the last execution in Norwegian history — that of Ragnar Skancke.
Skancke (English Wikipedia entry | Norwegian) was an electrical engineer in academia, and the very first posts he held in his political life were the ministries that Vidkun Quisling named him to in the wartime Third Reich client government. That doesn’t exactly mean the man was apolitical; he had joined Quisling’s Nasjonal Samling fascist movement in 1933.
As Minister for Church and Educational Affairs for most of the war years, Skancke got to do things like purge books in service of a fascist-friendly curriculum, and maneuver Norway’s reluctant Lutheran clergy into better compliance with the new order.
Since he was just an academic, and in matters of state an administrator outside the security apparatus — not a guy ordering executions or deploying the paramilitaries — Skancke wasn’t really expected to draw the severest punishment at the postwar trials of collaborators. Skancke himself shared this view, and mounted a slight and indifferent defense that he would come to regret when he heard the shock sentence.
A two-year appeals process would explore in numbing (literally so, for Skancke) detail the precise legal stature of Norway’s 1940 capitulation to the invading Germans, and whether or not that document cast the pall of treason over further collaboration with the Nazis. In fine, the government and the king fled the country and delegated a general to make the knuckling-under arrangements recognizing German victory, but simultaneously averred that Norway as a state — meaning its exiled remnants — remained at war with Germany. All well and good for the so-called “London Cabinet” strolling gardens in Buckingham Palace, but what’s that supposed to mean for the Norwegians still in Norway? As a minister, Skancke’s collaboration was considerable in degree; the question remained, was it treasonable in kind? The reader may discern the answer given by courts, but the conduct of the purge trials as a whole has remained a going controversy long after the last gavel fell.
As public distaste for the death penalty in general was also mounting, and the entire legal apparatus by which Norway conducted its postwar purges came under some scrutiny — among other things, Norway’s “capitulated” government had specifically reintroduced the already-abolished death penalty from exile with a view to these proceedings — Skancke’s increasingly frantic appeals were mirrored by a public campaign for clemency among the clergy that he had so recently pushed around.
Norway fully abolished the death penalty in 1979 and today registers consistently overwhelming public opposition to its reintroduction.
On this day..
- 1955: Emmett Till lynched
- 1588: Eight Catholics after the defeat of the Spanish Armada
- 476: Orestes, father of the last Roman Emperor
- 388: Magnus Maximus, minimized
- 1628: Edmund Arrowsmith, Catholic priest
- 1648: Sir Charles Lucas and Sir George Lisle, royalists
- 1765: Three Burglarious Johns
- 1987: Dale Selby Pierre, Hi-Fi Murderer
- 1941: Nguyen Thi Minh Khai, Indochina Communist cadre
- 1793: Adam Philippe, Comte de Custine
- 1944: Bronislav Kaminski, Waffen SS collaborator
- Themed Set: Russian Revolutions That Weren't
- 1807: James McLean, twice
By the time of his death, the Nazi collaborator (
