Bjørn Harrow

Bjørn Egge CBE (born August 19, 1918 in Kristiansand , † July 25, 2007 ) was a Norwegian resistance fighter , major general of the Norwegian armed forces and diplomat . From 1981 to 1987 he was also President of the Norwegian Red Cross .

Life

education

From 1933 Egge went to sea for three years as a teenager . He then served in the bodyguard of the Norwegian King Haakon VII and then attended the NCO school of the Norwegian Army. When the German Wehrmacht occupied Norway on April 9, 1940 as part of the " Operation Weser Exercise ", Egge's unit was deployed in southern Norway, with a month-long fighting.

Resistance Actions

During the occupation , Egge took part in various resistance actions in northern Norway. After a temporary arrest by the Gestapo in the summer of 1941, he managed to escape to Sweden , where he briefly studied at Uppsala University . In March 1942 he was involved in the so-called Operation Performance , the aim of which was to break the German blockade ring around Sweden and to smuggle material such as steel and ball bearings from Gothenburg to Aberdeen . The Norwegian ship on which Egge had hired, however, was attacked by German scouts. The Norwegian crew managed to sink their ship and its cargo. Nevertheless, Egge and the other crew members came into German captivity.

captivity

Egge initially spent almost a year in the Westertimke internment and prisoner-of-war camp , where merchant ship crews from 42 nations were held. In accordance with the Geneva Conventions , the camp was under the protection of the International Committee of the Red Cross .

Entrance gate of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp with the roll call area behind it

In 1943, however, Egge was deported to the Sonnenburg concentration camp near Küstrin on the basis of the so-called Night and Fog Decree . On the way there he survived an Allied bombing raid on Szczecin . In Sonnenburg he had to do the hardest work twelve hours a day. Many of the prisoners became ill with tuberculosis or typhus . Forty-three of the 151 Norwegian prisoners died, many of them from malnutrition.

As the front drew nearer, Egge and other Norwegian prisoners were transferred to Sachsenhausen concentration camp in November 1944 . There they were isolated as night-and-fog prisoners and sometimes treated even more brutally than the other internees. Egge was one of the so-called shoe runners who had to test new boots for the German armed forces for wear and tear and who had to walk a 45-kilometer march on the roll call square every day.

Shortly before the end of the war, Egge profited from the rescue operation of the White Buses initiated by the Swedish Red Cross under the direction of its Vice President Folke Bernadotte . About 15,000 mostly Danish and Norwegian prisoners from the concentration camps were released this way. Egge was only able to return to Norway after a long period of treatment in Sweden.

Military career after World War II

After the end of the war, Egge trained as an intelligence officer. First he acted as an advisor to the then Norwegian Defense Minister Jens Christian Hauge; then he worked for several years as a military attaché at the Norwegian embassy in Moscow . In the 1960s he was a member of the Norwegian contingent of the United Nations Operation in the Congo . He was the first to see the body of Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld , who died in an air accident in Ndola in 1961 . Egge explained at the time that the otherwise uninjured body of Hammarskjöld had a wound on the forehead, "a hole in the head". This information gave rise to speculation that the Secretary General was not killed in the plane crash, but was killed by a pistol shot.

Between 1976 and 1980 Egge was deputy commander at the NATO Defense College in Rome . He ended his military career in 1983 as major general and in command of Akershus Fortress .

Norwegian Red Cross and other duties

In 1981, in grateful memory of the rescue operation of the White Buses, he accepted the offer to become President of the Norwegian Red Cross. He completed this task until 1987.

Until his death, Egge was honorary president of the World Veteran Federation (World Association of War Veterans). He also worked as an ambassador for the non-profit Stiftelse Hvite Busser til Auschwitz (White Buses to Auschwitz Foundation), which organizes educational trips to the memorials of the former concentration camps and mediates conversations primarily between schoolchildren and contemporary witnesses.

In the last years of his life he appeared in the media several times as a security policy expert. He warned of the excessive influence of the USA on world politics and condemned the sending of Norwegian soldiers to the crisis areas of Iraq and Afghanistan .

Awards and honors

In 1980 Bjørn Egge was awarded the Commander's Cross of the Saint Olav Order . He was also, among other things, commander of the Order of the British Empire and bearer of the Swedish Order of the Sword . In 2005 he received the Henry Dunant Medal of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement . In June 2007 he was awarded a Polish medal for his services in the fight against National Socialism .

The Norwegian government honored Egge with a state funeral . The burial in the Trinity Church in Oslo took place on August 3, 2007 in the presence of Crown Prince Haakon . Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg gave the commemorative speech .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c} Report on kriegsende.ARD.de, 2005 ( Memento of the original from July 23, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. : “60 years of the end of the war. Saved at the last moment ”. (Interview with Bjørn Egge on ARD, 2005)  
2. ↑ ^{a b} Eyewitness report Bjørn Egges ( Memento of the original from September 28, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. on hvitebusser.no: Bjørn Egges historie  
3. ↑ Report in the Swedish daily newspaper Dagens Nyheter, March 24, 2007 : Legosoldat sköt Hammarskjöld.
4. ↑ Interview with the Norwegian newspaper Ny Tid, April 24, 2004 ( memento of the original from September 27, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. : Out of area, hvor he vi there?  

literature

• Bjørn Egge: De ga oss en dag til å bridge. Et liv for forsvar, frihet and fred. Forum, Oslo 1996, ISBN 82-03-29072-8 . (Norwegian; autobiography)

Web links

• ARD : 60 years of the end of the war - saved at the last moment
• NRK : Krigsveteran død . July 25, 2007 (with photo; Norwegian)
• Aftenposten : War hero dead at 88 . July 26, 2007