Andreas Eliassen Grini

From Ideology to Politics – German Occupation of Sámi Everyday Life 1940–45 

During World War II, Norway, like several other countries in Europe and the rest of the world, would experience the fate of being occupied. Unlike many of these other countries, however, Norway was granted a special position in the Nazi regime’s imagined post-war world order, based on a fabricated “Germanic shared destiny”. While the role of Norway and Norwegians in this world order has been the subject of many studies, the Sámi war history has so far remained a relatively unexplored field. My doctoral project is motivated by this research gap and by the position of the Sami as a perceived Asian people in a Nordic context, from which the project examines two questions:

1. How were the Sámi people viewed by Norwegian and German National Socialists within the framework of National Socialist racial ideology?
2. What kind of contact was there established between Sámi communities and the German occupying forces during the war, and how were the meetings influenced by the above-mentioned racial ideology?

The first question is motivated by the duality of the National Socialist treatments of the Sámi analyzed so far. On the one hand, there are frequent descriptions of the Sámi’s “Mongolian” and “East Baltic” origins, while on the other hand there is a sometimes practical, sometimes esoteric admiration for the Sámi way of life as part of nature rather than culture. Something that would result, among other examples, in German soldiers adopting Sámi clothing habits and in Himmler’s plans to turn Northern Norway into a Sámi reserve.

The second question is posed in light of the fact that Norwegian war historiography hardly contains studies of everyday Sámi wartime life, and the majority of the few studies that have been done focus the Sámi border guides. Through the use of German, Norwegian and Sámi sources, my doctoral project attempts to create an empirically based account of the broad spectrum of German encounters with the Sámi from Sámi resistance to collaboration and the grey zones in between.

In this way, the project also sheds light on how the World War in various ways was a turning point for the Sámi, a peripety, be it in the changed everyday life during the war, in the gradual end of Norwegianization or in the scorching of large parts of Sápmi.

• “Kampen om Narvik – nasjonal heltemyte eller oppgjør med fortiden? [The Battle of Narvik – a National Myth or a Reckoning with the Past?],” Historikeren 1 (2023): 18-21.
• “Basert på hvilke virkelige hendelser? Gråsoner og filmatiske fremstillinger av andre verdenskrig [Based on what real events? Grey areas and cinematic representations of World War II],” Historikeren 4 (2022): 17-21.

• “Wehrmacht, Finns and Sámi in Lappland,” presentation at The Centre of Excellence in History of Experience, Tampere University, September 24, 2024.
• “The Naked Life, Man and Nature in Northern Norway,” presentation at the Lisbon Summer School for the Study of Culture, Lisbon, June 25, 2024.
• “German Occupation of Sámi Everyday Life 1940–1945,” presentation at Falstad Centre, April 11, 2024.
• “The Occupation of Sápmi during World War II,” presentation at the Summer School of Scandinavian and Central European History, Univerzita Karlova, Prague, June 29, 2023.
• “Memories of Norway, Wehrmachts Mountain Divisions and the Natural North,” presentation at the Summer School of Scandinavian and Central European History, Univerzita Karlova, Prague, June 28, 2023.