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This small, clean house in Kristiansad next to the road to Stavanger and the port during the war years was the most terrible place in all of southern Norway.

"Skrekkens hus" - "House of Horror" - that's what they called it in the city. Since January 1942, the Gestapo headquarters in southern Norway have been located in the city archive building. Arrested people were brought here, torture chambers were equipped here, from here people were sent to concentration camps and to be shot.

Now, in the basement of the building where the punishment cells were located and where the prisoners were tortured, there is a museum that tells about what happened during the war years in the building of the state archive.
The layout of the basement corridors has been left unchanged. There were only new lights and doors. The main exposition with archival materials, photographs, posters is arranged in the main corridor.

So the suspended arrested person was beaten with a chain.

So tortured with electric stoves. With the special zeal of the executioners, the hair on the head could catch fire in a person.

I have written about water torture before. It was also used in the Archives.

In this device, fingers were clamped, nails were pulled out. The machine is authentic - after the liberation of the city from the Germans, all the equipment of the torture chambers remained in its place and was saved.

Nearby - other devices for conducting interrogation with "addiction".

Reconstructions were arranged in several basements - as it looked then, in this very place. This is a cell where especially dangerous arrested persons were kept - members of the Norwegian Resistance who fell into the clutches of the Gestapo.

The torture chamber was located in the next room. Here, a real scene of the torture of a married couple of underground workers taken by the Gestapo in 1943 during a communication session with an intelligence center in London is reproduced. Two Gestapo men torture a wife in front of her husband, who is chained to the wall. In the corner, on an iron beam, another member of the failed underground group is suspended. They say that before interrogations, the Gestapo were pumped up with alcohol and drugs.

Everything was left in the cell, as it was then, in 1943. If you turn over that pink stool at the woman's feet, you can see the mark of Kristiansand's Gestapo.

This is a reconstruction of the interrogation - the Gestapo provocateur (on the left) shows the arrested radio operator of the underground group (he is sitting on the right, in handcuffs) his radio station in a suitcase. In the center sits the chief of the Kristiansand Gestapo, SS-Hauptsturmführer Rudolf Kerner - I will talk about him later.

In this showcase are things and documents of those Norwegian patriots who were sent to the Grini concentration camp near Oslo, the main transit point in Norway, from where prisoners were sent to other concentration camps in Europe.

The system for designating different groups of prisoners in the Auschwitz concentration camp (Auschwitz-Birkenau). Jewish, political, gypsy, Spanish republican, dangerous criminal, felon, war criminal, Jehovah's Witness, homosexual. The letter N was written on the badge of a Norwegian political prisoner.

School tours are given to the museum. I stumbled across one of these - several local teenagers were walking down the corridors with Ture Robstad, a local war survivor volunteer. It is said that about 10,000 schoolchildren visit the museum in the Archive every year.

Toure tells the children about Auschwitz. Two boys from the group were there recently on an excursion.

Soviet prisoner of war in a concentration camp. In his hand is a homemade wooden bird.

In a separate showcase, things made by Russian prisoners of war in Norwegian concentration camps. These handicrafts were exchanged by Russians for food from local residents. Our neighbor in Kristiansand had a whole collection of such wooden birds - on the way to school she often met groups of our prisoners going to work under escort, and gave them her breakfast in exchange for these carved wooden toys.

Reconstruction of a partisan radio station. Partisans in southern Norway transmitted to London information about the movements of German troops, the deployment of military equipment and ships. In the north, the Norwegians supplied intelligence to the Soviet Northern Fleet.

"Germany is a nation of creators."

Norwegian patriots had to work under the strongest pressure on the local population of Goebbels propaganda. The Germans set themselves the task of the speedy nazification of the country. Quisling's government made efforts for this in the field of education, culture, and sports. Quisling's (Nasjonal Samling) Nazi Party, even before the start of the war, inspired the Norwegians that the main threat to their security was military power. Soviet Union. It should be noted that the Finnish campaign of 1940 contributed to the intimidation of the Norwegians about Soviet aggression in the North. With the coming to power, Quisling only stepped up his propaganda with the help of the Goebbels department. The Nazis in Norway convinced the population that only a strong Germany could protect the Norwegians from the Bolsheviks.

Several posters distributed by the Nazis in Norway. "Norges nye nabo" - "The New Norwegian Neighbor", 1940. Pay attention to the now fashionable technique of "reversing" Latin letters to imitate the Cyrillic alphabet.

"Do you want it to be like this?"

The propaganda of the "new Norway" in every way emphasized the kinship of the "Nordic" peoples, their unity in the struggle against British imperialism and the "wild Bolshevik hordes". Norwegian patriots responded by using the symbol of King Haakon and his image in their struggle. The king's motto "Alt for Norge" was ridiculed in every possible way by the Nazis, who inspired the Norwegians that military difficulties were temporary and that Vidkun Quisling was the new leader of the nation.

Two walls in the gloomy corridors of the museum are given over to the materials of the criminal case, according to which the seven main Gestapo men were tried in Kristiansand. There have never been such cases in Norwegian judicial practice - the Norwegians tried Germans, citizens of another state, accused of crimes in Norway. Three hundred witnesses, about a dozen lawyers, the Norwegian and foreign press took part in the process. The Gestapo were tried for torture and humiliation of those arrested, there was a separate episode about the summary execution of 30 Russian and 1 Polish prisoners of war. On June 16, 1947, all were sentenced to death penalty, which for the first time and temporarily was included in the Criminal Code of Norway immediately after the end of the war.

Rudolf Kerner is the chief of the Kristiansand Gestapo. Former shoemaker. A notorious sadist, in Germany he had a criminal past. He sent several hundred members of the Norwegian Resistance to concentration camps, is guilty of the death of an organization of Soviet prisoners of war uncovered by the Gestapo in one of the concentration camps in southern Norway. He was, like the rest of his accomplices, sentenced to death, which was later commuted to life imprisonment. He was released in 1953 under an amnesty declared by the Norwegian government. He went to Germany, where his traces were lost.

Near the building of the Archive there is a modest monument to the Norwegian patriots who died at the hands of the Gestapo. In the local cemetery, not far from this place, the ashes of Soviet prisoners of war and English pilots, shot down by the Germans in the sky over Kristiansand, rest. Every year on May 8, flagpoles next to the graves raise the flags of the USSR, Great Britain and Norway.

In 1997, it was decided to sell the building of the Archive, from which the State Archive moved to another place, into private hands. local veterans, public organizations strongly opposed, organized into a special committee and ensured that in 1998 the owner of the building, the state concern Statsbygg, transferred the historic building to the veterans' committee. Now here, along with the museum that I told you about, there are offices of Norwegian and international humanitarian organizations - the Red Cross, Amnesty International, the UN.

This small, clean house in Kristiansad next to the road to Stavanger and the port during the war years was the most terrible place in all of southern Norway. "Skrekkens hus" - "House of Horror" - that's what they called it in the city. Since January 1942, the Gestapo headquarters in southern Norway have been located in the city archive building. Arrested people were brought here, torture chambers were equipped here, from here people were sent to concentration camps and to be shot.
Now, in the basement of the building where the punishment cells were located and where the prisoners were tortured, there is a museum that tells about what happened during the war years in the building of the state archive.
The layout of the basement corridors has been left unchanged. There were only new lights and doors. The main exposition with archival materials, photographs, posters is arranged in the main corridor.

So the suspended arrested person was beaten with a chain.

So tortured with electric stoves. With the special zeal of the executioners, the hair on the head could catch fire in a person.

water torture

In this device, fingers were clamped, nails were pulled out. The machine is authentic - after the liberation of the city from the Germans, all the equipment of the torture chambers remained in its place and was saved.

Nearby are other devices for conducting interrogation with "addiction".

Reconstructions were arranged in several basements - as it looked then, in this very place. This is a cell where especially dangerous arrested persons were kept - members of the Norwegian Resistance who fell into the clutches of the Gestapo.

Everything was left in the cell, as it was then, in 1943. If you turn over that pink stool at the woman's feet, you can see the mark of Kristiansand's Gestapo.

Reconstruction of the interrogation - the Gestapo provocateur (left) shows the arrested radio operator of the underground group (he is sitting on the right, in handcuffs) his radio station in a suitcase. In the center sits the chief of the Kristiansand Gestapo, SS-Hauptsturmführer Rudolf Kerne.

In this showcase are things and documents of those Norwegian patriots who were sent to the Grini concentration camp near Oslo - the main transit point in Norway, from where prisoners were sent to other concentration camps in Europe.

The system for designating different groups of prisoners in the Auschwitz concentration camp (Auschwitz-Birkenau). Jewish, political, gypsy, Spanish republican, dangerous criminal, felon, war criminal, Jehovah's Witness, homosexual.

Soviet prisoner of war in a concentration camp. In his hand is a homemade wooden bird.

In a separate display case, things made by Russian prisoners of war in Norwegian concentration camps. These handicrafts were exchanged by Russians for food from local residents. Our neighbor in Kristiansand has a whole collection of these wooden birds.

Reconstruction of a partisan radio station. Partisans in southern Norway transmitted to London information about the movements of German troops, the deployment of military equipment and ships. In the north, the Norwegians supplied intelligence to the Soviet Northern Fleet.

The propaganda of the "new Norway" in every way emphasized the kinship of the "Nordic" peoples, their unity in the struggle against British imperialism and the "wild Bolshevik hordes". Norwegian patriots responded by using the symbol of King Haakon in their struggle.

Two walls in the gloomy corridors of the museum are given over to the materials of the criminal case, according to which the seven main Gestapo men were tried in Kristiansand. There have never been such cases in Norwegian judicial practice - Norwegians tried Germans, citizens of another state.

Rudolf Kerner - chief of the Kristiansand Gestapo. Former shoemaker. A notorious sadist, in Germany he had a criminal past.

Near the building of the Archive there is a modest monument to the Norwegian patriots who died at the hands of the Gestapo. In the local cemetery, not far from this place, the ashes of Soviet prisoners of war and English pilots, shot down by the Germans in the sky over Kristiansand, rest.

This small, clean house in Kristiansad next to the road to Stavanger and the port during the war years was the most terrible place in all of southern Norway. "Skrekkens hus" - "House of Horror" - that's what they called it in the city. Since January 1942, the Gestapo headquarters in southern Norway have been located in the city archive building. Arrested people were brought here, torture chambers were equipped here, from here people were sent to concentration camps and to be shot. Now, in the basement of the building where the punishment cells were located and where the prisoners were tortured, there is a museum that tells about what happened during the war years in the building of the state archive.



The layout of the basement corridors has been left unchanged. There were only new lights and doors. The main exposition with archival materials, photographs, posters is arranged in the main corridor.


So the suspended arrested person was beaten with a chain.


So tortured with electric stoves. With the special zeal of the executioners, the hair on the head could catch fire in a person.




In this device, fingers were clamped, nails were pulled out. The machine is authentic - after the liberation of the city from the Germans, all the equipment of the torture chambers remained in its place and was saved.


Nearby - other devices for conducting interrogation with "addiction".


Reconstructions were arranged in several basements - as it looked then, in this very place. This is a cell where especially dangerous arrested persons were kept - members of the Norwegian Resistance who fell into the clutches of the Gestapo.


The torture chamber was located in the next room. Here, a real scene of the torture of a married couple of underground workers taken by the Gestapo in 1943 during a communication session with an intelligence center in London is reproduced. Two Gestapo men torture a wife in front of her husband, who is chained to the wall. In the corner, on an iron beam, another member of the failed underground group is suspended. They say that before interrogations, the Gestapo were pumped up with alcohol and drugs.


Everything was left in the cell, as it was then, in 1943. If you turn over that pink stool at the woman's feet, you can see the mark of Kristiansand's Gestapo.


This is a reconstruction of the interrogation - the Gestapo provocateur (on the left) shows the arrested radio operator of the underground group (he is sitting on the right, in handcuffs) his radio station in a suitcase. In the center sits the chief of the Kristiansand Gestapo, SS-Hauptsturmführer Rudolf Kerner - I will talk about him later.


In this showcase are things and documents of those Norwegian patriots who were sent to the Grini concentration camp near Oslo, the main transit point in Norway, from where prisoners were sent to other concentration camps in Europe.


The system for designating different groups of prisoners in the Auschwitz concentration camp (Auschwitz-Birkenau). Jewish, political, gypsy, Spanish republican, dangerous criminal, felon, war criminal, Jehovah's Witness, homosexual. The letter N was written on the badge of a Norwegian political prisoner.


School tours are given to the museum. I stumbled across one of these - several local teenagers were walking down the corridors with Ture Robstad, a local war survivor volunteer. It is said that about 10,000 schoolchildren visit the museum in the Archive every year.


Toure tells the children about Auschwitz. Two boys from the group were there recently on an excursion.


Soviet prisoner of war in a concentration camp. In his hand is a homemade wooden bird.


In a separate showcase, things made by Russian prisoners of war in Norwegian concentration camps. These handicrafts were exchanged by Russians for food from local residents. Our neighbor in Kristiansand had a whole collection of such wooden birds - on the way to school she often met groups of our prisoners going to work under escort, and gave them her breakfast in exchange for these carved wooden toys.


Reconstruction of a partisan radio station. Partisans in southern Norway transmitted to London information about the movements of German troops, the deployment of military equipment and ships. In the north, the Norwegians supplied intelligence to the Soviet Northern Fleet.


"Germany is a nation of creators."
Norwegian patriots had to work under the strongest pressure on the local population of Goebbels propaganda. The Germans set themselves the task of the speedy nazification of the country. Quisling's government made efforts for this in the field of education, culture, and sports. Quisling's (Nasjonal Samling) Nazi Party, even before the start of the war, inspired the Norwegians that the main threat to their security was the military power of the Soviet Union. It should be noted that the Finnish campaign of 1940 contributed to the intimidation of the Norwegians about Soviet aggression in the North. With the coming to power, Quisling only stepped up his propaganda with the help of the Goebbels department. The Nazis in Norway convinced the population that only a strong Germany could protect the Norwegians from the Bolsheviks.


Several posters distributed by the Nazis in Norway. "Norges nye nabo" - "The New Norwegian Neighbor", 1940. Pay attention to the now fashionable technique of "reversing" Latin letters to imitate the Cyrillic alphabet.


"Do you want it to be like this?"




The propaganda of the "new Norway" in every way emphasized the kinship of the "Nordic" peoples, their unity in the struggle against British imperialism and the "wild Bolshevik hordes". Norwegian patriots responded by using the symbol of King Haakon and his image in their struggle. The king's motto "Alt for Norge" was ridiculed in every possible way by the Nazis, who inspired the Norwegians that military difficulties were temporary and that Vidkun Quisling was the new leader of the nation.


Two walls in the gloomy corridors of the museum are given over to the materials of the criminal case, according to which the seven main Gestapo men were tried in Kristiansand. There have never been such cases in Norwegian judicial practice - the Norwegians tried Germans, citizens of another state, accused of crimes in Norway. Three hundred witnesses, about a dozen lawyers, the Norwegian and foreign press took part in the trial. The Gestapo were tried for torture and humiliation of those arrested, there was a separate episode about the summary execution of 30 Russian and 1 Polish prisoners of war. On June 16, 1947, all were sentenced to death, which for the first time and temporarily was included in the Criminal Code of Norway immediately after the end of the war.


Rudolf Kerner is the chief of the Kristiansand Gestapo. Former shoemaker. A notorious sadist, in Germany he had a criminal past. He sent several hundred members of the Norwegian Resistance to concentration camps, is guilty of the death of an organization of Soviet prisoners of war uncovered by the Gestapo in one of the concentration camps in southern Norway. He was, like the rest of his accomplices, sentenced to death, which was later commuted to life imprisonment. He was released in 1953 under an amnesty declared by the Norwegian government. He went to Germany, where his traces were lost.


Near the building of the Archive there is a modest monument to the Norwegian patriots who died at the hands of the Gestapo. In the local cemetery, not far from this place, the ashes of Soviet prisoners of war and English pilots, shot down by the Germans in the sky over Kristiansand, rest. Every year on May 8, flagpoles next to the graves raise the flags of the USSR, Great Britain and Norway.
In 1997, it was decided to sell the building of the Archive, from which the State Archive moved to another place, into private hands. Local veterans, public organizations strongly opposed, organized themselves into a special committee and ensured that in 1998 the owner of the building, the state concern Statsbygg, transferred the historic building to the veterans' committee. Now here, along with the museum that I told you about, there are offices of Norwegian and international humanitarian organizations - the Red Cross, Amnesty International, the UN

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The story contains scenes of torture, violence, sex. If this offends your tender soul - do not read, but go to x ... from here!

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The story takes place during the Great Patriotic War. A partisan detachment operates on the territory occupied by the Nazis. The Nazis know that there are many women among the partisans, but how to figure them out. Finally, they managed to catch the girl Katya when she was trying to draw a diagram of the location of German firing points ...

The captive girl was brought into small room at the school where the Gestapo branch was now located. A young officer interrogated Katya. In addition to him, there were several policemen and two vulgar-looking women in the room. Katya knew them, they served the Germans. I just didn't quite know how.

The officer instructed the guards holding the girl to let her go, which they did. He gestured for her to sit down. The girl sat down. The officer ordered one of the girls to bring tea. But Kate refused. The officer took a sip, then lit a cigarette. He offered Katya, but she refused. The officer started the conversation, and he spoke good Russian.

What is your name?

Katerina.

I know that you were engaged in intelligence in favor of the communists. This is true?

But you are so young, so beautiful. You probably fell into their service by accident?

No! I am a Komsomol member and I want to become a communist, like my father, Hero of the Soviet Union, who died at the front.

I regret being so young beautiful girl fell for the bait of the red-assed. At one time, my father served in the Russian army in the First World War. He commanded a company. He has many glorious victories and awards to his credit. But when the communists came to power, he was accused of being an enemy of the people for all his services to his homeland and shot. Starvation awaited my mother and me, as children of enemies of the people, but one of the Germans (who was in captivity and whom his father did not allow to be shot) helped us escape to Germany and even enter the service. I always wanted to be a hero like my father. And now I have come to save my homeland from the communists.

You are a fascist bitch, an invader, a murderer of innocent people...

We never kill innocent people. On the contrary, we return to them what the red-assed have taken from them. Yes, we recently hanged two women who set fire to houses where our soldiers temporarily settled. But the soldiers managed to run out, and the owners lost the last thing that the war had not taken away from them.

They fought against...

Your people!

Not true!

Okay, let's say we're invaders. You are now required to answer a few questions. After that, we will determine the punishment for you.

I will not answer your questions!

Okay, then name with whom you are organizing terrorist attacks against German soldiers.

Not true. We have been watching you.

Then why should I answer?

So that the innocent don't get hurt.

I won't name anyone...

Then I will invite the boys to untie your stubborn tongue.

You won't get anything!

And we'll see this. So far, there has not been a single case out of 15, and so that nothing has come of it ... Let's get to work, boys!

In 1936, the future People's Commissar of Internal Affairs, Nikolai Yezhov, who then headed the department of leading party bodies of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, went to the Third Reich for treatment. Although the Soviet media were sharply critical of Hitler's policies, German medicine remained one of the best in the world. The son of Georgy Malenkov later reported from the words of his father that Yezhov was sent abroad "for treatment from pederasty."

Did the German doctors help the high-ranking Bolshevik who turned to them with such delicate issue, unknown. However, Yezhov’s trip was remembered in 1939, when the political “star” of the chief Chekist had already set, and the execution cellar of the Lubyanka loomed in front of him. At the Plenum of the Central Committee on the case of Nikolai Yezhov, Malenkov was the speaker. Yezhov's biographer Aleksey Polyansky reports that the participants in the plenum, having heard about "unlimited assault, torture, torture of those under investigation", qualified this practice "as methods borrowed by Yezhov in Nazi Germany". Many researchers consider this story to be a fiction created with the aim of maximally vilifying Yezhov.

“There simply could not be any “exchange of experience” in the conditions of the then existing relations between the USSR and Germany. And who would let Yezhov on an "internship" in the Gestapo? - asks the historian Nikita Petrov in the book "Stalin's pet" - Nikolai Yezhov.


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