Published on 24 September 2016
On the 8th of April 1940, the last meeting of the Norwegian Order of Freemasons was held at Stamhuset in Oslo before the building was requisitioned by the German occupying forces in Norway. German soldiers were billeted at Stamhuset for a short period. When later the soldiers were stationed elsewhere, the Norwegian Freemasons retained the administration of their own building until Vidkun Quisling was appointed premier on the 1st of February 1942 and assigned this house by Reichskommissar Terboven. During this period, a number of ritual objects, books, artworks and other artefacts were taken from the house and stolen.
The Norwegian Order of Freemasons has roots back to the middle of the 1800s. Before there was a separate Norwegian Order of Freemasons, the Norwegian Freemasons, bearing the name The Norwegian Masonic Grand Lodge, were under the Swedish Freemasons. The lodge was founded in 1856. In 1890, Stamhuset, built in Oslo, became the Freemason’s premises and a location for their festivities. What today is the Norwegian Order of Freemasons was founded the following year, in 1891. From then on, the name of the lodge in Oslo was the Norwegian Masonic Grand Lodge. Lodges were established in other large towns in Norway.
Stamhuset in Oslo was consecrated in 1894; it was a large building of several floors, richly decorated and embellished with fine materials in different stone and types of wood in addition to the numerous art objects such as sculptures and paintings. Under the German soldier’s stay in 1940, some of the building’s inventory was destroyed. When the Nasjonal Samling [National Unity] party took over in 1942, the house was remodelled. With its attractive location in the middle of the centre of Oslo, Stamhuset must have provided suitable premises for NS, which called it the party’s house.
In 1935, Freemasonry was banned in Germany. The Order of Freemasons was abolished and Freemasons persecuted. Nonetheless, the Nazis showed great interest in Masonic literature, artefacts and buildings. Masonic artefacts were exhibited in exhibitions intended to shock and warn the public in Germany, and literature was collected in a large research library in Berlin where the enemy’s literature was studied. Those who studied the enemy were called Gegnerforscher, and they also studied communist, socialist, Jewish and other literature written by the enemies of Nazism.
On the 20th of September 1940, Norwegian freemasonry was abolished and about a month later, mapping of the Norwegian Order’s library began. A known Norwegian fascist, anti-Semite and crusader against the evils of freemasonry at that time was the architect Eugene Nielsen. He established his own publishing house in 1928, Antiforlaget A/S, to publish and distribute anti-Semitic and anti-Masonic literature in Norwegian. He had the German anti-Masonic Erich Ludendorff’s book: Frimureriets avsløring [Masonic revelations], translated and published. Nielsen was not alone in doing this. In the years before and during the Second World War, a number of anti-Masonic books were published in Norway. The books had titles such as Vekk med frimureriet [Abolish Freemasonry] (1936) and Bak frimureriets kulisser [Behind Masonry’s scenes] (1944). In 1942, the NS Press and Propaganda division published the book Frimureriets hemmelighet. Avsløringer bygget på autentisk materiale fra de beslaglagte frimurerarkiver i Oslo, m.m. [Freemasonry’s secrets. Revelations built on authentic materials from the seized Masonic archives in Oslo, etc.].
Eugen Nielsen was not a member of NS, but the SD (Sicherheitsdienst) selected him to catalogue the Masonic library at Stamhuset. A bare six months later, the head of the RSHA (Reichssicherheitshauptamt) research library in Berlin, Karl Burmester, came to Oslo to look at the Masonic collection. He ordered it all to be sent to Berlin. The Order’s library at Stamhuset contained literature in Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, English, French and German. At the outbreak of war, the library contained 5,916 publications; Freemasons themselves reckon that about 4,500 of these were sent abroad. They are also certain that Frederick V’s Bible, which was the first Bible printed in a Scandinavian language, was among the material sent to Berlin. It has not been possible to find this Bible since.
In 1943, the books were moved from RSHA’s library in Berlin to the Fürstenstein i Schlesien palace. The palace was used as a depot for the storage of materials that had to be protected from the Allies’ bombs. Later, hundreds of thousands of books, archives and other written material was saved from German towns after the Allies’ intensive bombing in the last years of the war. Enormous numbers of books, etc. were placed in the borderlands between Germany and Czechoslovakia, and Germany and Poland. Old palaces in the hinterlands were among other things used as depots. Enormous amounts of written material remained here until the war ended, and what happened to the material that was found in their territory after the war was up to the individual country in as far as it wasn’t taken care of by either the Soviet Union or the Allies.
In 1947, parts of the seized material were found and returned to the Norwegian Masonic Lodge from Offenbach Archival Depot. In 2009, another part of the collection was returned from Poznań in Poland where the University found enormous amounts of Masonic literature in their collections. There are still several parts of the Norwegian collection located in different parts of Europe. Norwegian Freemasons work actively for repatriation, that is, to see that all the books from 1940 are returned to Norway. We do not yet know how many Norwegian Masonic books will be found in the collections of the National Library of the Czech Republic, but up to now seven have been found. Provenance research regarding stamps and ex libris labels has shown that the books come from the Norwegian Lodge, even though they are not written in Norwegian.