Nicola Karcher, PhD, is a historian and Associate Professor in Social Science at the Østfold University College, Norway. She is also affiliated researcher at the History Department at Uppsala University, Sweden, with the research project Inception: The Birth of Nordic Fascism. She has published articles and books in Norwegian, German, and English on the history of fascism, occupation history, antisemitism, and racism, particularly with respect to the Nordic countries. Karcher is co-head of the NORFAS steering committee together with Oula Silvennoinen.
- Karcher, Nicola and Kjetil Braut Simonsen. 2024. “’The Apocalyptic Battle’: Conspiracist Antisemitism in Norway during the German Occupation.” In The Print Culture of Conspiracist Antisemitism 1917–1945: Universal Patterns and Nordic Particularities, edited by Nicola Karcher and Kjetil Braut Simonsen, special issue, Nordisk judaistik/Scandinavian Jewish Studies 1/35, https://doi.org/10.30752/nj.142223.
- Karcher, Nicola and Kjetil Braut Simonsen. 2023. “Antisemitism without Jews: The Impact of Redemptive Antisemitism in Norway before the Nazi Occupation,” Scandinavian Journal of History 49(2), https://doi.org/10.1080/03468755.2023.2283021.
- Karcher, Nicola. 2022. “National Socialisms in Clinch: The Case of Norwegian National Socialists in Interwar Germany.” In Nordic Fascism: Fragments of an Entangled History, Nicola Karcher and Markus Lundström, Abingdon: Routledge, 51–70.
Oula Silvennoinen, PhD, is a historian, Associate Professor and Research Fellow at the University of Helsinki. He is also affiliated researcher at the History Department at Uppsala University, with the research project Inception: The Birth of Nordic Fascism. His research interests include the history of policing and police institutions, the Holocaust, fascism, and the Waffen-SS in Finland, as well as the post-war politics of memory, on which he has published in Finnish, Swedish, German, English, Estonian, Ukrainian and Romanian. Silvennoinen is co-head of the NORFAS steering committee together with Nicola Karcher.
- Silvennoinen, Oula. 2024. “For freedom and justice? The Vasara circle as a conduit of conspiracist antisemitism in inter-war Finland.” In The Print Culture of Conspiracist Antisemitism 1917–1945: Universal Patterns and Nordic Particularities, edited by Nicola Karcher and Kjetil Braut Simonsen, special Issue, Nordisk judaistik/Scandinavian Jewish Studies 1/35, https://doi.org/10.30752/nj.142241.
- Silvennoinen, Oula. 2023. “Periphery of a Genocide: Finland and the Holocaust”, Holocaust and Genocide Studies 2/37, https://doi.org/10.1093/hgs/dcad034.
- Silvennoinen, Oula. 2022. “A Pragmatic Revolutionary: R. Erik Serlachius and Fascist Visions of Society and Community.” In Nordic Fascism: Fragments of an Entangled History, Nicola Karcher and Markus Lundström, Abingdon: Routledge, 71–94.
The Re-Establishment of Nordic Far-Right Activism after 1945
Historical research has so far had little to say of the processes through which the far right of 1945 in the Nordic region transformed itself into the far right of today. At the end of the Second World War, its activists and organisations throughout the region stood discredited, cut off from whatever support they had enjoyed from National Socialist Germany or their domestic governments, and under threat of judicial consequences and repression. This paper aims to present the first efforts after the Second World War to re-establish Nordic far-right activism, cooperation and ideology transfer. It will thus discuss open research questions, the current research situation, and our ideas of how to go forward in writing a history that so far has resisted attempts to describe it in detail.
Instead of disbanding themselves and abandoning their ideological stance, the late 1940s witnessed the first organisational revivals and ideological modifications to accommodate to the changed circumstances. A loose region-wide network to help fugitives and political émigrés abroad was rapidly created, also to serve as the first step towards the re-crafting of transnational Nordic networks of far-right collaboration. By the 1950s, new regional cooperation was in evidence in the Malmö-movement, and the re-establishment of ties to former German National Socialist actives and their organisations. Soon it was also time to ponder how the ideological torch could be transferred to a new generation.
A regional approach is mandated by the fact that much of the activities took place across national borders within a distinctly Nordic milieu. The primary reason for a Nordic orientation stemmed from the role of Sweden as neutral in the war. Unlike the other Nordic countries, in Sweden there was no experience of occupation, no fear of a Soviet invasion or a communist takeover, nor post-war pressure on criminalisation of far-right activism or judicial repression of local collaborators. This made Sweden a haven and a transit hub for far-right fugitives and political émigrés, and a base for renewed post-war attempts to reorganise and create new transnational networks between activists. The paper is intended as a historically grounded opening in the international field of far-right studies on a subject consistently overlooked by historians and political scientists. It will present both transnational key protagonists and their attempts to (re-)build networks across the Nordic region through joint meetings, organisations, mutual political support and ideological exchange. The findings of this paper are grounded in the joint research conducted by the Network of Nordic Fascism Studies (NORFAS, https://norfas.net/).