Northern Norway: rugged coastlines, beautiful nature, Midnight Sun. But a border with the Soviet Union and a direct road to Murmansk made it the perfect place for Nazi generals to launch a strategic punch against Stalin in June 1941’s invasion of the USSR.
Despite a massive build-up of troops and weapons, the northern breakthrough didn’t happen. The Germans dug in, supplying the front through the Norwegian fishing town of Kirkenes which was turned into a fortress. The northern coast bristled with guns, anticipating an Allied attack. The German soldiers stationed across the north vastly outnumbered the civilian population – and living alongside each other, friendships developed; children were born.
In October 1944 the three-year stalemate in the Arctic was broken.The Red Army launched a huge counter-offensive to push the invaders out of the USSR: the German answer was a scorched earth retreat across northern Norway, destroying everything that might have been of use to their enemy: buildings, harbours, bridges – even the telephone lines.
The Germans tried to forcibly evacuate the population of sixty thousand people to the south just before winter set in. The Nazis said they were saving them from Bolshevism – but thousands of Norwegians had other ideas and fled, barely surviving in caves and on remote islands. Somehow, this dramatic period has been forgotten outside northern Norway.
The Nazis pulled 230,000 men and a mountain of supplies and munitions back to the mountains around Tromso, using Soviet POWs as slave labour to build gun positions and bunkers. Underfed, badly treated and working in sub zero temperatures with little protection from the elements, many succumbed to starvation and brutal treatment - or were literally worked to death.
The Russians liberated Kirkenes in October 1944 but the north of Norway was reduced to ashes. Norwegian troops returned to take control of the liberated areas but found themselves running rescue and relief operations. When the war ended in May 1945 the full scale of the destruction was clear… everything had been destroyed.
Some families defied government advice and the lack of shelter to go back and begin rebuilding their lives. Women who had been too friendly with German servicemen now faced the wrath of their neighbours. The Soviet prisoners were sent home to a country which no longer wanted them. Northern Norway had paid a heavy price for its brief strategic importance in Hitler’s military ambitions - and seventy years later, the people whose roots are in the north are still counting the cost of the Nazis’ scorched earth retreat.
Vincent Hunt is the author of Fire and Ice. He is an award winning BBC documentary journalist. Here he travels across the Arctic gathering the compelling and often shocking personal stories of the scorched earth destruction of Northern Norway by the Nazis.