News-Info-Alerts

To: ALL

From: Andi Wolos & Bob Necci

(POW-MIA InterNetwork)

Re: POWs - Slave Labor

Date: April 02, 2001

"Norway Railway, Built by Nazis, Was "Blood Road"

ROGNAN, Apr 1, 2001 -- (Reuters) The train swings silently on the railway winding along the shores of the fjord. Soon it stops and all passengers step out into a station made of concrete beneath the snow-capped mountains.

This railway ends in Bodoe, the biggest town in Arctic Norway with 34,000 people, although Adolf Hitler, whose forces occupied Norway from 1940-45, once wanted it to run hundreds of kilometers (miles) further north to Kirkenes on the Russian border.

If it did, it could have helped him assault the Soviet Union from the North, cut off the vital convoy routes through which Allied supplies were delivered to the Soviet port of Murmansk and provide safe transport for iron ore from the Kiruna mine in Sweden to Germany.

Thousands of Russian, Polish and Yugoslav prisoners paid with their lives for that plan but Hitler's Great Polar Railroad was never built. Among the prisoners it was known as the "Blood Road".

Yet when the survivors went home to the Soviet Union in 1945 many were condemned as Nazi collaborators and sent to the Gulag by dictator Josef Stalin. For them the humiliation at home was much harder to go through.

"In Norway we were in the enemy's hands. That is how it is supposed to be. (In Russia) it was morally hard first of all," Vladimir Svertelov, a 79-year-old Russian who survived oppression by Adolf Hitler and Stalin, told Reuters in an interview in the town of Magadan in Eastern Siberia.

At the "Blood Road" museum in Rognan, set up in 1995 in an attempt to piece together a largely forgotten part of the war in the far north, the information about the Russian prisoners is still scarce.

"We do not know much about the Russian prisoners, all the records were taken away by the Soviets in 1945, and the contacts have been rare ever since," said museum director Jan Ivar Trones.

NORWEGIANS AND RUSSIANS SHARED THE VICTORY

Svertelov and 30,000 other prisoners had built about 200 kilometers (125 miles) of railway northwards from Mosjoen, crossing the Arctic Circle, almost to Rognan. That left the line 700 kilometers (435 miles) short of the Soviet border.

Watching them work and suffer at the hands of Nazi guards turned the majority of the 3,000 wartime inhabitants of Saltdal, a region with its center in the town of Rognan, against their occupiers.

Walter Johansen was only 10 when he witnessed the arrival of the first human cargo of Yugoslav prisoners of war in 1942. "The boat could not approach the shore and they made the prisoners swim in cold water.

"When we saw how the Germans treated the prisoners, we felt sorry for them. Prisoners soon discovered the Norwegians were on their side," said Johansen.

Soon a whole network of communications was set up between the prisoners and locals. Food was left for the prisoners under stones on their way to and from work. Letters were passed around between the camps. The most daring locals set up escape routes for prisoners into neutral Sweden.

Some of the Norwegians were arrested and sent to concentration camps.

In 1945, the Nazis had gone but about 10,000 of their prisoners, mostly Russians and many in poor condition, stayed in camps scattered along the railway awaiting repatriation.

Ivar Knoph, a Norwegian railway worker who was 24 at the time, tried to find Norwegian volunteers to paint a Norwegian flag over a giant 10 by 10 meter (33 feet) swastika on a rocky hillside overlooking the town. No one would risk the climb.

"I asked the Russians if they could help me. They asked me how many people I needed. Two, three hundred? I told them I only need a couple of men. In the end about a dozen went to help.

"When the job was finished we had a great party on the top of the hill. The Russians had brought some whisky and cognac they took from the Nazi officers," said Knoph, who is now 80.

FROM BLOOD ROAD TO ROAD OF BONES

But the party was short for many Russians.

Svertelov, sent to Norway after his capture in Leningrad in 1942 where he was a private in a field intelligence unit, would come to Rognan's port every day to see if the Soviet officials had arrived to take him back home.

When they did, the queue of Russians wanting to go back was so long that Svertelov could only get on a fourth boat. Hundreds of cheerful Norwegians waved goodbye from the banks of the fjord.

When Svertelov and others arrived in the Soviet Union they were never set free. He was sentenced to 10 years hard labor for collaborating with the Nazis and sent to mine cobalt on the notorious Kolyma track in Eastern Siberia, also known as the "Road of Bones".

In 1949, Norway joined NATO. To prevent Russians from visiting the camps they were demolished. Russian graves in Saltdal were moved to the remote island of Tjotta.

After the war, the Norwegians extended the line as far as Bodoe, 50 kilometers (31 miles) west of Rognan. Successive governments have been too daunted to extend it northwards.

In 1962, when the railway was completed, the Soviet authorities acquitted Svertelov. At the age of 79 he still works at a mechanical shop by the picturesque Nagayevo Bay in Magadan where he was first brought as a prisoner in 1946."