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Patrick Bernhard, Arne Hassing. Church Resistance to Nazism in Norway, 1940–1945., The American Historical Review, Volume 122, Issue 5, December 2017, Page 1709, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/122.5.1709
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Norway still tends to be neglected in research on the German occupation of Europe. In Church Resistance to Nazism in Norway, 1940–1945, Arne Hassing specifically examines how the Lutheran Church responded to the Nazi regime over the course of the war. Drawing on his previous works on this topic and a broad range of primary sources from Norwegian, Swedish, German, British, Swiss, and American archives, Hassing seeks to explain why members of the Norwegian higher clergy, including its undisputed leader, Bishop of Oslo Eivind Berggrav, took a stand against Nazism, thus acting in sharp contrast to Protestant religious leaders in Germany. While the Church of Norway initially attempted to accommodate Nazism, Hassing sees fundamental differences between the German and Norwegian Protestant episcopates in addressing the challenge posed by totalitarianism: while opposition to Nazism was infrequent and scattered in German Protestantism, Hassing asserts that in Norway it became a defining characteristic of the Church. Furthermore, whereas antisemitism was widespread within the German episcopate, it played only a marginal role in Norway (see in particular page 17).
