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Norway rail firm 'should apologise' for Nazi past

AFP/The Local
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Norway rail firm 'should apologise' for Nazi past
An NSB locomotive during the Nazi occupation. Photo: Norwegian Railway Museum

Norwegian train company NSB is facing calls to apologise for transporting Norwegian Jews and using prisoners of war during Norway’s occupation by Nazi Germany.

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Bjørg Eva Aasen, curator of a new exhibition on NSB’s collaboration with Nazi Germany said that NSB had neither made an attempt to examine its own dark history, nor apologies to those affected by its collaboration in inhuman acts.  
 
“I wish they had apologised to the Jews, and also to all the East European prisoners of war who were working for them on the construction of the Nordland Line,” she told the Local. “They say it’s a sad story, but they don’t apologise.” 
 
A large part of the exhibition at the Norwegian Railway museum in Hamar is devoted to how NSB collaborated with the Germans on the extension of the Nordland Line from Mosjøen to Dunderland, fot which the Germans put enormous numbers of Soviet prisoners of war to work in slave-like conditions.
 
Aasen has also uncovered new documents showing that as well as helping transport Jews from Oslo, which was previously known, NSB transported Jews from Trondheim. 
 
Bjørn Westlie, the Norwegian journalist who has turned himself into a historian of Norwegian collaboration with the Nazi occupation, told NRK that NSB should be more open about its dark past. 
 
“This is something NSB has tried to hide for 70 years. They should tell the whole story of what happened,” he said. 
 
NSB also chose not to send a representative to the opening of the exhibition. 
 
“Our president is on a journey on business to Vienna. I was meant to go to Hamar today, but had to cancel the trip for a meeting that it’s very important I attend,”  Åge-Christoffer Lundeby, a communications director for the company told The Foreigner. 
 
He earlier told Norway's Dagsavisen newspaper that the deportation of Jews from Norway to go to Nazi death camps, was "regrettable". 
 
“The persecution and deportation of Jews is clearly a dark chapter in Norwegian history. NSB's participation in this story is extremely regrettable,” he said. 
 
In another interview Lundeby questioned whether NSB had been motivated by profit. 
 
“It is here that this difficult discussion comes in: what was done voluntarily as business strategy, and what was done as a result of coercion under foreign occupation,” he told NRK. 
 
 
 

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