Falstad Internment Camp, Norway

The site today known as the Falstad Memorial and Human Rights Museum is representative for successive internment and penal histories on the site. Set up as an educational facility for unintegrated youth in the 1920s, during the Nazi occupation of Norway of the Second World War it taken over by the SS and transformed into a camp mostly for political prisoners from Nazi-occupied territories.  The facility functioned as labour camp, a transit camp and a death camp for more than 4200 individuals of 15 nationalities. In 1945, Falstad  turned into a detention and forced labour camp for collaborators, who were thus both penalized for their complicity and encouraged to contribute to the post-war rebuilding process. The economy of post-war Falstad included craft production, chopping wood, cleaning, office work, kitchen duties, construction work and carpentry.