Erik Gjems-Onstad was arrested in Sweden for his involvement with Norwegian resistance activity in the country in 1941, and was sent to the United Kingdom where he joined the Norwegian Independent Company 1 and received British military training.
120 Facts About Erik Gjems-Onstad
1.
2.
Erik Gjems-Onstad was deployed to Norway in 1943 as part of Lark, assigned with establishing radio connection with London.
3.
Erik Gjems-Onstad founded the Durham organisation for conducting psychological warfare towards the end of the war, and he took part in blowing up railway tracks.
4.
Erik Gjems-Onstad joined the Norwegian Home Guard after the war, where he served as a captain.
5.
Erik Gjems-Onstad completed his education in law, and worked as a judge and lawyer.
6.
Erik Gjems-Onstad ultimately reached the rank of colonel in the military, as military lawyer of the Royal Norwegian Air Force.
7.
Erik Gjems-Onstad had a career in sports, representing the sports club SK Rye in cycling and racewalking.
8.
Erik Gjems-Onstad later worked as a sports official, as a board member, and as chairman of various national sports bodies.
9.
Erik Gjems-Onstad was elected a Member of Parliament in the 1973 parliamentary election, and became the party's parliamentary leader following Anders Lange's death in 1974.
10.
Erik Gjems-Onstad was expelled from the party in 1976, and finished his term as an independent.
11.
Erik Gjems-Onstad became known for criticising the Norwegian government's policy in Africa, and for defending the governments of countries such as Rhodesia and South Africa.
12.
Erik Gjems-Onstad stood in election for the Stop Immigration party in 1989 and for the Fatherland Party in 1991, and he was later involved in the People's Movement Against Immigration and Stop Islamisation of Norway.
13.
Erik Gjems-Onstad worked at sea as a cabin boy in 1937, and went to port in both Africa and Asia.
14.
Erik Gjems-Onstad had been active in the Boy Scouts, where he learned navigation and map-reading.
15.
Erik Gjems-Onstad later replaced the scout leader who was called up to fight in the Winter War.
16.
Erik Gjems-Onstad became aware of the German presence when he and his family saw German planes flying right over their home.
17.
Erik Gjems-Onstad took his bike and cycled to his school, the Oslo Cathedral School, only to find it closed and in chaos.
18.
Erik Gjems-Onstad thought it contained nothing but verbiage, with no remarks about mobilisation, defence, fighting or war.
19.
Erik Gjems-Onstad thereafter wanted to join the resistance, but on his way met a man who told him that he would be rejected if he had not been through recruit training, and he thus returned home.
20.
Erik Gjems-Onstad started studying at the University of Oslo in late 1940, and he got in touch with students who wanted to organise a resistance movement.
21.
Erik Gjems-Onstad responded that the others were traitors, and Hirden members thus captured him and beat him up.
22.
In late 1940, Erik Gjems-Onstad's group wanted to bring some newly created military devices to Allied forces.
23.
Erik Gjems-Onstad was joined by three others, and they decided to let themselves be arrested in Ostmark in Sweden.
24.
Erik Gjems-Onstad was then directed to contact the British military attache.
25.
Erik Gjems-Onstad reached Major Malcolm Munthe, who was interested in the devices.
26.
Erik Gjems-Onstad was arrested by Swedish police in Stockholm on 25 March 1941, as parts of Munthe's organisation had been compromised.
27.
Erik Gjems-Onstad was imprisoned at the Stockholm police station for 13 days, and then for 59 days in the Stockholm Remand Prison.
28.
Erik Gjems-Onstad was scheduled to be deported to Canada via Moscow and China, but the plans were halted due to the German invasion of the Soviet Union.
29.
Erik Gjems-Onstad was instead sent to the Norwegian refugee camp in Oreryd.
30.
Erik Gjems-Onstad was ordered by the British to escape from Oreryd in October 1941 and travel to Norway.
31.
Erik Gjems-Onstad started his operations in Trondheim by establishing radio connection with London and operating the radio transmitter, and he soon became one of the most important persons in the leadership of Milorg.
32.
Erik Gjems-Onstad left Trondheim for Stockholm later that month, and received training in psychological warfare.
33.
Erik Gjems-Onstad founded the propaganda organisation Durham when he came back to Trondheim in March 1944.
34.
Erik Gjems-Onstad was to establish a new radio station, and investigate if Milorg and Lark could be rebuilt, as the organisation had been severely damaged by multiple arrests and murders.
35.
Erik Gjems-Onstad operated the paper DFP, or Deutsche Freiheitspartei, a form of black propaganda distributed to German soldiers and officers.
36.
Erik Gjems-Onstad became increasingly frustrated with the damages caused by Rinnan and his gang of Nazi collaborators, and he vocally advocated their assassination.
37.
Erik Gjems-Onstad however noted the importance of Durham, which he considered to have grown very powerful.
38.
Erik Gjems-Onstad was transferred back to Stockholm in March 1945, and Durham was dissolved.
39.
Erik Gjems-Onstad reacted with shock that London had decided that it was too dangerous for him to return to Trondheim.
40.
Erik Gjems-Onstad was uneasy about being set on the sideline, and headed a mission of four men from Stockholm to Namsvatnet at the end of the month to receive British sabotage supplies.
41.
Erik Gjems-Onstad was in Troms at the time of the German capitulation.
42.
Erik Gjems-Onstad became critical of the "retracted regional leadership" of the Home Front which he became aware of in late 1944.
43.
Erik Gjems-Onstad sent a wire to London requesting that they should take over what remained of Milorg, rather than remaining passive during the occupation only to step forward as leaders of Milorg when the war was over.
44.
Erik Gjems-Onstad became more critical when he became aware that they had started entering the administration in London and Stockholm, according to him without the necessary experience from practical fieldwork.
45.
Erik Gjems-Onstad had entered the administration in Stockholm in February 1945, but he had not been contacted whatsoever by Lark.
46.
Erik Gjems-Onstad questioned Norway's military abilities in a possible future war in Norway, based on post-war developments.
47.
Erik Gjems-Onstad deliberated his post-war views on the war in a 2008 ten-minute television special.
48.
Erik Gjems-Onstad pointed to the government fleeing the country, and what he considered the "pitiful" reaction of Prime Minister Johan Nygaardsvold.
49.
Erik Gjems-Onstad noted that while some of the figures in the Quisling regime had acted out far too harshly, some others had tried to maintain Norway's interests against the occupiers; the alternative of letting the Germans run the country completely unopposed under Josef Terboven could in his mind have ended up far worse.
50.
Erik Gjems-Onstad said he believed that the treason by Quisling should be compared with the lack of preparations for war by Nygaardsvold and the Labour Party government.
51.
Erik Gjems-Onstad complained that he for unexplained reasons had been kept away from public arrangements related to the Second World War.
52.
Erik Gjems-Onstad said he had not been invited to a single such event.
53.
Erik Gjems-Onstad was mobilisation manager as military lawyer colonel at Strike Command Southern Norway, one of the Air Commands of the Royal Norwegian Air Force, from 1970 to 1980.
54.
Erik Gjems-Onstad completed his education in law, graduating with a cand.
55.
Erik Gjems-Onstad worked as a judge in southern Buskerud from 1948 to 1949, and in 1949 he opened a law firm in Oslo.
57.
Erik Gjems-Onstad had served with Manus in the Norwegian Home Guard after the war, and had met his later wife Tikken Manus for the first time in 1943 when she worked as a military attache in Stockholm.
58.
In 1961 Erik Gjems-Onstad left his lawyer's firm to work as a consultant in Den norske Creditbank.
59.
Erik Gjems-Onstad became a central figure in the DnC's plans to develop the Vaterland neighbourhood in Oslo.
60.
Erik Gjems-Onstad was a board member of AS Vaterland from 1966 to 1972, and was its CEO from 1970.
61.
Erik Gjems-Onstad soon got the nickname the "Vaterland King", after a local 1930s house owner.
62.
Erik Gjems-Onstad retired as a defender in 1990, but remained a lawyer until 2001.
63.
Erik Gjems-Onstad represented the club SK Rye which he joined on 1 August 1936, and was made an honorary member of the club in 1986.
64.
Erik Gjems-Onstad became the Norwegian junior champion in cycling in 1939.
65.
Erik Gjems-Onstad was an active race walker, with two sixth places in the Norwegian championships achieved between 1967 and 1969.
66.
Erik Gjems-Onstad chaired the Norwegian Cycling Federation from 1959 to 1965 and the Norwegian Walking Association from 1967 to 1973.
67.
Erik Gjems-Onstad was a member of the Norwegian Olympic Committee from 1959 to 1973 and a deputy board member of the Norwegian Confederation of Sports from 1965 to 1967.
68.
Erik Gjems-Onstad was an official for Norway at the Summer Olympics in 1960 and 1972, and in 1993 he sat on the committee that organized the 1993 UCI Road World Championships.
69.
Erik Gjems-Onstad completed the race himself more than fifteen times; the last times with the starting number "1".
70.
From 1960 to 1964 Erik Gjems-Onstad was a member of the school board in Oslo, representing the Conservative Party.
71.
Erik Gjems-Onstad had been present at the founding meeting at Saga kino, and was offered a place in the party's central leadership by Anders Lange after they one day incidentally met outside Gjems-Onstad's lawyer's office.
72.
Besides his leading positions in business and sports, Erik Gjems-Onstad had for years expressed his political views in newspapers and journals, which broadly coincided with Lange's views.
73.
Erik Gjems-Onstad proposed in November 1973 to introduce gun and shooting training as an optional course for students in high school, and to separate church and state.
74.
In early 1976 Erik Gjems-Onstad voiced his discontent with the ever-ongoing conflicts within the party, and he had by mid-year not decided whether or not he wanted to run for re-election.
75.
Erik Gjems-Onstad eventually felt squeezed out of the party, and wanted no part in the intriguing he considered Hagen to represent.
76.
Erik Gjems-Onstad proposed steep budget cuts in 1974, notably in press support and in the Office of the Prime Minister.
77.
Erik Gjems-Onstad proposed to abolish the Ministry of the Environment and the Ministry of Consumer Affairs and Administration, as well as 22 laws the same year.
78.
Prime Minister Trygve Bratteli in turn claimed that Erik Gjems-Onstad "undermined democracy" because he was present and spoke in parliament too much.
79.
Erik Gjems-Onstad was among the signatories of a petition in 1974 that called on the Norwegian government to secure Israel's existence.
80.
Erik Gjems-Onstad wanted to terminate the Norwegian government's support of liberation movements in Portuguese Guinea the same year.
81.
Erik Gjems-Onstad proposed to end all public foreign aid, and instead grant tax deduction to private donations.
82.
Erik Gjems-Onstad proposed to prioritise Norwegian interests in Antarctica higher, and to align Norway's ambassador to Thailand with South Vietnam.
83.
Erik Gjems-Onstad advocated expelling the five Soviet KGB spies who had been exposed in Norway in 1975, but gained no support from the government.
84.
Erik Gjems-Onstad was criticised by the Norwegian Foreign Minister the same year for claiming that Tanzanian President Julius Nyerere used Norwegian taxes for "national socialist" experiments of forcibly moving populations.
85.
Erik Gjems-Onstad toured Portuguese Angola for a week in 1973, and was in Portuguese Guinea in 1974.
86.
Erik Gjems-Onstad came to regard it as a life's mission to work for Africa, and believed that the Norwegian government's policy in Africa contributed to destroy the continent through supporting "wars of liberation" and failed foreign aid.
87.
Erik Gjems-Onstad maintained that his prime concern was to warn against the entrenchment of socialism and communism in Africa.
88.
Erik Gjems-Onstad travelled extensively throughout South Africa, and said that conditions for blacks were better there than in other African countries.
89.
Erik Gjems-Onstad was introduced to a South African official visiting Norway in 1974 by Anders Lange, and visited the country himself in 1975 after being invited by the South African Department of Information.
90.
Erik Gjems-Onstad met with figures including Connie Mulder, and following Lange's death he considered himself as the continuation of Lange's legacy with regards to the country.
91.
Erik Gjems-Onstad supported the South African policy since the 1970s of gradually dismantling the apartheid system, which included the granting of independence to tribal homelands.
92.
Erik Gjems-Onstad was in the country in April 1976 for a conference that was to prepare the establishment of Transkei.
93.
Erik Gjems-Onstad later considered the homelands to be true democratic states governed by the rule of law, which he considered that many other African states were not.
94.
Erik Gjems-Onstad later pointed to the development in former Rhodesia, Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe.
95.
Erik Gjems-Onstad arranged several study trips to South Africa, and was part of a group of eight Norwegians who toured the country in 1987 and issued an "apology" to the South African government for the Norwegian government's policy towards the country.
96.
Erik Gjems-Onstad traveled to Rhodesia in April 1979 as the sole Norwegian observer of the general election, after he had been invited by the Rhodesian Department of Information.
97.
Erik Gjems-Onstad admitted at the same time that he for years had corresponded with the Rhodesian government about how he considered various institutions and individuals in Norway, particularly in the news media.
98.
The relationship was initiated after Erik Gjems-Onstad had written a letter of sympathy to Rhodesian Prime Minister Ian Smith some years ahead.
99.
Erik Gjems-Onstad criticised Hagen strongly for his complicity in the establishment of a Labour Party government in 1986, and was a member of the Conservative Party by 1988.
100.
Erik Gjems-Onstad had according to his own statement in 1987 not seen any reason for getting himself involved in the public debate about immigration until then.
101.
Erik Gjems-Onstad contested the 1989 parliamentary election for the Stop Immigration party in Akershus, and chaired its regional chapter from 1988 to 1990.
102.
In 1991 Erik Gjems-Onstad ran unsuccessfully in the local election for the Fatherland Party, and he was later active in the People's Movement Against Immigration.
103.
Erik Gjems-Onstad was present at the meeting at Godlia kino in 1995.
104.
Erik Gjems-Onstad expressed his outrage at the Lund Report in 1996 after it was revealed that he had been under surveillance by the Norwegian Police Security Service, considering it defamatory and demanding an apology.
105.
Erik Gjems-Onstad came to believe that the recent mass immigration to Norway was a greater threat than the Nazi invasion of Norway, although he made clear he had nothing against "normal immigration" and individuals, nor about Norwegians finding spouses in other countries.
106.
Erik Gjems-Onstad was involved in the Conservative Party in Asker from 2005 to 2007, but joined the Pensioners' Party in 2007 as their top ballot candidate for the municipal election.
107.
Erik Gjems-Onstad was expelled from the Pensioners' Party before the election, but removal from the ballot is legally impossible.
108.
Erik Gjems-Onstad was active as the internal meeting leader of Stop Islamisation of Norway and its predecessor FOMI from 2001 to 2009, and participated in a demonstration alongside SIAN's leader Arne Tumyr in 2009.
109.
Erik Gjems-Onstad made news in 2008 when he had talks with the disturbed man who fired a gun towards a refugee centre.
110.
Erik Gjems-Onstad maintained that it was only the other convict, Joe Erling Jahr, who had committed the murder.
111.
Erik Gjems-Onstad was married in 1949 to Borgny Pedersen.
112.
Erik Gjems-Onstad was married for the second time to Inger Opseth was born on 2 October 1937 and in 1974.
113.
Erik Gjems-Onstad met Inger when he worked for the Vaterland-project, where she worked as an interior architect.
114.
Erik Gjems-Onstad had three children, including his son, jurist Ole Erik Gjems-Onstad.
115.
Erik Gjems-Onstad lived in Hvalstad, Asker, where he owned a nine decare small farm.
116.
Erik Gjems-Onstad often cut lumber from the forest to build his own furniture.
117.
Erik Gjems-Onstad left behind his wife, children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
118.
Erik Gjems-Onstad released the book Krigskorset og St Olavsmedaljen med ekegren in 1995, which gives an overview of all the holders of Norway's highest wartime decorations.
119.
Erik Gjems-Onstad wrote about alternative Norwegian policies towards South Africa in the 1985 book Syd-Afrika i dag: Boikott eller samarbeid.
120.
Erik Gjems-Onstad has in addition released his own periodical, Nytt og kommentarer.