During the war more than 100000 Soviet POWs were transfered to camps all over Norway, with the concentration of them going to camps in Northern Norway. They were put to work in different industries and mainly the building of Atlantikwall fortifications and the railroad which were to connect Berlin with Murmansk. As the POWs lived under harsh and brutal conditions the mortality rate was high.
The dead were buried in provisoric graveyards near the prisoner of war camps, and they grew in size as the war progressed.
After the liberation, before the POWs were sent back to Soviet, they had made all the graveyards into nice memorials over their fallen friends.
In the years after the war these places were often visited by people from the Soviet Union, and as we entered the Cold War these visitors were looked at with growing suspicion as many of the old POW camps lay close to military installations.
In 1951 the government had decided to centralize all the Soviet fallen in a few graveyards around Norway, so they didn`t have to have potential Soviet spies nosing around military zones. Of course the official reason was that maintenance would be easier if the graveyards were all in one place.
The operation was given the name "Operation Asphalt", after the paper/asphalt bags used as bodybags, and it began the autumn 1951. It was attempted to do the operation as secretive as possible for not to upset anyone, specially the local populations. Naturally people got very upset when the nicely cared for monuments started to be blown up and graveyards emptied in a rush. When people got news about it they became angry. They looked at it as desecration. The digger teams got armed protection in fear of attacks from the locals. None of the protests were heard, and by October more than 8000 bodies had been exhumed and transported on a ship going south along the Norwegian coast.
The work itself had been a horrible affair for anyone involved. The bodies were only partly rotted and dissolved and they were placed in thin asphalt covered paper bags, which soon began to dissolve. The workers pay was increased several times and lots of alcohol were given to the workers.
In Mo i Rana, south of the Polar Circle, the ship and its exhumers met such a large group of angry people that they left with the job undone, and it is one of the few places in Northern Norway where the original Soviet POW gravesites is intact.
After much deliberation the government settled for a site for the new graveyard. The choice had fallen on a small remote place out by the coast, Tjøtta. In November 1944 the ship M/S Rigel sunk with ca 2500 Soviet POWs outside Tjøtta so it was a natural site to choose.
This chapter in the Norwegian history is a very shamefull one, and it kept going until recently.
In1953 part one of Tjøtta cemetery opened. 7551 POWs had been reburied, but only 826 had been identified by name. These nameplates were at some point removed and stoved away in a farm building, until they were re-discovered in 2005. After much work there is now ca 4800 names added, and placed on the wall around the cemetery. The work to fill in the missing ones goes on.
Part two of the cemetery was opened in 1970 and there lies 1011 of the POWs who went down with M/S Rigel.
R.I.P
Two monuments were rebuilt a few km away from the destroyed gravesites, here also by the Polar Circle.
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