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From Revolutionary History, Vol.2 No.2, Summer 1989. Used with permission.
The following memoir, which is published here for the first time, is by Nils Dahl, who celebrated his eightieth birthday earlier this year.
Comrade Dahl is an activist, who was for a time Trotsky’s bodyguard in Norway, and he has previously made available to us all his material on the sad fate of Walter Held – for which see Revolutionary History, Vol.1 No.2, Summer 1988, pp.9-11, and Vol.1 No.4, Winter 1988-89, pp.39-43.
This personal account throws some unfamiliar light on Trotsky’s views and personality and the response of the Scandinavian Trotskyism to the Finnish War. It is also a fascinating account of early Norwegian Trotskyism with which most readers will be unfamiliar.
I first became acquainted with the labour movement and with politics generally because I came from a family that had been deeply involved in politics since 1814, when Norway was liberated from Denmark by Marshal Bernadotte, a former French revolutionary. My father’s brother was a parliamentary member for the Conservative Party between 1920 and 1927, and their grandfather was in Eidsvoll in 1814.[1] During the war of 1814 he was the host of Bernadotte as the mayor of a city called Halden which was close to the Swedish border. The town was taken over by Bernadotte and used as his military headquarters during this war. When I was a student in 1927 there was a very violent political discussion and an economic crisis, especially in the countryside. In 1928-29 I did my compulsory military service as a reserve officer, and in 1929 I went into a political student organisation called Mot-Dag, led by a man called Erling Falk. Mot-Dag means ‘Towards Daybreak’. Falk had come back from the USA in 1920 where he had been involved with the ‘Wobblies’. [2] Being an accountant, he knew very well how big business was organised, and he organised Mot-Dag, mainly a students’ organisation, using the same organisational methods as big business. It was a very effective organisation. He played a leading role in the events of 1923, when the Norwegian Labour Party broke with the Comintern, and he was responsible for making the declaration which was carried in the Labour Party by two votes. There was a violent row between him and Radek. Radek said that the Norwegian Labour Party had to choose between Falk and the Comintern. Later Falk was manoeuvred out of the Labour Party (in 1924) and took his organisation with him. He was slung out because of the antimilitarist, pacifist position that he held. In 1926 he applied for membership of the Communist Party and this was refused by the Communist Party Central Committee in Norway, but the Russians had a commissar in Norway and Falk went along to see this commissar and got his support. So Mot-Dag was co-opted into the Communist Party by the vote of this Russian commissar, in spite of the antagonism of the Norwegian Communist Party. That is a rather surprising story, even in the Stalinist movement.
Mot-Dag did educational work among the students, scientists and literary people. When Stalin set up the Lenin school a few Mot-Dag members went there as teachers and students. Three of them, Uhle, Erle and Falk were greatly influenced by Stalinism. Because of this, as long as Erling Falk dominated the organisation, it was not a danger to the Stalinists. His health started to go in 1933-34 and he was expelled from his own organisation in 1936. I had only just joined the Communist Party in 1929, when I was expelled as an oppositionist in Trondheim. That was my first experience of expulsion. After the expulsion Mot-Dag expanded and took over the student organisation at Oslo University, and partly in the Technical High School in Trondheim.
After I had finished my technical education in Trondheim, the third city in Norway, I took further studies in photogrammetry in Berlin, in the technical high school. My father had a big surveying office in Norway, and photogrammetry was the up and coming thing. In the autumn of 1932 I got involved in the German Communist movement because after the expulsions of 1928-29, Mot-Dag as an organisation was heavily involved with the Communist Opposition in Berlin. The organisation was called the Communist Party (Opposition) (KPO) which was the centre of an international organisation (IVKO – International Verein Kommunistische Opposition) under the leadership of Heinrich Brandler and Fenner Brockway. When I went there they were publishing a paper called Gegen den Strom (Against the Stream). I gave them a report about the dispute between Denmark and Norway over Greenland. I went on the editorial board in the autumn of 1932 as a representative from Mot-Dag. I also went to some lectures by Brandler and Thalheimer on general politics. Brandler and Thalheimer never slept two nights in the same place. They were always on the move. The meetings of the editorial board could no longer be held in the evening. We would meet in the business quarter in the day time, as that was the best camouflage. I do not know what they planned to do in the event of a Nazi takeover. They thought that the political future was obvious. There was great optimism in the autumn of 1932 because there was the new general election in November, and in this election Hitler lost two million votes. I had some discussions with a Liberal and he said ‘Now Hitler is finished!’ and I said: ‘You are wrong, because even now they have great influence in the trade union movement, and the leader of theirs in the Ruhr district has virtually taken over the trade union, which is much more important from a revolutionary point of view than losing two million votes’.
Then, just before Hitler came to power, I fell sick and went back to Norway at Christmas 1932. Hitler took over in January, a week or two after I left. As a Norwegian national I do not think I was in any danger, and I went back in 1936 without any difficulty.
Earlier the situation was really dangerous. I lived in the working class Altmoabit district, the eastern part of Berlin, and once I was nearly killed because I wore a brown cap that was regarded as Nazi. I have never seen such a situation before, where people were sleeping in the streets, and people were throwing themselves in front of railways and trams, and so on. You could not walk in the streets without women hanging on to you. The only way to get rid of them was to say ‘Kein gelt’, ‘No money’. The housing situation was curious, since young people did not have the money to hire the usual flats, so they lived in cellars and attics whilst the rest of the house stood empty. That was one of the things that Hitler did when he came to power – he got the rents down, so people could live, and he earned a lot of sympathy because of this. In Berlin it was a left-wing Nazi who was in charge, Gregor Strasser, and he was only less radical in words than a Trotskyist. He had three main slogans: ‘Get the fat bureaucrats!’, ‘Get the Bolsheviks!’ and if anybody asked him the practical difficulty of carrying out some policy or other, ‘The Führer will manage that!’
It was in September or October or November that we had a transport strike. All the trams and buses stopped, and in Prussia there was a Labour government which sent troops against the strikers. The Nazis joined the strike, and as a result two Nazis were killed by soldiers or by the patriotic police. That made a very great impression on the workers in Norway.
Mot-Dag made attempts to get Jewish women out of Germany. A number of our people went to Germany and married them. In some cases it became a business racket, and some did it in return for paying off their student loans. These were not the political people.
When I arrived back in Norway in 1933, I did not get any technical employment, so I worked for Mot-Dag from 1933-34. After we were thrown out of the Comintern, Mot-Dag was independent (1929-36). The main theoretical work had been to get a translation of Karl Marx’s Capital published. This project was led by Falk. There were about a hundred, mainly intellectual, members in the organisation in those days, in different kinds of professions – lawyers, historians, and so on. Those people were able to make the first encyclopaedia based on Marxism and working class politics ever published outside Russia. The money was given by a big Labour weekly which was going well. The three main sources of income in those days were the publication of a big monthly paper, Mot-Dag, the translation of Capital and a series of pamphlets on the sexual question. These last were a tremendous success, which earned our organisation a lot of money. The translation of Capital sold quite nicely and we could make our political points in the discussions with the help of Karl Marx’s Capital and ‘Theory of Crises’. The encyclopaedia came out in six volumes. Only the first and second volumes of Capital had been translated by 1936 when Mot-Dag joined the Labour Party and Falk was thrown out.
In Mot-Dag I had a sub-editorial job and had to do the lay-out of the monthly paper and collect the manuscripts from people on time.
In 1934-35 I held small jobs on building sites in Oslo, and I was able to join the building workers’ union. In 1936 I got a job as a surveyor, working for the union of unskilled building workers in Oslo. That was the biggest trade union in Oslo with 6,000 members. We controlled all building work in Oslo and in many sites outside Oslo, such as those for hydroelectrical power stations, roads, and so on. All work had to be paid according to a certain price list. Ah work was piece work, which had to be measured, and the money was paid out under union control. I and between five and ten technicians had to survey all the different jobs that were on that list. My job was to see to it that every worker got his pay. By that system the job of foreman, the capitalists’ representative on the floor, was reduced to getting the necessary materials to the workers. I was the first person with a higher technical education who was attached to a local trade union as an employee. Before me there had been two lawyers on the highest level of the union. Trygve Lie[3] was the first who joined the trade union organisation. After him was Wiggo Hansteen [4], who was shot by the Germans in 1941. I had an interesting job dealing with the wage rates for different jobs, and I developed considerable standing in the union between 1936-40. That was more or less my background in politics and trade union matters, from which I discussed a number of different questions with Trotsky.
In 1929 someone in Berlin had written to the leader of the Norwegian Labour Party asking for asylum for Trotsky in Norway, and the Labour Party Group took it up and put forward a motion in Parliament that he should be allowed to live there. The Liberals were bitterly against it, but the whole Labour Party voted unanimously to accept him in Norway. That was the background, so everybody knew that the Labour Party was committed on that. Falk managed to reverse the Liberal Party’s previous decision against accepting Trotsky, though Trotsky was not told of this. A Stalinist faction took over the student group and was against inviting him. One of their Committee was Gerhardsen. [5]
Falk was very impressed by Trotsky. He went to Copenhagen in 1932 to try to get Trotsky to speak to the Norwegian student organisation. Trotsky was suspicious of him because of his Stalinist past, and the Trotskyists kept the whole thing very quiet. Norway had a Liberal government in 1932, but the Liberal government refused a visa except for a short visit.
Later, in 1935, there was a great change in Norway as the Labour Party got the chance of taking over the government, though it was not the majority. The general election of 1935 gave them the majority, and some went into the government. At the same time Trotsky’s case came up. Trotsky was invited at the beginning of July. He was not at all keen to go. Three people took up the task of getting him to Norway. They were Waiter Held, Scheflo [6], who was the former leader of the Communist Party, and Falk, who was the leader of Mot-Dag. Held wrote to him asking him to come on 27 March 1935. The first plan was that he would come into the country as a tourist, would stay with Scheflo in the south of Norway, and from there should apply for an extension of his stay. Trotsky said that he would not use that method – he had to do it openly, and he insisted upon that. Nygaardsvold [7] was asked, and he said: ‘Cannot you wait until the Parliamentary recess in the summer?’ Then the situation got worse for Trotsky in France, so that he had to leave there. He said to me:’It seemed that I had a choice as between Madagascar and Oslo, and I think Norway is preferable. So he got a telegram from his son saying that it was to be Norway in April. He went to Paris and then he stayed in Chamonix and was only allowed to be there for 24 hours. It was a really difficult situation at the beginning of June, and from 1 June to 12 June there was a lot of work for Held in persuading the government to let him in. The Norwegian state bureaucracy put up every obstacle in Held’s way, but finally Trotsky was allowed in.
I met Trotsky some time after he arrived in Norway in the middle of June 1935. I was a political and personal friend of Waiter Held, who was Trotsky’s representative in Norway. In those days I was a regular reader of the German Trotskyist paper Unser Wort. I met Trotsky as soon as he had settled down in Hönefoss, which is a little town about an hour’s drive from Oslo. In those days I had a car at my disposal and on many occasions took Waiter Held over to see Trotsky.
I stayed with Trotsky for two periods of time, each lasting for a number of days. One was in September 1935, and one was at Christmas 1935 and early 1936. In between, and later, I went only on day trips to Hönefoss, and in 1936 I remember we mainly discussed the situation in the Norwegian trade unions. I tried to explain my two longer visits with Trotsky to Deutscher, but he got it wrong. Trotsky had a pleasant time in 1935. No-one bothered him except for some articles in the Agrarian Party papers, and even the Communists kept quiet in 1935 so that he had a good opportunity to do some work. However, in the summer of 1935 Trotsky had been sick. The leading Mot-Dag doctor, Karl Evang, saw to it that he was sent to hospital for investigations and tried to find out what was wrong. According to his report to Mot-Dag neither Socialist nor capitalist doctors could find out what was wrong with him. It could have been nervous strain, and he was discharged from hospital in August. I think he recovered well by September 1935. At the end of August, Konrad Knudsen, Trotsky’s host, asked me if I knew a place where Trotsky could have a peaceful rest out of reach of people. At that time we used a big house, in a lonely park in a forest in Andorsrud in Skoger as a resort for holidays. Once upon a time Andorsrud had been a large property which had gone broke. In 1935 it was owned by a bank, but the old woman who was the former owner of the house still lived there and kept it in good order, and we used to go there for weekends. So I was able to arrange it.
Sköger is 90 kilometres south-west of Oslo and about an hour and a half’s drive from Hönefoss. I had a car at my disposal in those days because I was in charge of an aeroplane firm’s section for photogrammetry for map-making. We met secretly in Drammen, midway between Skogen and Oslo. Trotsky arrived with Natalia, Konrad Knudsen and Jean van Heijenoort, who was his secretary then, together with my wife and I. I took this opportunity of taking the week off to get married, and the week we spent together with Trotsky was also my honeymoon. Waiter Held also married at this time. It was a very quiet and peaceful time and we had a lot of discussions in front of the fireplace in the evenings, or when we were walking. That was my main period with Trotsky. My wife spoke fluent French because she had been in France as an au pair; also she was a nurse, and Natalia, who spoke very good French, was then suffering with some stomach ailment, so they spent a lot of time together. My wife looked after Trotsky’s health, and she was astonished at the sort of pills he needed for digestion, and so on. I was not able to communicate very much with Natalia because she only spoke French. With Trotsky it was much easier, because I spoke German well, and he did too. It was only occasionally that I was able to communicate with Natalia, but for my wife it was the other way round. After that week I met Trotsky time and again. In December 1935 I was mobilised by Konrad Knudsen asking me to come to help because Trotsky had gone for a vacation in Knudsen’s hut in the wooded district east of Hönefoss, and there had been a very heavy snowfall and Trotsky had been snowed in. I immediately went there. In the neighbourhood there was a hotel. When I arrived Trotsky had been able to get out of the hut on his own. He and Natalia had succeeded in getting down to the valley without our help, so we only went to the hut to clear up and put it back in some order. (It was a difficult time with storms and heavy snow falls in December 1935. It would have been impossible for Piatakov to have visited Trotsky then, as Vyshinsky claimed during the second Moscow Trial.) I was able to ski to the hut and down to the valley, although the snow was knee deep. I spent Christmas Eve together with Trotsky. I remember that there were a number of people and some local kids, and Trotsky was pressurised to walk around the Christmas tree, but he refused to go along with this custom of walking around the tree.
He needed a new milieu in winter time, and he got it in the hut. He said later on that he was too old for the exercise of being snowed in and getting out. It seemed to me that the shock brought back his working abilities. He worked very hard during the spring of 1936. Konrad Knudsen told me that Trotsky used to get up at 5 o’clock in the morning, get himself some tea or bread, and then work on his own until 8 o’clock in the morning, when he would go down for his usual breakfast meal. Then he would carry on working all day. There were times when his secretaries complained that even they could not stick to the eight hours work, either.
In 1936 I left my business job and went into the trade union movement and got a professional job there. I remember that I discussed the Norwegian trade union movement with Trotsky in 1936, but I was not really very much involved with him that year. He was busy in the spring of 1936 writing The Revolution Betrayed, and I have not now any remembrance of our being together during this period. When he was arrested in August 1936, he had been in the southern part of Norway together with Scheflo, who was a political friend of his and the leader of the Norwegian Communist Party from 1923 until he was expelled or left in 1928 (as were most of our friends from the Comintern).
In 1935 there had been a lot of difficulty before the Norwegian Labour government, as a minority government, dared to give him a visa. Obviously they regretted it in 1936, and left the dirty work to Trygve Lie. He had Trotsky cut off from the outside world so he could not comment on the Moscow Trials. The pressure on Trotsky’s friends in 1936 was very strong. Indeed, in the first Moscow Trial Stalin threatened the Norwegian Trotskyists around Scheflo with elimination. Falk fell ill in 1936 and was never again what he had been before. He died in 1940. Scheflo was ill too, and had to resign as editor in Kristiansand. When Norway was occupied he was too ill to be brought to Sweden. He died in hospital in 1943.
The reason for Trotsky’s expulsion from Norway in 1936, as far as governmental opinions and facts are concerned, have now been published in a book in Norway, written by a Liberal researcher named Yngvar Ustvedt. He had the opportunity of going through the wartime files of documents of the Nazi organisation and the documents in the Norwegian Foreign Office. The book is more or less a compilation from these documents. The research for the book has been done rather hurriedly, and has been published under the title of The World Revolution from Hönefoss. This book gives the answers to most of the questions concerning the facts and the forces behind the official actions.
There are plenty of interviews and quotations from eyewitnesses. Documents exist giving the official accounts and explanations. The attacks on Trotsky were made as a combined operation by very different groups. It is very difficult to divide them because they were so interconnected. Many things happened at the same time. So many incidents happened on different planes.
As soon as the Revolution Betrayed was finished he went down to Scheflo and spent the whole summer there. He was immediately attacked by forces in Germany who acted with the help of gangs of Norwegian followers of Quisling. The German attack was followed by a Russian attack in connection with the first Moscow Trial in the middle of August. The Labour minority government which had given Trotsky asylum came under heavy attack from internal forces, the Liberals and reactionary politicians as well as Nazi-sympathising bureaucrats.
This was during the first Moscow Trial, and he defended himself vigorously, and gave press conferences, and so on. This was noticed in the Norwegian Parliament and because of Russian pressure he was interned. A certain Major Attlee, who was Prime Minister of Britain after the war, sent a private letter to Nygaardsvold. Attlee pointed out that this treatment of Trotsky was a very bad precedent for all refugees. I asked here where one could find a copy of this letter, but I have not been able to find out. It was a private letter. The security forces were called out and it was obvious that his life was in danger. Later two Nazis admitted in court that they had conspired to kill him. One of them tried to burgle his house, and the burglar said in a book that when he met Trotsky the latter spoke fluently in German and stated that the Nazi was helping Stalin and Stalin’s politics. That made an impression on the Nazi, who sat down, thought it over and decided he did not want to help Stalin. As a result the man was reprimanded by his Nazi superior, and accused of losing his Nazi ideology. Later when Trotsky went to Scheflo he was followed by a gang of Nazis, one of whom had a room at the hotel, and he had an automatic pistol pointed at him, so he immediately dashed round the corner. His life was really in danger. Although I could see that he was very angry at being interned and kept there, yet I think that this actually saved his life.
The Labour politicians feared they might lose their governmental position. They got panicky, and Trygve Lie resorted to brutality towards Trotsky. Trotsky was condemned to death in Moscow as an international terrorist on 24 August. On 25 August he was put under arrest by a decision of the Norwegian Labour government. So he was interned and placed under the surveillance of the state police and cut off from the world. He was deprived of the possibility of defending himself and of criticising the Trial. The state police were led by a man who committed suicide in 1945 shortly before he could have been arrested by the liberation movement. His name was Jonas Lie. During the war he was the leader of the Norwegian internal police fighting against the resistance movement, 1942-45. But in 1936 he and Trygve Lie collaborated, and had Trotsky interned in a place called Sundby in Hurum, between Oslo and Skoger. That was the first, up to now the only, concentration camp that there ever was in Norway, and it was established in September-October 1936. I was again mobilised in December 1936 by Waiter Held and Konrad Knudsen, who asked me to be prepared to be a bodyguard for Trotsky, who was going to go through France. His friends there had obtained a transit visa for him. I got in contact with a well-known French lawyer, Gerard Rosenthal, who had come to Norway. Shortly before Christmas we discussed how we were going to contact Trotsky and arrange the journey to France. We applied to Trygve Lie but only got an evasive answer. Just before Christmas it was announced that Trotsky had left Norway some weeks before, although they had still kept a police guard around the place to prevent the Communist Party and others from intervening. So he had been deported secretly on a Norwegian vessel under the control of Jonas Lie. He was sent to a Norwegian concentration camp in September, but he was not handed over to Russian justice, thanks mainly to that letter from Attlee to the Norwegian Labour government. Under police guard, he and Natalia were sent to Mexico on 8 January, where he regained his freedom. To avoid being attacked on the open sea, the vessel took detours on the way to Mexico. The ship had been ordered to maintain radio silence, but the Stalinists seem to have learned of the wavelength and code, and they sent a message: ‘New orders. Go to the Baltic’. The captain was clever enough not to reply and to carry on to Mexico. For Held, myself and the French lawyer Gerard Rosenthal, it was a bitter disappointment that Trotsky had left us. It was almost Christmas 1936. The idea that Mexico would regard it as an honour to give Trotsky unconditional asylum came from Aras, the Turkish foreign minister. The Russian Ambassador sent Trygve Lie flowers when Trotsky was sent to Mexico.
There is a problem about the real causes as to why Trotsky was first invited and then was expelled from Norway. It is rather a long story and to answer it would depend upon your point of view. Trotsky explained his view in a book published in Switzerland: Stalins Verbrechen (The Crimes of Stalin). I tried to investigate which forces in the labour movement were behind Trygve Lie in his work of expelling Trotsky. Soon after Trotsky was expelled I, together with Konrad Knudsen, went to meet the right wing leader of the Norwegian labour movement. The labour movement had been split in three in 1923, a right wing Social Democrat Party, a centrist party led by Tranmael [8], and a Communist Party round Scheflo. When I met the right wing leader, Magnus Nilssen [9], in 1937 I asked him if he felt like a victor now that Trotsky had been expelled from Norway. He got a bit touchy and said that I was quite wrong. It was not the right wing Social Democrats who stood behind Trygve Lie, it was their opponents. The people around Trygve Lie who pushed him were the people who, in the old days, had been ‘so unbelievably revolutionary’, as Nilssen expressed it. After later investigation I found that that he was correct. It was wavering centrists around Tranmael who were the driving forces behind Trygve Lie, and the best helpers of Stalin in his bloody work.
The basic reason for Trotsky’s expulsion was the pressure from Germany and Russia from the outside, and from the Norwegian Nazis from the inside. This sketch only gives a bare and incomplete picture about what happened to Trotsky in the second half of 1936. I intend to add a further report when I return to Norway and have studied the recently published book World Revolution from Hönefoss, and have looked into my own archives.
1. The Norwegian Constitution was adopted in Eidsvoll in Eastern Norway, 80 km north of Oslo, on 17 May 1814. The ‘Men of Eidsvoll’ play a role in the Norwegian national mythology analogous to the signatories to the proclamation of Irish in dependence of 1916 in Irish history. See K.T. Derry, A History of Modern Norway, 1973, Chapter 1 for the details of this period.
2. Erling Falk (1887-1940) had earlier combined a career as a cost accountant in Chicago with the ‘Wobblies’, the nickname of the IWW – International Workers of the World.
3. Trygve Lie (1896-1968). Legal adviser to the Trade Union Federation, 1922-35; an active chairman of the Workers’ Sports Association, 1931-35; Minister of Justice 1935-39; Minister of Trade and Supply 1939-40; Minister of Foreign Affairs November 1940-February 1946. General Secretary of the United Nations 1946-53; County Governor of Oslo 1955-63; Minister of Industry 1963, and of Trade 1963-65. An illuminating portrait of Lie appears in Isaac Deutscher, Marxism, War and Revolution, London, 1984, pp.169-177.
4. Wiggo Hansteen (1900-41). Previously in Mot-Dag but in 1941 a CP member who nevertheless opposed the CP line which supported Hitler’s New Order up to July 1941. After the invasion of Russia there was a strike by 15,000 engineers in Oslo against the removal of their free milk supply at their place of work. Hansteen had opposed the action as tactically rash, but he and a young shop steward, Wickstrom, were shot.
5. Einar Gerhardsen (1897- ). The son of an Oslo road worker who, to start with, himself worked on the roads. He had been a strong supporter of Trannael and a class war prisoner for agitation among soldiers, who was released by the first Labour Government in 1928 that had only lasted a fortnight. In 1941 he was the secretary of the Labour Party. Prime Minister 1945-51, Leader of the Labour Party in the Storting 1951-55, Prime Minister 1955-63 and Prime Minister 1963-65. He was something of an elder statesman by the ’seventies.
6. Olav Scheflo (1883-1942). A carter’s son who had been to sea; an early associate of Tranmael in Trondheim; editor of Social Demokraten 1918-21; the main leader of the Norwegian Communist Party 1921-28.
7. Nygaardsvold (1879-1952). A husmann’s son employed in a sawmill at twelve, and as a forest and railway construction worker in Canada and the USA, 1902-07; member of the Storting, 1916-49; Minister of Agriculture 1928; Premier 1935-45 – five years of this in the London government-in exile. After the war he was held partly responsible for the inadequate defence preparations.
8. Martin Trannael (1869-1967). Journeyman painter in the USA 1900-02 and 1903-05. Secretary of the Norwegian Labour Party 1918 and editor of its principal newspaper 1921-49. An agitator of great power who led the Labour Party into and out of the Third International, but wished for no public office. He played a part in the patriotic resistance in Stockholm during the war. According to Dahl it was his influence that prevented the deportation of Held in the period before the war.
9. Magnus Nilssen (1871-1947). A journeyman goldsmith who later started his own business. Labour Party Secretary 1901; Member of the Storting, 1906-21 and 1927-45; Minister of Labour 1938; Vice President of the Storting 1935-40.
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