Project overview

This project examines how forced displacements have shaped the development of the Nordic region. Several prominent scholars are now shedding light on historical events that have long remained in the shadows.

Book

One of the key outcomes of the research collaboration is the scholarly volume Forced Migrants in Nordic Histories. This book won the Nordic History Book Award in 2025 at the Nordic historians’ conference in Reykjavik. Professor Hans Otto Frøland of NTNU and Dr Vendula Vlková Hingarová contributed one of the chapters, in which they investigate the forced relocation of Czech men to remote and Arctic regions of Norway.

During the Second World War, approximately 2,000 young men from Bohemia and Moravia—now part of the Czech Republic—were deported to Norway as forced labourers. At the time, these regions were under Nazi German occupation.

Their experiences upon arriving in the north, and the way they have been remembered since, have largely been neglected in Norway. Simultaneously, their stories were intentionally concealed in the former Czechoslovakia.

The representation of forced evacuees in historical works

Chapter 3 reveals that, prior to the 1990s, forced evacuees attracted limited attention within academic research. A few notable exceptions existed, particularly concerning minority groups such as Jewish and Karelian refugees. Interest in these communities began to grow from the 1970s onwards, as voices from outside the academic sphere increasingly questioned and challenged the national narratives that had long shaped traditional historical accounts.

Forced Czech labourers

Chapter 11 draws upon German archival materials, personal accounts from the workers themselves, and interviews with their descendants. The research team explores how these men experienced the events in question and how they remembered them. The chapter also examines the ways in which these memories have been preserved and interpreted within a broader historical framework.

Links

The book, Forced Migrants in Nordic Histories is available as an Open Access publication.
You may also access the specific chapters to which Professor Hans Otto Frøland contributed:
•    Chapter 3: Forced Migrants in Nordic Historiographies
•    Chapter 11: Forced Labour Displacement during the Second World War: Czechs in Norway and Their Postwar Memorialisation

For further information, visit the project’s official website (in English): Histories of Refugeedom in the Nordic Countries.