Johan Bernhard Hjort (25 February 1895 – 24 February 1969) was a Norwegian supreme court lawyer. He is known for co-founding Nasjonal Samling in 1933, his later resistance work against Nazi Germany, including his work to help Scandinavian prisoners, as well as for his role as one of the country's leading defence attorneys after the war.
Hjort joined Harald Nørregaard's law firm in 1932 and after 1945 continued the firm as Advokatfirmaet Hjort. He was deputy leader of Nasjonal Samling from 1933, and from 1935 he served as the leader of Hirden, the party's paramilitary wing. However, he broke with the party in 1937 and was arrested by the Gestapo in 1941. He was then sent to Germany, where he was interned at the Gross Kreutz estate together with Didrik Arup Seip, and carried out resistance work that saved the lives of many Scandinavian prisoners. Among other things, the group at Gross Kreutz collected lists of names of Scandinavian prisoners, and these formed the basis for the rescue operation with the white buses.
After the war, he was notable as a defender of homosexual rights and as a defender of controversial artists' freedom of expression, as in the so-called Red Ruby controversy. From 1961 until his death, he was chairman of Riksmålsforbundet. As a public figure, he stood for a liberal worldview, sharply criticizing the Labor Party governments of the 1950s and 1960s.
Family and background
He was the son of marine biologist, oceanographer, and director of fisheries, Johan Hjort and his wife Wanda Maria von der Marwitz. His mother was of Prussian nobility. During Johan's childhood, the family lived in Bergen, and his parents divorced when he was in his teens. The children moved with their mother to Bestum in Oslo.
In 1920, he married Anna Cathrine Holst. His two sisters Astrid and Wanda soon after married German men: the two brothers Rüdiger and Georg Conrad Graf von der Goltz, and moved to Germany. Astrid's husband, Rüdiger von der Goltz, was from 1936 a member of the Reichstag for the NSDAP. The sisters' father-in-law was the prominent General Rüdiger von der Goltz, who led the Freikorps in the Baltic States and the German intervention in the Finnish Civil War.
Hjort had six children with his wife: social worker and resistance member Wanda Hjort Heger, Supreme Court lawyer Johan Hjort, doctor, professor and politician Peter F. Hjort, engineer Helge Hjort, pianist Kirsti Hjort and psychologist Haldis Hjort. He is the grandfather of publisher Anders Heger and district court judge Kim Heger.
Early life and career Hjort began studying law and graduated in 1919 with a cand.jur., equivalent to a master's degree. Shortly after graduating, Hjort was employed by the law firm Bredal, Fougner and Schjødt, which at the time was one of Oslo's leading firms. After a year, he was asked to leave in order to gain more experience as a temporary judge. Hjort then worked for a year in Aker before joining the Union of Norwegian Cities (, now KS) as a legal consultant.
Following the First World War, Norway experienced significant economic troubles. Through his position at the Union of Norwegian Cities, Hjort gained in-depth knowledge of the poor finances of the municipalities and the state. Together with his friend Trygve Hoff (later editor of Farmand), Hjort prepared an alternative state budget in 1923 to improve the budget overview. As a result, he was eventually tasked with an investigation assignment for Johan Egeberg Mellbye in the Farmers' Party and a position as an advisor for the Lykke government under Finance Minister Fredrik Ludvig Konow.
As Hjort prepared his economic reports, focused on the state's poor finances and the politicians' inability to balance the budget deficit, his confidence in the existing non-socialist parties weakened. In 1927, Hjort joined the Fatherland League and was elected to the Aker county council for the Conservative Party. In the 1930 parliamentary elections, Hjort campaigned for a non-socialist victory, and attacking revolutionary aspects of the Labour Party. Responding to an article by Edvard Bull Sr. (Labor Party politician and later Foreign Minister) in the journal Vor Verden, Hjort argued that one could not give power to an admitted revolutionary party even if it won the election, as this would be tantamount to "bolshevism by parliamentary means" ().
Though the non-socialists won the election in 1930, the economic crisis (now global in the form of the Great Depression) was becoming increasingly serious and unemployment was rising. In the spring of 1931, this led to a major lockout by employers. The crisis and what Hjort perceived as a weak response from the establishment parties lead him towards the more radical right-wing.
In 1932, Hjort was admitted as a partner in Harald Nørregaard's law firm, which was subsequently renamed Nørregaard & Hjort. Nørregaard was regarded as one of Norway's leading supreme court lawyers of his time. Hjort's biographer, Ivo de Figueiredo, writes: "In Nørregaard he found a role model. The elderly lawyer was known for his eloquence in court. It was said of him that he dominated the courtroom with his presence, and that his warm voice wrapped itself around the Court of Appeal like velvet." Nørregaard died after six years of partnership in 1938. Nørregaard and Hjort had a somewhat distant family relationship - Nørregaard's grandmother was married to Hjort's great-grandfather.
Involvement with Nasjonal Samling
Beginning Hjort was in contact with a circle of concerned establishment figures, to which Vidkun Quisling had also been invited. From the spring of 1930, they met for dinner at Frederik Prytz's house at Hafrsfjordsgaten 7. In May 1931, Quisling was appointed Minister of Defense in Peder L. Kolstad's government, formed by the Farmers' Party. During the throne speech in April 1932, Quisling gave a speech in the Storting in which he accused the two socialist parties (the Labor Party, DNA, and the Communist Party of Norway, NKP) of treasonous connections with the Soviet Union. The circle around Prytz attempted to use the speech to promote Quisling's political position and weaken the socialist parties.
In May 1932, the circle from Hafrsfjordsgate formed an informal group called "Polkom"; from Hjort's office, this group worked to exploit Quisling's accusations and information against the two socialist parties. This marked the start of Hjort's period of close collaboration with Quisling. Polkom's work was aimed at getting the non-socialist parties to declare DNA and NKP illegal, as they aimed to overthrow the system. During the summer and fall, Hjort developed a plan, based on constitutional theory, for a coup d'état carried out by the government against the Storting. Under this plan, parliamentarism was to be abolished and the threat from the socialists neutralized.
Hjort's basis for taking such drastic action was his sense of crisis. As Hjort saw it, the plan was constitutionally legitimate, and he saw a unifying anti-socialist leader in Vidkun Quisling. To showcase the constitutional legality of the coup d'état plan, Hjort referred to 1814, 1884 and 1905; three major years in Norwegian political history. However, the success of the plan depended on broad support, and to ensure this, a meeting was held on 26 October 1932 at the home of landowner Carl Otto Løvenskiold at Bærums Verk.
Present at this meeting were the leaders of various non-socialist parties and organizations. The meeting later became known as the "Wednesday meeting". Hjort introduced and presented the plan, but it was negatively received by the old Conservative prime minister Jens Bratlie, and it also led to prominent supporter Johan Throne Holst (noteworthy industrialist and CEO of Freia) withdrawing. Over the course of the fall and winter, the plan collapsed as Quisling and new Prime Minister Jens Hundseid clashed over the pacifist Captain Kullmann in what became known as the "Kullmann case". This was the first blow to Hjort's faith in Quisling.
Founding of Nasjonal Samling Jens Hundseid's government fell in March 1933, and Polkom – in which Hjort played a central role – explored the possibility of a broad non-socialist coalition that would include the Farmers' Party, the Fatherland League, and others. However, a lack of interest in this front meant that on 17 May, in the newspaper Tidens Tegn, Quisling presented a program for a separate party, Nasjonal Samling. As de facto deputy leader of the new party, Hjort threw himself into the election campaign for the 1933 general election, in which his wife Anna Cathrine also participated.
The newly founded party did not get any MPs. Hjort lamented Quisling's leadership style, which he felt was unclear and amateurish. In the spring of 1934, NS made a new attempt at non-socialist cooperation, led by Hjort. However, these negotiations were unsuccessful, and in March 1935 the Labor Party formed a government with the support of the Farmers' Party.
In addition to his legal practice, Hjort continued to work organizationally for NS. He also investigated how laws and the Constitution must be amended to meet "the demands of the new era". He also put forward a proposal in the spring of 1935 to reintroduce the "Jew clause" (a historical ban excluding Jews from Norway) in the Constitution. Despite the fact that Hjort was a co-founder and de facto deputy leader of NS, his ideas about the organization of the state were in theory within the limits of democracy. Hjort was also not a supporter of a planned economy, and he distanced himself from German National Socialism.
In March 1935, Hjort took over the leadership of Hirden, who partly acted as security guards at NS meetings, but whose primary task was to discipline and educate its members. Hirden was modeled after the German (SA). With his Prussian background, sergeant training from the Armed Forces and natural authority, Hjort was made for the role. Hirden was the activist core of NS, with a couple hundred members. At a meeting in Gjøvik on Ascension Day 1936, Hjort addressed several thousand attendees and opened with "Countrymen, traitors, monkeys and others". The meeting ended in chaos and street fighting, the so-called Torgslaget.
Internal struggle and break with NS Johan Bernhard Hjort had little patience with people he regarded as "fools" or amateurish, and he believed there were many of them in NS. In addition, Hjort was an able organizer, and a good speaker. Quisling's lack of these qualities was very problematic for the party. A battle for the leadership of NS was therefore inevitable.
In the summer of 1936, Hjort traveled to Germany to seek support for NS. Probably with the help of his German brothers-in-law, he met Heinrich Himmler, among others. He was well received, but received no financial support. However, Himmler offered to link NS to the German SS, which Hjort is said to have rejected.
Back in Norway, he became involved in the NS action against Trotsky. Hirden broke into Konrad Knudsen's house in Hønefoss, where Trotsky lived, and took a number of documents that Hjort handed over to the police. The case attracted enormous attention and was for NS a successful provocation. NS's fight against communism and Judaism took center stage, and Trotsky was eventually expelled.
In the election campaign before the 1936 general election, Hjort gave everything. At the same time, he was under pressure from internal intrigues in NS and the knowledge that he was neglecting his family in favor of politics. However, NS had a poor showing in the election and was once again left without MPs. In the internal dispute that followed, Hjort proposed far-reaching organizational changes. Hjort's proposals were rejected, and in the fall of 1936 the conflict between him and NS intensified. In February 1937, he left the party, and several other key figures left NS at this time as well.
Prelude to war