Bidspirit auction | Memoirs of a Norwegian ”Night

Memoirs of a Norwegian ”Night and Fog” Prisoner in the Natzweiler-Struthof, Buchenwald, and Dachau Concentration Camps. Oslo, 1946 – First Edition - Vi ga oss ikke (We Did Not Surrender), by Hans Cappelen. Published by Nasjonalforlaget, Oslo, 1946. First edition. The memoir of a ”Night and Fog” prisoner (En ”Nacht und Nebel”-fange forteller), documenting one of the most secretive and brutal programs of Nazi repression, designed to make resistance fighters and political opponents disappear into concentration camps in Germany without a trace and without providing any information to their families. Norwegian. Extremely rare. Hans Cappelen was a Norwegian lawyer, businessman, and resistance fighter whose story of survival became one of Norway's best-known symbols of the brutality of the Nazi ”Night and Fog” (Nacht und Nebel) program. Born in December 1903, Cappelen was a leading member of Milorg, the principal Norwegian resistance organization that fought against the German occupation and the puppet regime of Vidkun Quisling. In his role within the resistance, Cappelen managed its clandestine financial and supply networks, serving as a liaison between the local leadership in Oslo and the representatives of the Norwegian government-in-exile in Sweden and Great Britain. During the early years of the war, Cappelen was deeply involved in underground operations. Among other activities, he organized the escape of the Crown Prince's secretary to England, forged identity papers for fugitives after successfully stealing official German seals, directed operations to seize equipment, wagons, and weapons from the Germans, prepared resistance fighters for Gestapo interrogations, and transmitted intelligence to the Allies regarding the locations of German headquarters in Norway during the summer of 1941, among many other missions. In November 1941, Cappelen was arrested by the Gestapo in Oslo following an informer's tip. He was imprisoned at the central prison Møllergata 19 and later at Victoria Terrasse, the notorious Gestapo headquarters. There he was subjected to a prolonged series of brutal interrogations and severe physical torture, primarily at the hands of the infamous German interrogator Siegfried Fehmer. Despite the intense physical and psychological pressure, Cappelen refused to reveal the identities of his fellow resistance leaders. The torture was so severe that it left him with permanent physical injuries, and at one point he attempted to take his own life in his cell rather than risk breaking under interrogation. He was repeatedly beaten and seriously injured during weeks of interrogations, experiences that he recounts in harrowing detail. In 1943, Cappelen was designated a Night and Fog (NN) prisoner, a classification established by Adolf Hitler's directive to make resistance fighters disappear into isolated concentration camps in Germany, completely cut off from the outside world and without leaving any trace that might allow their families to learn whether they were alive or dead. He was deported from Norway and sent first to Natzweiler-Struthof Concentration Camp in Alsace, an especially brutal camp where NN prisoners were subjected to forced labor in the granite quarries under conditions of extreme starvation. He later describes in detail his ordeals at Natzweiler-Struthof and Dachau Concentration Camp, where he came close to death on several occasions. He survived a number of selections in which his name had appeared on lists of prisoners marked for execution, escaping only because fellow inmates warned him in advance, enabling him to avoid the lists. As the Allies advanced in 1944, Cappelen was transferred through a succession of camps - including Olomouc (Olmütz) and Melk, during the evacuation transports and Death Marches, before arriving at Dachau Concentration Camp. The life expectancy of Night and Fog prisoners in these camps was exceedingly low, yet Cappelen survived against all odds. Emaciated and suffering from intestinal diseases and typhoid fever, he was transferred near the end of the war, together with several other resistance prisoners from Dachau, to Buchenwald Concentration Camp, where he remained until its liberation. After the war, he published his memoirs. Immediately after the war, Cappelen returned to Norway and published his memoir, Vi ga oss ikke (We Did Not Surrender), one of the earliest and most significant firsthand accounts to expose to the public the Gestapo's methods of torture and the conditions of life in the German concentration camps. Having survived the entire ordeal of the Night and Fog (NN) program, Cappelen was selected to serve as a principal witness for the prosecution at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg in 1946. In his dramatic and detailed testimony before the Tribunal, he calmly and meticulously described the Gestapo's secret methods of torture, the organizational structure of the Gestapo in Norway, and the conditions of sanitation,