Henrik Lunde

Henrik Lunde is a sociologist who studies the Norwegian right-wing extremist scene and works with the Antiracist Center, which monitors racist and anti-immigration activity. In the book, he serves as a careful interpreter of a landscape where small, shifting groups could cultivate an image of power through names, propaganda, and militant language, while the evidence for organized political violence remained uncertain. His account neither treats extremist talk as harmless nor assumes that every threat became an actionable plan: it follows the distance between the two.

Expertise and Assessment of Threat

Lunde is introduced as one of Norway’s leading experts on right-wing extremist movements. His perspective is especially relevant to the question of whether groups such as the Einsatzgruppe were prepared to move from rhetoric into political terrorism. He acknowledges a movement toward greater violence and points to access to guns and dynamite, as well as an ideology that could make extreme action conceivable. Yet, in his assessment, acquiring weapons and adopting radical language did not by themselves establish that a group had crossed the final threshold into an attack. That step required a break with ordinary life that, he argues, was difficult even when the practical demands seemed modest.

This distinction shapes his treatment of the Einsatzgruppe case. The question is not simply whether its members sounded dangerous, but whether investigators and the court could establish concrete plans. Lunde leaves room for the seriousness of the rhetoric while resisting the conversion of suspicion into proof. The unresolved gap between what members claimed, what they possessed, and what they could be shown to have planned becomes central to his account.

From Earlier Groups to the Einsatzgruppe

Lunde traces the group’s origins to the far-right milieu around Brumunddal. Arne Myrdal, an anti-immigration activist convicted in connection with an intended attack on a refugee center, had politicized gangs gathering around a local gas station. Jan Holthe became involved in that milieu and founded several groups, including Hvit Arisk Motstand, modeled on the Swedish Vitt Ariskt Motstånd, and the Birkebeiner Group. The latter would provide the basis for the later Einsatzgruppe. Holthe also published the magazine Vikingen; Lunde characterizes him as prolific in producing printed material, while noting that much less translated into action.

The Birkebeiner Group eventually disbanded after Holthe left the movement to focus on family life. Its remaining members reorganized as the Einsatzgruppe. The new name invoked the SS killing units known as Einsatzgruppen, giving the organization a deliberately violent historical association; the use of the designation Sonderkommando for sub-units extended that image. Lunde cautions, however, that elaborate military titles should not be mistaken for a correspondingly substantial structure. Norwegian extremist circles, he observes, often generated organizational labels that made them appear larger than they were.

His examples from Brumunddal likewise mark a distinction between intimidation and more serious violence. Activists targeted the town’s mayor with repeated harassment, including ordering merchandise, pizzas, and ambulances in his name, and used other disruptive stunts to signal opposition to municipal policy. Lunde says that this activity did not develop into a sustained campaign of serious physical attacks or major vandalism there. After Holthe withdrew, the activity diminished, though the account describes the movement continuing elsewhere.

A Small Core, Uneven Action

In Stavanger, the Einsatzgruppe’s remaining members were, in Lunde’s description, few but unusually active. They distributed flyers and stickers and sought contacts before some members began committing assaults against immigrants. In one incident, a group ran along a street attacking people they encountered and was apprehended. The episode illustrates why Lunde does not reduce the movement to empty posturing: the record includes violence, even as the scale and organization implied by its public identity require scrutiny.

The court proceedings also expose the difficulty of reconstructing such incidents. One Vietnamese victim said that he had fallen from his bicycle and had not been attacked. Witnesses contradicted him, and the judge rejected his account on the grounds that he might fear reprisal. Lunde’s description preserves both the discrepancy and the court’s reason for resolving it as it did, rather than presenting the case as a simple, uncontested narrative.

He estimates the hard core of the Einsatzgruppe at four or five people, corresponding to those arrested by police, with perhaps fifteen to twenty more peripheral hangers-on whose numbers fluctuated. Some of the latter might join in activities they considered exciting or daring, such as plans to disrupt a meeting of the Israel Mission in Stavanger. Lunde contrasts that peripheral participation with much more consequential steps, such as stabbing arms dealers or stealing assault rifles to shoot political opponents. For him, the distinction helps explain why a loose circle could attract participants without necessarily having the cohesion or readiness to carry out its most extreme ambitions.

When the case came to trial in 1998, the charges against the Einsatzgruppe were dropped because the court could not produce concrete evidence that terrorist strikes had actually been planned. Some of those accused later brought counter-lawsuits against the state for wrongful imprisonment. Lunde leaves the ultimate question open: the group’s material and ideological preparation is part of the record, but whether its members were ready and able to carry out political terrorism cannot be known with certainty.

Music, Networks, and Political Recruitment

Lunde also describes contact between the nationalist fringe and Black Metal as a set of routes rather than a single formal alliance. Black Metal fanzines carried advertisements for outlets selling neo-Nazi material and for political groups; articles could reinforce ideological connections. People moved between the scenes, and some changed political affiliation and appearance with striking speed. Music supplied a means of contact and cohesion that political movements had long used, while Black Metal bands could place slogans such as Norwegian Aryan Black Metal on their records.

Within this exchange, Lunde singles out Varg Vikernes’s development as especially important. Vikernes was expected to contribute a track to a compilation issued by Boot Boy Records, although the contribution never materialized. The episode indicates a possible point of contact between music networks and the political far right, but it does not establish that a completed collaboration followed. Lunde’s broader observation is that extremist propaganda was not necessarily aimed at winning ordinary public approval. Its crude and offensive style could instead be directed toward recruiting people regarded by its producers as capable of fighting. In that account, music and provocation function less as a bid for respectability than as ways to find, bind, and mobilize a narrower constituency.