Varg Vikernes and Tom Eiternes’s relationship

Varg Vikernes and Tom Eiternes’s relationship joined two currents that had once appeared connected mainly by shared slogans and symbols: the Norwegian Black Metal scene and organized revolutionary far-right politics. They met in prison, where Eiternes reportedly adopted Odinism after conversations with Vikernes, broke with the Ku Klux Klan, and formed an alliance with him. By 1997, that personal and ideological connection had acquired practical stakes: an extremist group associated with Eiternes planned, among other actions, to free Vikernes from jail by force.

From Prison Contact to Alliance

Eiternes met Vikernes while serving a sentence at Ila prison for a gun-store robbery in Stavanger. Eiternes and four other members of the group had robbed the store; the attempt ended with the clerk nearly fatally stabbed. The men fled toward the Swedish border in a stolen car, only to discover a customs post missing from their map. They drove through it and were stopped by armed police farther inside Sweden, then extradited to Norway. This earlier episode placed Eiternes in an already violent political milieu before his association with Vikernes took shape.

The prison meeting marked a change in Eiternes’s affiliations. He made public that he had converted to Odinism, apparently after talking with Vikernes, and ended his contact with the Ku Klux Klan. He then forged an alliance with Vikernes. The account does not establish the precise content of their conversations or reduce the conversion to a single cause; it presents Vikernes’s influence as a likely factor and the new alliance as a consequential break from Eiternes’s former political connection.

Shared Beliefs and Different Scenes

Vikernes was already a prominent figure in Norwegian Black Metal. His record label, Deathlike Silence Productions, and the gathering of musicians and acquaintances around the Helvete record shop helped make him a focal point of a scene that had no formal membership structure. By mid-1991, numerous bands were in contact with him, while the shop’s atmosphere and the desire for acceptance gave senior figures influence even without official organization. The book’s account of the later relationship with Eiternes thus places their connection against a background of informal networks: personal access and shared convictions could matter more than membership cards or a recognized hierarchy.

The book distinguishes this earlier scene-based overlap from the political convergence visible in 1997. Until then, the connection between people such as Vikernes and extremist political movements had seemed largely a matter of similar slogans and imagery. The account presents the Einsatzgruppe affair as a turning point: Vikernes’s influence now appeared to provide motivation to people engaged in revolutionary right-wing politics, rather than merely furnishing a provocative aesthetic.

Eiternes’s stated politics were explicitly revolutionary and National Socialist. He advocated a one-party system and justified political violence as necessary self-defense against the Norwegian regime. His public account blamed politicians for encouraging race-mixing and invoked conspiracy claims about international Jewish control. The book describes his outlook as extreme and reports that he admired David Lane, an American terrorist serving a life sentence for conspiracy to commit murder and robbery. These details locate Eiternes’s activism in a distinct political tradition; they do not make the two men’s relationship equivalent to a formal organization led by Vikernes.

The Escape Plan and Its Resources

Eiternes was able to run away while on leave from prison, and it was during this period of freedom that the Einsatzgruppe initiated its plans. Police said the group intended direct action against prominent Norwegian politicians, bishops, and other public figures, and that its plans included breaking Vikernes out of jail by force. The reported preparations went beyond rhetoric: police found bulletproof vests, steel helmets, cartridge belts, ski masks, a list of twelve firearms, and a map marking a mountain hiding place. They initially confiscated sawed-off shotguns and dynamite with blasting caps; a later raid uncovered additional firearms, including a military-style 7.62 mm rifle, a pistol, a rifle, and an old Russian AK-47, as well as parts of a submachine gun.

The police also found a 100,000-kroner war chest, close to $20,000, supplied by Vikernes’s mother, Lene Bore. She was arrested and charged with financing an illegal group. Bore confessed to providing the money but said she did not know the men were right-wing extremists. She said her concern was her son’s treatment in prison, including what she described as violence by fellow inmates; the prison director dismissed that allegation as unfounded. Vikernes’s jaw had, however, been broken in an altercation with another inmate in late 1996. Police speculated that the funds might have come from his record royalties, while Bore said they came from the sale of a house. The evidence therefore establishes a financial connection through his mother, but leaves the money’s original source disputed.

Public Signals and Contested Evidence

In a TV2 interview, Vikernes rejected the police’s involvement of his mother as absurd and described himself and his would-be rescuers as nationalists and Odinists. Asked about the military equipment, he responded dismissively. His appearance sharpened the public association: he had a shaved head, wore a black bomber jacket associated with neo-Nazi skinheads, and displayed a belt buckle bearing SS insignia. The episode made visible a political identification that the book says had been obscured when similar signals could be dismissed as attempts to offend.

The connection had also appeared in the design of a Burzum T-shirt produced in early 1997 to Vikernes’s specifications and sold by his English record label, Misanthropy. It paired the Burzum logo with an SS death’s-head and carried a slogan supporting a local Einsatzkommando. The shirt attracted criticism and sold briskly, but many observers took it as provocation rather than evidence that Vikernes’s support for the group was serious. In retrospect, the shirt linked a commercial object and an extremist political signal to the later allegations about the rescue plan.

The case’s evidence was not presented as uncontested. Police treated lists of private addresses belonging to bishops and government figures, including Oslo police commissioner Ingelin Killengreen, as death lists; the defense said they were for sending propaganda. Investigators also found a magazine article showing prominent figures’ homes and sketches of a military camp near Kongsberg with its arms depot marked. The group faced charges under Section 104 of the Norwegian Penal Code, which concerned conspiracy to disturb social order or gain influence in public affairs through sabotage, force, or other illegal means. The prosecution’s account and the defense’s explanation differed over the intended use of some materials, even as the weapons discoveries gave the case a concrete paramilitary dimension.

Significance of the Relationship

The relationship matters less as a documented account of private friendship than as a channel through which ideological influence, prison contact, and political action intersected. Eiternes’s conversion to Odinism and alliance with Vikernes connected a former Ku Klux Klan organizer to a Black Metal figure whose public influence had previously been associated chiefly with music, anti-Christian provocation, and the church-burning milieu. Their association did not itself constitute proof that Vikernes directed the Einsatzgruppe; rather, the reported plan to free him made him its intended beneficiary and exposed the practical consequences of the alliance.

That shift also clarifies the limits of the earlier image of the Black Circle around Helvete. The shop-based scene had been described as informal, with no official membership or meetings, yet its senior figures, meeting places, music, and shared outlook could create pathways into other subcultures. The later relationship between Vikernes and Eiternes shows how a loose social world could touch a more organized political project without erasing the difference between them. What had seemed like converging symbols became a reported plan involving money, weapons, targets, and an attempted prison breakout.