Brent jord: langsiktige politiske konsekvenser av nedbrenning og tvangsevakuering i Nord-Troms og Finnmark

Abstract

In the autumn of 1944, the German occupation forces launched Operation Nordlicht, which featured scorched-earth tactics. The material damage and human costs were enormous. The destruction and the operation itself are well doc-Årgang umented, but few studies have looked at the long-term political effects. In this paper, we use two causal designs, dif-ference-in-differences and the synthetic control method, to analyze the long-term political effects of the destruction and the forced evacuation of the people of Northern Troms and Finnmark. We find that the scorched-earth tactics had lasting effects on political integration in Northern Troms and Finnmark. Both voter turnout and support for the Labour Party declined in the affected municipalities compared to other municipalities in Norway in general and Northern Norway in particular. We observe a short-term effect immediately after the war on voter turnout and a lagged negative effect for the Labour Party starting in the 1970s. This can be explained by the growing discontent with rebuilding efforts after the war and that the effects of the scorched-earth tactics and the trauma experienced by the civil society did not really become part of the broader collective memory of World War II in Norway.