Knut Rød (30 June 1900 – 19 May 1986) was a Norwegian police prosecutor responsible for the arrest, detention and transfer of Jewish men, women and children to SS troops at Oslo harbor. For these and other actions related to the Holocaust in Norway, Rød was acquitted in two highly publicized trials during the legal purge in Norway after World War II that remain controversial to this day. The trials and their outcome have since been dubbed the "strangest trial in post-war Norway."
Background
Rød was born in Kristiania (today's Oslo) in 1900 and earned his law degree in 1927. He was immediately hired into the police department in Aker, serving under Johan Søhr, who was noted in his time for opposing the admission of Jewish refugees into Norway during World War I and for vilifying shechita (slaughter of animals in accordance with Jewish law). He was promoted to detective ("kriminalbetjent") in 1929 and to lieutenant ("førstebetjent") in 1937. When the police departments in Aker and Oslo were merged in 1940, he was transferred to the surveillance desk. He became a member of Nasjonal Samling (NS) on 4 January 1941, well after the German invasion of Norway.
Rød joined the newly established Statspolitiet ("state police") and became the administrative head of the Oslo section. For reasons and under circumstances that remain unclear, Rød resigned from the state police in September 1943 and his membership in NS on 30 September 1943.
Career in Statspolitiet
In the fall of 1941, Jonas Lie, the commissioned police minister in the Terboven administration, established Statspolitiet, consisting of several merged surveillance sections throughout the country. The force was initially 150 men strong and was under the command of Karl Marthinsen. Marthinsen was under the direct command of German authorities independently of Lie. All but four of the police officers in this group were members of NS. For the purposes of the operations related to the Holocaust, Rød was Martinsen's executive officer who acted on his authority in crucial moments.
Identifying, arrests, detention, and deportation of Jews
The identifying, arrest, detention, deportation, and ultimate murder of Jews in Norway was effected through several steps. As a member of Statspolitiet, Rød participated in the arrest of Jewish men in and around Oslo on 26 October 1942, and in the confiscation of Jewish property at the same time. However, he was given field command authority for the police action on 25 and 26 November 1942, in which 532 Jews were forced on board the cargo ship SS Donau and sent via the port of Stettin (now Szczecin, Poland) to Auschwitz, where all but eight perished.
The ground operations were complex and had to be planned and executed on one day's notice. Under Martinsen and Rød's command, his section made up lists of Jewish women, children, patients, and elderly who were not yet arrested and detained. He organized 100 squads, each consisting of a police officer, a squad leader and two assistants, typically Hird members, SS soldiers, or other police officers. A taxi was requisitioned for each squad. Each squad was given a list of four addresses. The plan was that each member would arrest and detain a family, and the taxi would take each family to the pier in turn. At 4:30 am, 100 taxis (half of the entire fleet of taxis in Oslo and Aker) were parked outside the police station in the Majorstuen section of Oslo.
Statspolitiet made a head start on this mission the night before by arresting Jewish patients at hospitals, psychiatric institutions, nursing homes, etc. Although doctors often protested, seriously ill patients were transported to the pier and put on board the ship.
Trials
After the liberation of Norway, Rød was arrested on 14 May 1945 and imprisoned at Ilebu prison, which was known as Grini concentration camp during the Nazi regime. He was charged with several violations, among them §86, providing comfort to the enemy; and the treason ordinances (landssvikandordningen) passed during the war and §223 of the penal code (against kidnapping, though this was not included in the retrial). Although few of the facts were in dispute, he was acquitted on 4 February 1946, against the objection of the professional judge, Johan Munthe Cappelen. Three separate arguments were made in Rød's defence: