Underground Church

When night came, the tall, blue-eyed Norseman put on spectacles and a false black beard. Quietly he slipped past the guards of his isolated cottage "prison" and made his way to Oslo, twelve miles away. There, night after night, within a stone's throw of Gestapo headquarters, he presided at secret meetings of the Norwegian State Lutheran Church.

Last week the church revealed that the man in the disguise was none other than its primate, Bishop Eivind Berggrav. During most of the years when Himmler's quislings congratulated themselves that Bishop Berggrav was safely behind bars, he was actually leading one of occupied Europe's most successful undergrounds.

Bishop Berggrav first used his famed persuasive powers on his own guards --and converted them. This enabled him to move outside his cottage. He then ran the underground church through a coded information system which cobwebbed Norway. (He corresponded regularly with Bishop Gustaf Aulen in Sweden, signing his letters "Dr. Kattman" and discussing religious subjects in medical language.) Exactly three years from the day he was interned, Bishop Berggrav escaped with the aid of his chief guard (TIME, May 7). He boarded a train for Oslo, got off a few stations before the city, was met by Swedish Consul Leif Oehrvall. The consul drove Berggrav (this time hiding behind a false mustache) directly through Oslo to a hiding place. Next day the church underground sent him a detailed report of the profane rage which Jonas Lie (Quisling's police chief) was suffering over Berggrav's escape.

Because of its determined, efficient underground work, the church was able to pop up on V-E day with the reins all ready in its hands. It had plans ready for the reconstruction of destroyed or damaged churches, had raised 1,000,000 kroner ($200,000) to start a new church newspaper (the first issue will be published June 1) and had kept close tabs on clergymen who had betrayed the church in its hour of need. Bishop Berggrav's first official act last week was to suspend 50 quisling pastors.

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