Per Imerslund: a Norwegian Volunteer for Franco

Per Imerslund (1912–1943) was a writer, adventurer, journalist, National Socialist activist, and one of the few Norwegian combatants on the Francoist side in the Spanish Civil War. (In the photograph, the blond Imerslund can be seen at the upper far left, together with some of his Falangist comrades in Seville.) He later took part in the Finnish Winter War against the Soviet Union and on the Eastern Front under the command of the Waffen-SS. He died in December 1943, at the age of 31, as a result of war wounds sustained in Finland.

In late autumn 1936, deeply disappointed by the internal maneuvers of Vidkun Quisling’s Nasjonal Samling following its poor results in the recent elections, Imerslund decided to travel to Spain. Under the pretext of serving as a correspondent for the pro-fascist newspaper Tidens Tegn, he set out for Spain at the end of December via Portugal, where he was mistaken for an anarchist spy and sent to a Lisbon prison. Once the confusion had been cleared up and his sympathies for the Francoist cause made known, he was released and continued on to Spain by train, arriving in Seville in January 1937.       He did not find journalism sufficiently appealing, and in mid-April he enlisted as a volunteer on the Falangist front line thanks to his knowledge of Spanish acquired in Mexico. Imerslund felt closer the JONS (Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional-Sindicalista) of Ramiro Ledesma Ramos than with the Falange Española of José Antonio Primo de Rivera. Imerslund and his Falangist comrades set out on foot for Málaga in mid-February, a week after the city had fallen to Francoist troops. In mid-April, together with other Falangist fighters, he was sent to the Córdoba front, where he would receive his own baptism of fire during the five or six weeks he spent there.

With the assistance of the Norwegian consulate in Seville, Imerslund left Spain in the second half of May 1937 after suffering a bout of malaria that left him very weakened and without any desire to continue fighting in the Civil War, with which he had already become ideologically disillusioned. He finally arrived in Oslo in June.

Almost a year after his return to Norway, on 26 March 1938, Imerslund married Liv Asserson in a religious ceremony inspired by Norse paganism. They then spent their honeymoon in Spain. As a result of this trip, the couple wrote a series of newspaper articles expressing their disappointment at seeing how Spain had irredeemably fallen under the reactionary power of the Catholic Church and, according to Liv, into the most outdated form of machismo. Following a brief return to Oslo, they continued their honeymoon in Mexico. The couple had two children, one of whom was born after Per’s death.

Imerslund’s articles and essays offered Norwegians an ideological and literary perspective on the Spanish Civil War. In this regard, his particular interest lies in a critical stance, rooted in his ideological disappointment at the rise of Francoist National Catholicism at the expense of a more national-syndicalist and revolutionary agenda.

MGC