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By using a wide array of sources, the database includes individuals arrested by actors ranging from the German Gestapo to the Norwegian State Police. The database provides insight into the multifaceted history of wartime imprisonment by documenting sites of incarceration as well as prisoner movements into and out of occupied Norway. The geographical range of prisoner mobilities and imprisonment spanned the globe, from the arctic circle to Africa, from occupied Poland to Japan. The victims include civilian internees of numerous nationalities, political prisoners, seafarers, Soviet POWs, as well as Norwegian Jews, Norwegian Roma, and Romani.
Fanger presents individuals from these victim groups in a relational way through individual profiles that are linked to date of imprisonment, place and events, as well as familial relationships. It is one of the few publicly available databases to gather information about the fate of close to 50% of Norwegian Jewish Holocaust victims, and it does so in an individualising way that provides
a human face to statistics and broader historical events.
Accessible online and freely available, the database is developed and maintained by ARKIVET Peace and Human Rights Centre in Kristiansand and the Falstad Centre in Levanger. The open-access database enables the two peace and human rights centres to combine and share their expertise in developing and maintaining databases connected to the history of the Second World War. The work with the database started in 2017 and was officially launched in May 2020. Since 2023, further work with the database has been financed by the Norwegian state.
Fanger is a continuation and expansion of the work started in the 1980s by former concentration camp survivor and resistance fighter Kristian Ottosen, encouraged by several other camp veteran organisations. Ottosen’s work was later maintained and updated by the National Archives in Norway. ARKIVET and Falstad cooperate with the Norwegian National Archives to digitise relevant source material and make it publicly available. This includes the newly digitised questionnaires filled out by returning survivors of imprisonment in spring 1945 and lists from various police prisons in occupied Norway.
We rely on volunteers who continuously work with these sources enabling us to register new data on hundreds of prisoners. The volunteers are mostly self-motivated individuals, who have the necessary interest and skills to use the IT infrastructure of Fanger to transcribe from historical sources. The volunteers are given basic training in how to use the database. The work is undertaken with the guidance of the Fanger staff, who are responsible for quality assurance and for solving any interpretive issues.
Fanger is dependent on involvement from the public. Since the beginning, we have worked closely with descendants of prisoners. They provide feedback and enquire about their own family members and their profiles, and importantly, notify us of individuals missing from the database. We actively encourage public participation in the database by engaging with audiences on social media platforms such as Facebook, hosting free public seminars, maintaining points of contact at both centres, and responding via email or telephone. In this way, the public contributes to the documentation of the subjective and firsthand experiences of captivity. Archival materials help document imprisonment, while the public help us document the life of prisoners and their experiences by providing access to unknown sources and family stories. This form of participation facilitates a strong public interest and sense of ownership of the work with the database.
Additionally, Fanger has a dedicated reference group consisting of historians, researchers and archivists who provide advice on the further development of the database.
Functionality: Timeline, Sources, Artefacts, and Objects
The work with Fanger is based on systematically collecting, organising, and linking relevant historical sources to individual prisoner profiles. Each personal profile contains biographical information, including date of birth, profession, citizenship, county and municipal residence, civil status, and date of death.
The personal profile is enhanced by
a visual and chronological timeline, creating a contextual basis for understanding where and when the person was imprisoned by the relevant authorities, and what happened to them. The timeline consists of the events understood as central to the person’s imprisonment and presented in three main categories: time and site of arrest, site and duration of imprisonment, and aftermath of their release. As a tool to geographically locate the events, the timeline is shown on a map, pinpointing the sites referenced, displaying the imprisonment in
a geographical space as well as over time.
Each personal profile may provide links to relevant archival sources, literature, photos, video, and audiotapes. Where possible, archival sources are linked by providing URLs to the National Archives of Norway’s digitised material. Photos are included in the profile-layout, either uploaded to Fanger itself, or by links to specific sites of imprisonment. The same goes for videos and audiotapes with links to external platforms such as YouTube, Vimeo, and Digitalarkivet.
anger also links to objects in the national Norwegian digital museum database (DigitaltMuseum), a project where all Norwegian museums collaborate to make their collections available to the public. These mostly consist of historical photographs and photos of museum objects. Some prisoner profiles in Fanger are linked to historical objects, such as personal items acquired or made during imprisonment. This functionality ties the person to a material dimension of imprisonment, placing the historical sources in relation to museum and archaeological perspectives.
Fanger is an Azure PostgreSQL database, meaning a structured database with
a flexibility of handling data such as adding geographical coordinates and free text. The database has an administrative and public interface. While most of what is recorded is published on the public-facing side, it is also possible to register non-published data in the administrative interface.
Beyond the personal profiles, Fanger offers additional functions. The prison sites module lists over one thousand different sites of imprisonment in and outside occupied Norway. These are categorised according to the characteristics of the site, such as prisons, district prisons, concentration camps, and labour camps, as well as hospitals and ships used for prisoner transport or confinement, to name a few. Fanger thus takes a broad approach
By using a wide array of sources, the database includes individuals arrested by actors ranging from the German Gestapo to the Norwegian State Police. The database provides insight into the multifaceted history of wartime imprisonment by documenting sites of incarceration as well as prisoner movements into and out of occupied Norway. The geographical range of prisoner mobilities and imprisonment spanned the globe, from the arctic circle to Africa, from occupied Poland to Japan. The victims include civilian internees of numerous nationalities, political prisoners, seafarers, Soviet POWs, as well as Norwegian Jews, Norwegian Roma, and Romani.
Fanger presents individuals from these victim groups in a relational way through individual profiles that are linked to date of imprisonment, place and events, as well as familial relationships. It is one of the few publicly available databases to gather information about the fate of close to 50% of Norwegian Jewish Holocaust victims, and it does so in an individualising way that provides
a human face to statistics and broader historical events.
Accessible online and freely available, the database is developed and maintained by ARKIVET Peace and Human Rights Centre in Kristiansand and the Falstad Centre in Levanger. The open-access database enables the two peace and human rights centres to combine and share their expertise in developing and maintaining databases connected to the history of the Second World War. The work with the database started in 2017 and was officially launched in May 2020. Since 2023, further work with the database has been financed by the Norwegian state.
Fanger is a continuation and expansion of the work started in the 1980s by former concentration camp survivor and resistance fighter Kristian Ottosen, encouraged by several other camp veteran organisations. Ottosen’s work was later maintained and updated by the National Archives in Norway. ARKIVET and Falstad cooperate with the Norwegian National Archives to digitise relevant source material and make it publicly available. This includes the newly digitised questionnaires filled out by returning survivors of imprisonment in spring 1945 and lists from various police prisons in occupied Norway.
We rely on volunteers who continuously work with these sources enabling us to register new data on hundreds of prisoners. The volunteers are mostly self-motivated individuals, who have the necessary interest and skills to use the IT infrastructure of Fanger to transcribe from historical sources. The volunteers are given basic training in how to use the database. The work is undertaken with the guidance of the Fanger staff, who are responsible for quality assurance and for solving any interpretive issues.
Fanger is dependent on involvement from the public. Since the beginning, we have worked closely with descendants of prisoners. They provide feedback and enquire about their own family members and their profiles, and importantly, notify us of individuals missing from the database. We actively encourage public participation in the database by engaging with audiences on social media platforms such as Facebook, hosting free public seminars, maintaining points of contact at both centres, and responding via email or telephone. In this way, the public contributes to the documentation of the subjective and firsthand experiences of captivity. Archival materials help document imprisonment, while the public help us document the life of prisoners and their experiences by providing access to unknown sources and family stories. This form of participation facilitates a strong public interest and sense of ownership of the work with the database.
Additionally, Fanger has a dedicated reference group consisting of historians, researchers and archivists who provide advice on the further development of the database.
Functionality: Timeline, Sources, Artefacts, and Objects
The work with Fanger is based on systematically collecting, organising, and linking relevant historical sources to individual prisoner profiles. Each personal profile contains biographical information, including date of birth, profession, citizenship, county and municipal residence, civil status, and date of death.
The personal profile is enhanced by
a visual and chronological timeline, creating a contextual basis for understanding where and when the person was imprisoned by the relevant authorities, and what happened to them. The timeline consists of the events understood as central to the person’s imprisonment and presented in three main categories: time and site of arrest, site and duration of imprisonment, and aftermath of their release. As a tool to geographically locate the events, the timeline is shown on a map, pinpointing the sites referenced, displaying the imprisonment in
a geographical space as well as over time.
Each personal profile may provide links to relevant archival sources, literature, photos, video, and audiotapes. Where possible, archival sources are linked by providing URLs to the National Archives of Norway’s digitised material. Photos are included in the profile-layout, either uploaded to Fanger itself, or by links to specific sites of imprisonment. The same goes for videos and audiotapes with links to external platforms such as YouTube, Vimeo, and Digitalarkivet.
anger also links to objects in the national Norwegian digital museum database (DigitaltMuseum), a project where all Norwegian museums collaborate to make their collections available to the public. These mostly consist of historical photographs and photos of museum objects. Some prisoner profiles in Fanger are linked to historical objects, such as personal items acquired or made during imprisonment. This functionality ties the person to a material dimension of imprisonment, placing the historical sources in relation to museum and archaeological perspectives.
Fanger is an Azure PostgreSQL database, meaning a structured database with
a flexibility of handling data such as adding geographical coordinates and free text. The database has an administrative and public interface. While most of what is recorded is published on the public-facing side, it is also possible to register non-published data in the administrative interface.
Beyond the personal profiles, Fanger offers additional functions. The prison sites module lists over one thousand different sites of imprisonment in and outside occupied Norway. These are categorised according to the characteristics of the site, such as prisons, district prisons, concentration camps, and labour camps, as well as hospitals and ships used for prisoner transport or confinement, to name a few. Fanger thus takes a broad approach