Erik-Ørn Gjems-Onstad (22 February 1922 – 18 November 2011) was a Norwegian resistance member, officer, lawyer, sports official, politician, author and anti-immigration activist.

His other activities included assisting with weapons smuggling, preparing for the sinking of the German battleship Tirpitz, and plotting to assassinate Nazi collaborator Ivar Grande.

Due to the war in Europe, scouting exercises were treated seriously,[3] and Gjems-Onstad claims the movement played an important role in the early organisation of Norwegian resistance.

One time, he and other youth who sympathised with the resistance disrupted a public meeting held by the fascist party Nasjonal Samling (NS).

Later, due to an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in December, Gjems-Onstad took part in digging mass graves for slaughtered cows in Dikemark and in Nesøya.

[11][12] He was originally scheduled to be deported to Canada via Moscow and China, but the plans were halted due to the German invasion of the Soviet Union.

[15] Sørli and Gjems-Onstad were set to maintain Lark, establish radio connection with London and get intelligence about the German battleship Tirpitz, at the time located in the Trondheimsfjord.

[14][18] From there they travelled with fake identification via Namsos to Trondheim, where they reunited with fellow Lark members Johnny Pevik and Nils Uhlin Hansen, the other group sent from London.

[29] Gjems-Onstad took over as leader of the group from Sørli in October 1943,[30] and it was decided to pull him out of Norway and close the radio station following news that Pevik had been arrested.

[36][37] Eager to bring supplies to Trondheim, he and Sørli soon decided to transport propaganda material, handguns and explosives to the Norwegian border.

After finding a lost resistance member in the mountains, Gjems-Onstad joined a course in Alby near Stockholm where he worked as instructor in "silent killing" for a month.

The mission went into a new phase, as the Norwegian resistance started organising defence against potential destructions during the now largely inevitable German withdrawal.

[50] He was uneasy about being set on the sideline, and headed a mission of four men from Stockholm to Namsvatnet at the end of the month to receive British sabotage supplies.

He also noted that while some of the figures in the Quisling regime had acted out far too harshly, some others had tried to maintain Norway's interests against the occupiers; the alternative of letting the Germans run the country completely unopposed under Josef Terboven could in his mind have ended up far worse.

[61] From 1972 to 1977 he operated a lawyer's firm in Oslo again, and from 1977 he moved his office to Hvalstad and worked as a defender in Asker and Bærum District Court.

He had been present at the founding meeting at Saga kino, and was offered a place in the party's central leadership by Anders Lange after they one day incidentally met outside Gjems-Onstad's lawyer's office.

He proposed in November 1973 to introduce gun and shooting training as an optional course for students in high school, and to separate church and state (with its financial implications).

[76] Gjems-Onstad and Lange nonetheless stood together in their conflict with Carl I. Hagen and Kristofer Almås, who sought to strengthen the party's deliberately loose organisation.

[106] He supported the South African policy since the 1970s of gradually dismantling the apartheid system, which included the granting of independence to tribal homelands.

[111] Gjems-Onstad traveled to Rhodesia in April 1979 as the sole Norwegian observer of the general election,[112] after he had been invited by the Rhodesian Department of Information.

The relationship was initiated after Gjems-Onstad had written a letter of sympathy to Rhodesian Prime Minister Ian Smith some years ahead.

[117] Carl I. Hagen wrote in his book Ærlighet varer lengst in 1984 that he would put his office on the line in order to prevent Gjems-Onstad from making a "comeback" to the Progress Party (ALP's successor), despite his alleged requests.

He supported prospects of a Conservative Party government led by Jan P. Syse, but criticised the Norwegian political system for being a "caricature" of democracy, instead considering it a particracy.

The reaction followed a comment by Conservative Party student politician Knut Albert Solem, in which he "presupposed" that anti-immigration sentiment was based on feelings of "foreign-hate", something which Gjems-Onstad disputed.

[121] Gjems-Onstad expressed his outrage at the Lund Report in 1996 after it was revealed that he had been under surveillance by the Norwegian Police Security Service (POT), considering it defamatory and demanding an apology.

[130] Gjems-Onstad praised anti-immigration Progress Party MPs Vidar Kleppe and Øystein Hedstrøm at their election campaign rally in 1999,[131] and participated in the demonstration against Muslim prayer calling in 2000.

In her will, millionaire Clara Westin declared that 2.5 million kr be given to anti-immigration activists, and that the distribution be decided by a board consisting of four people.

It surfaced that suggestions by board members included the mother of one of the convicts of the murder of Benjamin Hermansen, Ole Nicolai Kvisler.

[141] The left-wing anti-racist organization SOS Rasisme petitioned the Norwegian state to confiscate Gjems-Onstad's war decorations, but to no avail.

[1] He wrote about the psychological warfare of the Norwegian resistance movement in DURHAM: hemmelige operasjoner i Trøndelag mot tysk okkkupasjonsmakt 1943-45, released in 1981.