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.
[3] 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.
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.
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.
[5][6] Statspolitiet made a head start on this mission the night before by arresting Jewish patients at hospitals, psychiatric institutions, nursing homes, etc.
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).
The court also accepted the "camouflage" argument, namely that Rød's cover as a collaborating police officer, would have been jeopardized had he resisted the order to arrest and transfer the Jews.
The center also held a symposium on the issue, concluding that Jews were considered outside the collective - before, during, and after the war - to the extent that Norwegians thought the deportation somehow was an external matter.
Rieber-Mohn, published on 14 February 2007 an op-ed piece in Dagbladet where he found that the acquittal was appropriate on a strictly legal basis, because, in order for §86 - giving aid and comfort to the enemy - to apply, the totality of the defendant's actions had to be considered; and in this case the panel felt that Rød's assistance to the resistance under cover of being a police officer for the Nazis outweighed the damage he had done by deporting the Jews.
In late October 2008, Olav Njølstad, Jens Chr Hauge's biographer revealed that Rød had been recruited in the immediate aftermath of the war to register communists and their sympathizers.
The possibility was thereby raised that Hauge or other influential Norwegians influenced the outcome of the trials against Rød, to keep him in the police force, where he could continue his surveillance.