Einar Gerhardsen
Einar Gerhardsen was prime minister of Norway for seventeen years, from 1945 to 1951 and from 1955 to 1965, the road worker's son who came out of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in 1945 to lead the Labour party, won it an absolute majority in the first free election and held one until 1961, and built in those years the Norwegian welfare state, the planned economy of the reconstruction, the entry into NATO in 1949 against his own party's neutralists, and the consensus the country has lived in since. The Norwegians called him the father of the nation, and he lived in a flat in a housing cooperative in Oslo until he died. He was born in Asker in 1897, left school at fourteen for the roads department, and rose through the Oslo Labour movement, in its revolutionary years a member of the party that joined the Comintern. In its reformist years he was the party secretary who kept it together. He was deputy mayor of Oslo when the Germans came in 1940, mayor for a few months, and was arrested in 1941 and sent to Sachsenhausen, where he was the Norwegians' leader in the camp, and then to Grini in Norway. He was brought home and made prime minister of the all-party government of June 1945, and in October Labour won seventy-six of the hundred and fifty seats. The programme was reconstruction by plan: rationing until 1952, price controls, the state's ownership of the hydroelectric power and the new industries, housing cooperatives, the national insurance that made the welfare state universal, and full employment as the measure of everything. The Communist party had eleven seats in 1945, and his speech at Krakeroy in February 1948, weeks after the Prague coup, that the greatest threat to Norway's freedom was the Communists, turned the country against them and took Norway into the Atlantic alliance in April 1949 with its own conditions, no foreign bases and no nuclear weapons in peacetime. He handed the office to Oscar Torp in 1951, tired, and took it back in 1955. The Kings Bay mining accident on Svalbard in 1962, which killed twenty-one men, brought his government down for a month in 1963 in the first change of power since the war, and the election of 1965 ended Labour's twenty years. He retired from the Storting in 1969, wrote four volumes of memoirs, and died in 1987.
- Lived: 1897 CE – 1987 CE
- Nationality: Norwegian
- Roles: prime minister, politician
