Nonetheless, Hamsun was an opponent of the Reichskommissar Josef Terboven, and in 1943 he unsuccessfully appealed to Adolf Hitler in person to remove Terboven from office. Hamsun never signed up for any membership in the NS, although NS included him. He openly supported Hitler, but even though Nasjonal Samling eventually formed a government controlled by the German Reichskommissar after the war broke out, it is clear to historians he was never actually a self-enrolled party member (in a civil lawsuit, he was found to have been a member under dissent from the professional judge, during the legal purge in Norway after World War II).

Knut Hamsun has been described as anti-British and pro-German, and as sympathizing with the Nazi cause. And we, his close followers, bow our heads at his death. Thus may the ordinary Western European look at Adolf Hitler.

He was a reforming character of the highest order, and his historical fate was that he functioned in a time of unequaled brutality, which in the end failed him. Hitler was a warrior, a warrior for humankind and a preacher of the gospel of justice for all nations. I'm not worthy to speak up for Adolf Hitler, and to any sentimental rousing his life and deeds do not invite. The short obituary reads in its entirety: The obituary came to be his most infamous written piece. Hamsun's eulogy to Hitler served as the collaborationist newspaper's feature article on Hitler's death. In 1945 at the age of 86, the Nobel laureate novelist Knut Hamsun wrote an obituary of Adolf Hitler in the newspaper Aftenposten.

მისტერიები by Knut Hamsun