What really happened to Thor?

I’ve taken a little detour from my search for Thor’s banking scholarship in Hamburg (see last post), to re-visit another one of the unsolved mysteries of Thor’s life.

We believe that Thor Einar Jensen, my great-uncle on my mother’s side, died on October 6, 1941, at the age of 37 ½, of unknown causes in Hammerfest, Norway, where he was the bank manager for Norges Bank. I am still searching for official documentation of his cause of death but since I have been looking for this for the last two years, I am not hopeful at this point. In Norway, archival documents will finally be available in 2021, 80 years after Thor’s death, which may hopefully provide information. 

If you have been following my story, in April 2018, I published an article in this paper where I discussed some of questions I had about his body being transported to Trondheim from Hammerfest.

I have a newspaper announcement of his cremation - which supposedly took place on October 20, 1941 in Trondheim (800 nautical miles from Hammerfest). Until the 1940s most ports north of Trondheim could not be reached by road from Oslo, so the sea was the only means of access. This information didn’t seem significant at first, but then I realized his body would need to be transported by sea, as there were no trains this far north and there were roadblocks on major roads (all roads were terrible at this time and used primarily for the military).

 In 1940 the trip between Hammerfest and Trondheim would have taken somewhere around 60 hours by sea. There was indeed a closer crematorium, in Vestvågøy in the Lofoten Islands, but it is possible that this location was too dangerous (only 30 hours by sea).

 So, while Trondheim was the closest city that had an available crematorium, according to a member of the church common council in Trondheim, their database has no record of Thor at the Tilfredshet Crematorium where the cremation would have taken place.  

 The other complication with this story is that the Hurtigruten, the main ship and means of transport up and down the Norwegian coast since 1893, had been grounded since September 1941. On the 13th of September, the ship “SS Richard With”, was sunk by the British submarine HMS Tigris and 99 passengers were killed. The British bombed the ship because many of these ships were used by the Germans to transport troops. Thor’s remains would normally have been on one of the Hurtigruten transport ships heading to Trondheim, since these ships had refrigeration. After the suspension of this line, additional ships had to be used to transport goods in the Hurtigruten’s place - these were called the “replacement Hurtigruten” ships and were in service between 1941-1944. The transportation of his body then seems fraught with so many problems, and the fact that no records have been found (so far), make me question if he even was cremated at all.