To build Atlantic Wall defenses and infrastructure in occupied Norway, the Germans transported approximately 5,000 Yugoslav political prisoners and prisoners of war to camps stretching from Bergen to Hammerfest. There were 31 such camps in total. Many of the prisoners were Serbs from the Independent State of Croatia, the Axis puppet regime. They had not been captured in combat. They were selected on the basis of ethnicity. Between 1941 and 1945, as many as 150,000 foreign prisoners of war, political prisoners, and forced laborers were held in Norway. More than 13,700 died. The majority performed heavy labor on construction projects including the Nordland Line railway and Highway 50, the road that is today's E6.

The guard staff at Beisfjord consisted of roughly 150 men from the Ordnungspolizei, controlled by the SS, and about 50 Norwegian volunteers. SS-Kommandant Hermann Dolp oversaw the camp. Historian Knut Flovik Thoresen, quoted by the newspaper Dagbladet in 2013, described the treatment of Yugoslav prisoners in northern Norway as among the most brutal acts he had ever encountered in his research. Norwegian camp guards from the Hirden, the paramilitary wing of the Norwegian fascist movement, were issued bayonets on their first deployment. They used them so freely that, in Thoresen's words, "even the Germans had enough of it." The second group of guards was not issued bayonets, for fear they would become equally bloodthirsty. The total number of people victimized by Dolp and his subordinates may have reached 3,000 or even 4,000.

On 12 July, German and Norwegian physicians inspected the camp. The SS officers suspected typhoid fever. A Norwegian doctor picked out 85 prisoners who he said were infected, selecting them from a distance based on how frail they appeared, without taking blood or stool samples. These prisoners were moved to an infirmary. Six days later, on 18 July, the massacre took place. The killing had been ordered by Terboven himself. The sick and weakened prisoners held in the barracks, surrounded by barbed wire, were among the victims. In all, 288 people were killed. After the massacre, surviving prisoners were marched to Bjornfjell, where they were quarantined, and a new camp at Ovre Jernvann was established.

After the war, accountability was scarce. Thoresen noted in 2013 that had Norwegian prisoners been subjected to the same atrocities, many of the perpetrators would have received death sentences. Instead, most received punishments more lenient than those given to women who had served as nurses on the front lines. Everyone in the Norwegian Public Roads Administration denied involvement with the Yugoslav prisoners. The Beisfjord massacre remained largely absent from Norwegian public memory for decades. In 2013, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre's Efraim Zuroff sought a meeting with the Norwegian Department of Justice, but a miscommunication within the department meant he was never notified. The silence around Beisfjord was not a conspiracy of concealment so much as a collective failure to reckon with the fact that Norwegian citizens, not just German occupiers, participated in the atrocities.

The 1949 memorial was an early acknowledgment of what had happened, erected jointly by the people of Norway and Yugoslavia while the events were still raw. In 2011, a new monument was unveiled. The village of Beisfjord itself is quiet, a small settlement at the head of a fjord near Narvik, unremarkable in every way except for what happened there. The camp buildings are gone. What remains is the stone, the inscriptions, and the gradually expanding historical record as researchers like Thoresen and investigative journalists have pushed the story back into public awareness. For the descendants of the prisoners who died there, many of them Serbs whose only crime was their ethnicity, the site is a place where their ancestors' humanity was taken from them. The memorial insists on giving some of it back.