The initiative for Berg came not from the German occupiers but from Norway's own fascist Nasjonal Samling party in the fall of 1941. SS leader Wilhelm Rediess, the senior German security official in Norway, actually opposed the idea. The camp's main advocates were Minister of Justice Sverre Riisnaes, Toensberg's mayor Bjerck, and Eivind Wallestad, head of the local Hirden paramilitary in Vestfold. Police minister Jonas Lie approved construction plans on June 12, 1942. The camp was designed for 3,000 prisoners but was never fully completed. Its administration fell under the Ministry of Police, making it unique among Norwegian camps -- a purely domestic instrument of oppression, conceived and operated by Norwegians who had chosen the occupier's side.

The first prisoners arrived on October 26, 1942: sixty Jewish men, arrested in a coordinated roundup and force-marched from the train station into a camp that was not yet finished. The barracks had no insulation, no sanitary facilities, no beds, no furniture. Within two days, 350 prisoners were crammed into these conditions under the authority of commandant Leif Lindseth. The guards made the terms clear: anyone who attempted escape would be shot, and ten fellow prisoners along with their families would be executed in retaliation. For the month before their deportation to Germany and then Auschwitz, the Jewish prisoners were forced to work expanding the very camp that held them, laboring seven days a week from 7:30 in the morning until 8:30 at night. They subsisted on a quarter loaf of bread, watery soup, and ersatz coffee.

Of the 280 Jewish prisoners deported from Berg, seven came back alive. The local Red Cross chapter, led by Anton Jervell, attempted to provide relief to prisoners with limited success. After most of the Jewish detainees had been sent to their deaths, political prisoners filled the camp. Conditions, already grim, deteriorated further, and disease spread through the barracks. Berg was considered among the worst camps in occupied Norway, far worse than the better-known Grini. By the winter of 1944-45, the camp held between 500 and 600 prisoners. In total, 847 political prisoners passed through Berg in addition to the 350 Jewish detainees. As of 2015, only one Jewish survivor of Berg was still alive -- Martin Mankowitz, who had avoided deportation because he had a Norwegian wife. After the war, he changed his surname to Meholm.

When liberation came in May 1945, the camp did not close. Instead, its purpose was reversed: Berg became a detention center for Norwegians accused of collaborating with the Quisling regime. The same barracks that had held victims of fascism now held those who had enabled it. The irony was deliberate. Norway's postwar reckoning with collaboration was extensive, and Berg served as a physical embodiment of that process -- a place where the machinery of oppression was turned against its creators. Today, the site near Toensberg carries the weight of a story that Norway has been slow to fully confront: the reality that the Holocaust in Norway was not solely a German project. Norwegian hands built the camp, Norwegian guards ran it, and Norwegian bureaucrats signed the deportation orders.