William Hakvaag, born in 1948, spent decades gathering military artifacts before opening the museum on 15 June 1996. His collecting was not academic in nature -- Hakvaag was a guitarist and self-taught historian driven by a personal conviction that the war's impact on the Lofoten Islands and northern Norway deserved permanent documentation. The result is a collection that mixes the expected with the extraordinary. Military uniforms from German, Norwegian, and British forces fill the cases, along with weapons, field equipment, and personal effects. The museum now holds Norway's largest exhibition of World War II uniforms, the majority from Nazi-era Germany. In 2010, the previously private museum was incorporated into Museum Nord, a regional consortium, though its character remains unmistakably Hakvaag's creation.

What distinguishes this museum from larger institutions is how many artifacts are tied to specific, identifiable people. A peaked cap that belonged to Siegfried Wolfgang Fehmer, one of the most feared Gestapo interrogators in occupied Oslo, sits near a jacket that belonged to his colleague Ernst Weiner. Caps belonging to General Carl Gustav Fleischer, who led Norwegian forces in the 1940 Narvik campaign, and Colonel Birger Eriksen, who ordered the guns of Oscarborg Fortress to fire on the German cruiser Blucher, anchor the Norwegian side of the collection. A letter file from Reichskommissar Josef Terboven, who governed occupied Norway, shares space with lanterns and a compass from the boats of Leif Larsen, the most decorated Allied naval officer of the war, who ran clandestine missions between Norway and Britain.

Beyond the high-profile artifacts, the museum collects the everyday objects of occupation -- the things that reveal what life actually felt like under German control. Cigarette packages, condoms, ration materials, and Christmas decorations adorned with swastikas fill the cases. A lamp salvaged from the German battleship Tirpitz, which was hidden in Norwegian fjords for years before being sunk by RAF Lancaster bombers in 1944, sits among the displays. There is even a case believed to have belonged to Eva Braun. These objects are not presented for shock value but as evidence of how thoroughly the war penetrated daily life, even in places as remote as the Lofoten Islands. The occupation lasted five years in northern Norway, and Hakvaag's collection testifies to the weight of those years through accumulation rather than spectacle.

The museum's particular focus on the Lofoten region gives it context that national-level institutions cannot match. The Lofoten Islands were the target of multiple British commando raids during the war -- Operations Claymore, Anklet, and others -- and the German response included a steadily growing garrison. For the civilian population, the occupation meant curfews, censorship, requisitioned boats, and the constant anxiety of living in a militarized zone. Fishermen who had worked these waters for generations found their movements restricted and their catches regulated by an occupying power. Hakvaag's collection documents both sides of this experience: the machinery of occupation and the resilience of the occupied. The non-partisan framing is deliberate. German, Norwegian, and Allied artifacts are presented side by side, and the museum lets the objects speak for the complexity of the period.