Spotlight: The Falstad Centre

By Dr. Ben Pelling

Our Spotlight series takes a deeper dive into the digital offerings of worldwide memorial sites. This week, Dr. Ben Pelling looks at how the Falstad Museum, Memorial and Human Rights Centre has used technology to enhance its offerings and educational programme and how it overcame some of the challenges this has presented. 

Within the top 5 results following a Google search of “Falstad Prison Camp” is a page from the Visit Norway website announcing a guest house for up to 55 guests and the description:

“Experience serenity in a rural setting at the Falstad Center, a national memorial situated within the main building of the former German prison camp, SS Strafgefangenlager Falstad, dating back to World War II.”

Guests can access the museum’s exhibitions, libraries and more.

While perhaps surprising, this is actually just one in a long line of reinventions and changes in the history of the former prison camp.

Falstad: School, Prison, Museum & Memorial

The remote site was first established in 1895 as a Reformative School for Troubled Boys, part of a movement that at the time was seen as a progressive.

But in October 1941, the occupying German forces seized the property and turned it into a prison camp. The camp was fenced off with barbed wire, extended in 1943 and a Commander’s house added – all built with its prisoners’ forced labour.

Over 4,200 prisoners from more than 15 nations were incarcerated at Falstad during World War II, with the majority Norwegian, 50 of which were Jewish men.

Under the command of the German SS and run by Obersturmbahnführer Gerhard Flesch throughout the occupation, prisoners were subjected to an extremely violent regime, forced to work at high speed as slave labourers.

The site of the former prison camp sits alongside Falstad Forest. From 1942–43, more than 200 prisoners were executed and buried here, including 43 Norwegians, 74 Yugoslavs and more than 100 Soviet citizens. Today the Falstad Forest is a national memorial site, commemorating the prisoners who were executed there.

At the end of the war in 1945, Falstad was turned into a detention and forced labour camp for people convicted of treason during the occupying years, including former members of the Norwegian Nazi party. The camp was dissolved in March 1949 and it was once again run as a school from 1951 right up until the 1990s.

Set up in 2000, today, The Falstad Museum, Memorial and Human Rights Centre  exists as “a national centre for the education and documentation of the history of imprisonment during the Second World War, humanitarian international law and human rights.”

The centre is a museum with the former camp area turned into a memorial landscape and living place of memory. This latest development of the Falstad centre was, however, not without debate and opposition: the main objection was that, by including all of the site’s history, this permanent exhibition could risk portraying Nazis as commonplace and ordinary.

The team have developed a number of digital resources aimed at descendants, tourists, researchers and in-person educational offerings, three of which have been recorded in the Landecker Digital Memory Lab’s Digital Memory Database, a global, perpetual resource launching January 2026.

Fanger.no is an online database of people in Nazi captivity during WW2, both Norwegians (in and outside Norway) and foreign prisoners in Norway. Users can search for information about 48,000 persons across 1000 prisons and camps. It is a collaborative project between ARKIVET Peace and Human Rights Centre and The Falstad Centre.

Krigsgraver.no offers an overview of foreign war graves in Norway. This database includes both information about the grave sites and the persons who are buried there. From the individual entries there are also references to sources, for example captivity cards and reports from local authorities.

Falstad Digital Reconstruction app This app, to be used on site, takes advantage of augmented and virtual reality (AR and VR) technologies and the portability of an iPad. Visitors can explore the present-day landscape at Falstad while viewing a virtual reconstruction of the camp as it appeared at the time of the Liberation in May 1945. Users can also access witness testimonies and stories from 1941–1945.

For this blog, I’m going to focus on the Falstad Digital Reconstruction.

The Falstad Digital Reconstruction app

In 2022, the Director of the Landecker Digital Memory Lab, Prof. Victoria Grace Richardson-Walden interviewed several members of the Falstad team about these projects. Here are some of their insights about the development of the Falstad Digital Reconstruction app.

The project to build the app at Falstad was led by the Centre’s former director, Christian Wee, as part of their wider IC-Access project  ‘Accessing Campscapes: Inclusive Strategies for European Conflict Pasts’ in collaboration with the NTNU University in Trondheim and Professor Marek Jasinski.

Wee recalls that one of the driving factors behind the desire to create some form of site guide app came from the understanding that it was “very difficult for visitors of all age[s]… to really understand the camp structure [and] that this beautiful landscape, once upon a time, was a prison camp”.

In 2017, the team at Falstad got to see the Bergen-Belsen app, Spaces of Memory and saw how a visual history tool could be useful for their own site. From this theyrealised that “there was a potential, if more funding was available, to develop a… digital reconstruction [with] the potential to explore how placing content at specific relevant sites in the landscape would add the… reconstruction.”

Working with SPECS Lab as their digital partner, they developed the current app, which launched in the Summer of 2019. (Watch a video of SPECS Lab’s Dr Paul Verschure give his keynote talk at this year’s Connective Holocaust Commemoration Expo 2025).

“3D models of the previous buildings are supported by location-specific historical information including testimonies, drawings, photographs and diaries of former inmates and witnesses”.

Arne Langas, a curator at Falstad was a key member of the development team and had previously made a similar 3D model of the site, based on blueprints, using the architectural modelling software SketchUp. Some of his work was integrated into the final digital reconstruction project.

Although at the core of the Falstad Digital Reconstruction app are the 3D models of the previous buildings, they are supported by much location-specific historical information. This includes a wide range of sources that were available at the museum, including testimonies, drawings, photographs and diaries of former inmates and witnesses.

As Langas points out in his interview with the Landecker Digital Memory Lab, this ensures that the app is not just a site guide but tells stories with these sources that are based on different buildings and areas that the visitor encounters. It therefore presents a range of stories and histories of the locations that are not necessarily set at one particular point in time or from a single perspective.

At its launch, the app was initially conceived as a guide for visitors and tourists, with content available in Norwegian, English, Russian and German. This proved popular as, at that time, their physical exhibitions were only available in Norwegian. However, it soon became clear that it would prove a very useful tool to use with students as part of the Centre’s education programme.

Christoffer Nilsen, who runs the education programme at Falstad says that he now uses the Digital Reconstruction app for school trips and regular visitors. Although it can’t replace interacting with and expert educator knowledgeable about the site, having it as an additional, supporting option is very helpful – particularly when dealing with large school groups. Its interactive nature, allowing clicking for more information on something that the user finds interesting is particularly good for education purposes.

In addition, including testimonies from former prisoners brings the history and people closer for the students, especially when they are standing in the place being discussed.

“The app makes the user think about their relationship to the past”.

This highlights a wider advantage of VR/AR apps in general, beyond the immediate visual aspects – there is clear value in viewing and hearing testimony when in situ, not just sitting at home or in a classroom. As Ingeborg Hjorth, Falstad’s head of research, points out: it makes the user think about their relationship to the past.

The team at Falstad do however admit that there are sometimes difficulties with apps of this nature, particularly in such a remote location. GPS connections can be lost when walking too far away from the main camp (and into the forest for example).

This can be problematic as the app relies on knowing its exact location to show the VR/AR view of the buildings in the distance and direction that the iPad is being pointed.

To help alleviate this problem, calibration points have been installed around the site to enable re-setting of the iPad’s location. This can however interrupt the user experience somewhat. Beyond this, weather conditions and the iPad’s battery life can also be temperamental and affect how useful a tool it is or what the students take away from the experience

Although these issues are difficult for the Centre to resolve themselves, they do have ideas for potential future developments for the Digital Reconstruction app.

There is a desire to update the app’s content and materials and the team has already identified areas where more information could be valuable. For example, it currently contains little about foreign prisoners of war, the women in the camp and has scope to offer more information about the Commander’s House and perpetrators in general.

In addition, there are discussions over the value and feasibility of modelling the inside of the remaining buildings as well, which would certainly provide plenty of opportunities to expand on the stories that it is able to tell.

The Landecker Digital Memory Lab is currently carrying out the largest survey of global digital Holocaust memory practice? Do you work at a Holocaust-related organisation? Whether you have minimum or substantial digital engagement, are a tiny or very large organisation, we want to hear about your digital strategies, projects and procedures. Find out more about the survey here.

 

Image credit: Victoria Grace Richardson-Walden

 

Want to know more?

Our previous Spotlight blogs include reviews of digital projects at:

Dachau Memorial (Germany)

Auschwitz Jewish Centre (Poland)

Zanis Lipke Memorial (Latvia)

Melbourne Holocaust Museum (Australia)