Klungset Bedehus

The mission society’s own house

Klungset mission society was active before 1900, and about 1915 it built a house of its own, known as Klungset bedehus, which it let out to other clubs and societies nearby. A temperance lodge affiliated to the IOGT met there.

Notices in the Salten newspaper show the house in use from October 1914, when the Klungset lodge held a bazaar there to pay for an organ, and afterwards for bazaars in aid of the building and for inner mission festivals.

Requisitioned quarters

The building’s wartime use began before the occupation. A local history talk, drawing on the narrator’s mother, who was twenty-two and lived nearby, recalls the prayer house as a collecting station for Norwegian wounded during the fighting between Mo and Fauske in May 1940, where the injured were cared for before being sent on to Bodø.

The occupation authorities took meeting halls and schools across Fauske. With the school buildings gone, teaching at Klungset was carried on in the prayer house instead.

Some of the concrete work at the hospital was done by a Ukrainian work commando that lodged in the prayer house while the job lasted. The local war history describes these Ukrainians as Ostarbeiter, nominally voluntary civilian workers whose regular workplace was the Frostfilet plant at Langstranda in Bodø. Prisoners of war, who made up the bulk of the labour on the installation, were held in guarded camps; civilian eastern workers were lodged in requisitioned buildings such as this one.

One of the Ukrainians sent over from Frostfilet was Vladimir Kozlov, who lodged in the prayer house and became friendly with Magnus Nordvik of Solheim, the house just to the east. The same volume records around 850 Soviet civilian workers, most of them Ukrainians, reaching A/S Frostfilet in early June.

From Ukraine to northern Norway

His journey led from Ukraine through Germany, then by ship to Bodø in 1942. He worked at a German fish-processing factory on Langstranda before assignments elsewhere in the district brought him to Klungset.

Building the hospital

The installation stood on the boundary of the Klungset farm, which is how it took the name Ortslazarett Klungset, and work began early in 1942.

The hospital formed part of the occupation authorities’ construction effort around the planned Arctic railway. Organisation Todt directed its construction in 1942–1943. It primarily served German troops, engineers, contractors and civilian workers connected with the works. Riksantikvaren records that prisoners of war made up a large part of the construction workforce but received limited treatment at the hospital.

The buildings combined rapid timber construction with a substantial concrete basement. Prefabricated wall sections and roof structures accelerated the work above ground. Below were treatment and service spaces, including operating and X-ray rooms, kitchens, bathrooms and storage. These surviving structures document the scale and technical demands of the project on which forced labourers worked.

A building register of 1946 lists fourteen buildings with up to 200 beds; Riksantikvaren’s own summary gives twelve.

A record preserved locally

His colour drawings record the journey, factory work and German authority, with Russian annotations in mirror script. Preserved by a local family, they entered the museum collection in 1995.

The museum catalogues twenty-four items under FA.F.10006, the drawings and two photographs taken by Johan Lundli in 1943. It records that he is thought to have died in the border mountains while trying to reach Sweden, and that his full name is not known.

The hospital after liberation

In June 1945 the Swedish Red Cross brought personnel, special food and medical equipment to Klungset to help severely ill former Soviet prisoners prepare for their journey home. The hospital later became a Norwegian military storage facility. Its surviving buildings and underground rooms received heritage protection, preserving the worksite’s history alongside the museum’s record of the workers.

The Swedish Red Cross staffed the hospital from 6 June to 5 July 1945, flying in 35 tonnes of special food and equipment. Soviet staff then ran it until the last patients left Fauske aboard the hospital ship Stella Polaris in July or August.

The prayer house afterwards

The prayer house outlasted its wartime use, with a mission gathering there in September 1949 and the Free Evangelical Assembly still meeting in it in 1980.

A plot was separated off for the house in 1968 as bnr. 39 Heggdal. Klungset health society took it over in 1972, and in 2001 it passed to Klungset grendelag as the community hall.

How many forced workers lodged there at any one time, and how long each commando stayed, is not recorded in any source found.