“There are reasons to believe we are going to see an increase in activity in the extreme right during 2015," Bjørnland told Norwegian state broadcaster NRK. "The specific reasons are the connections across national borders. They are connected to other extreme right-wing groups in Northern Europe." 

 

Over the last year, the neo-Nazi group Nordfront, which is established in Sweden, Denmark and Finland, has run a recruitment drive in at least six counties in Norway, she reported.

 

On Holocaust Remembrance Day, the group unleashed a coordinated operation which saw tape bearing the Nordfront logo placed at the offices of ten different media organisations in Sweden, and Nordfront banners unfurled at the Holocaust Center and Stiftelsen Arkivet in Oslo. 

 

Stein Christian Salvesen, who works at Stiftelsen Arkivet, said that it had been the third time that year that extremists had targeted the building, which once housed the Gestapo headquarters where many Norwegians were tortured during  the Second World War 

 

”It's scary. These banners are being hung up by an organization that denies the Holocaust, cheering for Nazism," Salvesen told NRK. 

 

In November last year, police seized several guns from Nordfront sympathisers in Rogaland, after which a 16-year-old youth was charged. 

 

Nordfront's Swedish wing, which is headed by Klas Lund, who has past convictions for manslaughter and armed robbery, is committed to expanding into other Nordic countries.  

”Our political goal is to take command in the Nordic countries,” the group's Swedish Spokesperson, Pär Öberg, told Expressen.  

 

Right-wing extremism is a sensitive issue in Norway following the twin terror attacks mounted by the far-Right anti-Islamist Anders Behring Breivik, which left 77 people dead and at least 300 injured.