It’s Monday afternoon in early February. This year’s cohort from the Oslo Guide Course are gathered. In front of them stands Preben Dietrichson, one of the students in this year’s course, to tell a story.
It is not just a history lesson about the Second World War; it is a personal inheritance. It is the story of his father, Fredrik Dietrichson—agent “Dave 347”—whose journey from resistance fighter to concentration camp survivor provides a harrowing, human lens through which to view the history of the White Buses.
Based on Preben Dietrichson’s lecture, this article traces the path of one man through the darkness of the Holocaust and the miraculous rescue that brought him home.
The choice to resist
Fredrik Dietrichson was born in 1914. When the war broke out, he was working in the hotel industry abroad, safely situated in Switzerland. He could have stayed. Instead, driven by a sense of duty to his country, he traveled back through a Germany not yet fully consumed by the horrors of total war and made his way to Stockholm.
In August 1940, at the Norwegian legation in Sweden, Fredrik was recruited into the SOE (Special Operations Executive), an organization established by Winston Churchill to wage resistance in occupied territories. His mentor, Major Munthe, trained him in weaponry, tactics, and the art of silence.
Fredrik became a courier. Working as a headwaiter at Frognerseteren restaurant in Oslo, he facilitated a high-stakes smuggling operation. He received sensitive documents from agents within occupied industries, hiding them behind the mirrors in train bathrooms on the line to Sweden. He communicated via coded personal ads in newspapers—what his son Preben jokingly calls “the Tinder of the time”—where a meeting request at a specific time signaled that a package was en route.
For nine months, Fredrik lived a double life. But in the world of espionage, luck eventually runs out.
The arrest and dehumanization
On Thursday, March 19, 1942, Fredrik’s war changed forever. While at work, he was approached by the Gestapo. Waiting in the car outside was Sigfried Fehmer, a man Preben describes as a psychological brute tasked with crushing the resistance.
Fredrik was taken to the notorious Møllergata 19 prison. In a chilling ritual of dehumanization that would define his coming years, he was stripped of his clothes and left in a cell with nothing but a wool blanket. During interrogations at Victoria Terrasse, he was beaten with iron, though he later spoke little of the physical torture, focusing instead on the mental game of simulating interrogations in his head to protect his network.
The descent into the camps
The true descent began when Fredrik was deported to Germany and the concentration camp Natzweiler close to France. They left Oslo with the boat Monte Rosa, and landed in Stettin in Poland. The journey took them via Berlin to the first camp Fredrik stayed in.
Preben emphasizes a specific moment his father recounted as a turning point: the moment he entered the camp, had his head shaved, and was given a prisoner number. “When you lose your name, you lose something fundamental,” Preben explains. Fredrik was no longer a man; he was a number in a system designed to destroy him.
Fredrik’s journey through the Nazi camp system was a tour of increasing brutality:
- Natzweiler-Struthof: A “Night and Fog” camp in Alsace, known for extreme cold and backbreaking labor carrying stones. His stay there lasted 12 months. Here, Fredrik contracted dysentery and came close to death, saved only by the intervention of a fellow prisoner and doctor, the Norwegian Leif Poulsson.
- Dachau: Described by Fredrik as “rigid” and systematized. He stayed there only for a week.
- Mauthausen & Melk: The nadir of his experience. In the Melk sub-camp, prisoners worked underground in tunnels. This stay lasted about fire months, mainly in Melk.
The arrival of the White Buses
In the spring of 1945, chaos gripped the camps. As the Allied forces approached, the prisoners at Melk were evacuated. Weak, starving, and unable to think in complete sentences, Fredrik marched with the others, fearing they were being led to their execution.
Then, the miracle happened. The column of prisoners stopped, and before them stood white buses marked with the Red Cross.
“It took a long time before he understood that this was not a deception,” Preben notes. These were the Swedish White Buses. The transition from the “total dehumanization” of the camps to the care of Swedish doctors and nurses was a shock to the system. Some prisoners, starved for years, tragically died from eating too much too soon.
Fredrik survived the transport. He was taken to Ramlösa in Sweden, where he spent three weeks relearning how to be human—how to use cutlery, how to sit at a table, and how to sleep without fear.
From the Shadow into the Spotlight
Fredrik Dietrichson returned to Norway in May 1945. But contrary to the narrative of the broken, passive survivor often associated with severe trauma, Fredrik did not withdraw from the world. Instead, he attacked life with a voracious appetite.
According to the lecture slides presented by his son, Fredrik “immediately started a business in the entertainment industry” upon his return. While the war had taken three years of his life, he seemed determined to make up for lost time by filling the ensuing decades with enough events for three lifetimes.
The Impresario of the Extraordinary Preben Dietrichson describes his father’s post-war career as that of an impresario working with artists, musicians, and theater people. But this description barely scratches the surface of the spectacular reality.
Driven by a newfound love for “aesthetics, movement, and freedom”, Fredrik became a facilitator of the incredible. As noted in the supplementary details provided for this article, Fredrik’s career included feats that seem almost fiction today:
- The Blue Whale Tour: In a logistical marvel, he managed the transport of a preserved blue whale around Europe, bringing the mysteries of the ocean to landlocked cities.
- The Kon-Tiki: The same truck that carried the whale was later used to transport Thor Heyerdahl’s legendary raft, the Kon-Tiki, continuing Fredrik’s connection to great explorers and adventurers.
- Skiing in Paris: Perhaps most audaciously, he once organized a ski jumping event in the middle of Paris, featuring the famous Ruud brothers, bringing a piece of Norwegian winter to the heart of France.
He was a host to international stars and a man who made the impossible happen*. It was as if the man who had been reduced to a number in a static, gray system was now determined to orchestrate a world of color, motion, and grandeur.
The Dual Reality Yet, the lecture transcript reveals that this outward explosion of energy coexisted with a quiet, private struggle. Preben Dietrichson emphasizes that his father lived a “good life” and was a “good father”, but he also bore the invisible scars of Møllergata and Mauthausen.
For years, Fredrik struggled with sleeplessness, easily awakened by sounds or smells that triggered memories of the camps. He spoke very little about the war—not because he couldn’t, but because he chose not to.
This duality defines Fredrik Dietrichson’s legacy. He was the impresario who could move whales across a continent and build ski jumps in Paris*, yet he was also the man who sat quietly at the breakfast table, having learned the hard way the value of simply being able to sleep without fear. He did not let the darkness of the camps consume his future; instead, he used his regained freedom to stage a spectacular second act.
This article is based on the transcription of a lecture by Preben Dietrichson, recorded on February 2, 2026.
