Which ambassadors followed Norway's government into exile?

[peter2010]

Quick question: Which foreign ambassadors, if any, followed the Norwegian government into exile in 1940?

[Rob Stuart]

Presumably you're talking about ambassadors accredited to Norway and located in Oslo. I would think that for sure the Polish ambassador and his staff must have left in April, and then the Dutch and Belgian embassy staffs would have left, if they could, after 10 May. The UK and French ambassadors would have been withdrawn rather than going into exile per se. The Danish ambassador would either have stayed put or gone back to Denmark, I suppose, since the Danish government did not go into exile. I'm not sure what would have happened to the Yugoslav and Greek ambassadors in 1941, whose governments went into exile, or the Soviet ambassador, whose government did not. I think that the rules for the mutual return of embassy staffs were fairly clear and were followed in most cases, e.g., the return of US diplomats in Japan and Japanese diplomats in the US to their respective countries after Pearl Harbor, but I don't know if there were rules for the return of one's diplomats from a country with which you were not at war but which was occupied by an enemy country.

[peter2010]

Thank you very much for your reply. It stands to reason that countries at war with Germany would not maintain an embassy in a German-occupied country and would leave sooner or later. However, and I should have been clearer about this in my initial posting, I was more interested in ambassadors from neutral countries, who did not have to leave but nevertheless did so because they considered it their duty to stay in touch with the government they were accredited to. Did a bit of digging around myself, and it turns out that the US ambassador to Norway, Florence "Daisy" Harriman, and other members of the US legation left Oslo on April 9 1940, following other refugees, including members of the royal family, into neutral Sweden. (Interesting fact: Captain Robert M. Losey, a military attache at the US embassy, was killed on April 21 in a German air raid, and is considered the first American military (not civilian) death in World War Two.) Harriman did not return to Oslo even after the Norwegian campaign had ended, and the US decided to maintain diplomatic links with the Norwegian government-in-exile in London. I'd be interested in other examples like this. It appears that the Mexican ambassador to Oslo, Juan Manuel Alvarez de Castlllo, did also not stay in Norway after 1940, but I don't know the details of his story.