This archive traces four family lines that converge in my father, Harald Sundlo (1927–2019).
His father was Konrad Bertram Holm Sundlo (1881–1965), a career army officer who rose to colonel and commanded the Hålogaland Infantry Regiment at Narvik. Konrad came from the Sundlo family of Levanger in Trøndelag. Harald’s mother — Konrad’s wife — was Katrine, née Speilberg, from a clerical family whose roots run back through the parishes of southern Norway to eighteenth-century Copenhagen.
Harald married Borgny, whose father Nils Edvard Ringset came from the Ringset family in Liabygda on Sunnmøre, and whose mother Marta Baade Ringset belonged to the Baade family — descendants of Hanseatic merchants who came from Mecklenburg to Bergen in the early 1700s.
These four lines — Sundlo, Speilberg, Ringset, and Baade — are the families documented in this archive.
Konrad Sundlo is a controversial figure in Norwegian history, remembered as the officer who surrendered Narvik on 9 April 1940. The courts acquitted him of deliberate treason for the capitulation itself, but convicted him for his active role in the Nazi occupation apparatus. He served about five years in prison. Jan P. Pettersen’s book Oberst Konrad Sundlo (2025) argues, based on the trial documents, that Sundlo was in large part used as a scapegoat.
Konrad left extensive notes on family history, life in the Caucasus in 1919, and Norwegian volunteers on the Eastern Front during the Second World War. After retiring in 1992, Harald transcribed a selection of these notes and gathered additional material on the Sundlo and Speilberg families. I digitised what he left behind and put it online rather than let it moulder in a drawer.
The English and German translations were produced with the assistance of Claude Code.