The day Norway lost its innocence, a quiet, retired diplomat living thousands of kilometers away in the south of France lost his identity. July 22, 2011, was the date 33-year-old Anders Breivik embarked on a terrifying, calculated campaign that resulted in the deadliest massacre in the history of peacetime Europe: the cold-blooded murder of 77 people, most of them teenagers, after a massive car bomb tore through the heart of Oslo. The horror that scarred a nation also delivered a profound, personal anguish to one man: Jens Breivik, the killer’s father.

In a rare and deeply agonizing interview, Jens Breivik spoke candidly about the burden of paternity and the impossible realization that the perpetrator of such unspeakable evil was his own flesh and blood. His words were unequivocal, dripping with shame and a shattered sense of self: “He’s a monster.”

The Calculus of Terror and the Day of Reckoning

The massacre unfolded with the precision of a military operation, driven by Breivik’s twisted, neo-Nazi ideology against multiculturalism. The first act of terror was the detonation of a one-ton car bomb in downtown Oslo, turning the peaceful streets into a scene of unimaginable devastation, where debris and wounded people littered the streets like something from a war zone. Eight people died in the blast, but this was merely a diversion.

Breivik, dressed as a police officer, was already headed for his main target: the tiny island of Utoya, an hour north of Oslo, where the ruling Labour Party was holding its youth summer camp. For 90 minutes, he hunted terrified teenagers through the forest, armed and unrepentant.

The experience of those who survived remains a national trauma, a wound that may never heal. Adrian Pratzon, a teenager who cheated death not once but twice that day, described the chilling terror of being stalked by Breivik. While attempting to swim to safety, exhausted and drowning, he was forced to turn back, only to find the gunman standing over him. As Breivik aimed his rifle, Adrian screamed, “No, don’t shoot.” For whatever inexplicable reason, the killer lowered his weapon and walked away, only to continue his rampage moments later. Adrian survived being grazed on the skull by a bullet when Breivik was distracted by the arrival of police, which led to his surrender. His first words to the authorities, a chilling display of narcissism and detachment, were to ask for a band-aid for a cut on his finger.

The Diplomat’s Despair: A Life Shattered

As these terrible events unfolded, Jens Breivik, a former diplomat who had faithfully served his country for four decades, was thousands of miles away in France, watching the horror on television. A respected man who had built a quiet life, he was utterly unprepared for the terrible realization that would come at daybreak. Like everyone else, he assumed the killer must be a madman, certainly a stranger.

The truth was delivered not by a call, but by a computer screen. Switching on his device, the first thing he saw was the picture of the man responsible for the explosions and the Utoya killings. “It was of course a terrible shock for me,” he recounted. “I was petrified, I was paralyzed. It was like the roof fell down on my head.” Norway’s national trauma had instantly become his crushing, personal anguish, forcing him to live under the inescapable shadow of his son’s atrocities.

For Jens, a man unaccustomed to public scrutiny and raised in a culture that valued peace and quiet dignity, the shame is a tangible, living punishment. He is no longer defined by his decades of service, but by a new, horrifying title: “I am the father of a terrorist.” This knowledge, he says, is something he has to live with for the rest of his life, an inescapable stain that forever connects him to the victims.

The Unforgivable Sin and the Paternal Burden

Jens Breivik has made it unequivocally clear that he cannot and will not forgive his son for what he has done. The scale of the crime—the cold-blooded murder of children—makes acceptance or understanding impossible. His anguish manifests as a dark wish for his son’s self-annihilation: “He should have spread the last bullet for himself instead of killing so many people in cold blood. He should have taken his own life.”

This tormented statement encapsulates the chasm between the father and the son, a distance that was physical, emotional, and eventually, moral. Jens’s marriage to Breivik’s mother broke up when Anders was a baby, and his subsequent attempts to gain custody failed. The relationship that followed was troubled—the communication scarce between an absent father and an uncommunicative son.

In reflecting on what drove his son to become a killer, Jens is forced to confront his own role and character, a question that has been raised by both the public and his own tortured conscience. “Does any part of you think that there was something you did to create that monster?” he was asked. He offered no easy defense, only profound uncertainty: “I know that some people have said that maybe if I had taken better care of him, he wouldn’t have massacred people. I have no answer to that.”

The reflection goes deeper than mere absence, touching upon a shared psychological trait. Jens admitted that he is not good at showing his feelings, a trait he shared with the young Anders, who also “didn’t like to talk” and “didn’t show his feelings.” This shared emotional reticence raises the possibility that Breivik inherited a difficulty that, when combined with a twisted ideology, festered into a murderous rage. In grappling with whether his son is evil or simply mad, Jens leans toward the latter, positing that “there must be something wrong in his head.” Yet, the result is the same: the whole world knows the name Breivik, and Jens must live with that collective, painful acknowledgment.

The Eternal Sentence of Shame

Anders Breivik’s trial, during which he appeared hateful and unrepentant, was a theatrical display of his ideology, a spectacle he seemed to revel in. The court’s only decision was whether he was insane or simply irredeemably evil. Yet, for Jens, the verdict of the court mattered little, as his own sentence had already been passed.

The burden of his son’s actions is symbolized by a chilling detail: the interview was conducted on Jens’s 77th birthday, a haunting parallel to the 77 lives his son took. This magnitude is overwhelming, ensuring he is perpetually reminded of what has happened. He has to live with the knowledge that he is inherently connected to the suffering of all the innocent victims—the fathers, mothers, sisters, and brothers.

Jens Breivik openly accepts his pain as a form of divine or existential retribution. “I am a victim, but I feel that the worst thing with this case is to think about all the innocent people he killed… It is my punishment that I have such a son, so I have to accept that.”

The agony is so complete that he says he does not think he will ever go back to Norway. His peaceful, quiet life is lost forever. He is forever tormented by the question of “what if,” what if he had been closer, what if he had somehow prevented the transformation of a boy into a monster. Jens Breivik now lives out his twilight years in sadness and in shame, the true and eternal life sentence for the father of a terrorist. His pain is a stark, human testament to the devastating, generational cost of radicalized evil.