The 1942 Norsk (Norwegian) teachers’ resistance is one of the most successful campaigns of nonviolent defiance waged against the Nazis during World War II. About 12,000 to 14,000 strong, the teachers acted with unusual cohesion and courage. But the movement was not remarkable primarily for the extreme heroism it displayed; many resistance movements of the time showed equal courage. The teachers’ resistance is incredible because the resisters were average people who did not aspire to heroism. These ordinary people were simply unwilling to comply with unjust laws, especially when the laws damaged children. Without violence or expressions of hatred, a large and influential segment of society said “no” to cooperating with evil. The teachers’ resistance shows what can happen when average people disobey rather than violate their consciences.
The resistance begins
The Nazis and their collaborators took all resistance seriously, of course, including nonviolence. It did not matter if the resistance was expressed in minor ways. For example, after pins and badges with national symbols were banned, Norwegians on the street and students in classrooms wore paperclips in their lapels or linked together as jewelry; the paperclips signified the unity of Norwegians against Nazism. Wearing a paperclip was soon outlawed, and teachers were ordered to search their students for the pieces of criminally bent metal. One of the resistance leaders, a schoolteacher named Haakon Holmboe, later explained, “What was done often seemed ridiculous, but it had the effect of uniting all the opposition forces.” Eventually, the Nazi backlash that started over such small matters as a paperclip would lead to the death of schoolteachers.
Norway had wanted to remain officially neutral during World War II as they had done during World War I. The public feeling was anti-German, but Norway was also self-consciously peaceful, with a strong pacifist presence through popular organizations such as Folkereisning mot krig — the Norwegian section of War Resisters’ International. Indeed, Norway still prides itself as being “the peace nation” that bestows a Nobel Peace Prize every year.
Geography made Norway’s invasion inevitable, however. The British and French had mined the Norwegian coast to disrupt iron ore shipments from Sweden that were vital to the German war effort. Germany needed Norway’s ice-free harbors to protect such shipping and to exert its control over the North Atlantic. On April 9, 1940, Germany invaded. Norway gave a conventional military response, assisted by the British and French. But the outcome was a foregone conclusion. Overwhelmed, Norway surrendered on June 10, and Germany’s five-year occupation began. Nazi envoys and their collaborators didn’t speak of occupation, of course. The German army was there to protect Norway’s neutrality against British-Franco aggression, they explained. The explanation failed to draw Norwegian applause or gratitude.
The rise of Quisling
After a few missteps on his part, the Nazi-puppet Vidkun Quisling became the face of power in Norway. Quisling was a Norwegian politician who had formed a fascist party called Nasjonal Samling (National Gathering) in 1933. A devout Nazi, Quisling had met with Hitler personally and gained Dur Führer’s official support. Quisling wasn’t the Germans’ first choice, however. They had hoped to capture King Haakon VII and the Norwegian parliament in order to give the occupation a patina of legitimacy; then, the Germans could replace the government with their own men. The
king and the parliament foiled this plan by escaping to London, where they formed a government-in-exile. Next, the ship carrying the Nazi’s chosen replacement government sank en route. Quisling became the best alternative still standing.
The best for Germany, that is. The Norwegian people viewed Quisling as a traitor and a German mouthpiece. The depth of public anger toward him can be judged by the fact that in 1945, the “peace nation” sentenced him to death by firing squad for high treason. Since WWII, the word “Quisling” has been a synonym for “a traitor who collaborates with the enemy.”
Most Norwegians didn’t want to obey the Germans or Quisling, but they were not psychologically or otherwise prepared for an occupation. They probably hoped for life to continue on as it had been before. “In the summer of 1940,” Holmboe recalled, “there was no feeling of ‘Now we are going to resist.’” In the autumn of 1940, however, Quisling demanded that government employees sign an oath of loyalty to his regime. For the people who refused, violence was used as persuasion; this created even more resistance.
Some Norwegians resisted by taking up arms, but most dismissed violence as impractical due to Germany’s massive military advantage. Illegal newspapers multiplied. But how else could they resist? As Holmboe explained, Norwegians confronted a classic problem of pacifism: There “is a burglar on your door and you have to fight him.” But how? “Nowhere … did the idea of non-violent resistance come in,” Holmboe continued. “Instead of an idea, it developed as … a way to do something. I don’t think we realised the theoretical point at all. We just felt that something must be done, and we must do it.”
Meanwhile, Quisling began to implement his ideal of a Mussolini-style corporate state. The system is characterized by state officials managing the economy by organizing society into large interest groups or “corporations” under state control. As a pilot project and a blueprint for imposing corporatism, Quisling chose one of Norway’s most established and esteemed interest groups — schoolteachers.
Teachers and students fight back
Quisling’s corporatism started with small steps at first. His portrait was hung in every school, for example, but even these small measures were deeply resented and largely rejected. When a Nasjonal Samling Youth Front emerged, many students refused to “join” the mandatory organization that was modeled after the Hitler Youth in Germany. This was part of a larger refusal by most Norwegian youth to cooperate with authorities. Instead, young people wore covertly nationalist symbols and made gestures to show support for the King of Norway; they turned their backs as German soldiers walked by; when school inspectors entered a classroom, students burst into patriotic song. The authorities pushed back; when Oslo high school students refused to join the Nazi Youth Front, Nazis beat teachers and teenagers alike. Beatings, arrests, and bribes did not work, however, and the Nazis gave up trying to enforce membership.
In June 1941, the established teachers’ union was eliminated due to the mass resignations that followed a Nazi attempt to assume control. Through illegal meetings, a group of teachers drafted a list of four points upon which Norway’s teachers were admonished to stand firm. In his pamphlet “Tyranny Could Not Quell Them: How Norway’s Teachers Defeated Quisling and What it Means for Unarmed Defence Today,” Gene Sharp, an American political scientist and a global leader in the movement for nonviolent action and resistance, described these points of resistance:
(1) Any demand for the teachers to become members of Quisling’s party, the Nasjonal Samling;
(2) Any attempt to introduce Nasjonal Samling propaganda in the schools;
(3) Any order from outside the school authorities;
(4) Any collaboration with
the Nasjonal Samling youth movement.
During December 1941 and January 1942, the list circulated among Norway’s teachers. Its spirit was captured by what became known as the Teachers’ Pledge to Students:
I will not call upon you to do anything which I regard as wrong. Nor will I teach you anything I regard as not conforming with the truth. I will, as I have done heretofore, let my conscience be my guide, and I am confident that I shall then be in step with the great majority of people who have entrusted to me the duties of an educator.
By early February 1942, Quisling went full throttle on converting the school system into an education factory for fascism. Teachers must pledge fealty to German occupiers and teach Nazi values to students. Quisling declared all teachers to be members of a new national teachers’ organization that was under the leadership of the Hirden (the Hird). A Norwegian version of the Gestapo, this uniformed paramilitary cracked down violently on dissidents. The Hird was notorious for prisoners who suddenly died in its custody, for example.
On February 11 and 12, 1942, resistance leaders met secretly in Oslo. Sharp gave a sense of the meeting’s atmosphere. The leaders “saw Qulsling’s step as the moment they had been waiting for and [they] shared the view of the teachers: if they accepted this beginning, there would be no clear later point of resistance. They would finally have to accept the logical consequences of the first step.” The resistance focused on the teachers, undoubtedly because Quisling was also doing so.
Months earlier, Holmboe became the general resistance contact for a large rural district in eastern Norway, with Hamar as its center; Hamar was a small town about 130 kilometers north of Oslo and Holmboe’s home. His job was to select a reliable representative from different professional groups in the district, none of whom knew each other’s role; if anyone was caught and tortured, this ignorance would limit the damage inflicted. Holmboe was also responsible for teachers in his district.
He described the ingenuity with which resistance leaders in Oslo spread instructions to outer regions. “A friend telephoned me one afternoon,” Holmboe explained, “and asked me to meet him at the railway station. There he gave me a small box of matches.” The box contained a statement in response to the demand that teachers join the new organization established by Quisling. Holmboe continued, “My job was to circulate it secretly among the teachers in my district. That was all I knew. I didn’t know who the ‘leaders’ were who met in Oslo.” After handing him the match box, Holmboe’s friend boarded another train and left. The statement read:
According to what the Leader of the new teachers’ organisation has said, membership in this organisation will mean an obligation for me to assist in such [fascist] education, and also would force me to do other acts which are in conflict with the obligations of my profession. I find that I must declare that I cannot regard myself as a member of the new teachers’ organisation.
The teachers were to duplicate this statement in individual letters addressed to the Education Department. They were to sign their own names and include real addresses. All letters were to be posted personally on the same day: February 20, 1942. The teachers knew the extreme danger of expressing even passive resistance, and many were bookish people, not warriors. In his booklet “Tyranny Could Not Quell Them,” Sharp wrote about a teacher who was isolated in the mountains. Before posting his letter, the nervous man “telephoned long distance to Mr. Holmboe to be sure that everyone else was really carrying out the plan — despite the probability that the telephone was tapped.”
An estimated 8,000 to 10,000 teachers wrote to the Education Department. “If there had been even as many as 4,000 or 5,000,” Holmboe declared, “we should have regarded the action as a success.” As it happened, it was “very, very moving to see the reaction.” He explained the high response rate. “It was a matter of conscience. We just couldn’t do those things [ordered by Quisling]. We could not have looked into the faces of family and friends if we had not made this protest.” An estimated 90 percent of Norway’s teachers refused to join the mandatory new union.
On February 25, Quisling closed all schools for a month, claiming that a “fuel crisis” did not permit the buildings to be heated. Closing the wood-heated buildings in forested Norway made little sense. People demanded to know the real reason their children were at home. Ironically, the school closures were instrumental in making the entire nation aware of the teachers’ resistance, which had received no coverage in the official media.
This article was originally published in the January 2024 issue of Future of Freedom.
