Vidkum Quisling had good reason to be angry, but cracking down could backfire badly, as an earlier encounter should have taught him. On May 22, 1942, Quisling arrived at the Stabekk gymnasium (high school) in the company of the Minister of Education and the head of the national police. Twenty members of the Hird surrounded the school and forced the teachers to attend a meeting. Quisling raged at the assembly, ending his rant with the words, “You teachers have destroyed everything for me!” These words become a badge of honor for resisters, and they were repeated throughout Norway. Meanwhile, teachers at the school meeting were arrested. The next day, a handful of teachers who had been absent entered the town’s prison, stating, “We should be arrested, too.”
Perhaps realizing the futility of his iron hand policies and not wishing to increase resistance, Quisling allowed some teachers to be released. Although disease was not widespread at Kirkenes, many prisoners were so starved and depleted they were unable to do hard labor. In the wake of a doctor’s report, the Germans announced that 150 teachers would be sent home. (Richard Bartlett Gregg places the number at 50, but 150 derives from a first-hand account.)
The strategy of resistance
There was a catch. They were required to sign a statement declaring they would resume their teaching as members of the new Nazi union. In last-minute discussions, the teachers who would be left behind debated. Some argued that signing was a personal decision for which no one should be criticized. Most believed that, as in actual war, it is sometimes prudent for the wounded or ill to leave the front lines and work for the cause as noncombatants. The 150 signed. In a bitter irony, however, their declarations never left Kirkenes and were never used for propaganda by Quisling or the Germans. By the end of August, the teachers were welcomed home as national heroes.
On September 16, another group of about 100 teachers went home without signing statements.
Approximately 400 prisoners remained. As winter drew near and temperatures plunged below freezing, they worried about surviving an Arctic winter. Happily, on November 4, the remaining teachers were loaded onto a steamer to make the 16-day trip south. They signed no statements.
As with the teachers released earlier, people flocked to the stations to sing songs and applaud the national heroes. People brought flowers and scarce food to their homes, where notes of congratulation filled mailboxes. Eight months to the day of his arrest, on November 20, Haakon Holmboe arrived home to a proud wife. She admitted that when he had been called up years ago to defend against the German invasion, “I felt my knees were cut off. Later, when the war came, and he was arrested twice, I felt more and more quiet.” Over and over, teachers and their families credited the solidarity of Norwegians and the strength of nonviolent resistance with allowing them to persist.
Sweet victory
The teachers’ protest was a near total victory against Quisling’s dream of corporatism. His new teachers’ organization never came into being, and Norwegian schools never taught fascist propaganda. After Quisling’s pilot program for the corporative state failed so miserably, Hitler personally intervened to order the complete abandonment of the plan. Equally importantly, the teachers had weathered the occupation in such a manner as to retain their self-respect; this meant their postwar lives could truly go back to normal. Largely because of the teachers’ protest, historians have described the occupation of Norway as “an unconditional ideological defeat upon Nazism.”
The teachers did not use non-violent resistance because they rejected violence. “We also had military organisations during the occupation,” Holmboe said. In fact, “many of the teachers, including myself, were active in organising illegal military groups when we got the opportunity. We were willing to use weapons when we had them.”
Years later, Gene Sharp interviewed Holmboe and asked what he had learned from the Teachers’ Protest. Holmboe replied, “For the first time the Norwegian people had experience with nonviolent resistance and realised that the leaders of nonviolent resistance were as courageous and clever as those fighting in the ordinary way.”
Holmboe also learned the dynamics of successful nonviolent resistance. A sense of solidarity was
essential, for example, because participants needed to know “that others will do it too.” In turn, such unity depended on an elaborate contact system to create a commonality of knowledge and purpose. To preserve the lessons of the Teachers’ Protest and nonviolent resistance in general, Holmboe suggested setting up a special “nonviolent defence academy” where people could study past struggles, the necessary dynamics, and how to implement nonviolence against tyranny.
The legacy of resistance
In its day, the teachers’ protest received international acclaim. President Franklin D. Roosevelt paid tribute to Norway’s resistance, both military and nonviolent, in a speech known as “Look to Norway.” On September 16, 1942, he declared, “If there is anyone who doubts the democratic will to win … let him look to Norway … Norway, at once conquered and unconquerable…. At home, the Norwegian people have silently resisted the invader’s will with grim endurance.”
Today, outside of Norway, the teachers’ protest has been all but forgotten. Indeed, Norwegians themselves are in danger of forgetting the teachers’ protest. In “Tyranny Could Not Quell Them,” Sharp speculated as to why:
Over the years … a change in attitude toward the various types of resistance seems to be taking place. There have been practically no major efforts to keep the idea of non-violent resistance alive in people’s minds, as there has been for the military method which has had the added advantage of long acceptance and tradition.
The advantage of nonviolent resistance — the main lesson of the teachers’ protest — is that tyrants depend on the people’s support. No government can stand if obedience must be commanded literally at the point of a gun. Quisling understood this point when he wrote to Hitler in 1944 with words of advice on Germany’s Eastern Front: “Russia cannot be held without the support of the population.”
The reason why was enunciated centuries ago by a 16th-century Frenchman, Estienne de la Boetie, in his essay “Discourse of Voluntary Servitude”:
If not one thing is yielded to them [tyrants], if, without any violence they are simply not obeyed, they become naked and undone and as nothing, just as, when the root receives no nourishment, the branch withers and dies…. Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break in pieces.
A better description of Quisling’s downfall could not be rendered.
The teachers’ protest was a remarkable example of how nonviolent resistance can topple a Colossus; it accomplished goals beyond the reach of military power. It did not prove nonviolence is always preferable to military means but, at the very least, it showed that sometimes it is. The courage and resolve of the teachers equaled that of any soldier on a battlefield. Perhaps the strongest lesson is this: those who seek resolution through peaceful means are not utopian idealists while those who bomb strangers are the realists. It is possible to be both idealistic and realistic, with no tension between the two.
This article was originally published in the March 2025 issue of Future of Freedom.
