Norway's teachers refused to teach the Nazi curriculum, and the occupier lost the schools
Germany took southern Norway in four weeks but never took Norway's classrooms in four years: of 14,000 teachers, 12,000 refused to join the Nazi teachers' union, more than 1,000 were sent to camps, and when they came back they were still not members.
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Teachers fought a war by not cooperating
During the occupation of Norway, teachers did not sabotage anything and did not take up weapons; their resistance was refusing to teach Nazi propaganda to their students. The Norwegian teacher Rolf Hansen, interviewed by the BBC in 1944, had by then escaped to Britain. He recalled that the occupation authorities demanded schools adopt a so-called "positive national policy": denigrating the king, proving to students that the constitution was worthless, and glorifying Quisling. His words were, "We never did that." This passive resistance lasted four years, until Norway's liberation on 8 May 1945.
— Rolf HansenOn the day of the invasion he was still at the school gate telling students to go home
Germany invaded Norway on 9 April 1940, and the capital, Oslo, fell almost immediately. Hansen remembered standing outside the school that day, watching Norwegian anti-aircraft guns try to shoot down German bombers. Three or four boys stood in the empty schoolyard, walked over confused and asked: "Teacher, is there no school today?" He couldn't help laughing at their stubbornness about duty, and sent them home. The scene shows how sudden the occupation was — Norway had until then tried to stay out of the war and was caught completely off guard.
— Rolf HansenThey hung a portrait, and the students threw it in the bin themselves
The occupation did not go after the schools at first. After Quisling's people became Minister of Church and Education in the autumn of 1940, German-directed notices began piling up on headmasters' desks, one of them requiring schools to hang a portrait of Quisling. One day, while Hansen was teaching English grammar, a local Quisling stormtrooper burst into the classroom, climbed onto a desk and nailed the portrait to the wall — and this man had once been his student. They carried on with the lesson as if the portrait did not exist. After class a girl stood up and said: "We can't let that picture stay here. Father says Quisling is a traitor, and a madman too." Hansen said he would discuss it with the other teachers, and when he came back for the next lesson the portrait was gone; a few days later the janitor saw it in the rubbish bin.
— Rolf HansenA propaganda speech was drowned out by the whole class laughing
Hansen never forgot the visit of Quisling's county propaganda chief to address all the children about "the mess of our rotten democracy." The school had just been given a new headmaster, a little fool who had schemed his way into the post by getting the old headmaster put in prison. At the start of the speech he stood carefully at the back of the classroom, his eyes not yet clear from the previous night's revelry in the German canteen. When the propaganda chief bellowed, "We don't want rotten democracy, we want a leader, and our leader is a capable man, a strong man," the boys and girls spontaneously turned to look at the new headmaster, the speaker's voice drowned in laughter, and the assembly soon collapsed entirely.
— Rolf Hansen12,000 teachers refused to join the Nazi union
In February 1942 Quisling issued a decree ordering all Norwegian teachers to join the Quisling teachers' union and to assist the compulsory Quisling youth service. Of Norway's 14,000 teachers, 12,000 flatly refused to have anything to do with the union. A month later, more than 1,000 teachers were beaten by German police in concentration camps, some were forced to labour for the German war machine in remote parts of Norway and Finland with their pay withheld, and many were dismissed. None of it changed the teachers' resistance. When they were released and sent home half a year later, they had already won a round against Quisling: they were still not members of his union, and his youth service had failed completely.
— Tim O'CallaghanThe net effect of the crackdown was to unite the whole country
Hansen's judgment was that Quisling's move against the teachers produced, as usual, the exact opposite of what he intended. Children, parents and teachers across the country were now united against him. One boy in his class joined the youth service — an organisation modelled on the German Hitler Youth — and was completely ostracised and shunned by his classmates. When studying English institutions, the boy would trot out the startling claims from German propaganda about "British-Jewish-Marxist-plutocratic democracy," and beyond that contributed nothing. He also kept a notebook recording things Hansen had said that he considered offensive to his party or to Germans. Hansen said that sharing a classroom with this Quisling youth gave him a share of the Gestapo nightmare that had been oppressing Europe since 1941.
— Rolf HansenThe Germans won the country but not the schools
Norway was liberated on 8 May 1945; Quisling was subsequently arrested, sentenced to death, and shot by a firing squad in October 1945. A year before liberation, in his 1944 broadcast, Hansen looked back with pride on the resistance of himself and his colleagues and gave the sharpest line of the whole episode: the Germans conquered the whole of southern Norway in four weeks, but our schools fought another four-year war against the Germans, and we held our ground the whole time. The line splits military occupation and cultural resistance into two fronts, and explains why the teachers' noncooperation deserves to be remembered as a piece of history in its own right.
— Rolf HansenIn their own words · checked verbatim
I didn't realise how little place schools, in the ordinary civilised sense of the word, would have in Hitler's new order.
Rolf Hansen4:14
The authorities wanted us to adopt what they called a positive national policy, which meant that we should slander our king, prove to our pupils that our constitution was no good, and extol Quisling. We never did.
Rolf Hansen7:25
12,000 of Norway's 14,000 teachers refused point blank to have anything to do with the union.
Tim O'Callaghan7:25
By his action against the teachers, Quisling had, as usual, achieved exactly the opposite of what he intended.
Rolf Hansen8:28
To teach in the class with the Quisling youth boy gave me my own small share of the Gestapo nightmare.
Rolf Hansen8:28
The Germans conquered the whole of southern Norway in four weeks. But our schools have waged another war against the Germans for four years, and we have stood our ground all the time.
Rolf Hansen9:35
Figures
| Date of the German invasion of Norway | 9 April 1940 | 2:06 |
| Norwegian teachers who refused to join the Quisling teachers' union | 12,000 out of 14,000 | 7:25 |
| Teachers sent to concentration camps and beaten | more than 1,000 | 7:25 |
| When Quisling was appointed head of the puppet government | early February 1942 | 5:15 |
| Date of Norway's liberation | 8 May 1945 | 9:35 |
| When Quisling was shot | October 1945 | 9:35 |
| Time Germany took to conquer southern Norway | four weeks | 9:35 |
Glossary
- Quisling
- Leader of Norway's fascist party, who collaborated with the Nazis during World War Two; his name later became a byword for traitor.
- Quisling Youth Service
- A compulsory youth organisation set up by the Norwegian occupation authorities on the model of the German Hitler Youth.
- Gestapo
- Nazi Germany's secret police organisation.
How to listen
Listeners interested in the history of wartime occupation, civilian nonviolent resistance, and how education gets used as a tool of rule — just right for the commute.
The host's introduction and the show promotion in the first two minutes can be skipped; start from the original interview audio at 2:06.