Road Trip Through History: The Resistance Museum in Oslo
The Resistance Museum in Oslo was not included in our history tour of Norway.* That turned out to be a good thing in my opinion. My Own True Love and I spent the entire morning at the museum on our own the day after the tour ended. We would have been frustrated at being hurried through it as part of a group. And the museum told its own story very clearly. In short, it’s a history bugg must-see if you’re in Oslo.
Here’s the longer version:
The Resistance Museum is unusual in that it was created by members of the resistance. Because the museum is in some ways a historical document writ large, the exhibits have not been updated since it was opened to the public in 1970.** Even without the help of modern museum technology, it is a powerful example of visual story telling. And it was the perfect end to our trip.
Beginning with the first day of the invasion, the museum uses photographs, blown-up newspaper pages, recordings, and artifacts to tell the story of Norway’s resistance to its Nazi occupiers (We were grateful that the museum designers provided English signs alongside the Norwegian.) The museum provides a step-by-step history of the Nazi occupation, giving the larger context and lots of detail for many of the stories we had heard over the tour.
A considerable section of the museum focused on the creation, training, deployment and adventures of the Kompani Linge, which operated as saboteurs and resistance fighters in conjunction with Britain’s SOE (Special Operations Executive). But it did not limit the story to the obvious heroism of armed resistance. It also portrayed acts of civil disobedience against Nazi attacks on personal freedom. After all, heroes don’t always carry guns and blow things up.
Norwegian teachers in the concentration camp near Kirkenes.
If I had to choose a favorite story of the resistance from the museum, it would be the action of Norway’s school teachers, known as the Defense of Education. In 1942, Vidkun Quisling’s proto-Nazi government** created a new Norwegian Teacher’s Union. All teachers were required to join and pledge to teach Nazi principles in the classroom. Almost immediately, an underground group in Oslo sent out a statement for teachers to copy and mail to the authorities, stating that they refused to participate. Roughly 90 percent of Norway’s 14,000 teachers signed the protest statement.
Quisling responded by closing the schools for a month. Not a popular decision. More than 200,000 unhappy parents wrote letters of protest to the government. Meanwhile, many teachers defied the governments orders and held classes in private.
Hoping to break the teacher’s resistance, the government arrested some 1,000 male teachers. In April, the government of occupation sent 499 of those teachers to a concentration camp near Kirkenes, in the arctic. News of the relocation leaked and crowds gathered along the train tracks when the teachers were being transported, singing and giving the prisoners food.****
In mid-May, the Nazis gave up on creating a fascist teachers’ organization. By November, those teachers who survived had returned from the concentration camp. The Nazi curriculum was never imposed on Norway’s schools, thanks to Norway’s teachers.
*For those of you haven’t been reading along, in June My Own True Love and I spent two weeks in Norway on a history-nerd tour run by the Vesterheim Museum. It was fabulous.
**Which is longer ago than I like to think.
***More to come on Quisling in a later blog.
****Not a small gesture given wartime food shortages.
Little Norway and Sigrid Schultz
First, let me say that this post is not about either the now defunct Little Norway living history site in Wisconsin or Little Norway Resort in Minnesota, which are the first things that a Google search of Little Norway will pull up.
Instead it is the story of the main training camp for the Royal Norwegian Air Force during World War II. Or at least a story about the camp. There is probably a story to tell about every man who trained there.
Here goes:
After King Haakon VII and members of the Norwegian government escaped from the Nazis, they formed a government-in-exile in London. They decided to keep those Norwegian military pilots who also managed to escape as a separate, wholly Norwegian military unit.
In the best of all possible worlds, the Royal Norwegian Air Force would have established a training base in Europe.* With most of Europe under Nazi control, the best alternative was Canada. On November 10, 1940, the base known as “Little Norway” went into service outside Toronto. The camp was initially set up at the Toronto Flying Club’s airport on the Toronto Islands. Hundreds of young men escaped from Norway through Sweden or by way of the North Sea and found their way to Canada to enlist in the new service—a trip that in many cases required a heroic effort. The islands soon proved to be too small and the base was relocated to Muskoka Airport, north of Toronto. More than 3300 Norwegian air men and ground crews would train at the camp.
The first Norwegian squadron arrived in Iceland in April 1941. They patrolled the North Atlantic looking for German submarines. The second, a fighting squadron with an all-Norwegian air and ground crew, arrived in England in June, 1941, followed by a third in January 1942. Both of these squadrons fought as part of the British RAF; they participated in the Dieppe Raid, the Normandy landings, and the liberation of Holland.
In the spring of 1942, the leaders of the base invited Sigrid Schultz to visit Little Norway.** They had heard her broadcasts from Berlin about the invasion of Norway and thought she might be interested in doing a story about the camp as the second anniversary of the invasion drew near.
Sigrid spent a week in Toronto, meeting with the young pilots and working on her story. It was easy reporting by her standards: instead of rushing to meet her filing deadline with the details of a breaking story, she could take time to collect material and write the story. She met with the young Norwegians who had escaped from their country to help fight the Germans in a canteen that smelled of fresh cut wood, pine, cleanliness, and a whiff of coffee—scents that perhaps carried with them memories of summer holidays with her cousins in Norway. The young fliers were eager to tell her whatever they knew. She asked each of the men the same question: “What convinced you that you had to leave Norway and come out and fight?” Each had a story of the incident which finally made him decided to risk his life to join the armed forces in exile. Many had thrilling stories of dangerous escapes. The details of each man’s story were different, but the core was the same: the crimes of the Gestapo and the SS convinced them that life in Norway under Nazi rule was not to be tolerated
During her visit, the airmen gave her a parade, passing in review before her while she struggled to hide her tears, perhaps remembering her young Norwegian fiancé who died in the Great War.
As part of her visit, she did a fifteen- minute broadcast from Toronto for the Canadian radio network and Mutual Broadcasting on the second anniversary of the invasion of Norway. Before she spoke, she had to show the text of what she had written to Lieutenant-Colonel Ole Reistadt, the commanding officer of the camp. Speaking to the young men had reminded her about the role neutral Sweden had played in defeat of Norway by allowing Germany to send army supplies through the country. She had been angry then. Now she was angry again. She “made some very nasty remarks about the Swedes” in her script. Reistadt reminded her that neutrality had two sides: “Miss Schultz, you can’t do that because you have a lot of Swedish civilians who help our people escape from the Germans over the mountains. You cannot be nasty to them.” So, she later said with a sigh, “I had to be ladylike.”
Her article ran in the Chicago Tribune on August 16. It was a lively tribute to the young men of the Norwegian air force.
*Actually, in the best of all possible worlds, the Nazis would not have occupied Norway and the question of where to establish an aviation training base would not have arisen.
**Anyone who’s been reading along here for the last several years knows who Sigrid Schultz was. But in case you stumbled on this post while looking for info about Little Norway, here’s the short version: Sigrid Schultz was the Berlin bureau chief for the Chicago Tribune from 1925 to 1941. She was one of the first American reporters to warn her readers just how dangerous the Nazis were and one of the last American reporters to make it out of Berlin.
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It is worth pointing out that the Norwegian merchant marine played a much larger, if less glamorous, role in supporting the Allies in World War II than the Royal Norwegian Air Force. In 1940, Norway had the largest merchant fleet in the world, some 1100 ships. At the time of the Nazi invasion, 1024 of those ships were at sea. King Haakon ordered them to proceed to allied ports. All of them complied. They were then put in the service of the Allies. Norwegian ships carried half the fuel and one third of all other supplies transported to Britain, at great cost to themselves: almost 4,000 seaman killed, some 6,000 additional casualties and 570 ships lost.
From the Archives: Last Hope Island
Often when we’re traveling, something we see makes me think about posts from the past, books I’ve read, or posts from the past about books I’ve read.
While we were in Norway, that book/post was Lynne Olsen’s Last Hope Island. As soon as we got home, I pulled it off the shelf and have been dipping in and out ever since. It is just as good as I remembered.
As those of you who hang out regularly here on the Margins have probably guessed, I love it when a book turns what I think I know upside down and shakes the change out of its pockets. Last Hope Island: Britain, Occupied Europe and the Brotherhood that Helped Turn the Tide of War is one of those books.
Historian Lynne Olson looks at the seldom-told stories of how European refugees—both governments-in-exile and individual patriots—continued to fight Nazi Germany from a (relatively) safe base of operations in London.
Taken individually, their stories are dramatic, and occasionally tragic. Queen Wilhemina of the Netherlands was outraged when the captain of the British destroyer on which she escaped Amsterdam refused to put her ashore at Zeeland: she had been determined to “be the last man to fall in the last ditch” in defense of her country. (She continued to be outraged throughout the war. Her grandchildren were not allowed to listen to her radio broadcasts because her language was so bad when she talked about the Nazis) A young French banker named Jacques Allier, traveling on a fake passport, smuggled the world’s supply of heavy water from German-occupied Norway to Scotland under the nose of Abwehr operatives—hamstringing Germany’s efforts to develop a nuclear bomb.
Told in combination, these stories challenge traditional accounts of the war. Olson reminds us that French forces guarded British troops during the heroic evacuation at Dunkirk. That Polish pilots played a critical role in the Battle of Britain and in defending London during the Blitz. That Britain’s successes in breaking the Enigma codes rested on the work of the Polish underground, who were able to decipher a high percentage of Enigma intercepts by early 1938. That Churchill was a butthead as well as a great leader.*
In the English-speaking world, Britain and the United States are often portrayed as standing alone against the Nazis in World War II. Last Hope Island reminds us that was never true.
*Okay. She doesn’t say that. But the stories she tells reinforce my growing dislike for the man.