Conquered Yet Unconquerable: Norwegian Resistance to Nazi Tyranny

On Tuesday, April 9, 1940, Nazi Germany launched an invasion of neutral Norway. Hitler hoped to prevent the British from gaining access to the 62,000-mile Norwegian coastline, from which the Germans could launch a future air attack against Britain. The German invasion was a “paralyzing, almost unreal nightmare,” recalled Tore Gjelsvik, who was a college student in Oslo when the occupation began. The Nazis seized the coastal towns of Bergen, Trondheim, and Narvik. Unlike Denmark, however, which capitulated to Hitler within a few hours, Norway heroically fought back. With help from British, French, and Polish forces, the Norwegians inflicted heavy casualties. Most importantly, Norwegian artillery at the Oscarsborg fortress sank the Nazi flagship, Blücher, allowing King Haakon VII and his government to flee Oslo by train just one hour before Nazi troops arrived. Nevertheless, the Germans soon overwhelmed the Allied forces. On June 7, the Royal Family and the Storting (Norway’s parliament) fled to London and set up a government-in-exile. Reichskommissar Joseph Terboven took power and outlawed all political parties except the pro-Nazi Nasjonal Samling, led by Vidkun Quisling (whose surname has become synonymous with traitor). Norway had been defeated. 

The primary goal of Nazi occupation was ideological hegemony. The Nazis believed that the “Nordic” Norwegians were racially equal to Germans. Hitler himself hoped to establish a model “Aryan” society in Scandinavia. All that the Nazis needed to do was compel the people of Norway “to adopt National Socialism.” Norwegians would have none of it. While civilians organized an armed resistance group called Milorg with 40,000 men in its ranks by 1945, the majority of civilian protest against the Germans was “by nonviolent means.” Teachers refused to indoctrinate their students with Nazi propaganda or join the pro-Nazi teacher league. Parents protested the induction of their children into the Nazi youth organization. Priests refused to preach National Socialism, a worldview (Weltanschauung) deeply rooted in a neo-pagan idolization of the Aryan race and a wholesale repudiation of orthodox Christianity, in their parishes. This civil resistance demonstrated the strength of a people committed to the Christian and democratic ideals of their independent country. 

A Valiant King

The courageous leadership of King Haakon VII, in spite of his exile, spearheaded Norwegian national resistance. His Majesty’s “unyielding attitude during the [Nazi] invasion,” wrote Gjelsvik, “won him the respect and admiration of his countrymen.” Soon after leaving Oslo, the Storting convened at Elverum (eighty-seven miles to the north), where they granted the King emergency authority. Despite German demands, the King valiantly refused to appoint Vidkun Quisling as prime minister. “For my part I cannot accept the German demands,” he said in a broadcast speech on April 10. “It would conflict with all that I have considered to be my duty as King of Norway since I came to this country nearly thirty-five years ago.” Haakon made clear that he would rather abdicate his throne than turn against his people.

The King’s actions were rooted in his pledge to uphold the Norwegian constitution. During the turbulence of the Napoleonic Wars, Norway sought to gain independence from Denmark, a kingdom allied with Napoleon. On May 17 1814, the Norwegian national assembly drew up a Constitution at Eidsvoll, which proscribed a  “limited and hereditary monarchy” as the country’s form of government. Although Denmark ceded Norway to Sweden at the Treaty of Kiel, Norway retained the 1814 constitution and the local authority of the Storting. When Norway dissolved the union with Sweden on June 7 1905, the Storting invited Prince Carl of Denmark to become king of Norway. Prince Carl, however, promised that he would only serve if the Norwegian people wanted him. He supported the demands of Norwegian republicans for a referendum, epitomizing the Norwegian democratic spirit. In November of 1905, seventy-eight percent of Norwegian voters chose a constitutional monarchy in favor of a republic.

Prince Carl took the name Haakon, after the heroic kings of medieval Norway, and publicly swore to defend the Norwegian constitution at his coronation. “I promise and swear that I will govern the Kingdom of Norway in accordance with its Constitution and Laws,” Haakon stated at Nidaros Cathedral in Trondheim, “so help me God, the Almighty and Omniscient.” From the beginning of his reign in 1905, Haakon committed himself to rule as a constitutional monarch. The 1814 constitution specified that Norway would preserve “our Christian and humanistic heritage” and “ensure democracy, a state based on the rule of law and human rights.” It was these ideals which the King would eventually defend against Nazi totalitarianism.

Throughout the war, even while in exile, King Haakon continued to lead his country. His broadcast speeches in London, which highlighted the evils of Nazi ideology and the bravery of Norwegians, also inspired confidence. “The Axis Powers are fighting against all principles of Christianity,” he said on New Year’s Day 1943, and “the Norwegian people are conducting a bitter fight against an enemy, who is behaving with a cruelty and brutality without parallel in world history.” The monogram H7 (for Haakon VII) became the central sign of the resistance movement. Norwegians also wore red woolen hats and pinned paper clips to their coat lapels to show loyalty to the King. One circular letter spread around Norway during the resistance movement contained the “ten commandments of Norwegians.” The first commandment was “Thou shalt obey King Haakon whom thou thyself hast elected” and the tenth was “God save the King and the Fatherland.” 

It is unlikely that a republican government, which Norwegians nearly chose in 1905 and which some continue to advocate for, would have motivated similar resistance. Choosing a constitutional monarchy gave Norwegians a leader who intentionally placed himself above partisan politics, allowing him to represent all Norwegians as they faced their greatest crisis. The ideals of independent Norway, as expressed in the Eidsvoll constitution, were not merely abstract principles, but embodied realities in King Haakon VII. This King refused to seize power or control his people but nevertheless led regally when his beloved country was threatened.

Courageous Churchmen

The gallant actions of the Church of Norway were another fundamental element of Norwegian civil resistance. Initially, the church sought to cooperate with Nazi authorities, as many Protestant churches in Germany did (with the notable exception of the Confessing Church, lead by Dietrich Bonhoeffer). However, Norway’s bishops quickly realized that Nazi ideology was antithetical to Christianity and that the German’s occupying forces “did not intend to respect elementary human rights.” Spearheaded by Bishop Eivind Berggrav of Oslo, the Church of Norway formulated a robust theology of political resistance. Like the apostles of the early church, Norwegian bishops and priests chose to “obey God rather than men.” In doing so, they encouraged the defiance of the Norwegian people, ninety-six percent of whom were members of the state church.

As a Lutheran church, the Church of Norway rooted its actions in the historic confessions of the sixteenth century Reformation as she responded to “Nazi paganism.” The Augsburg Confession of 1530, the primary Lutheran statement of faith, noted that “lawful civil ordinances are good works of God” (emphasis added). However, as the Church of Norway emphasized, the unjust occupation of free Norway by the anti-Christian Nazis was not a lawful civil ordinance. This thinking accorded with the Magdeburg Confession of 1550, another important Lutheran statement of faith. After the defeat of the Lutheran Schmalkaldic League at the Battle of Mühlberg in 1547, the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, sought to reimpose obedience to the Pope upon the Lutheran territories of Germany. The confessors in Magdeburg dissented. They noted that although civil rulers normally required obedience, tyrannical actions of the state against natural law and Christian conscience required orderly resistance by “lesser magistrates” and by the people. The Norwegian bishops likewise emphasized that “the obligation to obey is restricted only to a just state.”

Berggrav also appealed to the writings of Martin Luther, whose ideas regarding the relationship between church and state Berggrav believed had been deeply misunderstood. Some argued that Luther’s thinking about God’s “two realms” or “two kingdoms” (the church and the government) lead to the capitulation of German Protestants to Hitler and even contributed to the erasure of the horrors of the Holocaust. The Swiss theologian and Confessing Church leader Karl Barth said in 1939 that this teaching “lies like a cloud over the ecclesiastical thinking and action of more or less every course taken by the German Church.” Historian William L. Shrier, on page 236 of his massive tome, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, claimed that Luther’s teaching demanded “absolute obedience to political authority” and undergirded the “servile” acquiescence of Protestant clergy to both Prussian and Nazi authorities. Bishop Berggrav sought to contradict this narrative and show that Luther’s doctrine of the two realms supported a strong resistance movement in Norway. 

In the spring of 1941, the good bishop traveled across his country, “from Trøndelag to Vestfold,” delivering a lecture entitled “When The Driver Is Out Of His Mind: Luther On the Duty of Disobedience.” Berggrav noted that both realms had specified callings from God. The duty of the state is to uphold God’s moral law and protect the innocent. The primary role of the church is to preach the gospel of the Lord Jesus’ death and resurrection and to administer the sacraments. However, Luther noted that both realms should be “united in the common task” of “promoting love,” virtue and human flourishing. When the state failed in her responsibilities or became, as Berggrav argued in the case of the Nazis, a servant of Satan himself, the Christian church must disobey. Bishop Beggraav cited Luther’s admonition that “when [rulers] want to invade the spiritual realm and take consciences captive – the realm where God alone wants to reign – then one is not to obey them at all.” Undermining the freedom of conscience is what the Church of Norway knew the Nazi authorities were doing. “In the fight against Nazism,” Berggrav wrote, Luther “was a magnificent weapon-arsenal for our church.” 

Eivind Berggrav’s thoughtful theological justification for the Norwegian Church’s resistance manifested itself practically. In February 1941, the Norwegian bishops published “The Pastoral Letter to Our Congregations from the Bishops of the Church of Norway.” In it, Berggrav and the other bishops appealed to the Augsburg Confession in protest against the Nazis’ tyrannical violation of the “clergy’s obligation to secrecy in questions of pastoral care.” Although the Reichskommisar Terboven tried to confiscate the letter, many parish priests read it to their congregations anyway. In April 1941, the Nazi-controlled church department forbade clergymen from furthering “political divisions,” which of course meant that priests could not criticize Nazism. Many disobeyed and 130 were subsequently arrested. In February 1942, when Vidkun Quisling was officially installed as leader of Norway in a “gaudy Wagnerian ceremony” in Trondheim’s Nidaros Cathedral, dean Arne Fjellbu refused to preach at that service. When Fjellbu preached at another service later that afternoon, the police barred the people of Trondheim from entering the Cathedral. A lone voice rose up to sing Martin Luther’s battle hymn, “A Mighty Fortress is Our God.” Soon the entire crowd began chanting “the words the [Nazi] conquerers learned to hate: And were the world with devils filled/ All watching to devour us,/ Our souls to fear we need not yield,/They cannot overpower us.” Before a small crowd in the Cathedral, Fjellbu preached on the words of St. Peter to Jesus, “we have forsaken all, and followed thee.” 

The leaders of the Church of Norway were willing to do just that. That same month, the bishops resigned from their state positions. Berggrav was also arrested in April 1942 and put in solitary confinement in his remote cabin for three years. He was allowed no visitors and his Nazi guards were regularly changed lest “his persuasive Christianity corrupt them.” A 1944 TIME Magazine story, published on Christmas Day, described the imprisoned Berggrav as “a man who has done as much as any other to keep Christian hope alight in the darkness of occupied Europe.” His fellow clergymen follow the bishop’s example. On Easter Sunday 1942, over ninety percent of parish priests resigned from their state roles, though not from their divine calling as pastors of the Christian church. From their pulpits, they read from a document compiled by the bishops, “The Foundation of the Church,” which noted that it was “intolerable for the church that any ruler should, for political or worldly reasons, not only deny an ordained man his office, but his commission to the service of Word and sacrament.”

The Church of Norway also opposed the Nazi maltreatment of Jews. At the time about 2,000 of Jews lived in Norway during the German occupation. The synagogues of Oslo and Trondheim had flourished since 1851, when the ban on Jews entering Norway was finally lifted, a ban sadly specified by the 1814 Eidsvoll constitution. In 1942, Quisling stated that “a Jew is not a Norwegian, nor a European.” The Nazi occupiers soon began arresting Jews in Harstad, Narvik and Tromsø and killing them in Trondheim. Bishop Berggrav himself staunchly opposed these persecutions. When the Church Department planned to forbid marriages between Norwegians and ethnic Jews or Norwegians and Sámi people, Berggrav argued against that the racist nazi “opinion that Jews and [Sámi] were inferior.” Berggrav understood that such an opinion, like Nazi ideology in general, was an assault on the sacrament of Holy Baptism (a sacrament espescially cherished by Lutherans), which recognizes no distinction between Jew and Gentile and makes “all one in Christ Jesus.”

Unfortunately, a paragraph explicitly stating such an opinion was tragically edited out of the final draft of “The Foundation of the Church.” However, a November 1942 document “The Letter to the Hebrews,” composed by Oslo University professor Ole Hallesby (who took an important leadership role in the church following Berggrav’s arrest), “urged Quisling to stop the persecution of [Jews] in Norway.” Another church protest document stated that the church must “admonish the earthly authorities and say in the name of Jesus Christ: halt the persecution of the Jews.” These protests were unsuccessful. The church could not prevent seven hundred and seventy-four Norwegian Jews from being sent to Auschwitz, only thirty-four of whom survived. 

Nevertheless, the church gave invaluable support to the protests of Norwegian parents and teachers against Nazi totalitarianism. Quisling and his single-party-state hoped to force Norwegians into ideological conformity with the Nazi worldview. In February 1942, Quisling imposed the “Law of National Youth Service,” which stated that all children ages ten to eighteen must join the Nasjonal Samlings Ungdomsfylking (National Union Youth Movement, an equivalent of the Hitler Youth). Norwegian parents, however, resisted strenuously. More than 200,000 of them (around sixty to seventy percent of all parents) sent protest letters with their full names and addresses, refusing to allow their children to be indoctrinated into the lies of National Socialism. The Church backed them in their efforts, declaring that “the relationship between parents and children” is “an order of creation which is inviolable and sacred for all homes.” The parents’ campaign worked. No Norwegian children were ever forced into the Nazi youth movement. These parents were unconquerable. 

Faithful Teachers

The Quisling government, through the Minister for Church and Educational Affairs, Ragnar Skancke, placed similar pressure on Norway’s teachers, forcing them to join a pro-Nazi organization, teach Nazi propaganda in their classrooms and support the Nazi youth league. “They knew that the purpose was to make good Nazis out of the children,” recalled Kjell Arne Norum, the son of a Norwegian teacher, Kaare Norum, in a 2019 documentary The Teacher’s Protest. “Teachers,” he said, “do not handle machines or plants but children.” Recognizing this, 12,000 out of 14,000 Norwegian teachers refused to obey Skancke, sending in letters that stated “I find myself unable to take part in the bringing up of Norwegian youth according to the line prescribed for youth service by the NS Youth Company” and “I will be faithful to my calling as a teacher and to my conscience.” 

In resisting, the teachers placed their sacred vocation above their personal safety. Indeed, over one thousand teachers were sent to concentration and labor camps. One group was sent to Kirkenes, in the Norwegian arctic circle, where they were housed in a “a cold leaky stable with an earthen floor.” While some of the teachers capitulated, others continued to refuse. The church stood by them, arguing that the state had no right to force schools to teach “a view of life which is estranged from the Christian faith” because most Norwegian parents “had baptized their children and promised to give them a Christian upbringing.” After a story about the treatment of teachers in labor camps was released by Swedish reporters who “forwarded” the news to the “Legation in Stockholm,” many of the remaining teachers were released. Like the failure of the Nazi youth league, no teacher was ever forced to teach Nazi curriculum in their classroom. Their resistance worked. As one Norwegian historian summarized, “Quisling had failed.”

In Closing

The resistance movement in Norway showed that Norwegians were united by a devotion to the honorable values of their constitution. When His Majesty King Haakon VII returned to Norway from London on June 7, 1945, five years to the day since the Royal Family had fled, he was received with jubilation, the “storm of war” having, at long last, passed. However, June 7 was also the date on which Norway became independent in 1905. “That we should return on the anniversary of the day when Norwegians regained their freedom and independence is for me a sign that we shall succeed in carrying out our future tasks to the benefit of our country,” Haakon noted. In 2020, Haakon’s grandson and the current monarch, His Majesty King Harald V, recalled that “75 years have passed since one of the happiest days in the history of our country: We could finally rejoice that we had regained our freedom after five grueling years of war.” It was only the bold resistance of countless Norwegians, however, which preserved such freedom. Inspired by the leadership of their King and their Lutheran church, these bold parents, priests and teachers secured the preservation of a free and democratic Norway, a country which Norwegians still celebrate every year. 

As Winston Churchill said before the Battle of Britain, World World II as a whole was a struggle to save the best of European civilization, despite its numerous flaws, from “the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.” The Norwegian people embodied that struggle. “If there is anyone who still wonders why this war is being fought,” said Franklin Delano Roosevelt in September 1942, “let him look to Norway … conquered yet unconquerable.”