Cruel World (50 page)

While these measures were fine for retrieving those who had a link, no matter how tenuous, with the Reich proper, the Reichskommissars of each of the “Nordic” occupied lands had their own ideas about how to win over the other millions of young people in their power. Things did not start out well for them in Norway or Holland. The day the Germans had taken Oslo, Vidkun Quisling, leader of the 4,000 members of the Nasjonal Samling, the tiny Norwegian Nazi Party, had declared himself Prime Minister. This was astonishing to all, not only because the King and government were still in the country and had not surrendered, but also because Quisling, who had spent considerable time ingratiating himself in Berlin, had never managed to get himself or any member of his party elected to the Norwegian Parliament. His lack of support immediately became clear to the Germans, and after six days he was removed from office. To make things even worse, resistance to the Germans continued for two more months, during which time Quisling’s efforts and person were ridiculed in what remained of the Norwegian press and future resistance to him guaranteed.

At the fall of Norway the King and government fled to England and Hitler appointed Joseph Terboven, the tough former Gauleiter of Essen, as Reichskommissar. Terboven moved quickly to get control. By the end of the summer of 1940 the only legal political party was the Nasjonal Samling, whose members were appointed to fill most high government posts. The unpopular Quisling was not yet one of them. His role for the time being would be to build up his party behind the scenes. In this he had some success: by 1942 there were 40,000 members, and on February 1, Quisling was allowed to form a government.
²⁵

By this time the Quisling government’s Minister for Education was deeply involved in trying to bring the universities and schools into line.
Portraits of Quisling were hung in the classrooms, German replaced English as the second language, and teachers were ordered to teach Nazi theory and give the Nazi salute upon entering their classrooms.
²⁶
This they blatantly ignored. Their students joined in the fun. When all the schoolchildren of Oslo were ordered to go to a Hitler Youth exhibition, they obeyed, but kept their eyes on the ground as they ran through.
²⁷
Pro-Norwegian graffiti were everywhere. Children cheered when British planes flew over, and adorned themselves with a series of provocative badges and symbols that, as soon as one was forbidden, they replaced with another. First came flags, then paper clips symbolizing solidarity. Red pixie hats combined with other white and blue garments were popular. When the red hats began to be confiscated from the children’s heads, 75 percent of the children switched to blue ones. Less obvious defiance came in the form of a red-tipped match worn on one’s hat, which stood for “flaming hatred.”
²⁸

Outraged by the situation in the schools, Quisling ordered obligatory membership for teachers in a “Teachers’ Front,” described by a pro-Quisling newspaper as “a strait jacket for all those who are unwilling to do their duty to the State and to Norwegian Youth,” which did nothing to encourage participation. Quisling’s effort was, at any rate, far too late. The teachers, like many other professions, had long since set up an underground communication system. Following instructions sent through this grapevine, 12,000 of Norway’s teachers refused in writing to put on the “strait jacket.” A hundred thousand parents supported them. Thirteen hundred teachers were arrested, and nearly half were sent through a series of brutal camps to the Arctic. The final camp at Kirkenes was reached after a ghastly boat journey in freezing conditions. There, considerably better treated by the Wehrmacht, the teachers would spend six months. Meanwhile, their colleagues not only did not surrender, but also wrote messages to their pupils praising them for their courage and exhorting them to believe in liberation and to work hard, as “laziness is desertion.”
²⁹
After two months of this, Quisling relented and the schools reopened, unchanged.

Efforts to centralize sports and youth activities were no more successful. The young simply boycotted the Nazi competitions. A Norwegian version of the Hitler Youth, theoretically obligatory for every child between ten and eighteen, seems not to have gotten very far either, due to widespread resistance and a blasting by the Church hierarchy, who declared unacceptable “the forced mobilization of all children from the age of nine or ten upwards and their subjection to influences which innumerable parents must regard as intolerable in regard to the obligations laid on them by their conscience.”
³⁰

Reichskommissar Arthur Seyss-Inquart of the conquered Netherlands sees off Dutch children being sent to summer camps and indoctrination in Germany
.
(photo credit 10.1)

Farther south, in the Netherlands, similar events were taking place, but at a different pace. Reichskommissar Seyss-Inquart was equally interested in control, but wary of the Dutch Nazi Party, or NSB, which was far more established than that of Norway. Like Quisling, its leader, A. A. Mussert, dreamt of having his own Nazi nation independent of German control. This was not at all what the Reich Nazis had in mind. They envisioned a completely restructured Netherlands, which, like Austria, would be annexed to Germany.
³¹
Seyss-Inquart realized that such a drastic change would not be popular so soon after the defeat of the Duitch, while surrender discussions were still in progress. His policy, therefore, would be one of gradual Nazification and circumvention of Muissert and his cronies.

To the citizens of Holland, whose Queen and government had also fled to England, it seemed important to try to maintain their usual lives. Four days after the invasion, before the surrender was fìrm, school authorities in the northern province of Groningen had ordered their schools to keep functioning as “normally as possible.” No one was excused from attendance. They appealed to both students and teachers to stay off the streets, avoid contact with the military, and “speak as little as possible” about “the circvmistances in which we find omselves.” They were also asked to remain
calm and support one another in the realization of “the responsibility that everyone has for a loyal attitude in the face of the occupying power.”
³²

As usual, things did not seem too bad at the beginning. The schools soon reopened, and in a grand gesture, whose purpose, he declared, was to thank the Dutch for taking care of Austrian children after World War I, Seyss-Inquart arranged for 6,000 Dutch children to go to summer camps in Austria.
³³
This was done with much fanfare and photo opportunities of the Reichskommissar seeing off trainloads of smiling children waving swastika flags.

Reality soon set in. One teacher noticed that most of the eight-year-olds in her class, when assigned compositions, wrote quite despairingly about the invasion. On the playground the little ones played war games and took “prisoners.” Things were worse in the fall, when several high schools had to be closed for anti-German demonstrations; in a parochial school in The Hague the following song was heard:

It also now appeared that education was not an area in which Seyss-Inquart wanted to go all that slowly. School libraries had been purged in the summer of 1940 and anti-German passages had to be excised immediately from textbooks while new editions were awaited; these would emphasize only
Volkisch
aspects of Dutch history such as the migration of Germanic tribes into Holland. Questions on Dutch national history were forbidden on examinations. The teaching of English and French were subordinated to German. Students were also warned not to show any outward signs of loyalty to the Dutch royal house.

Patriotic teachers took full advantage of the page- and paragraph-excising sessions, during which the banished passages became more memorable by their very exclusion. The absurdity of some of the cuts was happily emphasized: in one popular book a scene in which the hero tries to jump over a stream, but falls in instead, had to be excised because it was considered to be a negative view of Hitler’s plan to invade England. Children drew cartoons in the margins to remind them of what had once been there. One class, ordered to get rid of its first-year Greek text, written by a
Jewish classicist, simply cut out or blacked out the author’s name—a girl who covered hers up with a strip of orange paper, a reference to the Dutch royal House of Orange, was not criticized by the teacher. Fifty years later it was the only author’s name the girl still remembered.
³⁵

To counter all this, a pro-German, but not NSB, official had been put in charge of education and was required to report to a German supervisor who was a member of the SS. This gentleman was itching to eliminate the denominational school systems in Holland, but was restrained by Seyss-Inquart, who was all too aware of the very strong Catholic and Protestant allegiances in the Netherlands. There were other methods of control, however. In September 1940, the Germans declared that they had the right to approve the appointment or firing of teachers in all types of schools. The measure was gradually tightened so that the Nazis could, when necessary, dissolve recalcitrant school boards and replace them with more cooperative ones. The Dutch teacher corps, traditionally divided between Protestant, Catholic, and state schools, did not defy the Nazis as openly or with as much unity as the Norwegians had, but their resistance was strong. In this many of the officials of the Ministry of Education were tacitly complicit.

In early 1942, little progress having been made, strict Nazi guidelines were promulgated to “put an end to irregularities.” Any “attitude other than decisively positive cooperation in the formation of our youth” was not permissible. All school inspectors were required to confirm in writing that they did not have any problem supporting the guidelines. One brave soul replied that he saw no reason for such a confirmation, since the guidelines “left no freedom of choice: they are an order,” and that he was perfectly aware of the consequences of not obeying them. This inspector was fired a few months later.
³⁶

By the summer of 1943, teachers and school administrators were “resigning” and being arrested with increasing frequency.
³⁷
The circumstances under which they were forced to leave were often not pretty, depending as they did on denunciations, the corrupt enlistment of children, and the lowest aspects of human pride and ambition, as the following unedifying case, which could have come from any Nazi-controlled country, demonstrates.

On July 9, 1943, a school inspector from Heerlen, in the southern province of Limburg, reported on an ongoing investigation into the actions of two teachers, Mssrs Vleugels and Vermeulen, at a Catholic boys school that provided two years of continuing instruction for working-class children after the six elementary years. The inspector complained that the
board of the school seemed not to want to talk to him, though both it and the teachers knew perfectly well what the problem was. On July 7 the inspector had visited the school and found that both teachers in question were doing nothing to make clear to the students, aged twelve to fourteen, what the great problems being dealt with in Europe were, and were not promoting better relations between the Dutch and Germans. Indeed, opined the inspector, that was exactly why Vleugels and Vermeulen seemed to have been appointed in the first place. The inspector had then taken the trouble to give a little history lesson to the classes of the teachers in question, during which he had emphasized the fact that the Netherlands had had continuing wars with the British in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, while their relations with Germany had always been good. In the course of the lessons, it had become clear that the children not only knew nothing of these things, but that they were also very anti-German. The boys were also unable to name all the Germanic peoples and had no knowledge of economic relations between Germany and Holland, nor of the fact that what was good for Germany was good for the Netherlands. The inspector was sure that the suspect teachers had never taught history this way and that they never would. He felt that they were unfit to teach in the school and that their unfitness sprang from their anti-German and anti–National Socialist mentality, which also led him to question their loyalty.

But these ideological problems were not the whole story. The inspector also had a written declaration on the subject from “the only National Socialist student in the class,” and a fellow teacher, Mr. Ramecker, had said that both of them had often made anti-German remarks to school personnel. Indeed, Ramecker had helpfully written down all such remarks in a little notebook, which had now disappeared. Ramecker suspected the two teachers of stealing it. This was confirmed by the fact that some of the students had noticed Vermeulen searching Ramecker’s desk, and had seen the notebook in his hands. Now, the suspect two were avoiding Ramecker, “who is pro-German.” Getting personal, the inspector then went on to say that “characteristic of the mentality of Mr. Vermeulen, in addition to the things that you already know about him, is the fact that, last year, when I already was an inspector, he turned his back on me when we met at the station.” In a pompous conclusion, he continued that he did not wish to force the appointment of a particular teacher, but only to do his duty to see that the children were entrusted to teachers who would educate them in “a positive way.”
³⁸
The accused teachers had good reason to be afraid: dismissal could mean deportation to a concentration or forced labor camp and loss of all support for their families.