The confiscation of radios in Norway

On 2 August 1941 the German occupation authorities in Norway began an operation that affected almost every Norwegian home: they ordered the surrender of private radio sets. The order was issued by the Higher SS and Police Leader in Norway, SS-Obergruppenführer Wilhelm Rediess, the closest associate of Reich Commissioner Josef Terboven. The ban on owning a radio did not apply only to Germans and to members of Vidkun Quisling’s collaborationist party, Nasjonal Samling (NS). Everyone else had to take their sets to the police or to designated collection points. By the autumn the Germans had gathered some half a million receivers in this way. Norwegian studies give figures ranging from almost 500,000 to more than 538,000 – that is, nearly every set in the country. The purpose was single-minded: to cut Norwegians off from the news broadcast from London.

It is often said that “all civilian receivers” in Norway were confiscated on 2 August. In reality that was only the start of an operation spread over several weeks. On 2 August the collection of radios began in much of the country, mainly in the coastal districts. The legal basis came from an ordinance issued in the second half of August – on 19 August, according to some Norwegian sources – which allowed only NS members and German citizens to own a radio. In the Oslo area sets were taken only during the state of emergency in September, and according to Norwegian chronicles the ban applied throughout the country from 10 September. The first to lose their radios, as early as May 1940, in the opening weeks of the occupation, were Norway’s Jews.

Radio in occupied Norway

In 1940 radio was the most important source of news in Norway. The state broadcaster NRK, which had held a monopoly on broadcasting since 1933, had about half a million registered receivers across the country. The occupier understood its importance from the outset. On 9 April 1940, the day of the German invasion, Quisling announced over the radio that he was taking power. NRK then came under German control and broadcast programmes in line with the views of the occupier and the NS.

The voice of free Norway came from abroad. After Norway’s capitulation in June 1940, King Haakon VII and the government of Johan Nygaardsvold moved to London. Norwegian broadcasts on BBC wavelengths were prepared, in agreement with the government-in-exile, by NRK journalists who had made their way to Britain. From December 1940 they were led by Toralv Øksnevad, the same man who on 9 April had read the first bulletins about the German attack in Oslo. From January 1941 he was the chief newsreader of the BBC’s Norwegian news and, for many of his compatriots, “the voice from London”. The broadcasts opened with the words “Dette er London” (“This is London”). They carried war news, speeches by the King and ministers, and later also coded messages for the resistance. From September 1940 a Norwegian programme was also broadcast by the private short-wave station WRUL in Boston. After the German attack on the USSR in June 1941, Radio Moscow also began daily news in Norwegian.

The occupier saw ever more clearly how great an influence the London broadcasts had. In the spring and summer of 1941 the BBC’s European services called on listeners in the occupied countries to join the “V” campaign. In Norway the letter “V” and the King’s monogram “H7” appeared on walls, and the appeals from London shaped the mood in the country. After the outbreak of war with the Soviet Union the Germans also feared that news from Moscow would revive the Norwegian communists. According to Norwegian historians, Rediess justified the confiscation on grounds of military necessity. The historian Hans Fredrik Dahl suggests that Quisling also pressed for it. The NS leader wanted in this way to deprive the government-in-exile of its most important tool.

The course of the operation

Owners of radio sets had to hand them in by a set deadline at police stations or collection points. The sets were registered and stored in warehouses. Under the ordinance, keeping a radio in defiance of the ban was punishable by up to two years’ penal servitude, and the case could be treated as espionage. An operation on this scale changed daily life across the country. The company Nordisk Radio-Press, publisher of the radio listings weekly Norsk Programblad, went bankrupt because hardly anyone had a radio any more. Norwegian receiver factories such as Tandberg and Radionette were allowed to continue production, but the finished sets could only go into storage to wait for the end of the war.

Despite the ban, many receivers never reached the police. Some owners handed in old, broken sets and hid their good ones in attics, barns, cellars and cavities in the walls. Others assembled simple receivers from parts quietly smuggled out of factories and workshops. Listening to London became a clandestine activity. People listened at night, with the lights off, with someone watching the door, and only among trusted friends. Any such receiver could end with the arrest of an entire family.

Underground radio newspapers

The confiscation had the opposite effect to the one the occupier intended. Cut off from the radio, people wanted news more than ever, so those who had hidden their sets wrote down the BBC’s evening broadcasts and duplicated them. This gave rise to the so-called radio newspapers (radioaviser), the most common form of the Norwegian underground press. In the autumn of 1941 the paper For Konge og Fedreland (“For King and Fatherland”) began to appear in Oslo, chiefly passing on news from London. In Bergen radio papers were published by a group linked to the Stein organisation, which the Germans broke up at the beginning of October 1941, arresting some two hundred people. Another paper, titled London-radio from October 1941, printed shorthand transcripts of the BBC’s Norwegian news. The Norwegian broadcasts from London were in fact prepared with such publishers in mind: news items and poems were read slowly and clearly, with punctuation, so that they could be taken down straight away.

The illegal newssheets grew in number and reach. Many were typed with carbon paper in a few dozen copies that passed from hand to hand. Others were run off on duplicators in print runs of several hundred. The occupier responded with ever harsher penalties. According to Norwegian studies, in November 1941 the Germans shot the first person for listening to the BBC on an illegal receiver and spreading the news. In the autumn of 1942 an ordinance by Terboven introduced the death penalty for publishing illegal newspapers and listening to enemy stations.

Place in the war

The confiscation of radios was part of a hardening of the occupation regime in Norway in the summer and autumn of 1941. The period of relative caution, when the Germans had hoped to win the Norwegians over, had already ended in September 1940, when Terboven removed the King and the government from power and handed the ministries to Quisling’s men. Now the occupier turned to coercion against society as a whole. A few weeks later, on 8 and 9 September 1941, workers in Oslo went on strike when their milk rations were withdrawn. On 10 September Terboven declared a state of emergency in Oslo and neighbouring Aker. A summary court sentenced the trade unionists Viggo Hansteen and Rolf Wickstrøm to death, and they were shot the same day; some three hundred people were arrested within a week. It was during this period that radios were taken in the capital as well.

In the long run the confiscation only strengthened the Norwegians’ bond with London. The scattered radio papers became the nucleus of an underground network that in 1942–1945 passed on news and instructions from the leadership of the Norwegian resistance. Hidden receivers also picked up the BBC’s special messages announcing arms drops and resistance operations. Many arrests began with a hidden radio. So it was in 1942 in the village of Telavåg near Bergen, where the chain of events that ended with the village being burned and its men deported to a concentration camp began with a denunciation of the owner of an illegal radio. After the war Norwegians remembered evenings around the forbidden radio as one of the most important expressions of civil resistance. Loyalty to the King and the government-in-exile survived five years of occupation thanks in part to the people who, in August 1941, did not hand in their radios.