Milk strike

The milk strike ( Norwegian " Melkestreiken " ) was a spontaneous strike of the workers in Oslo in September 1941 during the occupation of Norway by the German Reich.

The strike was triggered initially by the deteriorating food supply under the German occupation. When, on Monday the 8th September 1941 by then distributed in the factories to the workers failed to milk replacement, the workers of many farms popped home.

On September 9, the day after, about 25,000 workers went on strike in Oslo. About a month before, the German administrator in Norway, Josef Terboven empire, announced that strikes to the state of emergency and the application of martial law would lead.

Given the great strike hit the German occupying power to quickly and arrested the chairman of the local union Rolf Wickstrøm and the lawyer ( and de facto head of the Norwegian trade unions) Harald Viggo Hansteen. Both were sentenced to death and executed exemplified on September 10, 1941. Ludvik Buland, Josef Larsson and Harry Vestli were also sentenced to death, but this death sentences were commuted to life imprisonment. Buland and Vestli, however, came later in German captivity to death after they had been deported.

For the AFL (now Landsorganisasjonen i Norge ) was the milk strike the occasion to make his legal guide go into the ground, whereupon the officially still existing trade union federation was taken over by the Norwegian fascist Nasjonal Samling. Among other things, the acting chairman Jens Tangen was deposed and replaced by the NS - man Odd Fossum.