What did education look like in occupied countries during WW2?

Question

For example, Germans occupied Poland, then Ukraine as a part of USSR. And this occupation went on for several years. Did universities keep on working? Schools? How did the curriculum change? I understand that there was no need to change maths. But what about history? Economics? Literature?

Were new textbooks written? Or were those lessons and faculties just abolished? Maybe someone knows concrete examples of how Germans dealt with those issues?

Was it very different in Ukraine and France for example? Maybe Germans thought that Slavs didn't need schools and colleges at all?

Answer 1

Depends on the country. In occupied Norway there were several factors. Many schools became barracs for german soldiers or used for other purposes by the occupiers.

There were attempts to "nazify" the schools (as well as the church and the organizations for various sports), which ended with the arrest and deportation of many teachers. These were replaced by more "suitable" people, which perhaps had less experience as teachers. Some parents took their children out of schools and home-schooled them.

In Oslo students at the University went on strike and demonstrated. This resulted in mass-arrest and the closing of the University. It's worth mentioning, that the resistance movement also flourished among youth in high-school and college age, and that several resistance-groups had universities as their base (for example the Norways technical university in Trondheim).

So this combined -- closed schools, bad teachers, and joining various resistance movement -- made educations (especially higher education, but primary too) somewhat "scetchy" in Norway during the five years the occupation lasted.

Answer 2

In the places that I know, universities were working: in Lvov, Kiev, Kharkov. Certainly universities were working in Paris. Schools were also working. Of course, in Soviet Union, students were not indoctrinated in Communist ideology under the occupation. Whether they were indoctrinated in any other ideology, and how, it is hard to tell: the teachers were the same, after all. Germans did not send teachers to teach in Ukraine. Enrollment to the universities sharply decreased, of course, and many teachers had to leave. Others were fired. In Lvov, the Germans shot 25 university professors soon after the occupation. Many courses were cancelled. But those universities that I mentioned were not completely closed.

I found it difficult to learn more detail about the occupied Soviet Union, because the whole subject of German occupation was somewhat taboo in the Soviet Union. I have not seen textbooks published under occupation, but this very informative article cited by Anixx and translated into English by Google, details how the Germans printed Russian language textbooks, for use in formerly Soviet schools beginning in the school year that started on October 1, 1942.

Answer 3

In the first year of the war in the West, life went on as usual, schools would open for the new school year, Universities opened their gates, heck even football season continued in the Netherlands (and other Western countries) up until 1944. Universities were rapidly closed as the outrage about dismissal and ban of Jewish professors and other legislation caused resistance; they closed in late 1940/early 1941. As for other types of schools, at first the only difference was that the new bosses interfered much more with the ongoings of the schools and were trying to nazify the Dutch youth. However, unlike in Eastern Europe, the population in Western Europe was on a much and much bigger scale concerned about what was happening to their fellow Jewish countrymen, leading to one school in my own home area calling upon their students to all wear yellow stars of David in response to the Jewish inhabitants of their town being forced to. All the students adhered and this was the ONLY example in the West, de facto the whole of occupied Europe, that all the students of a school showed their disgust of the new measures. This incident, as well as the "Dokwerker" strike in Amsterdam of February 1941 (the first ever done during WW2 and the only one of it's kind in the West) and other incidents made it happen that school life was severely interrupted by the end of school year 1940-41 and that schools would close down for increasingly longer periods of time until they were definitively shut down in school year 1944-45.

Answer 4

The rest of pre-war Czechoslovakia (without Sudetenland) was occupied by German forces on March 15, 1939 (creation of Protektorat Bohmen und Mahredn) and at the same time a Slovak state was formed.

In October 1939, while celebrating anniversary of formation of Czechoslovakia (1918), a Czech university student Jan Opletal was shot, and later died. His funeral became a pretext for suppression of Czech university students, many were executed or sent to concentration camps. ALL universities closed. High school remained opened and operational. The German language became compulsory as the second language at schools.

All other "normal life" in an occupied country continued: football league, movies were shot as well as 250.000 Jews who has been living in Czech.