Axel Stang: Youth Leader of NS Ungdomsfylking and Head of the Ministry of Labor and Sport

• SPEECHES OF AXEL STANG

Background

Stang grew up in Rømskog in Østfold, where he took his art degree at Frogner gymnasium in 1922. Together with his older brother Thomas, in the 1930s he ran the family's large properties in Aurskog, Nes and Sør- Odal, where he developed new production methods in agriculture and otherwise showed great care for the forestry and farming families in the district.

Nasjonal Samling & Second World War

Together with a couple of comrades from his high school years, Stang had already joined Nasjonal Samling (NS), a party with which his father and brother also sympathized, in the founding year 1933. He did not hold office beyond a short-term work as a circuit manager in Glåmdalen in 1935–1936. He became a member of the party's council on 5 February 1939, and became one of Josef Terboven's commissary ministers on 25 September 1940, as head of the Ministry of Labor and Sports until 1 February 1942.

He then continued as a minister in the same ministry under Vidkun Quisling's second government until the end of the war. In addition, he was the leader of NS Ungdomsfylking, with the title "youth leader".

Stang's time as minister became a crescendo of conflicts. The rifts that immediately arose between the ministry and sports already led in the autumn of 1940 to a break and a war-long boycott on the part of sports (see sports front). It got worse when the ministry's German advisor in 1942 pushed through a law on compulsory youth service in the NS on the lines of the Hitler Youth in Germany. Stang believed that by applying the law lightly, he would make the parents realize that NS service was in the children's best interests. Instead, it led to the most extensive wave of civil resistance in Norway ever.

As a member of the government, Stang, like Jonas Lie and Sverre Riisnæs, served on the Eastern Front during the Second World War. There he participated for six to seven weeks in the summer of 1941 in SS-Kampfgruppe "Nord" at the Salla front during the Finnish Continuation War. He was awarded the Iron Cross 2nd class.

Axel Stang married in 1942 Helene Forseth Fretheim (1917–2008), daughter of NS minister Thorstein Fretheim.

After the war

During the treason settlement after the war, Stang was sentenced to lifelong forced labor in 1946. When the appeal was before the Supreme Court, a minority of three judges, including his colleague Emil Stang, voted for the death penalty. He also received a compensation claim of two million kroner.

Stang was released from prison in 1956 and moved with his family to Rømskog. He died in 1974.