[b]20: THE CONQUEST OF DENMARK AND NORWAY[/b]

 

 

THE INNOCENT-SOUNDING code name for the latest plan of German aggression was Weseruebung, or "Weser Exercise." Its origins and development were unique, quite unlike those for unprovoked attack that have filled so large a part of this narrative. It was not the brain child of Hitler, as were all the others, but of an ambitious admiral and a muddled Nazi party hack. It was the only act of German military aggression in which the German Navy played the decisive role. It was also the only one for which OKW did the planning and co-ordinating of the three armed services. In fact, the Army High Command and its General Staff were not even consulted, much to their annoyance, and Goering was not brought into the picture until the last moment -- a slight that infuriated the corpulent chief of the Luftwaffe.

 

The German Navy had long had its eyes on the north. Germany had no direct access to the wide ocean, a geographical fact which had been imprinted on the minds of its naval officers during the First World War. A tight British net across the narrow North Sea, from the Shetland Islands to the coast of Norway, maintained by a mine barrage and a patrol of ships, had bottled up the powerful Imperial Navy, seriously hampered the attempts of U-boats to break out into the North Atlantic, and kept German merchant shipping off the seas. The German High Seas Fleet never reached the high seas. The British naval blockade stifled Imperial Germany in the first war. Between the wars the handful of German naval officers who commanded the country's modestly sized Navy pondered this experience and this geographical fact and came to the conclusion that in any future war with Britain, Germany must try to gain bases in Norway, which would break the British blockade line across the North Sea, open up the broad ocean to German surface and undersea vessels and indeed offer an opportunity for the Reich to reverse the tables and mount an effective blockade of the British Isles.

 

It was not surprising, then, that at the outbreak of war in 1939 Admiral Rolf Carls, the third-ranking officer in the German Navy and a forceful personality, should start peppering Admiral Raeder, as the latter noted in his diary and testified at Nuremberg, with letters suggesting "the importance of an occupation of the Norwegian coast by Germany." [1] Raeder needed little urging and on October 3, at the end of the Polish campaign, sent a confidential questionnaire to the Naval War Staff asking it to ascertain the possibility of gaining "bases in Norway under the combined pressure of Russia and Germany." Ribbentrop was consulted about Moscow's attitude and replied that "far-reaching support may be expected" from that source. Raeder told his staff that Hitler must be informed as soon as possible about the "possibilities." [2]

 

On October 10, in the course of a lengthy report to the Fuehrer on naval operations, Raeder suggested the importance of obtaining naval bases in Norway, if necessary with the help of Russia. This -- so far as the confidential records show -- was the first time the Navy had directly called the matter to the attention of Hitler. Raeder says the Leader "saw at once the significance of the Norwegian problem." He asked him to leave his notes on the subject and promised to give the question some thought. But at the moment the Nazi warlord was preoccupied with launching his attack in the West and with overcoming the hesitations of his generals. [i] Norway apparently slipped out of his mind. [3]

 

But it came back in two months -- for three reasons.

 

One was the advent of winter. Germany's very existence depended upon the import of iron ore from Sweden. For the first war year the Germans were counting on eleven million tons of it out of a total annual consumption of fifteen million tons. During the warm-weather months this ore was transported from northern Sweden down the Gulf of Bothnia and across the Baltic to Germany, and presented no problem even in wartime, since the Baltic was effectively barred to British submarines and surface ships. But in the wintertime this shipping lane could not be used because of thick ice. During the cold months the Swedish ore had to be shipped by rail to the nearby Norwegian port of Narvik and brought down the Norwegian coast by ship to Germany. For almost the entire journey German ore vessels could sail within Norway's territorial waters and thereby escape destruction by British naval vessels and bombers.

 

Thus, as Hitler at first pointed out to the Navy, a neutral Norway had its advantages. It enabled Germany to obtain its lifeblood of iron ore without interference from Britain.

 

In London, Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, perceived this at once and in the very first weeks of the war attempted to persuade the cabinet to allow him to lay mines in Norwegian territorial waters in order to stop the German iron traffic. But Chamberlain and Halifax were most reluctant to violate Norwegian neutrality, and the proposal was for the time being dropped. [4]

 

Russia's attack on Finland on November 30, 1939, radically changed the situation in Scandinavia, immensely increasing its strategic importance to both the Western Allies and Germany. France and Britain began to organize an expeditionary force in Scotland to be sent to the aid of the gallant Finns, who, defying all predictions, held out stubbornly against the onslaughts of the Red Army. But it could reach Finland only through Norway and Sweden, and the Germans at once saw that if Allied troops were granted, or took, transit across the northern part of the two Scandinavian lands enough of them would remain, on the excuse of maintaining communications, to completely cut off Germany's supply of Swedish iron ore. [ii] Moreover, the Western Allies would outflank the Reich on the north. Admiral Raeder was not backward in reminding Hitler of these threats.

 

The chief of the German Navy had now found in Norway itself a valuable ally for his designs in the person of Major Vidkun Abraham Lauritz Quisling, whose name would soon become a synonym in almost all languages for a traitor.

 

[b]THE EMERGENCE OF VIDKUN QUISLING[/b]

 

Quisling had begun life honorably enough. Born in 1887 of peasant stock, he had graduated first in his class at the Norwegian Military Academy and while still in his twenties had been sent to Petro grad as military attache. For his services in looking after British interests after diplomatic relations were broken with the Bolshevik government, Great Britain awarded him the C.B.E. At this time he was both pro-British and pro- Bolshevik. He remained in Soviet Russia for some time as assistant to Fridtjof Nansen, the great Norwegian explorer and humanitarian, in Russian relief work.

 

So impressed had the young Norwegian Army officer been by the success of the Communists in Russia that when he returned to Oslo he offered his services to the Labor Party, which at that time was a member of the Comintern. He proposed that he establish a "Red Guard," but the Labor Party was suspicious of him and his project and turned him down. He then veered to the opposite extreme. After serving as Minister of Defense from 1931 to 1933, he founded in May of the latter year a fascist party called Nasjonal Samling -- National Union -- appropriating the ideology and tactics of the Nazis, who had just come to power in Germany. But Nazism did not thrive in the fertile democratic soil of Norway. Quisling was unable even to get himself elected to Parliament. Defeated at the polls by his own people, he turned to Nazi Germany.

 

There he established contact with Alfred Rosenberg, the befuddled official philosopher of the Nazi movement, among whose jobs was that of chief pf the party's Office for Foreign Affairs. This Baltic dolt, one of Hitler's earliest mentors, thought he saw possibilities in the Norwegian officer, for one of Rosenberg's pet fantasies was the establishment of a great Nordic Empire from which the Jews and other "impure" races would be excluded and which eventually would dominate the world under Nazi German leadership. From 1933 on, he kept in touch with Quisling and heaped on him his nonsensical philosophy and propaganda.

 

In June 1939, as the war clouds gathered over Europe, Quisling took the occasion of his attendance at a convention of the Nordic Society at Luebeck to ask Rosenberg for something more than ideological support. According to the latter's confidential reports, which were produced at Nuremberg, Quisling warned Rosenberg of the danger of Britain's getting control of Norway in the event of war and of the advantages to Germany of occupying it. He asked for some substantial aid for his party and press. Rosenberg, a great composer of memoranda, dashed out three of them for Hitler, Goering and Ribbentrop, but the three top men appear to have ignored them -- no one in Germany took the "official philosopher" very seriously. Rosenberg himself was able to arrange at least for a fortnight's training course in Germany in August for twenty-five of Quisling's husky storm troopers.

 

During the first months of the war Admiral Raeder -- or so he testified at Nuremberg -- had no contact with Rosenberg, whom he scarcely knew, and none with Quisling, of whom he had never heard. But immediately after the Russian attack on Finland Raeder began to get reports from his naval attache at Oslo, Captain Richard Schreiber, of imminent Allied landings in Norway. He mentioned these to Hitler on December 8 and advised him flatly, "It is important to occupy Norway." [5]

 

Shortly afterward Rosenberg dashed off a memorandum (undated) to Admiral Raeder "regarding visit of Privy Councilor Quisling-Norway." The Norwegian conspirator had arrived in Berlin and Rosenberg thought Raeder ought to be told who he was and what he was up to. Quisling, he said, had many sympathizers among key officers in the Norwegian Army and, as proof, had shown him a recent letter from Colonel Konrad Sundlo, the commanding officer at Narvik, characterizing Norway's Prime Minister as a "blockhead" and one of his chief ministers as "an old soak" and declaring his willingness to "risk his bones for the national uprising." Later Colonel Sundlo did not risk his bones to defend his country against aggression.

 

Actually, Rosenberg informed Raeder, Quisling had a plan for a coup. It must have fallen upon sympathetic ears in Berlin, for it was copied from the Anschluss. A number of Quisling's storm troopers would be hurriedly trained in Germany "by experienced and diehard National Socialists who are practiced in such operations." The pupils, once back in Norway, would seize strategic points in Oslo,

 

[quote]and at the same time the German Navy with contingents of the German Army will have to put in an appearance at a prearranged bay outside Oslo in answer to a special summons from the new Norwegian Government.[/quote]

 

It was the Anschluss tactic all over again, with Quisling playing the part of Seyss-Inquart.

 

[quote]Quisling has no doubt [Rosenberg added] that such a coup ... would meet with the approval of those sections of the Army with which he now has connections ... As regards the King, he believes that he would accept such a fait accompli.

 

Quisling's estimate of the number of German troops needed for the operation coincides with the German estimates. [6][/quote]

 

Admiral Raeder saw Quisling on December 11, the meeting being arranged through Rosenberg by one Viljam Hagelin, a Norwegian businessman whose affairs kept him largely in Germany and who was Quisling's chief liaison there. Hagelin and Quisling told Raeder a mouthful and he duly recorded it in the confidential naval archives.

 

[quote]Quisling stated ... a British landing is planned in the vicinity of Stavanger, and Christians and is proposed as a possible British base. The present Norwegian Government as well as the Parliament and the whole foreign policy are controlled by the well-known Jew, Hambro [Carl Hambro, the President of the Storting], a great friend of Hore-Belisha ... The dangers to Germany arising from a British occupation were depicted in great detail ...[/quote]

 

To anticipate a British move, Quisling proposed to place "the necessary bases at the disposal of the German Armed Forces. In the whole coastal area men in important positions (railway, post office, communications) have already been bought for this purpose." He and Hagelin had come to Berlin to establish "clear-cut relations with Germany for the future ... Conferences are desired for discussion of combined action, transfer of troops to Oslo, etc." [7]

 

Raeder, as he later testified at Nuremberg, was impressed and told his two visitors that he would confer with the Fuehrer and inform them of the results. This he did the next day at a meeting at which Keitel and Jodl were also present. The Navy Commander in Chief (whose report on this conference is among the captured documents) informed Hitler that Quisling had made "a reliable impression" on him. He then outlined the main points the Norwegians had made, emphasizing Quisling's "good connections with officers in the Norwegian Army" and his readiness "to take over the government by a political coup and ask Germany for aid." All present agreed that a British occupation of Norway could not be countenanced, but Raeder, become suddenly cautious, pointed out that a German occupation "would naturally occasion strong British countermeasures ... and the German Navy is not yet prepared to cope with them for any length of time. In the event of occupation this is a weak spot." On the other hand, Raeder suggested that OKW

 

[quote] be permitted to make plans with Quisling for preparing and executing the occupation either:

 

a. by friendly methods, i.e., the German Armed Forces are called upon by Norway, or

 

b. by force.[/quote]

 

Hitler was not quite ready to go so far at the moment. He replied that he first wanted to speak to Quisling personally "in order to form an impression of him." [8]

 

This he did the very next day, December 14, Raeder personally escorting the two Norwegian traitors to the Chancellery. Although no record of this meeting has been found, Quisling obviously impressed the German dictator, [iii] as he had the Navy chief, for that evening Hitler ordered OKW to work out a draft plan in consultation with Quisling. Halder heard that it would also include action against Denmark. [10]

 

Hitler saw Quisling again on December 16 and 18, despite his preoccupation with the bad news about the Graf Spee. The naval setback, however, seems to have added to his cautiousness about a Scandinavian adventure which would depend first of all on the Navy. According to Rosenberg, the Fuehrer emphasized to his visitor that "the most preferable attitude for Norway would be ... complete neutrality." However, if the British were preparing to enter Norway the Germans would have to beat them to it. In the meantime he would provide Quisling with funds to combat British propaganda and strengthen his own pro-German movement. An initial sum of 200,000 gold marks was allotted in January, with the promise of 10,000 pounds sterling per month for three months beginning on March 15. [11]

 

Shortly before Christmas Rosenberg dispatched a special agent, Hans- Wilhelm Scheidt, to Norway to work with Quisling, and over the holidays the handful of officers at OKW who were in the know began working on "Study North," as the plans were first called. In the Navy opinion was divided. Raeder was convinced that Britain intended to move into Norway in the near future. The Operations Division of the Naval War Staff disagreed, and in its confidential war diary for January 13, 1940, their differences were aired. [12]

 

[quote]The Operations Division does not believe an imminent British occupation of Norway is probable ... [It] considers, however, that an occupation of Norway by Germany, if no British action is to be feared, would be a dangerous undertaking.[/quote]

 

The Naval War Staff therefore concluded "that the most favorable solution is definitely the maintenance of the status quo" and emphasized that this would permit the continued use of Norwegian territorial waters for the ore traffic "in perfect safety."

 

Hitler was displeased with both the hesitations of the Navy and the results of Study North, which OKW presented to him the middle of January. On January 27 he had Keitel issue a top-secret directive stating that further work on "North" be continued under the Fuehrer's "personal and immediate supervision" and directing Keitel to take charge of all preparations. A small working staff composed of one representative from each of the three armed services was to be set up in OKW and henceforth the operation was to have the code name Weseruebung. [13]

 

This step seems to have marked the end of the Fuehrer's hesitations about occupying Norway, but if there were any lingering doubts in his mind they were dispelled by an incident which occurred in Norwegian waters on February 17.

 

An auxiliary supply ship of the Graf Spee, the Altmark, had managed to slip back through the British blockade and on February 14 was discovered by a British scouting plane proceeding southward in Norwegian territorial waters toward Germany. The British government knew that aboard it were three hundred captured British seamen from the ships sunk by the Graf Spee. They were being taken to Germany as prisoners of war. Norwegian naval officers had made a cursory inspection of the Altmark, found that it had no prisoners aboard and was unarmed, and given it clearance to proceed on to Germany. Now Churchill, who knew otherwise, personally ordered a British destroyer flotilla to go into Norwegian waters, board the German vessel and liberate the prisoners.

 

The British destroyer Cossack, commanded by Captain Philip Vian, carried out the mission on the night of February 16-17 in Josing Fjord, where the Altmark had sought safety. After a scuffle in which four Germans were killed and five wounded, the British boarding party liberated 299 seamen, who had been locked in storerooms and in an empty oil tank to avoid their detection by the Norwegians.

 

The Norwegian government made a vehement protest to Britain about this violation of its territorial waters, but Chamberlain replied in the Commons that Norway itself had violated international law by allowing its waters to be used by the Germans to convey British prisoners to a German prison.

 

For Hitler this was the last straw. It convinced him that the Norwegians would not seriously oppose a British display of force in their own territorial waters. He was also furious, as Jodi noted in his diary, that the members of the Graf Spee crew aboard the Altmark had not put up a stiffer fight -- "no resistance, no British losses." On February 19, Jodi's diary discloses, Hitler "pressed energetically" for the completion of plans for Weseruebung. "Equip ships. Put units in readiness," he told Jodl. They still lacked an officer to lead the enterprise and Jodl reminded Hitler that it was time to appoint a general and his staff for this purpose.

 

Keitel suggested an officer who had fought with General von der Goltz's division in Finland at the end of the First World War, General Nikolaus von Falkenhorst, who now commanded an army corps in the west, and Hitler, who had overlooked the little matter of a commander for the northern adventure, immediately sent for him. Though the General came from an old Silesian military family by the name of Jastrzembski, which he had changed to Falkenhorst (in German, "falcon's eyrie"), he was personally unknown to the Fuehrer.

 

Falkenhorst later described in an interrogation at Nuremberg their first meeting at the Chancellery on the morning of February 21, which was not without its amusing aspects. Falkenhorst had never even heard of the "North" operation and this was the first time he had faced the Nazi warlord, who apparently did not awe him as he had all the other generals.

 

[quote]I was made to sit down [he recounted at Nuremberg]. Then I had to tel1 the Fuehrer about the operations in Finland in 1918 ... He said: "Sit down and just tell me how it was," and I did.

 

Then we got up and he led me to a table that was covered with maps. He said: "... The Reich Government has knowledge that the British intend to make a landing in Norway ... "[/quote]

 

Falkenhorst said he got the impression from Hitler that it was the Altmark incident which had influenced the Leader the most to "carry out the plan now." And the General, to his surprise, found himself appointed then and there to do the carrying out as commander in chief. The Army, Hitler added, would put five divisions at his disposal. The idea was to seize the main Norwegian ports.

 

At noon the warlord dismissed Falkenhorst and told him to report back at 5 P.M. with his plans for the occupation of Norway.

 

[quote]I went out and bought a Baedeker, a travel guide [Falkenhorst explained at Nuremberg], in order to find out just what Norway was like. I didn't have any idea ... Then I went to my hotel room and I worked on this Baedeker At 5 P.M. I went back to the Fuehrer. [14][/quote]

 

The General's plans, worked out from an old Baedeker -- he was never shown the plans worked out by OKW -- were, as can be imagined, somewhat sketchy, but they seem to have satisfied Hitler. One division was to be allotted to each of Norway's five principal harbors, Oslo, Stavanger, Bergen, Trondheim and Narvik. "There wasn't much else you could do," Falkenhorst said later, "because they were the large harbors." After being sworn to secrecy and urged "to hurry up," the General was again dismissed and thereupon set to work.

 

Of all these goings on, Brauchitsch and Halder, busy preparing the offensive on the Western front, were largely ignorant until Falkenhorst called on the Army General Staff Chief on February 26 and demanded some troops, especially mountain units, to carry out his operation. Halder was not very co-operative; in fact, he was indignant and asked for more information on what was up and what was needed. "Not a single word on this matter has been exchanged between the Fuehrer and Brauchitsch," Halder exclaimed in his diary. "That must be recorded for the history of the war!"

 

However, Hitler, full of contempt as he was for the old-line generals and especially for his General Staff Chief, was not to be put off. On March 29 he enthusiastically approved Falkenhorst's plans, including his acquisition of two mountain divisions, and moreover declared that more troops would be necessary because he wanted "a strong force at Copenhagen." Denmark had definitely been added to the list of Hitler's victims; the Air Force had its eyes on bases there to be used against Britain.

 

The next day, March 1, Hitler issued the formal directive for Weser Exercise.

 

[quote]MOST SECRET

 

TOP SECRET

 

The development of the situation in Scandinavia requires the making of all preparations for the occupation of Denmark and Norway. This operation should prevent British encroachment on Scandinavia and the Baltic. Further it should guarantee our ore base in Sweden and give our Navy and the Air Force a wider starting line against Britain ...

 

In view of our military and political power in comparison with that of the Scandinavian States, the force to be employed in "Weser Exercise" will be kept as small as possible. The numerical weakness will be balanced by daring actions and surprise execution.

 

On principle, we will do our utmost to make the operation appear as a peaceful occupation, the object of which is the military protection of the neutrality of the Scandinavian States. Corresponding demands will be transmitted to the Governments at the beginning of the occupation. If necessary, demonstrations by the Navy and Air Force will provide the necessary emphasis. If, in spite of this, resistance should be met, all military means will be used to crush it ... The crossing of the Danish border and the landings in Norway must take place simultaneously ...

 

It is most important that the Scandinavian States as well as the Western opponents should he taken by surprise ... The troops may be acquainted with the actual objectives only after putting to sea ... [15][/quote]

 

That very evening, March 1, there was "fury" at the Army High Command, Jodl reported, because of Hitler's demands for troops for the northern operation. The next day Goering "raged" at Keitel and went to complain to Hitler. The fat Field Marshal was furious at having been left out of the secret so long and because the Luftwaffe had been put under Falkenhorst's command. Threatened by a serious jurisdictional dispute, Hitler convoked the heads of the three armed services to the Chancellery on March 5 to smooth matters out, but it was difficult.

 

[quote]Field Marshal [Goering] vents his spleen [Jodi wrote in his diary] because he was not consulted beforehand. He dominates the discussion and tries to prove that all previous preparations are good for nothing.[/quote]

 

The Fuehrer mollified him by some small concessions, and plans raced forward. As early as February 21, according to his diary, Halder had got the impression that the attack on Denmark and Norway would not begin until after the offensive in the West had been launched and "carried to a certain point." Hitler himself had been in doubt which operation to begin first and raised the question with Jodl on February 26. Jodl's advice was to keep the two operations quite separate and Hitler agreed, "if it were possible."

 

On March 3 he decided that Weser Exercise would precede "Case Yellow" (the code name for attack in the West) and expressed "very sharply" to Jodl "the necessity of prompt and strong action in Norway." By this time the courageous but outmanned and outgunned Finnish Army was facing disaster from a massive Russian offensive and there were well-founded reports that the Anglo-French expeditionary corps was about to embark from its bases in Scotland for Norway and march across that country and Sweden to Finland to try to save the Finns. [iv] The threat of this was the main reason for Hitler's hurry.

 

But on March 12 the Russo-Finnish War suddenly ended with Finland accepting Russia's harsh terms for peace. While this was generally welcomed in Berlin because it freed Germany from its unpopular championship of the Russians against the Finns and also brought an end, for the moment, of the Soviet drive to take over the Baltic, it nevertheless embarrassed Hitler so far as his own Scandinavian venture was concerned. As Jodl confided to his diary, it made the "motivation" for the occupation of Norway and Denmark "difficult." "Conclusion of peace between Finland and Russia," he noted on March 12, "deprives England, but us too, of any political basis to occupy Norway."

 

In fact, Hitler was now hard put to find an excuse. On March 13 the faithful Jodl recorded that the Fuehrer was "still looking for some justification." The next day: "Fuehrer has not yet decided how to justify the 'Weser Exercise.''' To make matters worse, Admiral Raeder began to get cold feet. He was "in doubt whether it was still important to play at preventive war (?) in Norway." [16]

 

For the moment Hitler hesitated. Two other problems had in the meantime arisen: (1) how to handle Sumner Welles, the United States Undersecretary of State, who had arrived in Berlin March 1 on a mission from President Roosevelt to see if there was any chance of ending the war before the slaughter began in the West; and (2) how to placate the neglected, offended Italian ally. Hitler had not yet bothered to answer Mussolini's defiant letter of January 3, and relations between Berlin and Rome had distinctly cooled. Now Sumner Welles, the Germans believed, and with some reason, had come to Europe to try to detach Italy from the creaky Axis and persuade her, at any event, not to enter the war on Germany's side if the conflict continued. Various warnings had reached Berlin from Rome that it was time something were done to keep the sulking Duce in line.

 

[b]HITLER MEETS WITH SUMNER WELLES AND MUSSOLINI[/b]

 

Hitler's ignorance of the United States, as well as that of Goering and Ribbentrop, was abysmal. [v] And though their policy at this time was to try to keep America out of the war, they, like their predecessors in Berlin in 1914, did not take the Yankee nation seriously as even a potential military power. As early as October I, 1939, the German military attache in Washington, General Friedrich von Boetticher, advised OKW in Berlin not to worry about any possible American expeditionary force in Europe. On December 1 he further informed his military superiors in Berlin that American armament was simply inadequate "for an aggressive war policy" and added that the General Staff in Washington "in contrast to the State Department's sterile policy of hatred and the impulsive policy of Roosevelt -- often based on an overestimation of American military power -- still has understanding for Germany and her conduct of the war." In his first dispatch Boetticher had noted that "Lindbergh and the famous flyer Rickenbacker" were advocating keeping America out of the war. By December 1, however, despite his low estimate of American military power, he warned OKW that "the United States will still enter the war if it considers that the Western Hemisphere is threatened." [18]

 

Hans Thomsen, the German charge d'affaires in Washington, did his best to impart some facts about the U.S.A. to his ignorant Foreign Minister in Berlin. On September 18, as the Polish campaign neared its end, he warned the Wilhelmstrasse that "the sympathies of the overwhelming majority of the American people are with our enemies, and America is convinced of Germany's war guilt." In the same dispatch he pointed out the dire consequences of any attempts by Germany to carry out sabotage in America and requested that there be no such sabotage "in any manner whatsoever." [19]

 

The request evidently was not taken very seriously in Berlin, for on January 25, 1940, Thomsen was wiring Berlin:

 

[quote]I have learned that a German-American, von Hausberger, and a German citizen, Walter, both of New York, are alleged to be planning acts of sabotage against the American armament industry by direction of the German Abwehr. Von Hausberger is supposed to have detonators hidden in his dwelling.[/quote]

 

Thomsen asked Berlin to desist, declaring that

 

[quote]there is no surer way of driving America into the war than by resorting again to a course of action which drove America into the ranks of our enemies once before in the World War and, incidentally, did not in the least impede the war industries of the United States.[/quote]

 

Besides, he added, "both individuals are unfitted in every respect to act as agents of the Abwehr." [vi]

 

Since November 1938, when Roosevelt had recalled the American ambassador in Berlin in protest against the officially sponsored Nazi pogrom against the Jews, neither country had been represented in the other by an ambassador. Trade had dwindled to a mere trickle, largely as the result of American boycotts, and was now completely shut down by the British blockade. On November 4, 1939, the arms embargo was lifted, following votes in the Senate and the House, thus opening the way for the United States to supply the Western Allies with arms. It was against this background of rapidly deteriorating relations that Sumner Welles arrived in Berlin on March 1, 1940.

 

The day before, on February 29 -- it was a leap year -- Hitler had taken the unusual step of issuing a secret "Directive for the Conversations with Mr. Sumner Welles." [20] It called for "reserve" on the German side and advised that "as far as possible Mr. Welles be allowed to do the talking." It then laid down five points for the guidance of all the top officials who were to receive the special American envoy. The principal German argument was to be that Germany had not declared war on Britain and France but vice versa; that the Fuehrer had offered them peace in October and that they had rejected it; that Germany accepted the challenge; that the war aims of Britain and France were "the destruction of the German State," and that Germany therefore had no alternative but to continue the war.

 

[quote]A discussion [Hitler concluded] of concrete political questions, such as the question of a future Polish state, is to be avoided as much as possible. In case [he] brings up subjects of this kind, the reply should be that such questions are decided by me. It is self-evident that it is entirely out of the question to discuss the subject of Austria and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia ...

 

All statements are to be avoided which could be interpreted ... to mean that Germany is in any way interested at present in discussing possibilities of peace. I request, rather, that Mr. Sumner Welles not be given the slightest reason to doubt that Germany is determined to end this war victoriously ...[/quote]

 

Not only Ribbentrop and Goering but the Leader himself followed the directive to a letter when they saw Welles separately on March 1, 3 and 2, respectively. Judging by the lengthy minutes of the talks kept by Dr. Schmidt (which are among the captured documents), the American diplomat, a somewhat taciturn and cynical man, must have got the impression that he had landed in a lunatic asylum -- if he could believe his ears. Each of the Big Three Nazis bombarded Welles with the most grotesque perversions of history, in which facts were fantastically twisted and even the simplest of words lost all meaning. [viii] Hitler, who on March 1 had issued his directive for Weseruebung, received Welles the next day and insisted that the Allied war aim was "annihilation," that of Germany "peace." He lectured his visitor on all he had done to maintain peace with England and France.

 

[quote]Shortly before the outbreak of the war the British Ambassador had sat exactly where Sumner Welles was now sitting, and the Fuehrer had made him the greatest offer of his life.[/quote]

 

All his offers to the British had been rejected and now Britain was out to destroy Germany. Hitler therefore believed "that the conflict would have to be fought to a finish ... there was no other solution than a life-and-death struggle."

 

No wonder that Welles confided to Weizsaecker and repeated to Goering that if Germany were determined to win a military victory in the West then his trip to Europe "was pointless ... and there was nothing more for him to say." [21] [ix]

 

Though he had emphasized in his talks with the Germans that what he heard from the European statesmen on this trip was for the ears of Roosevelt only, Welles thought it wise to be sufficiently indiscreet to tell both Hitler and Goering that he had had a "long, constructive and helpful" talk with Mussolini and that the Duce thought "there was still a possibility of bringing about a firm and lasting peace in Europe." If these were the Italian dictator's thoughts, then it was time, the Germans realized, to correct them. Peace yes, but only after a resounding German victory in the West.

 

Hitler's failure to answer Mussolini's letter of January 3 had filled the Duce with mounting annoyance. All through the month Ambassador Attolico was inquiring of Ribbentrop when a reply might be expected and hinting that Italy's relations with France and Britain -- and their trade, to boot -- were improving.

 

This trade, which included Italian sales of war materials, aggravated the Germans, who constantly protested in Rome that it was unduly aiding the Western Allies. Ambassador von Mackensen kept reporting his "grave anxieties" to his friend Weizsaeckcr and the latter himself was afraid that Mussolini's unanswered letter, if it were "disregarded" much longer, would give the Duce "freedom of action" -- he and Italy might be lost for good. [23]

 

Then on March 1 Hitler received a break. The British announced that they were cutting off shipments of German coal by sea via Rotterdam to Italy. This was a heavy blow to the Italian economy and threw the Duce into a rage against the British and warmed his feelings toward the Germans, who promptly promised to find the means of delivering their coal by rail. Taking advantage of this circumstance, Hitler got off a long letter to Mussolini on March 8, which Ribbentrop delivered personally in Rome two days later. [24]

 

It made no apologies for its belatedness, but was cordial in tone and went into considerable detail about the Fuehrer's thoughts and policies on almost every conceivable subject, being more wordy than any previous letter of Hitler's to his Italian partner. It defended the Nazi alliance with Russia, the abandonment of the Finns, the failure to leave even a rump Poland.

 

[quote]If I had withdrawn the German troops from the General Government this would not have brought about a pacification of Poland, but a hideous chaos. And the Church would not have been able to exercise its function in praise of the Lord, but the priests would have had their heads chopped off ...[/quote]

 

As for the visit of Sumner Welles, Hitler continued, it had achieved nothing. He was still determined to attack in the West. He realized "that the coming battle will not be a walkover but the fiercest struggle in Germany's history ... a battle for life or death."

 

And then Hitler made his pitch to Mussolini to get into the war.

 

[quote]I believe, Duce, that there can be no doubt that the outcome of this war will also decide the future of Italy ... You will some day be confronted by the very opponents who are fighting Germany today ... I, too, see the destinies of our two countries, our peoples, our revolutions and our regimes indissolubly joined with each other ...

 

And, finally, let me assure you that in spite of everything I believe that sooner or later fate will force us after all to fight side by side, that is, that you will likewise not escape this clash of arms, no matter how the individual aspects of the situation may develop today, and that your place will then more than ever be at our side, just as mine will be at yours.[/quote]

 

Mussolini was flattered by the letter and at once assured Ribbentrop that he agreed that his place was at Hitler's side "on the firing line." The Nazi Foreign Minister, on his part, lost no time in buttering up his host. The Fuehrer, he said, was "deeply aroused by the latest British measures to block the shipment of coal from Germany to Italy by sea." How much coal did the Italians need? From 500,000 to 700,000 tons a month, Mussolini replied. Germany was now prepared, Ribbentrop answered glibly, to furnish a million tons a month and would provide most of the cars to haul it.

 

There were two lengthy meetings between the two, with Ciano present, on March 11 and 12, and Dr. Schmidt's shorthand minutes reveal that Ribbentrop was at his most flatulent. [25] Though there were more important things to talk about, he produced captured Polish diplomatic dispatches from the Western capitals to show "the monstrous war guilt of the United States."

 

[quote]The Foreign Minister explained that these documents showed specifically the sinister role of the American Ambassadors Bullitt [Paris], Kennedy [London] and Drexel Biddle [Warsaw] ... They gave an intimation of the machinations of that Jewish-plutocratic clique whose influence, through Morgan and Rockefeller, reached all the way up to Roosevelt.[/quote]

 

For several hours the arrogant Nazi Foreign Minister raved on, displaying his customary ignorance of world affairs, emphasizing the common destiny of the two fascist nations and stressing that Hitler would soon attack in the West, "beat the French Army in the course of the summer" and drive the British from the Continent "before fall." Mussolini mostly listened, only occasionally interjecting a remark whose sarcasm apparently escaped the Nazi Minister. When, for example, Ribbentrop pompously declared that "Stalin had renounced the idea of world revolution," the Duce retorted, according to Schmidt's notes, "Do you really believe that?" When Ribbentrop explained that "there was not a single German soldier who did not believe that victory would be won this year," Mussolini interjected, "That is an extremely interesting remark." That evening Ciano noted in his diary:

 

[quote]After the interview, when we were left alone, Mussolini says that he does not believe in the German offensive nor in a complete German success.[/quote]

 

The Italian dictator had promised to give his own views at the meeting the next day and Ribbentrop was somewhat uneasy as to what they might be, wiring Hitler that he had been unable to obtain a "hint as to the Duce's thoughts."

 

He need not have worried. The next day Mussolini was a completely different man. He had quite suddenly, as Schmidt noted, "turned completely prowar." It was not a question, he told his visitor, of whether Italy would enter the war on Germany's side, but when. The question of timing was "extremely delicate, for he ought not to intervene until all his preparations were complete, so as not to burden his partner."

 

[quote]In any event he had to state at this time with all distinctness that Italy was in no position financially to sustain a long war. He could not afford to spend a billion lire a day, as England and France were doing.[/quote]

 

This remark seems to have set Ribbentrop back for a moment and he tried to pin the Duce down on a date for Italy's entry into the war, but the latter was wary of committing himself. "The moment would come," he said, "when a definition of Italy's relations with France and England, i.e., a break with these countries, would occur." It would be easy, he added, to "provoke" such a rupture. Though he persisted, Ribbentrop could not get a definite date. Obviously Hitler himself would have to intervene personally for that. The Nazi Foreign Minister thereupon suggested a meeting at the Brenner between the two men for the latter part of March, after the nineteenth, to which Mussolini readily agreed. Ribbentrop, incidentally, had not breathed a word about Hitler's plans to occupy Denmark and Norway. There were some secrets you did not mention to an ally, even while pressing for it to join you.

 

Though he had not succeeded in getting Mussolini to agree to a date, Ribbentrop had lured the Duce into a commitment to enter the war. "If he wanted to reinforce the Axis," Ciano lamented in his diary, "he has succeeded." When Sumner Welles, after visiting Berlin, Paris and London, returned to Rome and saw Mussolini again on March 16, he found him a changed man.

 

[quote]He seemed to have thrown off some great weight [Welles wrote later] I have often wondered whether. during the two weeks which had elapsed since my first visit to Rome, he had not determined to cross the Rubicon, and during Ribbentrop's visit had not decided to force Italy into the war. [26][/quote]

 

Welles need not have wondered.

 

As soon as Ribbentrop had departed Rome in his special train the anguished Italian dictator was prey to second thoughts. "He fears," Ciano jotted in his diary on March 12, "that he has gone too far in his commitment to fight against the Allies. He would now like to dissuade Hitler from his land offensive, and this he hopes to achieve at the meeting at the Brenner Pass." But Ciano, limited as he was, knew better. "It cannot be denied," he added in his diary, "that the Duce is fascinated by Hitler, a fascination which involves something deeply rooted in his makeup. The Fuehrer will get more out of the Duce than Ribbentrop was able to get." This was true -- with reservations, as shortly will be seen.

 

No sooner had he returned to Berlin than Ribbentrop telephoned Ciano  --  on March 13 -- asking that the Brenner meeting be set earlier than contemplated, for March 18. "The Germans are unbearable," Mussolini exploded. "They don't give one time to breathe or to think matters over." Nevertheless, he agreed to the date.

 

[quote]The Duce was nervous [Ciano recorded in his diary that day]. Until now he has lived under the illusion that a real war would not be waged. The prospect of an imminent clash in which he might remain an outsider disturbs him and, to use his words, humiliates him. [27][/quote]

 

It was snowing when the respective trains of the two dictators drew in on the morning of March 18, 1940, at the little frontier station at the Brenner Pass below the lofty snow-mantled Alps. The meeting, as a sop to Mussolini, took place in the Duce's private railroad car, but Hitler did almost all the talking. Ciano summed up the conference in his diary that evening.

 

[quote]The conference is more a monologue ... Hitler talks all the time ... Mussolini listens to him with interest and with deference. He speaks little and confirms his intention to move with Germany. He reserves to himself only the choice of the right moment.[/quote]

 

He realized, Mussolini said, when he was finally able to get in a word, that it was "impossible to remain neutral until the end of the war." Co-operation with England and France was "inconceivable. We hate them. Therefore Italy's entry into the war is inevitable." Hitler had spent more than an hour trying to convince him of that -- if Italy did not want to be left out in the cold and, as he added, become "a second-rate power." [28] But having answered the main question to the Fuehrer's satisfaction. the Puce immediately began to hedge.

 

[quote]The great problem, however, was the date ... One condition for this would have to be fulfilled. Italy would have to be "very well prepared" ... Italy's financial position did not allow her to wage a protracted war ...

 

He was asking the Fuehrer whether there would be any danger for Germany if the offensive were delayed. He did not believe there was such a danger ... he would [then] have finished his military preparations in three to four months, and would not be in the embarrassing position of seeing his comrade fighting and himself limited to making demonstrations ... He wanted to do something more and he was not now in a position to do it.[/quote]

 

The Nazi warlord had no intention of postponing his attack in the West and said so. But he had a "few theoretical ideas" which might solve Mussolini's difficulty of making a frontal attack on mountainous southern France, since that conflict, he realized, "would cost a great deal of blood." Why not, he suggested, supply a strong Italian force which together with German troops would advance along the Swiss frontier toward the Rhone Valley "in order to turn the Franco-Italian Alpine front from the rear." Before this, of course, the main German armies would have rolled back the French and British in the north. Hitler was obviously trying to make it easy for the Italians.

 

[quote]When the enemy has been smashed [in northern France] the moment would come [Hitler continued] for Italy to intervene actively, not at the most difficult point on the Alpine front, but elsewhere ...

 

The war will be decided in France. Once France is disposed of, Italy will be mistress of the Mediterranean and England will have to make peace.[/quote]

 

Mussolini, it must be said, was not slow at seizing upon this glittering prospect of getting so much after the Germans had done all the hard fighting.

 

[quote]The Duce replied that once Germany had made a victorious advance he would intervene immediately ... he would lose no time ... when the Allies were so shaken by the German attack that it needed only a second blow to bring them to their knees.[/quote]

 

On the other hand,

 

[quote]If Germany's progress was slow, the Duce said that then he would wait.[/quote]

 

This crude, cowardly bargain seems not to have unduly bothered Hitler. If Mussolini was personally attracted to him, as Ciano said, by "something deeply rooted in his make-up," it might be said that the attraction was mutual, for the same mysterious reasons. Disloyal as he had been to some of his closest associates, a number of whom he had had murdered, such as Roehm and Strasser, Hitler maintained a strange and unusual loyalty to his ridiculous Italian partner that did not weaken, that indeed was strengthened when adversity and then disaster overtook the strutting, sawdust Roman Caesar. It is one of the interesting paradoxes of this narrative.

 

At any rate, for what it was worth -- and few Germans besides Hitler, especially among the generals, thought it was worth very much -- Italy's entrance into the war had now at last been solemnly promised. The Nazi warlord could turn his thoughts again to new and imminent conquests. Of the most imminent one -- in the north -- he did not breathe a word to his friend and ally.

 

[b]THE CONSPIRATORS AGAIN FRUSTRATED[/b]

 

Once more the anti-Nazi plotters tried to persuade the generals to depose the Leader -- this time before he could launch his new aggression in the north, of which they had got wind. What the civilian conspirators again wanted was assurance from the British government that it would make peace with an anti-Nazi German regime, and, being what they were, they were insistent that in any settlement the new Reich government be allowed to keep most of Hitler's territorial gains: Austria, the Sudetenland and the 1914 frontier in Poland, though this last had only been obtained in the past by the wiping out of the Polish nation.

 

It was with such a proposal that Hassell, with considerable personal courage, journeyed to Arosa, Switzerland, on February 21, 1940, to confer with a British contact whom he calls "Mr. X" in his diary and who was a certain J. Lonsdale Bryans. They conferred in the greatest secrecy at four meetings on February 22 and 23. Bryans, who had cut a certain figure in the diplomatic society of Rome, was another of those self-appointed and somewhat amateurish negotiators for peace who have turned up in this narrative. He had contacts in Downing Street, and Hassell, once they had met, was personally impressed by him. After the fiasco of the attempt of Major Stevens and Captain Best in Holland to get in touch with the German conspirators, the British were somewhat skeptical of the whole business, and when Bryans pressed Hassell for some reliable information as to whom he was speaking for the German envoy became cagey.

 

"I am not in a position to name the men who are backing me," Hassell retorted. "I can only assure you that a statement from Halifax would get to the right people." [29]

 

Hassell then outlined the views of the German "opposition": it was realized that Hitler had to be overthrown "before major military operations are undertaken"; that this must be "an exclusively German affair"; that there must be "some authoritative English statement" about how a new anti-Nazi regime in Berlin would be treated and that "the principal obstacle to any change in regime is the story of 1918, that is, German anxiety lest things develop as they did then, after the Kaiser was sacrificed." Hassell and his friends wanted guarantees that if they got rid of Hitler Germany would be treated more generously than it was after the Germans had got rid of Wilhelm II.

 

He thereupon handed over to Bryans a memorandum which he himself had drawn up in English. It is a wooly document, though full of noble sentiments about a future world based "on the principles of Christian ethics, justice and law, social welfare and liberty of thought and conscience." The greatest danger of continuing "this mad war," Hassell wrote, was "a bolshevization of Europe" -- he considered that worse than the continuance of Nazism. And his main condition for peace was that the new Germany be left with almost all of Hitler's conquests, which he enumerated. The German acquisition of Austria and the Sudetenland could not even be discussed in any proposed peace; and Germany would have to have the 1914 frontier with Poland, which, of course, though he did not say so, was actually the 1914 frontier with Russia, since Poland' had not been allowed to exist in 1914.

 

Bryans agreed that speedy action was necessary in view of the imminence of the German offensive in the West and promised to deliver Hassell's memorandum to Lord Halifax. Hassell returned to Berlin to acquaint his fellow plotters with his latest move. Although they hoped for the best from Hassell's "Mr. X" they were more concerned at the moment with the so-called "X Report" which Hans von Dohnanyi, one of the members of the group in the Abwehr, had drawn up on the basis of Dr. Mueller's contact with the British at the Vatican. [x] It declared that the Pope was ready to intervene with Britain for reasonable peace terms with a new anti-Nazi German government, and it is a measure of the views of these opponents of Hitler that one of their terms, which they claimed the Holy Father would back, was "the settlement of the Eastern question in favor of Germany." The demonic Nazi dictator had obtained a settlement in the East "in favor of Germany" by armed aggression; the good German conspirators wanted the same thing handed to them by the British with the Pope's blessings.

 

The X Report loomed very large in the minds of the plotters that winter of 1939-40. At the end of October General Thomas had shown it to Brauchitsch with the intention of bucking up the Army Commander in Chief in his efforts to dissuade Hitler from launching the offensive in the West that fall. But Brauchitsch did not appreciate such encouragement. In fact, he threatened to have General Thomas arrested if he brought the matter up again. It was "plain high treason," he barked at him.

 

Now, with a fresh Nazi aggression in the offing, Thomas took the X Report to General Halder in the hope that he might act on it. But this was a vain hope. As the General Staff Chief told Goerdeler, one of the most active of the conspirators -- who had also begged him to take the lead, since the spineless Brauchitsch would not -- he could not at this time justify breaking his oath as a soldier to the Fuehrer. Besides:

 

[quote]England and France had declared war on us, and one had to see it through.

 

A peace of compromise was senseless. Only in the greatest emergency could one take the action desired by Goerdeler.[/quote]

 

"Also, doch!" exclaimed Hassell in his diary on April 6, 1940, in recounting Halder's state of mind as explained to him by Goerdeler. "Halder," the diarist added, "who had begun to weep during the discussion of his responsibility, gave the impression of a weak man with shattered nerves."

 

The accuracy of such an impression is to be doubted. When one goes over Halder's diary for the first week of April, cluttered as it is with hundreds of detailed entries about preparations for the gigantic offensive in the West, which he was helping to mastermind, this writer at least gets the impression that the General Staff Chief was in a buoyant mood as he conferred with the field commanders and checked the final plans for the 1greatest and most daring military operation in German history. There is no hint in his journal of treasonable thoughts or of any wrestling with his conscience. Though he has misgivings about the attack on Denmark and Norway, they are based purely on military grounds, and there is not a word of moral doubt about Nazi aggression against the four small neutral countries whose frontiers Germany had solemnly guaranteed and whom Halder knew Germany was about to attack, and against two of whom, Belgium and Holland, he himself had taken a leading part in drafting the plans.

 

So ended the latest attempt of the "good Germans" to oust Hitler before it was too late. It was the last opportunity they would have to obtain a generous peace. The generals, as Brauchitsch and Halder had made clear, were not interested in a negotiated peace. They were thinking now, as was the Fuehrer, of a dictated peace -- dictated after German victory. Not until the chances of that had gone glimmering did they seriously return to their old and treasonable thoughts, which had been so strong at Munich and at Zossen, of removing their mad dictator. This state of mind and character must be remembered in view of subsequent events and of subsequent spinning of myths.

 

[b]THE TAKING OF DENMARK AND NORWAY[/b]

 

Hitler's preparations for the conquest of Denmark and Norway have been called by many writers one of the best-kept secrets of the war, but it has seemed to this author that the two Scandinavian countries and even the British were caught napping not because they were not warned of what was coming but because they did not believe the warnings in time.

 

Ten days before disaster struck, Colonel Oster of the Abwehr warned a close friend of his, Colonel J. G. Sas, the Dutch military attache in Berlin, of the German plans for Weseruebung and Sas immediately informed the Danish naval attache, Captain Kjolsen. [30] But the complacent Danish government would not believe its own naval attache, and when on April 4 the Danish minister in Berlin sent Kjolsen scurrying to Copenhagen to repeat the warning in person his intelligence was still not taken seriously. Even on the eve of catastrophe, on the evening of March 8, after news had been received of the torpedoing of a German transport laden with troops off the south coast of Norway -- just north of Denmark -- and the Danes had seen with their own eyes a great German naval armada sailing north between their islands, the King of Denmark had dismissed with a smile a remark at the dinner table that his country was in danger.

 

"He really didn't believe that," a Guards officer who was present later reported. In fact, this officer related, the King had proceeded after dinner to the Royal Theater in a "confident and happy" frame of mind. [31]

 

Already in March the Norwegian government had received warnings from its legation in Berlin and from the Swedes about a German concentration of troops and naval vessels in the North Sea and Baltic ports and on April 5 definite intelligence arrived from Berlin of imminent German landings on the southern coast of Norway. But the complacent cabinet in Oslo remained skeptical. Not even on the seventh, when several large German war vessels were sighted proceeding up the Norwegian coast and reports arrived of British planes strafing a German battle fleet off the mouth of the Skagerrak, not even on April 8, when the British Admiralty informed the Legation of Norway in London that a strong German naval force had been discovered approaching Narvik and the newspapers in Oslo were reporting that German soldiers rescued from the transport Rio de Janeiro, torpedoed that day off the Norwegian coast at Lillesand by a Polish submarine, had declared they were en route to Bergen to help defend it against the British -- not even then did the Norwegian government consider it necessary to take such obvious steps as mobilizing the Army, fully manning the forts guarding the harbors, blocking the airfield runways, or, most important of all, mining the easily mined narrow water approaches to the capital and the main cities. Had it done these things history might have taken a different turning.

 

Ominous news, as Churchill puts it, had begun filtering into London by the first of April, and on April 3 the British War Cabinet discussed the latest intelligence, above all from Stockholm, which told of the Germans collecting sizable military forces in its northern ports with the objective of moving into Scandinavia. But the news does not seem to have been taken very seriously. Two days later, on April 5, when the first wave of German naval supply ships was already at sea, Prime Minister Chamberlain proclaimed in a speech that Hitler, by failing to attack in the West when the British and French were unprepared, had "missed the bus" -- a phrase he was very shortly to rue. [xi]

 

The British government at this moment, according to Churchill, was inclined to believe that the German build-up in the Baltic and North Sea ports was being done merely to enable Hitler to deliver a counterstroke in case the British, in mining Norwegian waters to cut off the ore shipments from Narvik, also occupied that port and perhaps others to the south.

 

As a matter of fact, the British government was contemplating such an occupation. After seven months of frustration Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, had finally succeeded in getting the approval of the War Cabinet and the Allied Supreme War Council to mine the Norwegian Leads on April 8 -- an action called "Wilfred." Since it seemed likely that the Germans would react violently to the mortal blow of having their iron ore shipments from Narvik blocked, it was decided that a small Anglo- French force should be dispatched to Narvik and advance to the nearby Swedish frontier. Other contingents would be landed at Trondheim, Bergen and Stavanger farther south in order, as Churchill explained, "to deny these bases to the enemy." This was known as "Plan R-4." [32]

 

Thus during the first week of April, while German troops were being loaded on various warships for the passage to Norway, British troops, though in much fewer numbers, were being embarked on transports in the Clyde and on cruisers in the Forth for the same destination.

 

On the afternoon of April 2, Hitler, after a long conference with Goering, Raeder and Falkenhorst, issued a formal directive ordering Weseruebung to begin at 5: 15 A.M. on April 9. At the same time he issued another directive stipulating that "the escape of the Kings of Denmark and Norway from their countries at the time of the occupation must be prevented by all means." [33] Also on the same day OKW let the Foreign Office in on the secret. A lengthy directive was presented to Ribbentrop instructing him to prepare the diplomatic measures for inducing Denmark and Norway to surrender without a fight as soon as the German armed forces had arrived and to concoct some kind of justification for Hitler's latest aggression. [34]

 

But trickery was not to be confined to the Foreign Office. The Navy was also to make use of it. On April 3, with the departure of the first vessels, Jodl reflected in his diary on the problem of how deceit could be used to hoodwink the Norwegians in case they became suspicious of the presence of so many German men-of-war in their vicinity. Actually this little matter had already been worked out by the Navy. It had instructed its warships and transports to try to pass as British craft -- even if it were necessary to fly the Union Jack! Secret German naval commands laid down detailed orders for "Deception and Camouflage in the Invasion of Norway." [35]

 

[quote]MOST SECRET

 

Behavior During Entrance into the Harbor

 

All ships darkened ... The disguise as British craft must be kept as long as possible. All challenges in Morse by Norwegian ships will be answered in English. In answer, something like the following will be chosen:

 

"Calling at Bergen for a short visit. No hostile intent."

 

... Challenges to be answered with names of British warships:

 

Koeln -- H.M.S. Cairo.

 

Koenigsberg -- H.M.S. Calcutta .... (etc.)

 

Arrangements are to be made to enable British war flags to be illuminated ...

 

For Bergen ... Following is laid down as guiding principle should one of our own units find itself compelled to answer the challenge of passing craft:

 

To challenge: (in case of the Koeln) H.M.S. Cairo.

 

To order to stop: "(1) Please repeat last signal. (2) Impossible to understand your signal."

 

In case of a warning shot: "Stop firing. British ship. Good friend."

 

In case of an inquiry as to destination and purpose: "Going Bergen. Chasing German steamers." [xii] [/quote]

 

And so on April 9, 1940, at 5:20 A.M. precisely (4:20 A.M. in Denmark), an hour before dawn, the German envoys at Copenhagen and Oslo, having routed the respective foreign ministers out of bed exactly twenty minutes before (Ribbentrop had insisted on a strict timetable in co-ordination with the arrival at that hour of the German troops), presented to the Danish and Norwegian governments a German ultimatum demanding that they accept on the instant, and without resistance, the "protection of the Reich." The ultimatum was perhaps the most brazen document yet composed by Hitler and Ribbentrop, who were such masters and by now so experienced in diplomatic deceit. [37]

 

After declaring that the Reich had come to the aid of Denmark and Norway to protect them against an Anglo-French occupation, the memorandum stated:

 

[quote]The German troops therefore do not set foot on Norwegian soil as enemies. The German High Command does not intend to make use of the points occupied by German troops as bases for operations against England as long as it is not forced to ... On the contrary, German military operations aim exclusively at protecting the north against the proposed occupation of Norwegian bases by Anglo-French forces ...

 

... In the spirit of the good relations between Germany and Norway which have existed hitherto, the Reich Government declares to the Royal Norwegian Government that Germany has no intention of infringing by her measures the territorial integrity and political independence of the Kingdom of Norway now or in the future ...

 

The Reich Government therefore expects that the Norwegian Government and the Norwegian people will ... offer no resistance to it. Any resistance would have to be, and would be, broken by all possible means ... and would therefore lead only to absolutely useless bloodshed... .[/quote]

 

German expectations proved justified as regards Denmark but not Norway. This became known in the Wilhelmstrasse with the receipt of the first urgent messages from the respective ministers to those countries. The German envoy in Copenhagen wired Ribbentrop at 8:34 A.M. that the Danes had "accepted all our demands [though] registering a protest." Minister Curt Brauer in Oslo had a quite different report to make. At 5: 52 A.M., just thirty-two minutes after he had delivered the German ultimatum, he wired Berlin the quick response of the Norwegian government: "We will not submit voluntarily: the struggle is already under way." [38]

 

The arrogant Ribbentrop was outraged. [xiii] At 10:55 he wired Brauer "most urgent": "You will once more impress on the Government there that Norwegian resistance is completely senseless."

 

This the unhappy German envoy could no longer do. The Norwegian King, government and members of Parliament had by this time fled the capital for the mountains in the north. However hopeless the odds, they were determined to resist. In fact, resistance had already begun in some places, though not in all, with the arrival of German ships out of the night.

 

The Danes were in a more hopeless position. Their pleasant little island country was incapable of defense. It was too small, too flat, and the largest part, Jutland, lay open by land to Hitler's panzers. There were no mountains for the King and the government to flee to as there were in Norway, nor could any help be expected from Britain. It has been said that the Danes were too civilized to fight in such circumstances; at any rate, they did not. General W. W. Pryor, the Army Commander in Chief, almost alone pleaded for resistance, but he was overruled by Premier Thorvald Stauning, Foreign Minister Edvard Munch, and the King, who, when the bad news began coming in on April 8, refused his pleas for mobilization. For reasons which remain obscure to this writer, even after an investigation in Copenhagen, the Navy never fired a shot, either from its ships or from its shore batteries, even when German troop ships passed under the noses of its guns and could have been blown to bits. The Army fought a few skirmishes in Jutland, the Royal Guard fired a few shots around the royal palace in the capital and suffered a few men wounded. By the time the Danes had finished their hearty breakfasts it was all over. The King, on the advice of his government but against that of General Pryor, capitulated and ordered what slight resistance there was to cease.

 

The plans to take Denmark by surprise and deceit, as the captured German Army records show, had been prepared with meticulous care. General Kurt Himer, chief of staff of the task force for Denmark, had arrived by train in civilian clothes in Copenhagen on April 7 to reconnoiter the capital and make the necessary arrangements for a suitable pier to dock the troopship Hansestadt Danzig and a truck to handle the moving of a few supplies and a radio transmitter. The commander of the battalion -- ail that was considered necessary to capture a great city -- had also been in Copenhagen in civilian clothes a couple of days before to get the layout of the land.

 

It was not so strange, therefore, that the plans of the General and the battalion major were carried out with scarcely a hitch. The troopship arrived off Copenhagen shortly before dawn, passed without challenge the guns of 'the fort guarding the harbor and those of the Danish patrol vessels and tied up neatly at the Langelinie Pier in the heart of the city, only a stone's throw from the Citadel, the headquarters of the Danish Army, and but a short distance from Amalienborg Palace, where the King resided. Both were quickly seized by the lone battalion with no resistance worth mentioning.

 

Upstairs in the palace, amidst the rattle of scattered shots, the King conferred with his ministers. The latter were all for nonresistance. Only General Pryor begged to be allowed to put up a fight. At the very least he demanded that the King should leave for the nearest military camp at Hovelte to escape capture. But the King agreed with his ministers. The monarch, according to one eyewitness, asked "whether our soldiers had fought long enough" -- and Pryor retorted that they had not. [xiv] [39]

 

General Himer became restless at the delay. He telephoned headquarters for the combined operation, which had been set up at Hamburg -- the Danish authorities had not thought of cutting the telephone lines to Germany -- and, according to his own story, [40] asked for some bombers to zoom over Copenhagen "in order to force the Danes to accept." The conversation was in code and the Luftwaffe understood that Himer was calling for an actual bombing, which it promised to carry out forthwith -- an error which was finally corrected just in time. General Himer says the bombers "roaring over the Danish capital did not fail to make their impression: the Government accepted the German requests."

 

There was some difficulty in finding means of broadcasting the government's capitulation to the Danish troops, because the local radio stations were not yet on the air at such an early hour. This was solved by broadcasting it on the Danish wave length over the transmitter which the German battalion had brought along with it and for which General Himer had thoughtfully dug up a truck to haul it to the Citadel.

 

At 2 o'clock that afternoon General Himer, accompanied by the German minister, Cecil von Renthe-Fink, called on the King of Denmark, who was no longer sovereign but did not yet realize it. Himer left a record of the interview in the secret Army archives.

 

[quote]The seventy-year-old King appeared inwardly shattered, although he preserved outward appearances perfectly and maintained absolute dignity during the audience. His whole body trembled. He declared that he and his government would do everything possible to keep peace and order in the country and to eliminate any friction between the German troops and the country. He wished to spare his country further misfortune and misery.

 

General Himer replied that personally he very much regretted coming to the King on such a mission, but that he was only doing his duty as a soldier ... We came as friends, etc. When the King then asked whether he might keep his bodyguard, General Himer replied ... that the Fuehrer would doubtless permit him to retain them. He had no doubt about it.

 

The King was visibly relieved at hearing this. During the course of the audience ... the King became more at ease, and at its conclusion addressed General Himer with the words: "General, may I, as an old soldier, tell you something? As soldier to soldier? You Germans have done the incredible again! One must admit that it is magnificent work!"[/quote]

 

For nearly four years, until the tide of war had changed, the Danish King and his people, a good-natured, civilized and happy-go-lucky race, offered very little trouble to the Germans. Denmark became known as the "model protectorate." The monarch, the government, the courts, even the Parliament and the press, were at first allowed a surprising amount of freedom by their conquerors. Not even Denmark's seven thousand Jews were molested -- for a time. But the Danes, later than most of the other conquered peoples, finally came to the realization that further "loyal cooperation," as they called it, with their Teutonic tyrants, whose brutality increased with the years and with the worsening fortunes of war, was impossible -- if they were to retain any shred of self-respect and honor. They also began to see that Germany might not win the war after all and that little Denmark was not inexorably condemned, as so many had feared at first, to be a vassal state in Hitler's unspeakable New Order. Then resistance began.

 

[b]THE NORWEGIANS RESIST[/b]

 

It began in Norway from the outset, though certainly not everywhere. At Narvik, the port and railhead of the iron ore line from Sweden, Colonel Konrad Sundlo, in command of the local garrison, who, as we have seen, was a fanatical follower of Quisling, [xv] surrendered to the Germans without firing a shot. The naval commander was of a different caliber. With the approach of ten German destroyers at the mouth of the long fjord, the Eidsvold, one of two ancient ironclads in the harbor, fired a warning shot and signaled to the destroyers to identify themselves. Rear Admiral Fritz Bonte, commanding the German destroyer flotilla, answered by sending an officer in a launch to the Norwegian vessel to demand surrender. There now followed a bit of German treachery, though German naval officers later defended it with the argument that in war necessity knows no law. When the officer in the launch signaled the German Admiral that the Norwegians had said they would resist, Bonte waited only until his launch got out of the way and then quickly blew up the Eidsvold with torpedoes. The second Norwegian ironclad, the Norge, then opened fire but was quickly dispatched. Three hundred Norwegian sailors -- almost the entire crews of the two vessels -- perished. By 8 A.M. Narvik was in the hands of the Germans, taken by ten destroyers which had slipped through a formidable British fleet, and occupied by a mere two battalions of Nazi troops under the command of Brigadier General Eduard Dietl, an old Bavarian crony of Hitler since the days of the Beer Hall Putsch, who was to prove himself a resourceful and courageous commander when the going at Narvik got rough, as it did beginning the next day.

 

Trondheim, halfway down the long Norwegian west coast, was taken by the Germans almost as easily. The harbor batteries failed to fire on the German naval ships, led by the heavy cruiser Hipper, as they came up the long fjord, and the troops aboard that ship and four destroyers were conveniently disembarked at the city's piers without interference. Some forts held out for a few hours and the nearby airfield at Vaernes for two days, but this resistance did not affect the occupation of a fine harbor suitable for the largest naval ships as well as submarines and the railhead of a line that ran across north-central Norway to Sweden and over which the Germans expected, and with reason, to receive supplies should the British cut them off at sea.

 

Bergen, the second port and city of Norway, lying some three hundred miles down the coast from Trondheim and connected with Oslo, the capital, by railway, put up some resistance. The batteries guarding the harbor badly damaged the cruiser Koenigsberg and an auxiliary ship, but troops from other vessels landed safely and occupied the city before noon. It was at Bergen that the first direct British aid for the stunned Norwegians arrived. In the afternoon fifteen naval dive bombers sank the Koenigsberg, the first ship of that size ever to go down as the result of an air attack. Outside the harbor the British had a powerful fleet of four cruisers and seven destroyers which could have overwhelmed the smaller German naval force. It was about to enter the harbor when it received orders from the Admiralty to cancel the attack because of the risk of mines and bombing from the air, a decision which Churchill, who concurred in it, later regretted. This was the first sign of caution and of half measures which would cost the British dearly in the next crucial days.

 

Sola airfield, near the port of Stavanger on the southwest coast, was taken by German parachute troops after the Norwegian machine gun emplacements -- there was no real antiaircraft protection -- were silenced. This was Norway's biggest airfield and strategically of the highest importance to the Luftwaffe, since from here bombers could range not only against the British fleet along the Norwegian coast but against the chief British naval bases in northern Britain. Its seizure gave the Germans immediate air superiority in Norway and spelled the doom of any attempt by the British to land sizable forces.

 

Kristiansand on the south coast put up considerable resistance to the Germans, its shore batteries twice driving off a German fleet led by the light cruiser Karlsruhe. But the forts were quickly reduced by Luftwaffe bombing and the port was occupied by midafternoon. The Karlsruhe, however, on leaving port that evening was torpedoed by a British submarine and so badly damaged that it had to be sunk.

 

By noon, then, or shortly afterward, the five principal Norwegian cities and ports and the one big airfield along the west and south coasts that ran for 1,500 miles from the Skagerrak to the Arctic were in German hands. They had been taken by a handful of troops conveyed by a Navy vastly inferior to that of the British. Daring, deceit and surprise had brought Hitler a resounding victory at very little cost.

 

But at Oslo, the main prize, his military force and his diplomacy had run into unexpected trouble.

 

All through the chilly night of April 8-9, a gay welcoming party from the German Legation, led by Captain Schreiber, the naval attache, and joined occasionally by the busy Dr. Brauer, the minister, stood at the quayside in Oslo Harbor waiting for the arrival of a German fleet and troop transports. A junior German naval attache was darting about the bay in a motorboat waiting to act as pilot for the fleet, headed by the pocket battleship Leutzow (its name changed from Deutschland because Hitler did not want to risk losing a ship by that name) and the brand-new heavy cruiser Bluecher, flagship of the squadron.

 

They waited in vain. The big ships never arrived. They had been challenged at the entrance to the fifty-mile-long Oslo Fjord ·by the Norwegian mine layer Olav Trygverson, which sank a German torpedo boat and damaged the light cruiser Emden. After landing a small force to subdue the shore batteries the German squadron, however, continued on its way up the fjord. At a point some fifteen miles south of Oslo where the waters narrowed to fifteen miles, further trouble developed. Here stood the ancient fortress of Oskarsborg, whose defenders were more alert than the Germans suspected. Just before dawn the fort's 28-centimeter Krupp guns opened fire on the Luetzow and the Bluecher, and torpedoes were also launched from the shore. The 10,000-ton Bluecher, ablaze and torn by the explosions of its ammunition, went down, with the loss of 1,600 men, including several Gestapo and administrative officials (and all their papers) who were to arrest the King and the government and take over the administration of the capital. The Luetzow was also damaged but not completely disabled. Rear Admiral Oskar Kummetz, commander of the squadron, and General Erwin Engelbrecht, who led the 163rd Infantry Division, who were on the Bluecher, managed to swim ashore, where they were made prisoners by the Norwegians. Whereupon the crippled German fleet turned back for the moment to lick its wounds. It had failed in its mission to take the main German objective, the capital of Norway. It did not get there until the next day.

 

Oslo, in fact, fell to little more than a phantom German force dropped from the air at the local, undefended airport. The catastrophic news from the other seaports and the pounding of the guns fifteen miles down the Oslo Fjord had sent the Norwegian royal family, the government and members of Parliament scurrying on a special train from the capital at 9: 30 A.M. for Hamar, eighty miles to the north. Twenty motor trucks laden with the gold of the Bank of Norway and three more with the secret papers of the Foreign Office got away at the same hour. Thus the gallant action of the garrison at Oskarsborg had foiled Hitler's plans to get his hands on the Norwegian King, government and gold.

 

But Oslo was left in complete bewilderment. There were some Norwegian troops there, but they were not put into a state for defense. Above all, nothing was done to block the airport at nearby Fornebu, which could have been done with a few old automobiles parked along the runway and about the field. Late on the previous night Captain Spiller, the German air attache in Oslo, had stationed himself there to welcome the airborne troops, which were to come in after the Navy had reached the city. When the ships failed to arrive a frantic radio message was sent from the legation to Berlin apprising it of the unexpected and unhappy situation. The response was immediate. Soon parachute and airborne infantry troops were being landed at Fornebu. By noon about five companies had been assembled. As they were only lightly armed, the available Norwegian troops in the capital could have easily destroyed them. But for reasons never yet made clear -- so great was the confusion in Oslo -- they were not mustered, much less deployed, and the token German infantry force marched into the capital behind a blaring, if makeshift, military band. Thus the last of Norway's cities fell. But not Norway; not yet.

 

On the afternoon of April 9, the Storting, the Norwegian Parliament, met at Hamar with only five of the two hundred members missing, but adjourned at 7:30 P.M. when news was received that German troops were approaching and moved on to Elverum, a few miles to the east toward the Swedish border. Dr. Brauer, pressed by Ribbentrop, was demanding an immediate audience with the King, and the Norwegian Prime Minister had assented on condition that German troops withdraw to a safe distance south. This the German minister would not agree to.

 

Indeed, at this moment a further piece of Nazi treachery was in the making. Captain Spiller, the air attache, had set out from the Fornebu airport for Hamar with two companies of German parachutists to capture the recalcitrant King and government. It seemed to them more of a lark than anything else. Since Norwegian troops had not fired a shot to prevent the German entry into Oslo, Spiller expected no resistance at Hamar. In fact the two companies, traveling on commandeered autobuses, were making a pleasant sightseeing jaunt of it. But they did not reckon with a Norwegian Army officer who acted quite unlike so many of the others. Colonel Ruge, Inspector General of Infantry, who had accompanied the King northward, had insisted on providing some sort of protection to the fugitive government and had set up a roadblock near Hamar with two battalions of infantry which he had hastily rounded up. The German buses were stopped and in a skirmish which followed Spiller was mortally wounded. After suffering further casualties the Germans fell back all the way to Oslo.

 

The next day, Dr. Brauer set out from Oslo alone along the same road to see the King. An old-school professional diplomat, the German minister did not relish his role, but Ribbentrop had kept after him relentlessly to talk the King and the government into surrender. Brauer's difficult task had been further complicated by certain political events which had just taken place in Oslo. On the preceding evening Quisling had finally bestirred himself, once the capital was firmly in German hands, stormed into the radio station and broadcast a proclamation naming himself as head of a new government and ordering all Norwegian resistance to the Germans to halt immediately. Though Brauer could not yet grasp it -- and Berlin could never, even later, understand it -- this treasonable act doomed the German efforts to induce Norway to surrender. And paradoxically, though it was a moment of national shame for the Norwegian people, the treason of Quisling rallied the stunned Norwegians to a resistance which was to become formidable and heroic.

 

Dr. Brauer met Haakon VII, the only king in the twentieth century who had been elected to the throne by popular vote and the first monarch Norway had had of its own for five centuries, [xvi] in a schoolhouse at the little town of Elverum at 3 P.M. on April 10. From a talk this writer later had with the monarch and from a perusal of both the Norwegian records and Dr. Brauer's secret report (which is among the captured German Foreign Office documents) it is possible to give an account of what happened. After considerable reluctance the King had agreed to receive the German envoy in the presence of his Foreign Minister, Dr. Halvdan Koht. When Brauer insisted on seeing Haakon at first alone the King, with the agreement of Koht, finally consented.

 

The German minister, acting on instructions, alternately flattered and tried to intimidate the King. Germany wanted to preserve the dynasty. It was merely asking Haakon to do what his brother had done the day before in Copenhagen. It was folly to resist the Wehrmacht. Only useless slaughter for the Norwegians would ensue. The King was asked to approve the government of Quisling and return to Oslo. Haakon, a salty, democratic man and a great stickler, even at this disastrous moment, for constitutional procedure, tried to explain to the German diplomat that in Norway the King did not make political decisions; that was exclusively the business of the government, which he would now consult. Koht then joined the conversation and it was agreed that the government's answer would be telephoned to Brauer at some point on his way back to Oslo.

 

For Haakon, who, though he could not make the political decision could surely influence it, there was but one answer to the Germans. Retiring to a modest inn in the village of Nybergsund near Elverum -- just in case the Germans, with Brauer gone, tried to capture him in another surprise attack -- he assembled the members of the government as Council of State.

 

[quote]... For my part [he told them] I cannot accept the German demands. 11 would conflict with all that I have considered to be my duty as King of Norway since I came to this country nearly thirty-five years ago ... I do not want the decision of the government to be influenced by or based upon this statement. But ... I cannot appoint Quisling Prime Minister, a man in whom I know neither our people ... nor its representatives in the Starting have any confidence at all.

 

If therefore the government should decide to accept the German demands -- and I fully understand the reasons in favor of it, considering the impending danger of war in which so many young Norwegians will have to give their lives -- if so, abdication will be the only course open to me. [41][/quote]

 

The government, though there may have been some waverers up to this moment, could not be less courageous than the King, and it quickly rallied behind him. By the time Brauer got to Eidsvold, halfway back to Oslo, Koht was on the telephone line to him with the Norwegian reply. The German minister telephoned it immediately to the legation in Oslo, where it was sped to Berlin.

 

[quote]The King will name no government headed by Quisling and this decision was made upon the unanimous advice of the Government. To my specific question, Foreign Minister Koht replied: "Resistance will continue as long as possible." [42][/quote]

 

 

That evening from a feeble little rural radio station nearby, the only means of communication to the outside world available, the Norwegian government flung down the gauntlet to the mighty Third Reich. It announced its decision not to accept the German demands and called upon the people -- there were only three million of them -- to resist the invaders. The King formally associated himself with the appeal.

 

But the Nazi conquerors could not quite bring themselves to believe that the Norwegians meant what they said. Two more attempts were made to dissuade the King. On the morning of April 11 an emissary of Quisling, a Captain Irgens, arrived to urge the monarch to return to the capital. He promised that Quisling would serve him loyally. His proposal was dismissed with silent contempt.

 

In the afternoon an urgent message came from Brauer, requesting a further audience with the King to talk over "certain proposals." The hard-pressed German envoy had been instructed by Ribbentrop to tell the monarch that he "wanted to give the Norwegian people one last chance of a reasonable agreement." [xvii] This time Dr. Koht, after consulting the King, replied that if the German minister had "certain proposals" he could communicate them to the Foreign Minister.

 

The Nazi reaction to this rebuff by such a small and now helpless country was immediate and in character. The Germans had failed, first, to capture the King and the members of the government and, then, to persuade them to surrender. Now the Germans tried to kill them. Late on April 11, the Luftwaffe was sent out to give the village of Nybergsund the full treatment. The Nazi flyers demolished it with explosive and incendiary bombs and then machine-gunned those who tried to escape the burning ruins. The Germans apparently believed at first that they had succeeded in massacring the King and the members of the government. The diary of a German airman, later captured in northern Norway, had this entry for April 11: "Nybergsund. Oslo Regierung. Alles vernichtet." (Oslo government. Completely wiped out.)

 

The village had been, but not the King and the government. With the approach of the Nazi bombers they had taken refuge in a nearby wood. Standing in snow up to their knees, they had watched the Luftwaffe reduce the modest cottages of the hamlet to ruins. They now faced a choice of either moving on to the nearby Swedish border and asylum in neutral Sweden or pushing north into their own mountains, still deep in the spring snow. They decided to move on up the rugged Gudbrands Valley, which led past Hamar and Lillehammer and through the mountains to Andalsnes on the northwest coast, a hundred miles southwest of Trondheim. Along the route they might organize the still dazed and scattered Norwegian forces for further resistance. And there was some hope that British troops might eventually arrive to help them.

 

[b]THE BATTLES FOR NORWAY[/b]

 

In the far north at Narvik the British Navy already had reacted sharply to the surprise German occupation. It had been, as Churchill, who was in charge of it, admitted, "completely outwitted" by the Germans. Now in the north at least, out of range of the German land-based bombers, it went over to the offensive. On the morning of April 10, twenty-four hours after ten German destroyers had taken Narvik and disembarked Dietl's troops, a force of five British destroyers entered Narvik harbor, sank two of the five 'German destroyers then in the port, damaged the other three and sank all the German cargo vessels except one. In this action the German naval commander, Rear Admiral Bonte, was killed. On leaving the harbor, however, the British ships ran into the five remaining German destroyers emerging from nearby fjords. The German craft were heavier gunned and sank one British destroyer, forced the beaching of another on which the British commander, Captain Warburton-Lee, was mortally wounded, and damaged a third. Three of the five British destroyers managed to make the open sea where, in retiring, they sank a large German freighter, laden with ammunition, which was approaching the port.

 

At noon on April 13 the British, this time with the battleship Warspite, a survivor of the First World War Battle of Jutland, leading a flotilla of destroyers, returned to Narvik and wiped out the remaining German war vessels. Vice-Admiral W. J. Whitworth, the commanding officer, in wirelessing the Admiralty of his action urged that since the German troops on shore had been stunned and disorganized -- Dietl and his men had in fact taken to the hills -- Narvik be occupied at once "by the main landing force." Unfortunately for the Allies, the British Army commander, Major General P. J. Mackesy, was an exceedingly cautious officer and, arriving the very next day with an advance contingent of three infantry battalions, decided not to risk a landing at Narvik but to disembark his troops at Harstad, thirty-five miles to the north, which was in the hands of the Norwegians. This was a costly error.

 

In the light of the fact that they had prepared a small expeditionary corps for Norway, the British were unaccountably slow in getting their troops under way. On the afternoon of April 8, after news was received of the movement of German fleet units up the Norwegian coast, the British Navy hurriedly disembarked the troops that had already been loaded on shipboard for the possible occupation of Stavanger, Bergen, Trondheim and Narvik, on the ground that every ship would be needed for naval action. By the time the British land forces were re-embarked all those port cities were in German hands. And by the time they reached central Norway they were doomed, as were the British naval ships which were to cover them, by the Luftwaffe's control of the air.

 

By April 20, one British brigade, reinforced by three battalions of French Chasseurs Alpins, had been landed at Namsos, a small port eighty miles northeast of Trondheim, and a second British brigade had been put ashore at Andalsnes, a hundred miles to the southwest of Trondheim, which was thus to be attacked from north and south. But lacking field artillery, antiaircraft guns and air support, their bases pounded night and day by German bombers which blocked the further landing of supplies or reinforcements, neither force ever seriously threatened Trondheim. The Andalsnes brigade, after meeting a Norwegian unit at Dombas, a rail junction sixty miles to the east, abandoned the proposed attack northward toward Trondheim and pushed southeast down the Gudbrandsdal in order to aid the Norwegian troops which, under the energetic command of Colonel Ruge, had been slowing up the main German drive coming up the valley from Oslo.

 

At Lillehammer, north of Hamar, the first engagement of the war between British and German troops took place on April 21, but it was no match. The ship laden with the British brigade's artillery had been sunk and there were only rifles and machine guns with which to oppose a strong German force armed with artillery and light tanks. Even worse, the British infantry, lacking air support, was incessantly pounded by Luftwaffe planes operating from nearby Norwegian airfields. Lillehammer fell after a twenty-four-hour battle and the British and Norwegian forces began a retreat of 140 miles up the valley railway to Andalsnes, halting here and there to fight a rear-guard action. which slowed the Germans but never stopped them. On the nights of April 30 and May 1 the British forces were evacuated from Andalsnes and on May 2 the Anglo-French contingent from Namsos, considerable feats in themselves, for both harbors were blazing shambles from continuous German bombing. On the night of April 29 the King of Norway and the members of his government were taken aboard the British cruiser Glasgow at Molde, across the Romsdalsfjord from Andalsnes, itself also a shambles from Luftwaffe bombing, and conveyed to Tromso, far above the Arctic Circle and north of Narvik, where on May Day the provisional capital was set up.

 

By then the southern half of Norway, comprising all the cities and main towns, had been irretrievably lost. But northern Norway seemed secure. On May 28 an Allied force of 25,000 men, including two brigades of Norwegians, a brigade of Poles and two battalions of the French Foreign Legion, had driven the greatly outnumbered Germans out of Narvik. There seemed no reason to doubt that Hitler would be deprived of both his iron ore and his objective of occupying all of Norway and making the Norwegian government capitulate. But by this time the Wehrmacht had struck with stunning force on the Western front and every Allied soldier was needed to plug the gap. Narvik was abandoned, the Allied troops were hastily re-embarked, and General Dietl, who had held out in a wild mountainous tract near the Swedish border, reoccupied the port on June 8 and four days later accepted the surrender of the persevering and gallant Colonel Ruge and his bewildered, resentful Norwegian troops, who felt they had been left in the lurch by the British. King Haakon and his government were taken aboard the cruiser Devonshire at Tromso on June 7 and departed for London and five years of bitter exile. [xviii] In Berlin Dietl was promoted to Major General, awarded the Ritterkreuz and hailed by Hitler as the Sieger von Narvik.

 

Despite his amazing successes the Fuehrer had had his bad moments during the Norwegian campaign. General Jodl's diary is crammed with terse entries recounting a succession of the warlord's nervous crises. "Terrible excitement," he noted on April 14 after news had been received of the wiping out of the German naval forces at Narvik. On April 17 Hitler had a fit of hysteria about the loss of Narvik; he demanded that General Dietl's troops there be evacuated by air -- an impossibility. "Each piece of bad news," Jodi scribbled that day in his diary, "leads to the worst fears." And two days later: "Renewed crisis. Political action has failed. Envoy Brauer is recalled. According to the Fuehrer, force has to be used ... [xix] The conferences at the Chancellery in Berlin that day, April 19, became so embittered, with the heads of the three services blaming each other for the delays, that even the lackey Keitel stalked out of the room. "Chaos of leadership is again threatening," Jodl noted. And on April 22 he added: "Fuehrer is increasingly worried about the English landings."

 

On April 23 the slow progress of the German forces moving up from Oslo toward Trondheim and Andalsnes caused the "excitement to grow," as Jodl put it, but the next day the news was better and from that day it continued to grow more rosy. By the twenty-sixth the warlord was in such fine fettle that at 3:30 in the morning, during an all-night session with his military advisers, he told them he intended to start "Yellow" between May 1 and 7. "Yellow" was the code name for the attack in the West across Holland and Belgium. Though on April 29 Hitler was again "worried about Trondheim," the next day he was "happy with joy" at the news that a battle group from Oslo had reached the city. He could at last turn his attention back to the West. On May 1 he ordered that preparations for the big attack there be ready by May 5.

 

The Wehrmacht commanders -- Goering, Brauchitsch, Halder, Keitel, Jodl, Raeder and the rest -- had for the first time had a foretaste during the Norwegian campaign of how their demonic Leader cracked under the strain of even minor setbacks in battle. It was a weakness which would grow on him when, after a series of further astonishing military successes, the tide of war changed, and it would contribute mightily to the eventual debacle of the Third Reich.

 

Still, any way one looked at it, the quick conquest of Denmark and Norway had been an important victory for Hitler and a discouraging defeat for the British. It secured the winter iron ore route, gave added protection to the entrance to the Baltic, allowed the daring German Navy to break out into the North Atlantic and provided them with excellent port facilities there for submarines and surface ships in the sea war against Britain. It brought Hitler air bases hundreds of miles closer to the main enemy. And perhaps most important of all it immensely enhanced the military prestige of the Third Reich and correspondingly diminished that of the Western Allies. Nazi Germany seemed invincible. Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland and now Denmark and Norway had succumbed easily to Hitler's force, or threat of force, and not even the help of two major allies in the West had been, in the latter cases, of the slightest avail. The wave of the future, as an eminent American woman wrote, seemed to belong to Hitler and Nazism.

 

For the remaining neutral states Hitler's latest conquest was also a terrifying lesson. Obviously neutrality no longer offered protection to the little democratic nations trying to survive in a totalitarian -- dominated world. Finland had just found that out, and now Norway and Denmark. They had themselves to blame for being so blind, for declining to accept in good time -- before the actual aggression -- the help of friendly world powers.

 

[quote]I trust this fact [Churchill told Commons on April 11] will be meditated upon by other countries who may tomorrow, or a week hence, or a month hence, find themselves the victims of an equally elaborately worked -- out staff plan for their destruction and enslavement. [45][/quote]

 

He was obviously thinking of Holland and Belgium, but even in their case, though there would be a month of grace, no such meditation began. [xx]

 

There were military lessons, too, to be learned from Hitler's lightning conquest of the two Scandinavian countries. The most significant was the importance of air power and its superiority over naval power when land bases for bombers and fighters were near. Hardly less important was an old lesson, that victory often goes to the daring and the imaginative. The German Navy and Air Force had been both, and Dietl at Narvik had shown a resourcefulness of the German Army which the Allies had lacked.

 

There was one military result of the Scandinavian adventure which could not be evaluated at once, if only because it was not possible to look very far into the future. The losses in men in Norway on both sides were light. The Germans suffered 1,317 killed, 2,375 missing and 1,604 wounded, a total of 5,296 casualties; those of the Norwegians, French and British were slightly less than 5,000. The British lost one aircraft carrier, one cruiser and seven destroyers and the Poles and the French one destroyer each. German naval losses were comparably much heavier: ten out of twenty destroyers, three of eight cruisers, while the battle cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau and the pocket battleship Luetzow were damaged so severely that they were out of action for several months. Hitler had no fleet worthy of mention for the coming events of the summer. When the time to invade Britain came, as it did so shortly, this proved to be an insurmountable handicap.

 

The possible consequences of the severe crippling of the German Navy, however, did not enter the Fuehrer's thoughts as, at the beginning of May, with Denmark and Norway now added to his long list of conquests, he worked with his eager generals -- for they had now shed their misgivings of the previous autumn -- on the last-minute preparations for what they were confident would be the greatest conquest of all.

 

_______________

 

[b]Notes:[/b]

 

i. It was on October 10 that Hitler had called in his military chiefs, read them a long  memorandum on the necessity of an immediate attack in the West and handed them  Directive No. 6 ordering preparations for an offensive through Belgium and  Holland. (See above. pp. 644-46.)

 

ii. It was a correct assumption. It is now known that the Allied Supreme War  Council, meeting in Paris on February 5, 1940, decided that in sending an expeditionary  force to Finland the Swedish iron fields should be occupied by troops  landed at Narvik, which was but a short distance from the mines. (See the author's  The Challenge of Scandinavia, pp. 115-16n.) Churchill remarks that at the meeting  it was decided "incidentally to get control of the Gullivare ore-field." (The Gathering  Storm, p. 560.)

 

iii. He had not impressed the German minister in Oslo, Dr. Curt Brauer, who twice  in December warned Berlin that Quisling "need not be taken seriously ... his  influence and prospects are ... very slight." [9] For his frankness and reluctance to  play Hitler's game, the minister was quickly to pay.

 

iv. On March 7 General Ironside, Chief of the British General Staff, informed Marshal  Mannerheim that an Allied expeditionary force of 57,000 men was ready to come  to the aid of the Finns and that the first division, of 15,000 troops, could reach  Finland by the end of March if Norway and Sweden would allow them transit.  Actually five days before, on March 2, as Mannerheim knew, both Norway and  Sweden had again turned down the Franco-British request for transit privileges.  This did not prevent Premier Daladier on March 8 from scolding the Finns for not  officially asking for Allied troops and from intimating that the Allied forces would  be sent regardless of Norwegian and Swedish protests. But Mannerheim was not  to be fooled, and, having advised his government to sue for peace while the Finnish  Army was still intact and undefeated, he approved the immediate dispatch of a  peace delegation to Moscow on March 8. The Finnish Commander in Chief seems  to have been skeptical of the French zeal for fighting on the Finnish front rather than on their own front in France. (See The Memoirs of Marshal Mannerheim.)

 

One can only speculate on the utter confusion which would have resulted among the belligerents had the Franco-British expeditionary corps ever arrived in Finland and fought the Russians. In little more than a year Germany would be at war with Russia, in which case the enemies in the West would have been allies in the East!

 

v. Examples of Hitler's weird views on America have been given in earlier chapters, but in the captured Foreign Office documents there is a revealing paper on the Fuehrer's state of mind at this very moment. On March 12 Hitler had a long talk with Colin Ross, a German "expert" on the United States, who had recently returned from a lecture trip in America, where he had contributed his mite to Nazi propaganda. When Ross remarked that an "imperialist tendency" prevailed in the United States, Hitler asked (according to the shorthand notes of Dr. Schmidt) "whether this imperialist tendency did not strengthen the desire for the Anschluss of Canada to the United States, and thus produce an anti-English attitude."

 

It must be admitted that Hitler's advisers on the U.S.A. were not very helpful in shedding light on their subject. At this same interview, Ross, in trying to answer Hitler's questions as to why America was so anti-German, gave the following answers, among others:

 

[quote]... An additional factor in hatred against Germany ... is the monstrous power of Jewry, directing with a really fantastic cleverness and organizational skill the struggle against everything German and National Socialist ...

 

Colin Ross then talked about Roosevelt, whom he believes to be an enemy of the Fuehrer for reasons of pure personal jealousy and also on account of his personal lust for power ... He had come to power the same year as the Fuehrer and he had to watch the latter carrying out his great plans, while he, Roosevelt ... had not reached his goal. He too had ideas of dictatorship which in some respects were very similar to National Socialist ideas. Yet precisely this realization that the Fuehrer had attained his goal, while he had not, gave to his pathological ambition the desire to act upon the stage of world history as the Fuehrer's rival ...[/quote]

 

After Herr Colin Ross had taken his leave, the Fuehrer remarked that Ross was a very intelligent man who certainly had many good ideas. [17]

 

[vi] Weizsaecker replied that Canaris himself had assured him that neither of the  men mentioned by Thomsen was an agent of the Abwehr. But no good secret  service admits these things. Other Foreign Office papers reveal that on January 24  an Abwehr agent left Buenos Aires with instructions to report to Fritz von Hausberger  at Weehawken, N.J., "for instructions in our speciality." Another agent  had been sent from the same place to New York in Decemberto gather information  on American aircraft factories and arms shipments to the Allies. Thomsen himself  reported on February 20 the arrival of Baron Konstantin von Maydell, a Baltic  German of Estonian citizenship, who had told the German Embassy in Washington  that he was on a sabotage mission for the Abwehr.

 

[vii] "Before God and the world," Goering exclaimed to Welles, "he, the Field Marshal, could state that Germany had not desired the war. It had been forced upon her ... But what was Germany to do when the others wanted to destroy her?"

 

[viii] A quite unofficial American peacemaker was also in Berlin at this time: James D. Mooney, a vice-president of General Motors. He had been in Berlin, as I recall, shortly before or after the outbreak of the war, trying like that other amateur in diplomacy, Dahlerus, though without the latter's connections, to save the peace. The day after Welles left Berlin, on March 4, 1940, Hitler received Mooney, who told him, according to a captured German record of the meeting, that President Roosevelt was "more friendly and sympathetic" to Germany "than was generally believed in Berlin" and that the President was prepared to act as "moderator" in bringing the belligerents together. Hitler merely repeated what he had told Welles two days before.

 

On March 11 Thomsen sent to Berlin a confidential memorandum prepared for  him by an unnamed American informant declaring that Mooney "was more or less  pro-German." The General Motors executive was certainly taken in by the  Germans. Thomsen's memorandum states that Mooney had informed Roosevelt  on the basis of an earlier talk with Hitler that the Fuehrer "was desirous of peace  and wished to prevent the bloodshed of a spring campaign." Hans Dieckhoff, the  recalled German ambassador to the United States, who was whiling away his time  in Berlin, saw Mooney immediately after the latter's interview with Hitler and  reported to the Foreign Office that the American businessman was "rather verbose"  and that "I cannot believe that the Mooney initiative has any great importance." [22]

 

[ix] See above, p. 648.

 

[x] The first three German supply ships had sailed for Narvik at 2 A.M. on April 3.  Germany's largest tanker left Murmansk for Narvik on April 6, with the connivance  of the Russians, who obligingly furnished the cargo of oil.

 

[xi] On the stand at Nuremberg, Grand Admiral Raeder justified such tactics on the  ground that they were a legitimate "ruse of war against which, from the legal point  of view, no objection can be made." [36]

 

[xii] This writer had rarely seen the Nazi Foreign Minister more insufferable than he  was that morning. He strutted into a specially convoked press conference at the  Foreign Office, garbed in a flashy field-gray uniform and looking, I noted in my  diary, "as if he owned the earth." He snapped, "The Fuehrer has given his  answer ... Germany has occupied Danish and Norwegian soil in order to protect  those countries from the Allies, and will defend their true neutrality until the end  of the war. Thus an honored part of Europe has been saved from certain downfall."  The Berlin press was also something to see that day. The Boersen Zeitung:  "England goes cold-bloodedly over the dead bodies of small peoples. Germany  protects the weak states from the English highway robbers ... Norway ought to  see the righteousness of Germany's action, which was taken to ensure the freedom  of the Norwegian people." Hitler's own paper, the Voelkischer Beobachter, carried  this banner line: GERMANY SAVES SCANDINAVIA!

 

[xiii] Total Danish casualties throughout the realm were thirteen killed and twenty-three  wounded. The Germans suffered some twenty casualties.

 

[xiv] See above, p. 676.

 

[xv] Norway had been a part of Denmark for four centuries and of Sweden for a  further century, regaining its complete independence only in 1905, when it broke  away from its union with Sweden and the people elected Prince Carl of Denmark  as King of Norway. He assumed the name of Haakon VII. Haakon VI had died  in 1380. Haakon VII was a brother of Christian X of Denmark, who surrendered  so promptly to the Germans on the morning of April 9, 1940.

 

[xvi] There is an ominous hint of further treachery in Ribbentrop's secret instructions.  Brauer was told to try to arrange the meeting "at a point between Oslo and the  King's present place of residence. For obvious reasons he, Brauer, would have to  discuss this move fully with General von Falkenhorst and would then also have to  inform the latter of the meeting place agreed upon." Gaus, who telephoned Ribbentrop's  instructions, reported that "Herr Brauer clearly understood the meaning  of the instructions." One cannot help but think that had the King gone to this  meeting, Falkenhorst's troops would have grabbed him. [43]

 

[xvii] Quisling did not last long in his first attempt to govern Norway. Six days after he had proclaimed himself Prime Minister, on April 15, the Germans kicked him out and appointed an Administrative Council of six leading Norwegian citizens, including Bishop Eivind Berggrav, head of the Lutheran Church of Norway, and Paal Berg, the President of the Supreme Court. It was mostly the doing of Berg, an eminent and scrappy jurist who later became the secret head of the Norwegian resistance movement. On April 24 Hitler appointed Josef Terboven, a tough young Nazi gauleiter, to be Reich Commissar for Norway, and it was he who actually governed the country, with increasing brutality, during the occupation. Brauer, who had opposed Quisling from the beginning, was recalled on April 17, retired from the diplomatic service, and sent to the Western front as a soldier. The Germans reinstated Quisling as Prime Minister in 1942, but though his unpopularity among the people was immense, his power was nil despite his best efforts to serve his German masters.

 

At the end of the war Quisling was tried for treason and after an exhaustive trial sentenced to death and executed on October 24, 1945. Terboven committed suicide rather than face capture. Knut Hamsun, the great Norwegian novelist, who had openly collaborated with the Germans, singing their praises, was indicted for treason, but the charges were dropped on the grounds of his old age and senility. He was, however, tried and convicted for "profiting from the Nazi regime," and fined $65,000. He died on February 19, 1952, at the age of ninety-three. General von Falkenhorst was tried as a war criminal before a mixed British and Norwegian military court on charges of having handed over captured Allied commandos to the S.S. for execution. He was sentenced to death on August 2, 1946, but the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.

 

[xviii] On April 13, General von Falkenhorst, no doubt goaded by Hitler, who was in a fury because of Norwegian resistance, signed an order providing for taking as hostages twenty of the most distinguished citizens of Oslo, including Bishop Berggravand Paal Berg, who, in the words of Minister Brauer, "were to be shot in the event of the continued resistance or attempted sabotage. [44]

 

 

[ix] The Swedes, caught between Russia in Finland and the Baltic countries and Germany in possession of adjoining Denmark and Norway, meditated and decided there was no choice except to cling to their precarious neutrality and go down fighting if they were attacked. They had placated the Soviet Union by refusing to allow Allied troops transit to Finland, and now under great pressure they placated Germany. Though Sweden had sent an impressive stock of arms to Finland, it refused to sell Norway either arms or gasoline when it was attacked. All through April the Germans demanded that Sweden allow the transit of troops to Narvik to relieve Dietl, but this was refused until the end of hostilities, although a train of medical personnel and supplies was allowed through. On June 19, fearing a direct attack by Germany, Sweden gave in to Hitler's pressure and agreed to permit the transport over Swedish railways of Nazi troops and war material to Norway on condition that the number of troops moving in each direction should balance so that the German garrisons in Norway would not be strengthened by the arrangement.

 

This was of immense help to Germany. By transporting fresh troops and war material by land through Sweden Hitler avoided the risk of having them sunk at sea by the British. In the first six months of the accord, some 140,000 German troops in Norway were exchanged and the German forces there greatly strengthened by supplies. Later, just before the German onslaught on Russia, Sweden permitted the Nazi High Command to transport an entire army division, fully armed, from Norway across Sweden to Finland to be used to attack the Soviet Union. What it had refused the Allies the year before it accorded to Nazi Germany. For details of German pressure on Sweden and for the text of the exchange of letters between King Gustav V and Hitler, see Documents on German Foreign Policy, IX. The author has covered the subject more thoroughly in The Challenge of Scandinavia.

 

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