The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (135 page)

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

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 Jösing 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 Jodl noted in his diary, that the members of the
Graf Spee
crew aboard the
Altmark
had not put up a suffer fight—“no resistance, no British losses.” On February 19, Jodl’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.

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.

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.

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.

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.
*
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.

Hitler’s ignorance of the United States, as well as that of Goering and Ribbentrop, was abysmal.
*
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 1,1939, the German military attaché 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