The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (139 page)

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,
*
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 attaché, and joined occasionally by the busy Dr. Bräuer, the minister, stood at the quayside in Oslo Harbor waiting for the arrival of a German fleet and troop transports. A junior German naval attaché 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 attaché 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. Bräuer, 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 attaché, 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. Bräuer 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. Bräuer’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 Bräuer 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. Bräuer 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,
*
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. Bräuer’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 Bräuer 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 Bräuer 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 Bräuer gone, tried to capture him in another surprise attack—he assembled the members of the government as Council of State.