During the night of April 6-7, the German fleet operation began. The battleships, cruisers, and destroyers sailed from their North Sea ports. A further stiffening in the Norwegian attitude to Germany was detected. Norwegian coastal defenses were on the alert, troop movements were reported, lighthouses and radio beacons were extinguished.
Norwegian pilots for the “coalships” waiting to pass northward through the Leads to Narvik and Trondheim were only slowly forthcoming—was this deliberate Norwegian obstructionism, or had the German admiralty simply failed to impress on these ships’ captains the importance of the timetable ? It was too late to speculate now, for the entire German invasion fleet was at sea.
Hitler was committed to either a catastrophic defeat, with the certain annihilation of his navy, or to a spectacular victory. In the small hours of April 9, Berlin picked up a Norwegian radio signal reporting strange warships entering the Oslo Fjord. Now Hitler knew that the toughest part of the operation—running the gauntlet of the Norwegian coastal batteries—had begun. But shortly before 6 A.M.
German signals from the forces landed at Narvik, Trondheim, and Bergen were monitored ; they called for U-boats to stand guard over the port entrances. Access to Norway had now been forced. Hitler and Jodl read the signals with evident relief, though not until later did the full measure of this German victory dawn on them. It was at Narvik that the real crisis began.
Ten destroyers landed General Eduard Died’s two thousand German and Austrian mountain troops virtually unopposed, for the local Norwegian commander was a Quisling sympathizer. But the three camouflaged supply ships and the tanker Kattegat never arrived from Germany. Only the tanker Jan Wellem arrived punctually from the naval base provided by Stalin at Murmansk ; as the ten destroyers could refuel only slowly from this one tanker, they could not be ready to return before late on the tenth.
But earlier that day five British destroyers penetrated the fjord in a blinding snowstorm ; in the ensuing gunplay and the battle fought there three days later, the aging British battleship Warspite and a whole flotilla of destroyers sank all ten German destroyers—though not before they had taken a toll from the British. Thus half of Raeder’s total destroyer force had been wiped out.(3) Hitler had that morning already radioed Died to hold on to Narvik at all costs.
He was to prepare frozen Lake Hartvig as an airfield ready to receive Luftwaffe supply planes. After word came of the sinking of the destroyers, Rosenberg found the Fhrer slumped deep in thought following a conference with Gring. When over the next two days news arrived of British troops landing at Harstad, not far north of Narvik, and at Namsos, to the north of Trondheim, the military crisis brought Hitler to the verge of a complete nervous breakdown.
The psychological effect of this drama on Hitler was interesting. He composed himself and with deliberate controlled evenness replied, “What would you advise?” Thereupon Jodl showed him an appreciation by his staff, appended to which was a draft directive to Dietl to hold out and contain enemy forces there as long as possible.
That evening Hitler signed the order ; but he made it abundantly clear in a preamble that he thought the whole northern position was bound to be overwhelmed by the Allies eventually, since all the odds were against Dietl and his four thousand ill-armed men. It was not one of his more felicitously worded messages. But military strength, if mindlessly applied, often proves counterproductive. In Norway, Falkenhorst had begun draconian reprisals to quell the incidence of sabotage.
Hostages were taken. Gring mentioned during an audience with Hitler that a mass resistance movement in Norway was growing. By late
on April 18 it was clear that earlier attempts at kid-glove tactics had failed. On that day, the fugitive Norwegian government declared itself at war with Germany. All diplomatic talks ceased, and Hitler told his staff that from now on brute force was the only answer.
At the war conference he announced his intention of transferring executive authority to Falkenhorst ; the tough young Gauleiter of Essen, Josef Terboven, would be appointed Reich Commissioner for Norway, answerable only to the Fhrer himself. Keitel—rightly fearing that Norway was now to suffer as Poland was already suffering—raised immediate objections. When Hitler’s only reply was to snub the OKW chief, Keitel took a leaf from Jodl’s book and stormed out of the conference chamber.
Afterward he privately cornered Hitler and warned that friction was bound to arise between Terboven and the military commander. Nevertheless, by that evening Terboven was already at the Chancellery ; the next day saw him ensconced in private with Hitler, Himmler, and Martin Bormann ; and
on April 21, Terboven and his staff were en route for Oslo and ready to introduce a reign of terror to the Norwegian people. There was no denying the effect Ribbentrop’s White Book on the Norwegian documents had on world opinion.
Well might Hitler ask, Who now dares condemn me for assailing Belgium and Holland if the Allies care so little for small states’ neutrality themselves ? At all events, on the very day the captured documents were released to the world, April 27, 1940, Hitler secretly announced to his staff the decision over which he had wavered these many months. He would launch “Yellow” in the first week of May. Now the real pressure was on.
On April 29, Hitler ordered the Luftwaffe to stand by to open “Yellow”
on May 5 ; on April 3o, he ordered the entire Wehrmacht to be ready to launch “Yellow” at twenty-four hours’ notice from the fifth. That day, General Jodl had confirmed to him that in Norway the German forces that had set out weeks before from Trondheim and Oslo had now linked ; the Fhrer was delirious with joy. “That is more than a battle won, it is an entire campaign !” he exclaimed. Before his eyes he could already see the autobahn he would build to Trondheim.
The Norwegian people deserved it. How utterly they differed from the Poles ! Norwegian doctors and nurses had tended the injured until they dropped with exhaustion ; the Polish “subhumans” had jabbed their eyes out. Moved by this comparison,
on May 9, Hitler was to give his military commander in Norway an order which began as follows : … In the course of the campaign in the east German soldiers who had the misfortune to fall injured or uninjured into Polish hands were usually brutally ill-treated or massacred.
By way of contrast, it must be said of the Norwegian army that not one single such incident of the debasement of warfare has occurred.The Norwegian soldier spurned all the cowardly and deceitful methods common to the Poles. He fought with open visor and honorably, and he tended our prisoners and injured properly and to the best of his ability. The civilian population acted similarly.
Nowhere did they join in the fighting, and they did all they could for the welfare of our casualties.I have therefore decided in appreciation for this to authorize the liberation of the Norwegian soldiers we took prisoner.
Only the professional soldiers will have to remain in captivity until such time as the former Norwegian government withdraws its call to arms against Germany, or individual officers and men give their formal word not to take part under any circumstances in further hostilities against Germany. The Norwegian soldier spurned all the cowardly and deceitful methods common to the Poles.
He fought with open visor and honorably, and he tended our prisoners and injured properly and to the best of his ability. The civilian population acted similarly. Nowhere did they join in the fighting, and they did all they could for the welfare of our casualties.I have therefore decided in appreciation for this to authorize the liberation of the Norwegian soldiers we took prisoner.
Only the professional soldiers will have to remain in captivity until such time as the former Norwegian government withdraws its call to arms against Germany, or individual officers and men give their formal word not to take part under any circumstances in further hostilities against Germany. I have therefore decided in appreciation for this to authorize the liberation of the Norwegian soldiers we took prisoner.
Only the professional soldiers will have to remain in captivity until such time as the former Norwegian government withdraws its call to arms against Germany, or individual officers and men give their formal word not to take part under any circumstances in further hostilities against Germany. After a while the country lanes began to climb a hill through scattered woods. When his limousine stopped, Hitler clambered stiffly out.
A former antiaircraft position on the side of a hill had been converted and strengthened to serve as his field headquarters. The nearest village had been completely evacuated, and would serve for his lesser staff. It was already daylight. The air was filled with the sound of birds heralding the arrival of another dawn. Hitler stood outside his bunker, watching the sun slowly bring color to the countryside. This was to be the first real day of spring weather.
From the two main roads in the valleys on each side of this hill they could hear the heavy rumble of convoys of trucks heading westward. An adjutant pointed wordlessly to his watch : it was 5:35 A.M. Far away they could hear the growing clamor of heavy artillery begin, and from behind them swelled a thunder of aircraft engines as the Luftwaffe fighter and bomber squadrons approached. 5 This was Dr. Joseph Mller, a Catholic lawyer, who later became the postwar Bavarian minister of justice.
Colonel Oster also repeated his earlier acts of subversion by giving the Dutch military attach a running commentary on each postponement of “Yellow” and the final definitive warning at 9 P.M. on the very eve of the offensive.
His complicated motives can be summarized thus : recognizing Hitler’s immense popular support by 1940, Oster desired to inflict on him such a military defeat that a coup against him would stand a better chance ; he also desired the Allies to take him seriously as a negotiating partner.
The Dutch military commander considered him “a pitiful specimen.” p. 100 Jodl’s deputy—Warlimont—ordered Lossberg to write down an account of Hitler’s nervous actions for the OKW war diary kept by Greiner. A copy survived among Greiner’s papers.
Schmundt was aghast ; as Lossberg later wrote (in an unpublished manuscript) : “He felt it was sacrilege to write down one of the ostensibly infallible Fhrer’s weak moments in black and white.” The page was stricken from the official diary text.
To get behind the OKW scenes, I used not only Jodl’s diary and Deyhle’s notes of April 24 (1781-PS) but also manuscripts by Lossberg and by the navy captains Wolf Junge and Heinz Assmann on Jodl’s staff, and interviews of Baron Sigismund von Falkenstein (his Luftwaffe staff officer) and General Ottomar Hansen (Keitel’s adjutant).p.
103 Details of the extraordinary British documents captured in Norway can be reconstructed from Jodl’s diary, April 23-27 ; from the naval staff diary, April 27 ; from Hitler’s letter to Mussolini on the 26th—pontificating about “the perfidious mendacity” of the Englishman—and from Goebbels’s confidential remarks at his ministerial conference the same day and
on May 3 and 19 ; from Colonel Wagner’s private letter of May 7 ; and from the AA’s White Book publishing the most important of the documents
on April 27, 1940.p. 106 From the text of Reynaud’s telephone conversation with Chamberlain at 10:10 P.M. on April 30, published in Vlkischer Beobachter, May 7, 1940, they appear in fact to have been discussing French plans to bomb the Caucasus oil fields of Baku and Batum (a plan of which the Germans learned in detail only when numbers of Allied planning documents fell into their hands during “Yellow”).
Reynaud assured Chamberlain that General Weygand, the French Commander in Chief Middle East, had promised to be ready by May 15, at which Chamberlain retorted that his impression was that people down there were taking their time. Reynaud explained that Turkey was raising “steeper demands each day” for overflight permission ; he talked of certain difficults mentales. For the French documents later captured relating to the bombing plan, see Weizscker’s AA files (Serial 121).
My researches establish prima facie the authenticity of the transcript of the conversation : it was obtained by the SS agent Fritz Lorenz, a language expert who had been on Ribbentrop’s staff since 1935 and transferred to the RSHA in January 1940. From his personnel records I established that he traveled with forged documents through Switzerland and Italy to Paris
on April 23, with the delectable job of seducing the telephone operator Marguerite T__; at their last rendezvous
on May 1 she handed him the transcript, which she herself had made. See his amusing correspondence in Himmler’s files, T175/124/9424 et seq., and in his personnel file in the BDC ; his insistent demand for a decoration went up to Hitler himself (see Hewel Ledger, January 15, 1942) but was vetoed because of his uncouth behavior in Italy—he had fired a revolver in a hotel when in an alcoholic stupor.p.
106 On the FA intercepts, see Jodl’s diary, the testimony of Sas, and Hermann Graml’s study of the Oster affair in VfZ, 1966, pages 26 et seq.
On May 8, 1940, there is also a cryptic reference in Tippelskirch’s diary to alerts proclaimed in the Low Countries : “Luxembourg : Telephone conversation [overheard on] May 6 : ‘Are they coming or aren’t they ?’ ‘It’s in the air.’ ” In the AA files of Ambassador von Mackensen (Rome) is extensive correspondence from May 17, 1940, to July 28, 1941, relating to the SD’s attempts to identify the German citizen in Rome who had tipped off the Vatican’s Father Robert Leiber,
S.J., about “Yellow” deadlines. p. 103 Details of the extraordinary British documents captured in Norway can be reconstructed from Jodl’s diary, April 23-27 ; from the naval staff diary, April 27 ; from Hitler’s letter to Mussolini on the 26th—pontificating about “the perfidious mendacity” of the Englishman—and from Goebbels’s confidential remarks at his ministerial conference the same day and
on May 3 and 19 ; from Colonel Wagner’s private letter of May 7 ; and from the AA’s White Book publishing the most important of the documents
on April 27, 1940.p. 106 From the text of Reynaud’s telephone conversation with Chamberlain at 10:10 P.M. on April 30, published in Vlkischer Beobachter, May 7, 1940, they appear in fact to have been discussing French plans to bomb the Caucasus oil fields of Baku and Batum (a plan of which the Germans learned in detail only when numbers of Allied planning documents fell into their hands during “Yellow”).
Reynaud assured Chamberlain that General Weygand, the French Commander in Chief Middle East, had promised to be ready by May 15, at which Chamberlain retorted that his impression was that people down there were taking their time. Reynaud explained that Turkey was raising “steeper demands each day” for overflight permission ; he talked of certain difficults mentales. For the French documents later captured relating to the bombing plan, see Weizscker’s AA files (Serial 121).
My researches establish prima facie the authenticity of the transcript of the conversation : it was obtained by the SS agent Fritz Lorenz, a language expert who had been on Ribbentrop’s staff since 1935 and transferred to the RSHA in January 1940. From his personnel records I established that he traveled with forged documents through Switzerland and Italy to Paris
on April 23, with the delectable job of seducing the telephone operator Marguerite T__; at their last rendezvous
on May 1 she handed him the transcript, which she herself had made. See his amusing correspondence in Himmler’s files, T175/124/9424 et seq., and in his personnel file in the BDC ; his insistent demand for a decoration went up to Hitler himself (see Hewel Ledger, January 15, 1942) but was vetoed because of his uncouth behavior in Italy—he had fired a revolver in a hotel when in an alcoholic stupor.p.
106 On the FA intercepts, see Jodl’s diary, the testimony of Sas, and Hermann Graml’s study of the Oster affair in VfZ, 1966, pages 26 et seq.
On May 8, 1940, there is also a cryptic reference in Tippelskirch’s diary to alerts proclaimed in the Low Countries : “Luxembourg : Telephone conversation [overheard on] May 6 : ‘Are they coming or aren’t they ?’ ‘It’s in the air.’ ” In the AA files of Ambassador von Mackensen (Rome) is extensive correspondence from May 17, 1940, to July 28, 1941, relating to the SD’s attempts to identify the German citizen in Rome who had tipped off the Vatican’s Father Robert Leiber,
S.J., about “Yellow” deadlines. p. 106 From the text of Reynaud’s telephone conversation with Chamberlain at 10:10 P.M.
on April 30, published in Vlkischer Beobachter, May 7, 1940, they appear in fact to have been discussing French plans to bomb the Caucasus oil fields of Baku and Batum (a plan of which the Germans learned in detail only when numbers of Allied planning documents fell into their hands during “Yellow”).
Reynaud assured Chamberlain that General Weygand, the French Commander in Chief Middle East, had promised to be ready by May 15, at which Chamberlain retorted that his impression was that people down there were taking their time. Reynaud explained that Turkey was raising “steeper demands each day” for overflight permission ; he talked of certain difficults mentales. For the French documents later captured relating to the bombing plan, see Weizscker’s AA files (Serial 121).
My researches establish prima facie the authenticity of the transcript of the conversation : it was obtained by the SS agent Fritz Lorenz, a language expert who had been on Ribbentrop’s staff since 1935 and transferred to the RSHA in January 1940. From his personnel records I established that he traveled with forged documents through Switzerland and Italy to Paris
on April 23, with the delectable job of seducing the telephone operator Marguerite T__; at their last rendezvous
on May 1 she handed him the transcript, which she herself had made. See his amusing correspondence in Himmler’s files, T175/124/9424 et seq., and in his personnel file in the BDC ; his insistent demand for a decoration went up to Hitler himself (see Hewel Ledger, January 15, 1942) but was vetoed because of his uncouth behavior in Italy—he had fired a revolver in a hotel when in an alcoholic stupor.p.
106 On the FA intercepts, see Jodl’s diary, the testimony of Sas, and Hermann Graml’s study of the Oster affair in VfZ, 1966, pages 26 et seq.
On May 8, 1940, there is also a cryptic reference in Tippelskirch’s diary to alerts proclaimed in the Low Countries : “Luxembourg : Telephone conversation [overheard on] May 6 : ‘Are they coming or aren’t they ?’ ‘It’s in the air.’ ” In the AA files of Ambassador von Mackensen (Rome) is extensive correspondence from May 17, 1940, to July 28, 1941, relating to the SD’s attempts to identify the German citizen in Rome who had tipped off the Vatican’s Father Robert Leiber,
S.J., about “Yellow” deadlines. p. 106 On the FA intercepts, see Jodl’s diary, the testimony of Sas, and Hermann Graml’s study of the Oster affair in VfZ, 1966, pages 26 et seq.
On May 8, 1940, there is also a cryptic reference in Tippelskirch’s diary to alerts proclaimed in the Low Countries : “Luxembourg : Telephone conversation [overheard on] May 6 : ‘Are they coming or aren’t they ?’ ‘It’s in the air.’ ” In the AA files of Ambassador von Mackensen (Rome) is extensive correspondence from May 17, 1940, to July 28, 1941, relating to the SD’s attempts to identify the German citizen in Rome who had tipped off the Vatican’s Father Robert Leiber,
S.J., about “Yellow” deadlines.