The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany

by William L. Shirer

  “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.”*

  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:

  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….

  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 Bräuer 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.* At 10:55 he wired Bräuer “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—all 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 Høvelte 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.*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.

  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 count
ry 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!”

  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 co-operation,” 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.

  THE NORWEGIANS RESIST

  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.