During the great round-up in early September, a broker who lived in a London suburb tuned in his radio to listen to BBC’s 9 o’clock news and was irked by some strange interference that came and went on schedule, lasting exactly seven minutes, from 9:02 to 9:09, four nights in a row. He called the police, and Scotland Yard sent a detector van to the suburb. It did not take long to locate a lonely house on a sideroad from which, it seemed, someone was sending faint Morse signals on an unlicensed transmitter.
The owner of the house was a meek little Government clerk, “a very ’umble person,” as Dickens would have said. When detectives searched his house, they found that the source of those crackling sounds was a wireless transmitter of a type that they had never seen. It had but a single tube and operated on three small batteries. The whole set, including its tiny Morse tapper, weighed only four pounds. It was the famous Afu, a little “whispering box,” sending out the faintest of signals. They were virtually inaudible in England but could be picked up by a special Abwehr station near Hamburg.
The clerk was soon salted away in Wormwood Scrubs, but his set was left undisturbed. A Secret Service signaler continued to send messages in his code. One day, in great excitement, the substitute agent radioed Wichmann that he had succeeded in procuring information of the utmost urgency, so important, indeed, that he was most reluctant to put it on the air. He asked the captain’s permission to come to Germany so that he could bring the message in person.
This was an unusual request and required high level consideration. Transportation was not a simple matter. The best means of getting an agent out of England was by submarine, but Doenitz’s boats were badly needed elsewhere. Nevertheless, Canaris coaxed from Hitler an order to place a U-boat at the Abwehr’s disposal.
Early in October, the agent was radioed his instructions; he would be picked up on the next totally moonless night in a lonely, rock-encrusted bay on the Welsh coast.
At 2:00 a.m. on the night fixed for the operation, the vague flickers of a flashlight’s staccato signals sent thin ribbons of light from the shore out to the black water. At intervals of ten minutes each, those vague lights flickered. An hour later came the answering light. The submarine had arrived.
Abruptly a bright light flashed. A moment later the air was filled with the din of battle. British destroyers had been lying in ambush for the U-boat and they sank it in a matter of minutes.
Captain Wichmann never found out what had happened. When nothing more was heard from either the sub or the agent, it was presumed that both had been lost after the boat had succeeded in the pick-up. It was a long time before Doenitz again consented to loan one of his U-boats to the confounded Abwehr.
7
Straws in the North Wind
In the book of traitors, Major Vidkun Quisling occupies a page to himself, partly because his treachery was so enormous and partly because his motives were so puzzling. Quisling was a traitor on a staggering scale, but he himself never conceded it. He regarded himself as a reincarnation of Harald the Conqueror, destined by Divine resolve to lead his people into some kind of promised land. What that land would be exactly, and how he would get there, Quisling did not quite know.
He was born in 1887 in Tyrdesdal, Norway, the son of a village preacher. It was still a wild region; bears roamed the countryside. Quisling abandoned the valley quite early, but the impact of his “barbarian birthplace” left him with feelings of inferiority and delusions of superiority. He was imbued with broad humanitarian impulses: “As a young boy,” he once said, “I wanted to preach on Sundays and heal on weekdays.” He became a professional soldier instead.
At the military academy, he was a superbly industrious and brilliant student, but he was stubborn, taciturn, and he secluded himself in an impenetrable shell. Before he was thirty, he was a captain in the Norwegian Army’s General Staff; then he became a military attaché at St. Petersburg and Helsingfors. The Russian revolution caused an upheaval within him, and in 1922, he turned his back on the army, became an assistant of Fridtjof Nansen, the great humanitarian, ministering to the needs of Russian refugees. In 1927, he was back in the Norwegian Legation in Russia and, during the break of Anglo-Soviet relations, he represented British interests in the U.S.S.R.
Despite the admitted brilliance of his work, Quisling never ceased to puzzle even those who seemed to be closest to him. When asked about his assistant, Nansen remarked, “I don’t know Quisling, because I cannot fathom him.”
In the late Twenties, Quisling’s career slowed to a standstill. Gradually he came to feel he was the victim of a conspiracy. From his morose, truculent, self-imposed isolation, he groped his way to others like himself and formed a clandestine fraternity of disgruntled patriots. One of them was a certain Hagelin, a prominent Oslo merchant; another was a colonel named Konrad Sunlo, commandant of the Narvik garrison, a dreamer of totalitarian dreams at his Arctic outpost.
Quisling became obsessed with a hatred of Bolshevism, which he viewed as a Jewish conspiracy, and he formed the National Unity Party. In 1931, he was made Minister of War in a hodge-podge coalition government, and promptly moved to bend the office to his personal ambition. He became involved in all sorts of nebulous conspiracies until his schemes proved too much for the tolerant Norwegians and he was kicked out.
It was at this loneliest stage in his career that the Nazis, looking for allies abroad, spotted him. Quisling was discovered by Alfred Rosenberg, the intellectual condottieri, who was always on the lookout for unemployed plotters.
In 1938, Rosenberg’s secretary, Thilo von Trotha, visited Oslo, ostensibly as a tourist, and called on Quisling. The self-styled Norwegian Colossus impressed von Trotha as a lone wolf, difficult to handle, so nothing developed then. But the situation changed abruptly; in 1939, Quisling decided to revive contact with Rosenberg. Upon Rosenberg’s invitation, Quisling made a trip to Berlin and met him in his house in Dahlem where the major was driven in a curtained car amidst theatrical secrecy.
His tongue loosened by generous portions of aquavit, Quisling treated his host to a dissertation he was never to forget. The Norwegian candidly censured Germany for her lack of interest in his homeland. “He pointed out,” Rosenberg later reported to Hitler, “the decisive geopolitical advantage of Norway in the Scandinavian region and the advantages gained by the Power in control of the Norwegian coast….” Quisling also requested support for his party and press in Norway, basing his request on the “Pan-Germanic” ideology. Rosenberg agreed to lend him this support.
In August, twenty-five members of Quisling’s Nasjonal Samling were secretly brought to Germany for a fourteen-day course, to learn the methodology of Nazi activism. At the same time, Rosenberg tried to peddle Quisling’s services to various German agencies. He tried to interest Hitler’s confidential secretariat in the Norwegian, and also Goering, the latter with the bait of Norwegian real estate as possible landing fields for Luftwaffe aircraft. For a while, there were no takers. Rosenberg was embarrassed because he had promised Quisling money and his own Bureau had no appreciable funds.
At last, in the fall of 1939, he found a customer for his client: Admiral Schniewind, Grand Admiral Raeder’s chief of staff. Raeder had long been yearning for an outlet to the North Sea and eyed Norway as an ideal base. As early as October 10, 1939, the Grand Admiral tried to coax Hitler into an invasion of western Scandinavia, but Hitler was too busy with other plans. The admiral then detoured into a conspiratorial side alley and was most receptive when Schniewind told him of Quisling’s availability. Rosenberg bolstered the case with a memo in which he spoke of Quisling in glowing terms and outlined what the fellow could do for the German navy.
“According to this plan,” he wrote, “a number of picked Norwegians will be given training in Germany for this particular task. They will be told exactly what to do, and will be assisted by seasoned National Socialists who are experienced in such matters. These trained men are then to be sent back to Norway as quickly as possible, where details will be dis
cussed. Several focal points in Oslo will have to be occupied with lightning speed, and simultaneously 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 [presumably that of Quisling]. Quisling has no doubt,” Rosenberg added, “that such a coup, achieved instantaneously, would at once meet with the approval of those sections of the Army with which he now has connections.”
Raeder asked Rosenberg to produce Quisling. Rosenberg took Quisling and Hagelin, the Oslo merchant and Quisling’s co-conspirator, to see Raeder on December 11. Quisling urged his German partners to act quickly lest the British move in ahead of them.
Raeder undertook to sell Quisling to Hitler. On December 16, the major was presented to the Fuehrer. It was a moist, sentimental meeting—the spirit of Nordic brotherhood dripping like dew—but it was not quite satisfying to Quisling. He found the Fuehrer evasive, even negative. Above all else, Quisling was appalled to find that Hitler took his pact with Stalin rather seriously and refused to be drawn into talks about a possible Russo-German clash.
Behind Hitler’s hesitation was both ignorance and ruse. He knew little about this fellow Quisling and had not thought seriously of an extension of the war in the direction of Norway. He did not want to show his hand to this foreigner about whom he knew nothing except Raeder’s and Rosenberg’s word. Quisling might be a double agent, an Allied tool to obtain information about his plans—straight from the horse’s mouth.
When Quisling returned to the Chancellery two days later, he found Hitler in a more accommodating spirit. He now agreed that a special staff be appointed under Raeder to explore the potentialities of Quisling’s military recommendations. The political exploration was to be done by Rosenberg. In Oslo, Commander Schreiber, the Naval Attaché, was to do the plotting with Quisling. From the Norwegian’s point of view, the Fuehrer’s most important concession came at the end of the second meeting. He promised two hundred thousand gold marks for Quisling from the secret funds managed by Counselor von Grundherr in the Foreign Ministry. But the Foreign Ministry still refused to subsidize Quisling whom they regarded as a crackpot, willing to sell his country but incapable of delivering it. Rosenberg never managed to pry the funds loose.
For all practical purposes, the Quisling story ended there. He lingers on in odium as the man who handed his country to the Nazis on a platter, but, in reality, Quisling had no share in the rape of Norway when it came, not because he was not willing, but because the Germans did not need him.
Until January, 1940, Admiral Canaris knew little if anything of Quisling’s perambulations, so closely was the wayward Norwegian held by Rosenberg and Raeder. The Abwehr entered the conspiracy against Norway as the result of a report from one of its V-men stationed at Metz in France. On January 4 this agent discovered that the Chasseurs Alpins, a division of crack mountain troops, had been withdrawn from the Maginot Line and shipped to England on the first leg of a trip to somewhere in Northern Europe—possibly to Finland to aid the Finns in their war with the Russians, or to Norway to seize Narvik.
The report was brought to the attention of the chief of the Hamburg outpost, Franz Liedig by name, a Navy commander on the retired list. Liedig immediately carried it personally to Canaris who, in turn, took it to Hitler. This piece of information may well have sealed the fate of Norway since, as we have seen, Hitler had not been much interested in that country, but he was determined to keep it out of Allied hands at any cost.
From then on, Canaris kept a finger in the Scandinavian pie. In February, when planning for the “Operation Weser Exercise,” as it was called, got under way in earnest, and a special task force of planners was set up at Wehrmacht headquarters—camouflaged as “Commando for Special Employment No. 31”—the admiral managed to plant Commander Liedig as the top intelligence officer of the enterprise.
Liedig had an efficient network going in Norway. Its members were chiefly coast watchers at Oslo, Bergen, Christiansand, Stavenger, Narvik and other ports. Their job was to observe the movement of ships and especially to report promptly the departure and routing of convoys bound for England. This was no easy task. Convoy information was dispensed only to the skippers of the ships and then only a few hours before sailing. But Liedig’s network operated with phenomenal skill and success. He boasted that reports from his agents enabled the Luftwaffe and the U-boats to sink one hundred and fifty thousand gross tons of Allied shipping within a few months in 1939–1940.
Upon receipt of his instructions from Commando 31, he went to Norway and personally organized an expansion of his network. The old coast watchers had to go to work also as collectors, and a second network was set up to procure additional information. Commander Liedig soon had Norway well covered.
While preparations for the “exercise” progressed, the over-inflated balloon of Quisling was losing air rapidly. Even Rosenberg had to concede that much and there was little he could do about it. Hitler probably did not even think of Quisling when on March 1, 1940, he ordered the Wehrmacht High Command to prepare for the occupation of Norway and Denmark; and he certainly acted without the slightest consideration for the hapless Norwegian when on April 1, he ordered the invasion to begin at 5:15 a.m. on April 9. On the contrary, a puzzling last-minute development in Oslo must have recalled to him his original doubts about Quisling.
On March 26, Commander Schreiber, the German Naval Attaché, reported from Oslo that Norwegian anti-aircraft and coastal defense units had been suddenly given permission to open fire without waiting for higher orders. Schreiber, who had kept more or less aloof from Quisling, suggested that there must have been a leak somewhere and hinted vaguely that it could have been in Quisling’s circle. After Schreiber’s report, Quisling was cut off from any information. On April 4, he hurried to Denmark for a secret meeting with a senior German officer. The general forced from him the confession that his own grandiose plans had failed to mature. After his initial bluster failed to move the German, Quisling went down on his knees to plead with the general to hurry up and start the invasion. Until then, the general had regarded him only as a crank—now he turned away from him with contempt: even he could not stomach such abject treachery.
Both Quisling and his mentors lost their influence on the operation. Rosenberg was eliminated and Raeder was superseded by General von Falkenhorst who refused to have anything to do with “that crackpot.” Minister Braeuer, following his instructions from the Foreign Ministry, conspired on a far higher social level. He tried to draw King Haakon VII into a pro-German plot and cultivated Foreign Minister Koht whom he thought to be sympathetic to the German cause and who might form a pro-Nazi coalition government.
At 4:00 a.m., on April 9, Commander Schreiber, the Naval Attaché, donned his uniform and went down to the harbor to greet the incoming German warships. “Everything that I can do here,” he wrote in his diary before he left, “has been considered and prepared down to the smallest detail.” On his drive to the harbor, Schreiber passed the British Embassy and saw a thin ribbon of smoke rising from the garden. “They are burning their papers,” he said to himself with a smug smile.
He waited in vain. Far out in Oslo Fjord, the Norwegian batteries heeded their instructions and challenged the Germans as soon as they sailed into view. The ships which Schreiber had come to greet were at the bottom of the fjord or stopped cold with mortal wounds.
At 9:30 a.m., Schreiber despaired, rushed back to his office and tried to raise Berlin by radio, but he could not establish contact. Schreiber now issued orders to burn his papers. He expected the police to break into the house momentarily because Quisling had failed to come through with his vainglorious coup.
At last, after noon, a Luftwaffe airlift brought in German soldiers who occupied the stunned and sullen city. The government fled toward the north. The King went with the government.
At 5:00 p.m., when Oslo was virtually secured by the Germans, Quisling came out of his hole. So
minor was his influence that most of the German generals did not even know he existed. When General Eberhardt arrived and established himself in the Grand Hotel, he found Quisling in a suite on the third floor of the hotel, claiming that he was the new Premier of Norway. Eberhardt had never heard of the man before. He called Braeuer in the German Legation and said, “There is a crank here on the third floor who says he is the chief of a new Norwegian government. Shall I throw him out? Or shall I arrest him?”
But by then, Braeuer’s own game was also played out. The King was gone and Koht refused the Nazi invitation with indignation. There was nobody left but Quisling. Braeuer told General Eberhardt: “It is all right. He’s a fellow named Quisling. He is the new Premier, so leave him alone.”
The terror regime over which Quisling presided actually became a liability to the Germans. It did not subdue the Norwegians and so he proved a flop for the second time. Without Quisling’s terror, there would probably have been no effective resistance; as it was, the people of Norway rose to harass their oppressors without a moment’s let-up and eventually to evict them, leaving Quisling alone to be shot.
When Philip of Macedonia, the father of Alexander the Great, was told that a certain city in his army’s path was impregnable, he asked: “Is there not a pathway to it wide enough for an ass laden with gold?”
It was the fate of Vidkun Quisling to be nothing but an ass.
In Denmark the Germans had no Quisling; they had someone far better, Commander Franz Liedig. Liedig went far beyond the usual scope of a mere intelligence officer; he blossomed out in the role of the conqueror.
Liedig was an avaricious reader of everything that bore on the work of the secret service, and among his favorites was a little book published in 1931 by the Italian Curzio Malaparte, called Coup d’Etat: The Technique of Revolution. The first chapter of this book, entitled “The Bolshevik Coup d’Etat and Trotsky’s Tactics,” presented a largely apocryphal account of the seizure of Petrograd by the Bolsheviks in October, 1917.
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