The Holocaust in Norway.

(This is the sixth of a series of posts on the Norwegian experience in the Second World War.)


During the Second World War, in a program that became known as the “Final Solution,” the Nazi regime attempted to murder the Jewish population of occupied Europe.


The Final Solution owed much to the popularity of so-called “scientific” racism in the early 1900s. Racial and religious bigotry had been around for millennia, but in the early twentieth century advocates of these doctrines did their best to make their prejudices seem scientific.  Proponents of “scientific” racism argued that humanity was divided into separate races, some of which were genetically superior to others.  The American author Madison Grant, for example, in his book The Passing of the Great Race, contended that Europe was inhabited by three different races: the Nordics, the Alpines, and the Mediterraneans, with the Nordics being, as he put it, “the white man par excellence,” with a capacity for leadership that other races lacked.  (For some reason, advocates of these theories invariably concluded that the race to which they personally supposedly belonged was one of the superior ones.)    Adolf Hitler, like Grant, felt that races were arranged in a hierarchy.  Hitler believed that that Germans were Nordics whose racial purity was threatened by peoples living to the east of Germany--Poles, Ukrainians, Russians--whom he thought belonged to a separate and inferior race.  Hitler's most obsessive fear, however, was of Jews, whom he regarded as lower than human.


Thus, in 1935, in the name of supposedly protecting Nordic purity, the Nazi regime outlawed marriage between Jews and non-Jews.  With the outbreak of war in 1939, Nazi racial policies became increasingly radical and violent.  In German-occupied Poland, Jews were arrested and were forced to live in extremely crowded urban ghettoes.  The residents of these ghettoes were deliberately denied adequate food rations, with the result that many soon starved to death.  Following the invasion of the Soviet Union in June of 1941, as the German army advanced into Ukraine and Russia, squads of the SS trailed behind, massacring large numbers of Jews.  In January 1942, a group of high-ranking Nazi officials, meeting in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee, adopted a plan for the systematic murder of European Jews.  The minutes of the meeting, known as the “Wannsee Protocol,” rely heavily on euphemisms to conceal the horrific nature of what was being advocated.  The mass execution of Jews was referred to as “the Final Solution of the Jewish Question,” as part of which Jews would “be transported to the east.”


What did the project described at Wannsee mean in reality?  In the Final Solution, Jews from throughout occupied Europe were arrested, often by local police forces, and were deported to concentration camps in eastern Europe where they were murdered with poison gas.  Some Jews were compelled to work in factories under conditions so barbaric that the vast majority soon died.  By the end of the war, six million Jews from countries across occupied Europe had been killed in what became known as the Holocaust.


In 1940, approximately 1,700 Jews lived in Norway.  Following the German invasion in April of that year, Norwegian Jews were subjected to an increasing degree of harassment.

From the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which provides the following caption: "On a Jewish-owned shop, Norwegian fascists painted the slogan: 'Palestine is calling. Jews are not tolerated in Norway.' Norway, after April 1940." http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/media_ph.php?ModuleId=10005460&MediaId=2185

In 1942 and 1943, the German occupation authority, working in close cooperation with local Norwegian police, arrested Jews and deported them to concentration camps.

The SS Donau, aboard which Jews were deported to Germany from Oslo in 1942.
Source: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/media_ph.php?ModuleId=10005460&MediaId=2187

About nine hundred Jews avoided deportation by escaping to Sweden.  Some Norwegians, such as social activist Sigrid Helliesen Lund, were secretly tipped off by government officials about the impending deportations beforehand and worked to help Jews evade arrest.  As scholar Per Ole Johansen notes, “Sigrid Helliesen Lund received early warnings from the Norwegian police on 25 October and 26 November 1942 and was able to alert probably more than 100 Norwegian Jews in Oslo.  J.F. Mykleburst, a policeman in Oslo, realized that the actions toward the Jews were a prelude to dreadful crimes. He accordingly warned Jews, as did colleagues throughout the country. ‘I just want you to know that we have orders from Oslo to arrest you,’ whispered Police Sergeant Anders Grut to Robert Savosnisk.”  The map below illustrates the paths used to escape to Sweden, as well as the route of the deportation ships from Oslo.

From the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/media_nm.php?ModuleId=10005460&MediaId=2178

The state-sponsored Lutheran church, along with other denominations, denounced the arrests.  In a letter of protest to Vidkun Quisling, church leaders declared that “according to God’s Word all people in principle have the same human worth and thereby the same human rights” and demanded, “Stop the persecution of Jews and stop the racial hatred that is being spread throughout our land!” (quoted in Hassing).


In the end, more than seven hundred Norwegian Jews were deported and killed in concentration camps.


Today in Oslo, a sculpture consisting of eight iron chairs in a field memorializes the deportations.

Photo from Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, University of Minnesota: http://www.chgs.umn.edu/museum/memorials/oslo/

Historians continue to work on uncovering the final solution in Norway.  Last year, a group of Norwegian scholars published a book entitled Jakten Etter Jødene På Agder: Fortellinger om de Sørlandske Holocaust, (which translates as The Hunt for Jews in Agder: Stories of the Southern Holocaust), which explores the arrests and deportations of Jews in southern Norway during the war.

Vidkun Quisling's wartime home now houses the Center for Holocaust Studies and Religious Minorities.
Photo from BBC: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/5282326.stm

Vidkun Quisling's wartime mansion in Oslo is now the home of the Center for Studies of Holocaust and Religious Minorities, which seeks to tell the story of the final solution in Norway and which also works to promote understanding and tolerance between cultures.




Sources:


Dawley, Alan.  Struggles for Justice: Social Responsibility and the Liberal State.  Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991.


Friedlander, Henry.  "Registering the Handicapped in Nazi Germany: A Case Study," Jewish History 11 (Fall 1997): 89-98.


Friedlander, Henry.  "Step by Step: The Expansion of Murder, 1939-1941." German Studies Review 17 (October 1994), 495-507.


Grant, Madison.  The Passing of the Great Race: Or, the Racial Basis of European History. 4th edition (originally published 1916) London: G. Bell and Sons, 1921.


Hassing, Arne.  “The Churches of Norway and the Jews, 1933-1943,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 26 (Summer 1989): 496-522.


HL-Senteret, Center for Studies of Holocaust and Religious Minorities: http://www.hlsenteret.no/Mapper/ENG/page/background.html


Johansen, Per Ole.  “Norway,” in The Holocaust Encyclopedia, edited by Walter Laqueur et. al., New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001.


Spiro, Jonathan Peter.  Defending the Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, and the Legacy of Madison Grant.  Burlington: University of Vermont Press, 2009.


Topography of Terror: Gestapo, SS and Reich Security Main Office on Wilhelm- and Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse.  A Documentation.  Berlin: Stiftung Topographie des Terrors, 2010.


United States Holocaust Memorial Museum entry for Norway: http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005460, accessed 20 May 2011.


Wannsee Protocol, January 20, 1942, in the Avalon Project of the Lillian Goldman Law Library at Yale Law School: http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/wannsee.asp

Norway under occupation.

(This is the fifth of a series of posts on the Norwegian experience in the Second World War.)

When Germany invaded Norway in April 1940, the Norwegian king, Haakon VII, had no intention of stepping down or of becoming a puppet of the German occupation.  As the Norwegian defenses collapsed, he sailed for Britain and established a Norwegian government in exile.

King Haakon VII.  Imperial War Museum Photo MISC 77700

For many Norwegians, the situation in the summer of 1940 must have looked hopeless.  It wasn't clear when or if Norway would ever be liberated.  Germany dominated Europe from the English Channel in the west to the Polish city of Warsaw in the east, and there was a real possibility that in the next few months Britain itself might fall to German forces.   The Soviet Union and the United States at this point were still neutral.   So, from standpoint of 1940, there was little prospect that Germany would be defeated in the near future.

The Germans appointed Josef Terboven, a German Nazi party official, as Reichskommissar for Norway.  The Norwegian civilian government stayed in place, but was expected to follow orders issued by the Nazis.  The German occupation of Norway, especially initially, was less brutal than the occupation of other countries, such as Poland.  The Nazis held that Norwegians were "Nordics," and thus deserved better treatment than the supposedly racially-inferior Poles.  The German occupation tried to convert the Norwegian population into supporters of Nazi Germany.

Vidkun Quisling in 1942.
Imperial War Museum photo MISC 17435

The most prominent Norwegian who collaborated with the Germans was Vidkun Quisling, head of the Nasjonal Samling (NS) party.  His prewar following had been tiny, but he cooperated with the Germans during and after the German invasion and brought his followers into positions of power in Norway's government.  In 1942, he was given the post of Minister President of Norway.  The NS tried to seize control of all major organizations in Norwegian society.  Quisling's goal was to win the Norwegians over to the German side--so that Norway would become a full-fledged ally of Germany.  This poster bears the cross-in-a-circle logo of the Nasjonal Samling party, and declares, "With Norwegians for Norway!"

Courtesy Stiftelsen Arkivet.

The Nazis attempted to recruit Norwegians into their paramilitary organization, the SS, which included combat units (known as the Waffen SS).  The SS played the leading role in organizing the mass murder of Jews throughout occupied Europe.  In an attempt to induce Norwegians to join the Waffen SS, the below recruiting poster drew on Viking imagery--

From: http://www.hlsenteret.no/kunnskapsbasen/aktor/gjerningsmenn/1414

The poster reads: "With the Waffen-SS and the Norsk Legion Against the Common Enemy/against Bolshevism."  Bolshevism was another term for Communism, and the creators of the poster were trying to draw on anticommunist sentiment to lure recruits into the SS.  Around 5,000 Norwegians did end up serving with the German armed forces.  The poster below roughly translates as, "The front with Bolshevism/Where are you today?"  (The hammer, sickle, the red star, and the color red were all symbols of communism.)

Courtesy Stiftelsen Arkivket.

But Quisling's efforts to reshape Norwegian society ran into stiff opposition.  When the NS attempted to take control of sporting organizations--sports such as skiing and skating were a big part of Norwegian culture--hundreds of thousands of their members rebelled by going on what some have termed "a sports strike."  This mass refusal to participate, writes one historian, turned "national championship competitions to third-rate contests with only a handful of spectators."  (Riste, Norway 1940-1945, 27).


Most Norwegians were Lutherans (a branch of Protestant Christianity), and the Lutheran church itself was an official state-sanctioned church.  When the Nazis tried to seize control of the church to use it for their own ends, more than ninety percent of pastors quit their posts.  In 1942, when the occupation government required that all schoolteachers join a Nazi educational association, more than eighty percent of teachers objected.  The authorities threatened to fire the protesting educators, but decided against this, presumably deciding that such a course would be impractical, and instead imprisoned more than a thousand teachers, five hundred of which were dispatched by a single overloaded boat to a remote prison camp with poor food and sanitation.


Increasingly, the Nazi occupation authorities relied on violence to maintain control.  When Oslo workers held a strike in 1941 to protest a cut in the milk ration, the occupation authorities killed two union members.

In such dispiriting conditions, humor played a crucial role in maintaining Norwegian morale.  Here are a few jokes that Norwegians made at the expense of their occupiers:

A German soldier was visiting the Viking Ships, but thought them nothing to brag about.  "You may not be impressed by these ships," replied the guard, "but with them, the Norwegians did after all manage to attack England." (Stokker, Folklore Fights, 161-62).

In September 1941 when martial law was declared in Oslo, a list of various offenses was posted, declaring "You will be shot if you...etc., You will be shot if you..., You will be shot if you..."  To these, someone added: "You will be shot if you haven't already been shot!" (Stokker, "Heil Hitler; God Save the King," 174.)

Satire could be expressed graphically as well.   The link below depicts the cover of a Norwegian magazine that appeared in 1943.  The illustration linked to below may at first seem innocuous, but Norwegians would have recognized the mustachioed father figure as Hitler, while the awkward child looks more than a bit like Vidkun Quisling.

http://snl.no/Norsk_Ukeblad

The artist as well as the editor of the magazine were imprisoned for their impudence. (Stokker, Folklore Fights, 97-101).

During the war, the occupation authorities censored the newspapers to exclude anti-Nazi sentiments.  To find out what was actually going on, Norwegians tuned their radios in to the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), but this became more difficult in 1941, when the occupation authorities confiscated radio sets.  The following poster sought to discourage Norwegians from listening to the British radio reports, and declares, "Think about it!"

Courtesy Stiftelsen Arkivet.

An illegal underground press appeared, providing Norwegians with another source of information free of Nazi censorship and bias.

The resistance worked in other ways to undermine the German occupation, collecting information about German ship movements and radioing it to the Allies.  For the most part, the Norwegian resistance acted with restraint when it came to using violent methods.  Norway had a population of three million people at the time, and the Germans, terrified of an Allied amphibious invasion, stationed three hundred thousand soldiers in Norway--this meant that about 10% of the people living in Norway were German occupation forces.  Any kind of guerrilla-type effort to drive out German forces was doomed to failure.  Furthermore, it was no secret to anyone that throughout the Nazi empire, any kind of violent resistance resulted in horrifying reprisals aimed at civilians.  For example, in 1942, when two members of the Gestapo were shot and killed as they tried to arrest two members of the resistance in the Norwegian town of Telavåg, the Germans responded by arresting the town's adult male population, who were transported to concentration camps from which most never returned.  The town itself was razed. 

Norwegians did sabotage industrial facilities and in 1945 conducted an extensive campaign targeting the nation's railways.  The Norwegian resistance cooperated with the British, who actively sponsored such networks all throughout Nazi-occupied Europe through a secret organization known as the Special Operations Executive (SOE).


The SOE and Norwegians worked closely to disrupt the German heavy water production program. Heavy water is a substance that can be used to prepare the radioactive ingredients for an atomic bomb, and was a key component for the German approach for building such a weapon.  The Nazi atomic program relied on a facility at Vemork, Norway, for its supplies of heavy water.  In February of 1943, a team of Norwegian commandos who had been flown into Norway by British intelligence infiltrated the defenses at Vemork and detonated explosives that damaged the plant and temporarily brought an end to heavy water production.   Later that year, American heavy bombers struck the plant, causing additional damage.  At this point, the Germans decided to call off further production of heavy water at Vemork, but their effort to transport the remaining heavy water to Germany was unsuccessful, as a boat ferrying the containers of heavy water across a Norwegian lake sank, the victim of Norwegian saboteurs.

Those who joined the resistance did so at great risk.  The German secret police, or Gestapo, sought to infiltrate the resistance movement with undercover informants.  Over the course of the war, about 40, 000 Norwegians were arrested and imprisoned.  An estimated five hundred of those who participated in the resistance movement gave their lives. 

In Kristiansand, the Gestapo headquarters was located in a building, the Arkivet (or archives) that before the war had served a more innocuous purpose as a government repository for documents.  Below is the Arkivet as it looks today--

Today, the Arkivet has been converted into a museum dedicated to telling the story of the Gestapo's cruelty in the Second World War.  In late April 2011, my wife and I took a tour of the Arkivet.  Our guide was Stein Christian Salvesen, head of information at the Arkivet.  Much of the information in the following few paragraphs he related to us over the course of the tour.


Norwegians suspected of resistance activities were imprisoned in the Arkivet's basement, where the Gestapo tortured them in an effort to learn about the resistance movement.  The Gestapo used various means to pressure suspects into giving up information.  For example, a suspect would be made to lie down on the floor, and portable heaters would be placed some distance on both sides of head.  As the interrogation continued, the heaters would be placed closer and closer to the suspect's head.  Another method was water torture, in which a vessel containing water was placed over a suspect's head.  Water would slowly drip onto the suspect's head.  At first, the drops had little effect, but after a while, the drip of water became torturous.

Torture sessions were often conducted in a centrally-located chamber in the basement.  This central room had no walls that bordered on the outside of the building, and thus it was more difficult for passers-by to hear the screams of those being tortured.   Over the course of the war, thousands of Norwegians were imprisoned in the Arkivet, and 307 people were subjected to extensive torture.


One of those tortured was Arne Laudal, a Norwegian army officer who after the German invasion had secretly become a leader of the resistance movement in southern Norway.   In 1942, in a surprise raid at his home, the Gestapo arrested him and brought him to the Arkivet, where he was beaten by interrogators seeking the names of other members of the resistance.  Laudal was executed in 1944.

Arne Laudal
Photo from Stiftelsen Arkivet website.

Another prisoner at the Arkivet, Louis Hogganvik, was subjected to whipping.  Hogganvik, while a prisoner, committed suicide in January of 1945.   The Nazis kept his death a secret from the public.

Louis Hogganvik
Photo from Stiftelsen Arkivet website.

During the war, the Germans also brought more than 100,000 Soviet prisoners of war (POWs) to Norway to work on construction projects.  Many Russian POW's perished from the abysmal conditions in these camps.  As Mr. Salvesen pointed out, more Russians died in Norway in World War Two than Norwegians.  Norwegians sympathetic to the POWs tried to smuggle food to them.  The photographs below show artwork and toys constructed by Russian POWs and given to Norwegians.

Each year, thousands of school students tour the Arkivet to learn about its history.  As Mr. Salvesen told us, the point is to help students understand that the kind of abuses that happened during the Nazi occupation of Norway are also occurring today around the world.

Above is a tapestry on display at the Arkivet illustrating the Norwegian wartime experience.   The black car in the lower right-hand represents the return of King Haakon VII, who received a hero's welcome.

Today, Norwegians honor the suffering of Soviet prisoners of war.  One of the POW camps was located in Kristiansand.

In what is today a forested park in Kristiansand called Jegersberg, a marker notes the place where, at the close of the war in 1945, some of the prisoners of war were murdered.   The plaque above states that five Russian prisoners of war were shot and killed here on 28 April and 5 May 1945.


Last December, the fourth-grade class from nearby Presteheia elementary school laid a wreath at the memorial site.

Sources:


Dahl, Per.  Heavy Water and the Wartime Race for Nuclear Energy. Bristol: Institute for Physics, 1999.


Gjelsvik, Tore.  Norwegian Resistance 1940-1945, trans. by Thomas Kingston Derry, London: C. Hurst and Company, 1979.


Hassing, Anne, "The Churches of Norway and the Jews, 1933-1943," Journal of Ecumenical Studies 26  (Summer 1989), 496-522.


"Hitler's Sunken Secret." This is an episode from the PBS documentary series NOVA exploring the sabotage of the ferry carrying heavy water across a Norwegian lake.  A transcript is available at: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcripts/3216_hydro.html


HL-Senteret: Center for Studies of Holocaust and Religious Minorities website: http://www.hlsenteret.no/Mapper/ENG/page/index.html#


Riste, Olav.  "Norway," in The Oxford Companion to World War II, eds. I.C.B. Dear and M.R.D. Foot, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.


Riste, Olav, and Berit Nokleby.  Norway 1940-1945: The Resistance Movement (3rd edition, originally published 1970), Norway: Nor-Media A/S, 1999.


Stiftelsen Arkivet website: http://www.stiftelsen-arkivet.no/english


Stokker, Kathleen.  Folklore Fights the Nazis: Humor in Occupied Norway, 1940-1945. (originally published by Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1995) Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997.


Stokker, Kathleen.  "Heil Hitler; God Save the King: Jokes and the Norwegian Resistance 1940-1945," Western Folklore 50 (April 1991), 171-190.

Naval and air campaigns, 1941-1945.

(This is the fourth in a series of posts on the Norwegian experience during World War Two.)

The Norwegian bases proved especially vital after June of 1941--for in that month Germany, in complete violation of the terms of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, invaded the Soviet Union.

The German invasion of Russia meant that two very different countries--democratic Britain and the communist Soviet Union--were allies in a fight against Nazi Germany.   The British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, despised communism but recognized that if Hitler conquered Russia, it would mean German domination of Europe.  Thus, Churchill directed that Britain begin sending convoys of ships to provide supplies to Russia.  These Arctic convoys sailed from the British Isles or Iceland, through the waters off Norway up to the Russian ports of Archangel, Murmansk, and Molotovsk. 

German submarines and aircraft based in Norway took a terrible toll on these convoys--over the course of the war, more than seven percent of the ships headed to Russia via this route were sunk. ("Arctic convoys").

German submarines in their base at Trondheim, on the Norwegian coast.  Photograph taken after the end of the war in May 1945.  Imperial War Museum photo BU 6376.

Any sailor who had failed to make it into a lifeboat after his ship had been torpedoed could not expect to live long in the icy waters.   German surface ships (such as destroyers and cruisers) also posed a threat.  In particular, the British worried that the German battleship Tirpitz would venture from its base in Norway and target merchant shipping.

The battleship Tirpitz in January of 1942 in a fjord.  Imperial War Museum photo HU 50947.

One particularly disastrous convoy, code-named PQ17, sailed from Iceland for Russia in the summer of 1942.  Summer was particularly bad time make the arctic voyage, as the extended daylight hours of northern latitudes made it easier for German forces to locate and attack Allied ships.  PQ17 had started its voyage with an escort of warships to keep German forces at bay.  But the British concluded, based on their reading of German radio communications, that the Tirpitz was in position to strike at PQ17.  The British commander, fearing that the German battleship would wreak havoc on the convoy, then withdrew the escort of warships and instructed the convoy to break up and spread out.   The scattered cargo ships, lacking escorts, were now much more vulnerable to German submarines and aircraft.  Fewer than a third of PQ17's ships made it to Russia (though none were attacked by the Tirpitz), and 153 sailors in the convoy perished.  ("Arctic convoys").  

Shaken by their losses, the British put a temporary stop on their convoys to the Soviet Union.  When Churchill flew to the Soviet Union to meet with Joseph Stalin that August, the dictator taunted the British prime minister, and through a translator queried, "has the British navy no sense of glory?" (Churchill, The Hinge of Fate, 447)

Artist Edward Sorel imagines the conference between a pipe-holding Stalin and cigar-holding Churchill in August of 1942.
Library of Congress: http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/churchill/interactive/_html/wc0178.html

The arctic convoys were resumed, and by the conclusion of the war had brought 4.43 million tons of supplies to Russia. 

The Allies received a tremendous boost from the entry of the United States into the war in December 1941.  Up to that point, America had remained officially neutral, but the American president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, worried about Nazi expansion, had provided war supplies to both the British and Soviets.  In December of 1941, following the Japanese attack on the American naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, Germany declared war on the United States, and the American Congress in turn declared war on Germany. 

American entry into the war marked an important turning point, in part because American war industry went into high gear, producing tremendous numbers of ships, airplanes, tanks, artillery, and all of the supplies needed to maintain a mechanized army in the field.  America's industrial contribution to the war was especially appreciated in the Soviet Union, and was key to the mobility of the Soviet army, as many Russian troops rode in American-made trucks.   Russians became familiar with the American concoction Spam as well. (Glantz and House, 150-151, 285-286)

The importance of American and British supplies to the Soviet Union--and the importance of the naval convoys that brought these supplies to Russian ports--becomes even more apparent once one realizes the vital contribution that the Soviet Union made to the victory over Germany.  According to military historians David Glantz and Jonathan House, more than seventy percent of German military losses (military personnel killed, wounded, captured, or missing) occurred fighting the Soviet Union. (Glantz and House, 284)

The naval convoys that brought Anglo-American supplies to the Soviet Union continued to suffer losses, but eventually the Allies were able to master the German u-boat menace, in part by providing escorts to convoys.   Allied aircraft also patrolled the ocean, bombing German submarines when they surfaced.  The following photograph shows a German submarine off Norway that was under attack from a British seaplane in July of 1944. 

Imperial War Museum photo C 4590.

The British made repeated efforts to sink the Tirpitz as well.  Below is a photo of the battleship under attack from British carrier aircraft in April of 1944.  

Imperial War Museum photo A 22633.

Later in 1944, the Tirpitz capsized after being hit in an attack by British heavy bombers. 

 The capsized battleship in Norwegian waters in March of 1945.  Imperial War Museum photo C 5148.

The British also launched airstrikes against shipping in Norwegian waters, as seen in the photograph below taken in March of 1945.

Imperial War Museum photo C 5117.

The British and Americans never invaded Norway--it remained occupied by Germany until the conclusion of the war.  The British did launch a number of commando raids along the Norwegian coastline.   

British soldiers during a raid on Vaagso, Norway, in December of 1941.  Imperial War Museum photo N 459.

These raids, while militarily insignificant in and of themselves, may have helped convince Germany that the Allies were contemplating a more serious invasion of Norway.

Indeed, the British deliberately fed the Germans false information to encourage them in their belief that there would be an Allied invasion of Norway.  This campaign of disinformation may have shaped German strategy--to the end of the war, Germany kept a large number of its soldiers stationed in Norway to fend off a seaborne invasion that never came.   These soldiers, of course, would have better served the Nazi cause elsewhere--fighting the Soviet army on what was known as the Eastern Front, or fending off the Anglo-American invasion that did come on the beaches of Normandy in France in June of 1944.

During the war, Hitler overestimated the strategic significance of Norway, and stationed troops there that would have more effectively used elsewhere.  As Thaddeus Holt writes in The Deceivers: Allied Military Deception in the Second World War, "the fact remains that three times as many Germans were kept there [in Norway] as would have been needed merely for occupation duties."  (p. 780)  Holt examines how the British and Americans worked to deliberately confuse the German high command as to where the Allied invasion of western Europe would take place.

In November 1942, British and American forces staged landings in North Africa to drive out German and Italian armies; in 1943, the British and Americans likewise invaded Italy, and in June of 1944, British, Canadian, and American armies crossed the English Channel to invade Normandy, a region in western France.  All this time, the Allies found it convenient to encourage Hitler that they were actually instead preparing for an amphibious invasion of Norway.

By doing this kind of "head-fake," the Allies hoped to encourage the Germans to maintain a large army in Norway--away from the places where the Allies would actually make seaborne landings.   How did the Allies go about attempting this deception?   In part by using double agents.   A double agent is an spy who tells one country that he is spying for them, but who is actually working on behalf of a second country.   For example, a number of German spies in Britain were captured by the British, and then "turned," that is, compelled or coaxed into supplying false or misleading information to their superiors back in Germany.  The German spy network believed that it was receiving valuable information from its agents in Britain, but in reality it was simply being fed false and misleading data generated by British intelligence agencies. 

British-controlled double agents were an important aspect of their campaign to confuse the German high command.  In 1942, for example, the British inaugurated operation SOLO I, whose job it was to convince the Germans that Scotland was to serve as a base for an impending invasion of Norway. 

As Holt explains, "Double agents reported public speculation that Norway would be invaded and retailed tales of energetic military activity in Ayrshire [Scotland], of special Commando training going on, and of stockpiling of tire chains and antifreeze, plus hints that Swedish collaboration was being sought.   Rumors were spread in Stockholm that the British were training special pioneer companies of Canadian lumberjacks while the United States Army was on the lookout for Scandinavian speakers among its personnel....twenty thousand shoulder flashes reading Norge were ordered, arctic kits and maps of Norway were issued, the troops were lectured on the dangers of frostbite, and rumors were spread about woolen underwear and special windproof jackets."  (Holt, 264).  The Allies conducted a similar simultaneous effort, code-named OVERTHROW, to convince Germany that the site of the landings would be France.  

Luckily for the Allies, as Holt explains, Hitler believed Norway to be of tremendous significance for the outcome of the war; in January of 1942, he had declared, "The fate of the war will be decided in Norway." (Holt, 174).  The German dictator's Norwegian fixation may have made the British ruse more plausible.

How effective was SOLO I?  It's always hard to judge such matters, but as Holt writes, "On October 19 [1942], the Führer ordered Narvik reinforced and its approaches specially protected.   On November 2, all central and northern Norway went on full alert.  As the winter nights lengthened, Hitler worried lest the Allies take advantage of them for a surprise descent upon northern Norway; as late as December 22, he fretted that January would be the most dangerous month for Norway.   The bottom line was that in 1942 no German ground forces were withdrawn from Norway for service elsewhere, and that was the object of SOLO I." (Holt, 268) And, as it turned out, the actual Allied landings in November 1942 occurred in North Africa rather than Norway.

Another such deceit, code-named FORTITUDE NORTH, came in 1944, in the hope of masking the impending invasion of Normandy, France that June.

While the British and Americans never invaded Norway, the Soviet Union, starting in October of 1944, began a limited invasion into northern Norway.  The liberation of most of the nation, however, had to wait until Germany's surrender in May of 1945.

Sources

"Arctic convoys," in The Oxford Companion to World War II. Ed. I. C. B. Dear and M. R. D. Foot. Oxford University Press, 2001. Oxford Reference Online.

Churchill, Winston, The Hinge of Fate (volume IV of The Second World War), New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1950. 

Glantz, David M., and Jonathan M. House.  When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler.  Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995. 

Holt, Thaddeus.  The Deceivers: Allied Military Deception in the Second World War.  New York: Scribner, 2004.

Riste, Olav, "Norway," in The Oxford Companion to World War II. Ed. I. C. B. Dear and M. R. D. Foot. Oxford University Press, 2001. Oxford Reference Online.

The Invasion of Norway--April 1940.

(This is the third of a series of entries on the Norwegian experience during the Second World War--the previous entries are dated January 31 and December 29).


In the first few months of 1940, Hitler decided to invade Norway.   In large part,  the invasion was motivated by a desire to curb British naval power.  At the time, Britain possessed many more surface warships (vessels that floated on top of the water, such as battleships and destroyers) than did Germany, and consequently held a decisive advantage at sea.   Seizing control of Norwegian airfields and ports would provide bases from which German aircraft and warships could undermine British naval supremacy.

The German move was also prompted by a desire to ensure a continued supply of Swedish iron ore.  Germany imported much of its iron ore (from which steel is made) from Sweden, and these ore imports were often transported across the border with Sweden to the Norwegian port city of Narvik, where in turn they were shipped by sea to Germany.  The Germans worried that the British navy might cut off this supply of ore and thus deny German industry access to this vital raw material.   

In any case, the Norwegian fascist Vidkun Quisling was certainly hoping for the German military's arrival.  In December of 1939, with the Phoney War in full swing, Quisling, hoping to bring about a Norwegian-German alliance, met with high-ranking Nazi party officials to discuss the possibility of a German troops being dispatched to Norway, and did secure an audience with Hitler.

On April 9, 1940, Germany invaded both Norway and Denmark.  Denmark, possessing only a small army and lacking a modern air force, was quickly overwhelmed and surrendered, but the German conquest of Norway took much longer.

The same day, the German navy landed soldiers at several different points on the Norwegian coast, including Kristiansand, Bergen, Trondheim, and Narvik.  German troops, landing by plane, took control of the airport at the capital city of Oslo.

As part of the April 9 invasion, the Germans planned to have a flotilla including the heavy cruiser Blücher sail north through Oslofjord and disgorge troops at Oslo.  On an island at a narrow spot in the fjord sat Oscarsborg fortress, which featured both heavy artillery and an antiquated machine for launching antiship torpedoes.

On the morning of April 9, the commander of Oscarsborg fortress, unsure of the nationality of the mysterious flotilla that was steaming north towards him, took a gamble and ordered his defenses to open fire.  Artillery and torpedo hits sank the Blücher.  The remaining vessels decided against venturing further north for the time being, and the delay in the German occupation of Oslo gave the Norwegian royal family time to escape the capital.  The Norwegian King, Haakon VII, refusing to abdicate or surrender, urged his country to fight the invaders.

Despite these setbacks, on April 9, 1940, the Germans succeeded in landing most of their soldiers ashore in Norway, and their land forces began advancing into the interior of the country.

For his part, Vidkun Quisling decided to help out the Germans by going on the radio and declaring that his countrymen should lay down their arms.  Few, if any, Norwegians paid him any heed; more likely, his broadcast may have pushed Norwegians to fight the Germans harder.

The Allied counterattack.

While the Norwegian army fought to contain the advance of German ground forces, the British and French made a serious attempt to contest the German invasion.  In two naval battles outside Narvik, the British navy sank or crippled ten German destroyers, in the process cutting the German forces who had landed there off from their source of supplies.  The British and French landed troops at Narvik and eventually were able to drive the German forces out of the city.  The Allies also dispatched troops to the north and south of the city of Trondheim, in preparation for retaking that city.

But the overall Allied effort was marked by disorganization and confusion; many troops landed without proper equipment.  The Germans, by quickly moving combat aircraft to newly-captured bases in Norway, were able to seize control of the skies in the southern part of the country and attack Allied ground forces and ships.  The following photographs suggest how decisive German air power was during the battle for Norway.   The upper photograph shows British soldiers among the ruins of Namsos, a city north of Trondheim that had been subjected to German bombing; the lower photo, taken near Namsos, shows the British navy ship Bittern after a German bombing attack.

Both photos from: http://www.iwmcollections.org.uk/qryMain.php

The Anglo-French efforts to retake Trondheim were so disastrous that the Allies had to withdraw their soldiers.  The collapse of the Trondheim campaign sent shockwaves through the British government, with many in the British Parliament (the national legislature) accusing the government of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain with botching the Norwegian campaign.  One member of Parliament, in calling for Chamberlain to step aside, repeated the words spoken by Oliver Cromwell to Parliament centuries before: "You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing.  Depart, I say, and let us have done with you.  In the name of God, go!"

The loss of support for Chamberlain led him to step down as prime minister, to be replaced by Winston Churchill, who for years had been warning that Nazi Germany threatened Europe.  Interestingly, it was Chamberlain who received the blame for the failure of the Trondheim operation, not Churchill, who as First Lord of the Admiralty had played a key role in planning and managing the operation.   Why did Churchill escape unscathed from the Norway fiasco?

To some extent, the parliamentary attacks on Chamberlain's handling of Norway were an expression of the growing belief that the prime minister had been too passive in confronting Hitler, and that who was needed was someone who was committed to defeating Germany (which Churchill certainly was) and who was vigorous enough to do the job.  After stepping down, Chamberlain continued serving in Parliament and lent his support to the man who had replaced him as prime minister.  Before the year was over, he was dead from cancer.

In the meantime, on May 10 1940, Germany invaded the Netherlands, Belgium, and France. At this point, the British and French, concluding that their troops still in Norway were more sorely needed elsewhere, evacuated their troops from Norway, and the remaining Norwegian forces in the field surrendered.  By the end of June, the Netherlands, Belgium, and France had all surrendered to Germany  as well. 

From the German standpoint, the seizure of Norway was to prove a strategic mixed bag.  Germany took control of naval and air bases that secured its control of the Baltic Sea and that extended its reach into the North Atlantic.  Both the British and German navies had lost roughly equivalent numbers of ships.  But since the German navy was much smaller than the British to begin with, Germany's naval losses (including ten destroyers and three cruisers) were much more significant, as they complicated German plans for a seaborne invasion of Great Britain.  After the fall of France in June 1940, Germany began preparations for an amphibious assault (code-named Operation Sealion) on Britain.  The Germans began assembling an invasion fleet to carry soldiers across the English Channel, and went so far as to compile a list of Britons to be arrested during the invasion, including Prime Minister Winston Churchill and science fiction writer H.G. Wells, author of The War of the Worlds.  In the summer of 1940, German bombers began attacking British airfields in preparation for an invasion.  In an extended air campaign lasting for several months, British fighter planes shot down a substantial portion of the German attacking warplanes, and Germany never attempted to actually carry out Operation Sealion.  However, Germany would have been in a better position to actually stage such an invasion had it not lost so many warships in the Norwegian campaign.

Sources:

Harr, Geirr H.,  The Battle for Norway, April-June 1940.  Barnsley, Great Britain: Seaforth, 2010.

Harr, Geirr H., The German Invasion of Norway, April 1940. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2009.

Kearsaudy, François, Norway 1940.  London: William Collins and Sons, 1990.

Riste, Olav, "Norwegian Campaign," in The Oxford Companion to World War II, edited by I.C.B. Dear and M.R.D. Foot.  Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.