The directive for Operation Weserübung

On 1 March 1940 Adolf Hitler, as Supreme Commander of the Wehrmacht, signed a top-secret document entitled “Directive for Case Weserübung” (Weisung für “Fall Weserübung”). It had been drawn up by the operations staff of the High Command of the Wehrmacht (OKW) – more precisely by the National Defence Department of Colonel Walter Warlimont, whom Hitler had told the day before to put an order for all three services in writing without delay. The directive ordered preparations for the occupation of Denmark and Norway “by part of the German armed forces”. It did not yet fix a date. It is often said that on this day Hitler ordered his generals to plan the invasion of Denmark and Norway. That is a fair description: the document of 1 March closed the period of studies and sketches and opened operational planning proper, with forces allotted, tasks set for the navy and the air force, and a single commander responsible for the whole undertaking.

The road to the directive

The idea had come from the navy in the autumn of 1939, and in December it won the backing of the Norwegian politician Vidkun Quisling. On 27 January 1940 the OKW took over the planning under Hitler’s personal supervision, and in February the staff of Captain Theodor Krancke produced the first plan for landings in Norwegian ports. After the Altmark incident Hitler demanded that the work be speeded up, and on 21 February he gave the command to General Nikolaus von Falkenhorst. His staff, designated Group XXI, added Denmark to the plan. On 29 February Hitler approved this change and called for a strong force in Copenhagen and a detailed plan for assault troops to seize the coastal batteries. That same day he told the party ideologist Alfred Rosenberg that Quisling would not be drawn into the preparations in any form. The directive of 1 March gave these decisions the form of an order.

What the directive contained

The first section set out the aim and the method. “The development of the situation in Scandinavia requires the making of all preparations for the occupation of Denmark and Norway,” the document began. The operation was to “forestall British encroachment on Scandinavia and the Baltic”, secure Germany’s ore base in Sweden and give the navy and the air force a wider starting line against Britain. Given the Reich’s superiority over the Scandinavian states, the forces employed were to be as small as possible; boldness and surprise were to make up for their lack of numbers.

The sentence that mattered most for what followed concerned the character of the operation. “On principle,” Hitler wrote, “we will do our utmost to make the operation appear as a peaceful occupation, the object of which is the military protection of the neutrality of the Scandinavian states.” At the start of the occupation the governments in Copenhagen and Oslo were to be presented with the appropriate demands, which the navy and the air force would, if necessary, reinforce with demonstrations of strength. Should resistance nevertheless be met, it was to be broken “by all military means”. An attack on two neutral states was thus presented in advance as the defence of their neutrality against the British.

The second section dealt with command. Hitler entrusted the preparation and conduct of the operation to the commander of XXI Army Corps, General of Infantry von Falkenhorst, who was directly subordinate to him in operational matters. The troops assigned to Weserübung were to have a separate command and could not be used elsewhere. The air units were to be under the tactical control of Group XXI, while the operations of ships and aircraft that remained under the navy’s and the Luftwaffe’s own command were to be coordinated with Falkenhorst.

The third section required the crossing of the Danish border and the landings in Norway to take place simultaneously, and the preparations to be pressed forward as fast as possible so that the Germans could respond at once if the enemy forestalled them in Norway. Surprise, of both the Scandinavian states and the Western powers, was paramount. If the preparations for embarkation could no longer be concealed, commanders and troops were to be misled with fictitious destinations. The soldiers were to learn their real objective only at sea.

The next two sections divided the tasks. The occupation of Denmark received the code name Weserübung Süd. Group XXI was to seize the Jutland peninsula and Funen by surprise and establish footholds on Zealand, then push on quickly to Skagen and the east coast. The navy was to secure the crossing between Nyborg and Korsør and help in the swift capture of the bridge over the Little Belt; the air force was above all to demonstrate its strength and drop leaflets. The occupation of Norway, Weserübung Nord, was to consist of seizing the most important places on the coast by surprise from the sea and from the air. The transport of troops fell to the navy, while the Luftwaffe, once the country had been taken, was to assume responsibility for air defence and use Norwegian airfields for the air war against Britain. The final section obliged Group XXI to report regularly and fixed the code words for the day and hour of the attack: “Weser-Tag” and “Weser-Zeit”.

A wave of protests

The directive met with opposition from two of the three services. The Army High Command (OKH) had viewed a northern expedition with reluctance since the autumn and, on the eve of the offensive in the west, did not want to give up divisions to a secondary theatre. What irritated it most was that the OKW was deciding how its troops were allotted. The Chief of the General Staff, General Franz Halder, noted that as of 2 March Hitler had not exchanged a single word about Norway with the Commander-in-Chief of the Army, Walther von Brauchitsch. The Luftwaffe protested against the subordination of its units to Group XXI and as early as 4 March obtained a ruling from Hitler that all the air forces committed to the operation would come under X Air Corps, which would receive its orders through the Luftwaffe’s own high command (OKL), “in accordance with the requirements of Group XXI”. The air force also refused to give up the 22nd Infantry Division, which was trained for airborne landings.

The navy took a different line. Its staff, which in January had still wondered whether it might be better to preserve Norway’s neutrality, concluded on 2 March that the matter had ceased to be purely military and had become “a question of the first importance for the war economy and for policy”. It recommended telling Hitler about the difficulties but assuring him that the fleet was determined to “cast aside all scruples” and overcome them with all its strength. On 4 March the navy cancelled other operations and began holding U-boats in port for Weserübung.

Hitler kept up the pressure. On 3 March, according to the diary of the chief of the OKW operations staff, General Alfred Jodl, he spoke “very sharply” about the need for a swift entry into Norway in strength and forbade any of the services to delay. He wanted the troops assembled by 10 March and ready to move on 13 March, so that a landing in northern Norway would be possible around 17 March. He also decided that Weserübung would precede the offensive in the west, with an interval of a few days.

Göring’s anger and the allocation of troops

On the afternoon of 5 March Falkenhorst and his chief of staff reported on the state of preparations at the Reich Chancellery before Hitler and the commanders-in-chief of the three services. The Commander-in-Chief of the Luftwaffe, Field Marshal Hermann Göring, who had so far been kept out of the planning, exploded. Jodl wrote: “Field Marshal in a rage because he was not consulted until now. Will not listen to anyone and wants to show that all previous preparations are worthless.” Once Göring had vented his anger, Hitler explained that he expected an early Allied intervention in Scandinavia under the pretext of aid to Finland, and again ordered the work to be accelerated. The meeting produced concrete decisions: stronger forces for Narvik; the warships to remain in the captured ports; Kristiansand could be left out at first; six divisions were envisaged for Norway; a foothold had to be seized in Copenhagen at once. That same day Group XXI issued its first operational order for Norway. It provided for two possibilities: a peaceful occupation, in which the Norwegian government would be assured that its internal sovereignty would be respected, or landings carried out by force.

Falkenhorst soothed the offended Göring with a separate presentation at his residence, Carinhall. On 7 March Hitler signed a further directive allotting the troops. According to the American historian Earl Ziemke, who described the campaign on the basis of German records, the 3rd Mountain Division, the 69th, 163rd, 181st and 196th Infantry Divisions and the 11th Motorised Rifle Brigade were assigned to Norway, and the 170th, 198th and 214th Infantry Divisions to Denmark. Hitler declared this allocation final. In practice two units were still swapped: the 214th Infantry Division went to Norway and the motorised brigade to Denmark, where the flat terrain favoured fast columns. Something else mattered more: Weserübung and the offensive in the west were now completely separated. The 7th Air Division (PL) and the 22nd Infantry Division returned to the plan for the attack on France and the Low Countries, so airborne landings on the scale envisaged in Krancke’s plan were out of the question. The occupation of Denmark was entrusted to XXXI Corps under General der Flieger Leonhard Kaupisch.

The date

The question of when remained. On 9 March the Commander-in-Chief of the Navy, Grand Admiral Erich Raeder, urged Hitler to carry out the operation quickly, since the British, on the pretext of helping the Finns, might occupy Norway and Sweden and cut the Reich off from its ore. At the same time he admitted that Weserübung ran counter to all the principles of naval warfare, because Germany did not command the sea and would be operating in the face of the overwhelming superiority of the British fleet. Only surprise could ensure success. On 11 March long-range U-boats sailed for their positions off the ports of western Norway.

The peace concluded in Moscow on the night of 12–13 March deprived both sides of their pretext. Hitler ordered planning to continue “without undue haste and without endangering secrecy”. On 13 March Jodl wrote down a sentence that at Nuremberg became one of the most frequently quoted: “Führer does not give order yet for ‘W’. He is still looking for an excuse.” The next day he added that Hitler had not yet decided what justification to give for Weserübung. Despite the doubts of some officers, including members of Falkenhorst’s staff, Hitler and Raeder held to the plan. On 26 March Raeder advised striking as soon as possible, because from the middle of April the northern nights would become too short to cover the ships. Hitler promised a date in the new-moon period, which began on 7 April. On 2 April, once Göring and Raeder had assured him that the weather would allow flying and that ice in the Baltic would not hinder the ships, he set “Weser-Tag” for 9 April and “Weser-Zeit” for 5.15 a.m. On that day the Wehrmacht attacked both countries.

Significance

The directive of 1 March 1940 sealed the fate of two neutral states and established the pattern by which the Reich intended to subjugate them. The formula of a “peaceful occupation” in defence of neutrality worked in Denmark, which capitulated within a few hours on 9 April. In Norway, where the government and the king rejected the German demands, it failed and opened a two-month campaign. The document also fixed a new chain of command: the Wehrmacht’s first campaign directed by the OKW, bypassing the Army High Command, which later became the rule in the north.

The Germans justified the attack by the need to forestall the British, and the Allies had indeed been planning an expedition through Narvik to the Swedish mines since February, and in April began mining Norwegian waters. Before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, however, the British prosecutor presented the directive as proof that Hitler had planned aggression before he knew anything of the Allies’ intentions, and Jodl’s notes from mid-March as proof that a pretext was still being sought. The Tribunal accepted this assessment.