Falkenhorst to command Operation Weserübung

At noon on 21 February 1940 General of Infantry Nikolaus von Falkenhorst, commander of XXI Army Corps, which was waiting in the west for the spring offensive, reported to the Reich Chancellery in Berlin. Until that day he had never met Adolf Hitler in person and had heard nothing of the plans for Norway. He left the Chancellery charged with preparing and, if the decision were taken, also leading Operation Weserübung – the German attack on Norway. It is usually recorded under this date that Falkenhorst took command of the coming invasion. That was indeed the case, although Hitler formally confirmed the appointment the following day, and Falkenhorst received his full powers of command only with the directive of 1 March.

A plan without a commander

Since 27 January 1940 planning for the operation against Norway had been in the hands of the Wehrmacht High Command (OKW), under Hitler’s direct supervision. From 5 February a small staff under Captain Theodor Krancke, made up of naval, army and air force officers, worked within it. At the beginning of February it produced what became known as the Krancke Plan: simultaneous landings in seven ports, from Oslo through Kristiansand, Arendal, Stavanger, Bergen and Trondheim to Narvik, by a force of one corps, half of it carried by air. Denmark Krancke wanted merely to intimidate with the threat of occupying Jutland, so as to obtain permission to use its airfields. The plan, however, had one major gap: there was no one to carry it out. Krancke’s staff was a team of planners, not a command.

Matters were hastened by the incident of 16 February. The British destroyer HMS Cossack entered the Norwegian Jøssingfjord and freed from the German supply ship Altmark nearly 300 British seamen taken prisoner by the Admiral Graf Spee. The Norwegian warships, which had earlier let the Altmark through after cursory inspections, did not stand in the way of the British. Hitler read this as proof that London had no intention of respecting Norwegian neutrality and that Oslo was incapable of defending it. On 19 February he demanded that the head of the OKW operations staff, General Alfred Jodl, vigorously speed up the work. Jodl recorded his instructions in his diary: get the ships ready, put the units on standby. He also reminded Hitler that the operation needed a corps commander with his own staff. According to accounts repeated by William Shirer, the head of the OKW, Wilhelm Keitel, proposed Falkenhorst, because in 1918 he had served in Finland in the division of General Rüdiger von der Goltz and knew the conditions of warfare in the north.

On the same day, 19 February, Hitler discussed with the party ideologist Alfred Rosenberg the Norwegian politician Vidkun Quisling, whom he had received twice in December. According to German documents cited by the American historian Earl Ziemke, he decided to drop the idea of Quisling seizing power in Oslo with German help. Quisling’s people were merely to remain in readiness. From then on Weserübung was a purely military undertaking, prepared without the knowledge of the Reich’s Norwegian allies. Quisling himself, seriously ill with a kidney complaint, was then confined to bed and knew nothing of the German preparations.

The meeting at the Reich Chancellery

What we know of the conversation of 21 February comes mainly from Falkenhorst himself, who described it under interrogation at Nuremberg in 1945. Hitler told him to sit down and tell him about the fighting in Finland in 1918. Then he led him to a table covered with maps and announced that the Reich government knew of a British intention to land in Norway. Falkenhorst gained the impression that it was the Altmark affair, more than anything, that had moved Hitler to “carry out the plan now”. To his surprise, he learned straight away that he was to be in command. The army was to give him five divisions, and the aim was to seize the most important Norwegian ports.

Around noon Hitler dismissed the general and told him to come back at five in the afternoon with a plan for the occupation of Norway. Falkenhorst had no material on the country with him. As he told the story at Nuremberg, he went into town and bought a Baedeker travel guide to find out what Norway was like, and then worked on it in his hotel room until the afternoon. The outline he presented at 5 p.m. was simple: one division for each of the five main ports – Oslo, Stavanger, Bergen, Trondheim and Narvik. “There was not much more to be done, because these were the big ports,” he explained later. Hitler was satisfied, swore him to secrecy and told him to hurry.

The Baedeker anecdote has been circulating for years in books on the Norwegian campaign, and it captures well the haste with which Hitler was looking for someone to carry out an idea that was already in place. It comes, however, from Falkenhorst alone and should be treated with some caution. What is certain is what the documents recorded: Jodl’s diary noted that Falkenhorst “accepted gladly”, and the war diary of his new staff summed up the task in two points. The Germans were to forestall the British by seizing the most important ports and towns, above all the ore port of Narvik, and to take so firm a grip on the country that Norwegian resistance or cooperation with Britain would become impossible. On 22 February, having studied the Krancke Plan, Falkenhorst presented a preliminary assessment, and Hitler confirmed his appointment.

Group XXI

On 26 February selected officers of the staff of XXI Army Corps began work in Berlin. The staff was named Group XXI (Gruppe XXI). In German terminology a “group” denoted a level between a corps and an army. Krancke’s team was incorporated into the staff, and Krancke himself and the air force representative became chiefs of staff for naval and air matters. What mattered most, however, was something else: Group XXI was to be subordinate directly to Hitler, bypassing the Commander-in-Chief of the Army, Walther von Brauchitsch. The Army High Command (OKH), absorbed in preparations for the offensive in the west, in practice learned of the whole undertaking only when, on 26 February, Falkenhorst called on the Chief of the General Staff, General Franz Halder, and asked for troops, especially mountain troops. A few days later Halder noted with evident indignation that not a single word had passed between Hitler and Brauchitsch on the matter.

Falkenhorst’s staff at once changed the plan on a point that sealed the fate of a second country. It concluded that diplomatic pressure on Denmark could not be relied upon, and proposed the military occupation of Jutland and, in the event of resistance, a landing on Zealand as well. Denmark lay on the supply route to Norway, and the airfields of northern Jutland, especially at Aalborg, were needed by the Luftwaffe. On 28 February Falkenhorst presented this change to Keitel and asked for an additional corps headquarters and two divisions for Denmark. That same day Jodl proposed that Weserübung be prepared in such a way that it could be carried out independently of the offensive in the west – that is, without the large parachute and airborne forces needed in France and the Netherlands. On 29 February Hitler approved both changes and added the requirement for a landing at Copenhagen. Immediately afterwards he summoned Rosenberg and told him that Quisling would not be drawn into the operation in any form.

From directive to invasion

On 1 March 1940 Hitler signed the “Directive for Case Weserübung”. The operation was to “forestall a British incursion into Scandinavia and the Baltic”, secure deliveries of Swedish ore and give the navy and air force better positions against Britain. It was divided into “Weserübung Nord”, the landings in Norway, and “Weserübung Süd”, the occupation of Denmark, which was entrusted to the corps headquarters of General der Flieger Leonhard Kaupisch. Falkenhorst, as commander of Group XXI, was responsible for the whole and answered directly to Hitler. The directive provoked a wave of protests. The army did not want to give up divisions before the campaign in the west, and Hermann Göring insisted that Luftwaffe units be subordinate not to Falkenhorst but to their own air corps. On 5 March, when Falkenhorst reported on the progress of the work, Göring, offended at having been kept away from the plans for so long, declared all the planning done so far to be worthless. On 7 March Hitler finally allocated the troops for the operation: for Norway a mountain division, four infantry divisions and a motorised rifle brigade, and separate forces for Denmark.

What followed belongs to the history of the campaign itself. The timing depended on the course of the Winter War and on the Allied plans to help Finland via Narvik, and after the Moscow peace of 12 March on the British intention to mine Norwegian waters. On 9 April 1940 Falkenhorst’s troops landed simultaneously at Oslo, Kristiansand, Bergen, Trondheim and Narvik and at several smaller ports, while paratroopers seized the airfield near Stavanger. Denmark capitulated within a few hours. That evening Quisling, passed over by the Germans, announced on the radio that he was taking power, although he had agreed this beforehand neither with the military nor with Berlin. The campaign lasted two months and ended with Norway’s capitulation on 10 June. Falkenhorst was promoted to Colonel General for it.

Significance

The choice of Falkenhorst closed the period in which the attack on Norway had been an idea of admirals, party ideologists and OKW planners. On 21 February the plan acquired a commander, and a few days later a staff that turned it into an operation covering two countries. The role of Denmark, added to the plan in the last week of February, shows how little this decision had to do with policy towards the Danes themselves and how much with military convenience. A principle that would weigh on the whole war also became visible: Group XXI was the first senior command subordinated directly to Hitler through the OKW, without the involvement of the OKH. Norway and Finland later became “OKW theatres”, and this dual high command survived in the Reich until 1945.

Falkenhorst commanded in Norway until December 1944. After the war a British military court sentenced him to death for passing on the order to kill captured commandos; the sentence was commuted to imprisonment. Quisling, whom Hitler had sidelined from the preparations in February 1940, nevertheless tied his fate to the occupation and became its best-known collaborator.