Germany occupies Denmark

At 4.15 a.m. Danish time on 9 April 1940 (5.15 a.m. by German time, in which Adolf Hitler had fixed the “Weser-Zeit”), Wehrmacht units crossed the Danish border in Schleswig. At the same moment German warships were landing troops in Danish ports, and Luftwaffe aircraft were circling over Copenhagen and the islands. Denmark, neutral since the first day of the war and bound to the Reich by a non-aggression pact, was not prepared to defend itself. Before six o’clock King Christian X and the government of Thorvald Stauning decided to end resistance. The last shots were fired in southern Jutland at around eight, and by evening German troops stood throughout the country except for Bornholm, which was occupied the next day.

It is commonly said that Denmark was invaded and capitulated within six hours. That is a fair approximation of how long the whole military operation lasted. The political decision to stop fighting, however, was taken sooner, less than two hours after the border was crossed. All that took longer was getting the order through to the units fighting in southern Jutland, because communications had been cut.

Denmark in the Weserübung plan

Denmark found its way into the German plans almost by accident. Operation Weserübung, in preparation since January 1940, was meant above all to seize Norway, secure the route of Swedish iron ore from Narvik and give the navy bases on the Atlantic. The first plans envisaged only diplomatic pressure on Denmark. It was the staff of General Nikolaus von Falkenhorst, to whom Hitler had entrusted command on 21 February, that concluded the country had to be occupied by force. Supplies for the troops in Norway were to pass through Denmark, and the Luftwaffe needed airfields in northern Jutland, above all at Aalborg, from which aircraft could reach Oslo and Stavanger. On 29 February Hitler approved this change, and the directive of 1 March gave the occupation of Denmark the codename Weserübung Süd.

The task was given to the XXXI Corps of General der Flieger Leonhard Kaupisch. He had at his disposal two infantry divisions, the 170th and the 198th, and the 11th Motorised Rifle Brigade with light tanks and armoured cars, some 40,000 men in all, as well as naval and air support. The plan was simple: motorised columns would enter Jutland by land, troops carried by ship would seize the ports and the crossings between the islands, paratroops would capture the airfield at Aalborg and the bridge on the road from the south to the capital, and a single battalion would land directly in Copenhagen to take the government and the king by surprise. Hitler insisted that both parts of the operation, Danish and Norwegian, should begin at exactly the same moment.

A country that did not want to provoke

For twenty years Denmark had based its security on neutrality and on good relations with Germany. The government of the Social Democrat Stauning and his Radical Liberal Foreign Minister Peter Munch was convinced that a small state with an open land border to the south could not defend itself against the Reich, and that any armed demonstration might give Hitler a pretext. From this conviction grew the non-aggression pact which Denmark, alone among the Nordic states, concluded with the Reich on 31 May 1939, when Sweden, Norway and Finland had rejected a similar offer. The army was small and in April 1940 not mobilised. On the day of the attack fewer than 4,000 Danish soldiers, most of them in Jutland, faced the German superiority.

There was no lack of warnings. On 4 April the Abwehr officer Colonel Hans Oster, an opponent of Hitler, passed word of the coming attack on Denmark and Norway to the Dutch military attaché in Berlin, who informed the Danish naval attaché. But contradictory signals were also reaching Copenhagen, and the prevailing view in the government was that any attack would be preceded by an ultimatum, such as a demand for bases in Jutland, which Denmark would accept anyway. On 8 April reports of German troops concentrating south of the border and of ship movements in the Great Belt led the generals to demand mobilisation and preparations to defend the border. The government refused. It concluded that the ships were heading for Norway and did not want to give the Germans a reason to occupy Denmark on the way. The units in Schleswig were put on alert at 1.30 p.m., but they were not allowed to dig trenches.

Dawn in Copenhagen

The key to a quick success was the capital. While it was still night the German minelayer Hansestadt Danzig, a former ferry, entered the harbour of Copenhagen with an infantry battalion of the 198th Division on board. She passed the Middelgrund fort, whose artillery guarded the harbour entrance, without being fired on: the gun that was to have fired a warning shot was manned by newly enlisted recruits who did not know how to work it. Before five in the morning some 800 soldiers went ashore at the Langelinie quay and, without firing a shot, took the nearby Kastellet citadel, the headquarters of the army command. Part of the force set off through the streets towards Amalienborg, the king’s residence.

Meanwhile, at about half past four, the German minister in Copenhagen, Cécil von Renthe-Fink, appeared at Munch’s home and handed him two documents. The first contained thirteen military demands designed to ensure an immediate end to resistance and the safety of the German troops. The second was a political memorandum: the Reich claimed that it had entered Denmark to forestall a British attack and to protect the country for the duration of the war, and gave assurances that it did not intend “either now or in the future” to violate its territorial integrity or political independence. The minister stressed that the demand for capitulation was an ultimatum, and that bombers were circling over the city ready to attack. Munch protested and replied that he could not take such a decision on his own.

At about 5.30 a.m. King Christian X, Crown Prince Frederik, Prime Minister Stauning, Munch, the Defence Minister Alsing Andersen, the army commander Lieutenant General William Wain Prior and the navy commander Vice Admiral Hjalmar Rechnitzer met at Amalienborg. At the same time shooting was going on beneath the palace windows. The Royal Life Guards, alerted by telephone from Kastellet moments before it was taken, had occupied the streets around the square and opened fire on the approaching Germans. Three guardsmen were wounded. Overhead, flights of German bombers were passing over the city, dropping leaflets headed “Oprop!” (a garbled Danish-Norwegian word for “appeal”), in which the German commander called on soldiers and civilians to remain calm.

The meeting lasted about half an hour. Prior alone argued for fighting on and, according to those present, proposed that the king and government should move to the military camp at Høvelte north of the capital. The others judged resistance hopeless: German tanks could cross flat Jutland in a day, and Copenhagen faced the fate of Warsaw, bombed in September 1939. The departure of the king and government abroad was also considered, but rejected. At about six, in line with Munch’s position, it was decided to accept the German demands. Even before the meeting ended, an aide-de-camp carried to the guardsmen the king’s order to cease fire, and the captain of the guard walked out into the middle of the street with his arms held away from his body and agreed a halt to the shooting with a German lieutenant.

Fighting in Jutland and on the islands

On the border the Danes fought for longer, because the order to cease resistance took a long time to reach them. The first clash broke out at 4.50 a.m. at Lundtoftbjerg, north of the crossing at Kruså: an anti-tank platoon with two 20 mm guns fired on a German column of armoured cars and motorcyclists and then withdrew towards Aabenraa. At Hokkerup some thirty-odd soldiers built a barricade of farm machinery and disabled several armoured vehicles before, at about 6.15, surrounded and under attack from the air, they had to surrender. At Bredevad, Bjergskov, Sølsted and Abild similar small detachments of cyclists and motorcyclists with light guns and machine guns delayed the German advance, taking losses from tank fire and low-flying aircraft. Haderslev held out longest: there some 400 soldiers stopped the Germans in the outskirts. The order to capitulate reached them by telephone only at about 8.15.

On the islands resistance was negligible. Even before four the Germans had crossed by ferry from Warnemünde to Gedser on Falster and set off northwards. At about five, paratroops dropped onto the fort on the islet of Masnedø and onto the Storstrøm Bridge, which linked Falster with Zealand near Vordingborg, and seized it without a fight, opening the road to Copenhagen. At about 6.30–7 a.m. another detachment of paratroops (PL) landed at Aalborg and took the airfield, the main objective of the whole operation. Soon dozens of Ju 52 transports were landing there, and that same day they were flying troops and fuel on to Norway. These were among the first parachute assaults in history carried out in combat. The old battleship Schleswig-Holstein, the same ship that had shelled Westerplatte on 1 September 1939, covered the landings at Korsør and Nyborg on either side of the Great Belt, while other units seized the crossings over the Little Belt.

The Danish navy did not fire a single shot, because it was not ordered to. The Army Air Corps was destroyed on the ground. At 5.25 a.m. German Bf 110 fighters appeared over the airfield at Værløse near Copenhagen, where all four squadrons were based. They shot down the only aircraft that managed to take off, killing both airmen, and strafed the rest, destroying or damaging most of the machines.

One unit did not obey the order to capitulate. Colonel Helge Bennike of the regiment at Roskilde concluded that the order had been extorted from the government and that the Germans had also attacked Sweden, so with some of his soldiers he crossed by ferry from Helsingør to the Swedish shore. When the misunderstanding was cleared up, most of them stayed in Sweden.

Losses

According to Danish historians, 16 Danish soldiers were killed on 9 April and some twenty wounded. Civilians also died in the crossfire at Haderslev. German losses have never been established precisely. The Wehrmacht command wanted to present the occupation of Denmark as peaceful and did not announce its dead. Figures circulating after the war, as high as 203 German dead, are regarded by most researchers as greatly exaggerated. In 2015 the Danish military historian H.J. Jürgensen put German losses at 2–3 killed and 25–30 wounded. For the Danes it was important to remember that the country had defended itself after all; for the Germans, that it had not.

A model protectorate

In the afternoon Munch and his ministry officials drafted a reply to the Reich. The government took note of the assurance that the German troops had not entered Denmark with hostile intent and that the Reich would not violate the territorial integrity and political independence of the kingdom, and declared that in these circumstances it would order the country’s affairs with due regard to the occupation. At the same time it lodged a “grave protest against the violation of Denmark’s neutrality”. Anything that might look like an agreement accepting the invasion was avoided. The German memorandum gave the Danes the two things they cared about most: the preservation of their own state, with its king, parliament and courts, and the inviolability of the border, meaning that North Schleswig (PL), awarded to Denmark in 1920 by a plebiscite held under the Treaty of Versailles, would remain Danish. Ironically, this was the first German recognition of that border.

That same day a proclamation “To the Danish people!”, signed by the king and Stauning, was posted up. It announced that German troops had crossed the border during the night and that the government had decided, “under protest”, to order the country’s affairs with due regard to the occupation. Citizens were to refrain from any resistance, keep calm and loyally obey “all those who have authority to exercise”. Stauning invited three Conservative politicians and three from the Liberal party, Venstre, into the government, forming a cabinet of national unity. Most of the Danish army was disarmed, and the prisoners returned to their units.

For Berlin Denmark proved a convenient prize. Hitler had no ideological or territorial aims there; he needed its roads, airfields and agriculture, and Nazi doctrine counted the Danes among the “Nordic” peoples. The Reich therefore left the king, the government and the parliament in Copenhagen, and relations with Denmark continued to be handled by Joachim von Ribbentrop’s Foreign Ministry through the minister, Renthe-Fink. Propaganda presented the country as a “model protectorate” and proof that states subordinated to the Reich could live in peace, and Wehrmacht soldiers themselves called service in Denmark “the whipped-cream front”.

Denmark and Norway

Denmark’s rapid capitulation stood in contrast to what happened the same day in Norway. There the German landings met resistance, the cruiser Blücher went down in the Oslofjord, and King Haakon VII, Christian X’s younger brother, left the capital with the government and rejected the German demands. The difference did not stem from political will alone. Norway had mountains, fjords and long roads on which an enemy could be delayed, and the hope of British help from the sea. Denmark was flat and small, with an open land border and a capital lying on an island which the Germans had seized in the first hours.

Abroad, especially in Britain and the United States, the Danes were for a time regarded as a nation that had surrendered without a fight. They themselves remembered 9 April as a humiliation. The Defence Minister Andersen later spoke of the “breaking” the country had then suffered, and in post-war Denmark the slogan “Never again a 9 April” took hold, which in 1949 contributed to the country’s accession to NATO.

Significance

The occupation of Denmark was the Wehrmacht’s least costly operation of the entire war, and it achieved its purpose: supplies for the troops fighting in Norway flowed through Danish airfields and ports, and the country became a food reserve for the Reich and part of its air and coastal defences. The Danish authorities did not go into exile, so the country had no government-in-exile. Some of the kingdom’s possessions, however, ended up on the Allied side: in April the British occupied the Faroe Islands, and in May Iceland, which was linked to Denmark by a personal union, and in April 1941 the minister in Washington, Henrik Kauffmann, on his own initiative placed Greenland under the protection of the United States. Some 240 Danish ships that were outside the country at the time of the invasion sailed for the Allies.

The “policy of cooperation” with the occupier lasted more than three years. In 1941 Denmark joined the Anti-Comintern Pact, banned the Communist Party and allowed volunteers to be recruited for the fighting in the east. Against all odds, in March 1943 it also held free elections, in which the Danish Nazis won little more than two per cent of the vote. A growing resistance movement, sabotage and strikes led to the turning point of 29 August 1943: the government refused to accept German demands, the occupier declared a state of emergency and disarmed the army, and the navy scuttled its ships. When the Reich plenipotentiary Werner Best prepared the deportation of the Danish Jews, warning reached them in time, and in October 1943 some 7,000 people crossed to Sweden with the help of their compatriots. The German forces in Denmark capitulated on 5 May 1945, and Bornholm was occupied by the Red Army until April 1946. The formula of “peaceful occupation” that Hitler had devised for Scandinavia worked only here, and only because, in return for compliance, the Reich left the Danes their state.