Hitler orders preparations to invade Norway

On 27 January 1940 the Chief of the High Command of the Wehrmacht (OKW), Colonel General Wilhelm Keitel, signed a short, top-secret document drawn up in five copies. In it he announced that the Führer and Supreme Commander of the Wehrmacht wished “Study N” to be developed further under his personal and immediate influence and in the closest connection with the overall conduct of the war. Keitel also stated that Adolf Hitler had entrusted him with directing the further preparations, that a working staff was being formed for this purpose within the OKW, which would at the same time be the nucleus of a future operations staff, and that all further work would be carried out under the code name “Weserübung”. From that day the attack on Norway ceased to be an idea of admirals and party ideologues and became an operational plan of the high command.

Some chronologies state under 27 January that Germany drew up its final plans for the invasion of Denmark and Norway. That statement runs ahead of events. On 27 January planning was only just getting properly under way, and only with regard to Norway. Denmark entered the plan in February, and Hitler signed the directive for the occupation of both countries on 1 March 1940. The date is nonetheless important: at Nuremberg the British prosecutor presented Keitel’s document as a sign that the OKW had adopted the thesis of the group that had been pressing for an operation in Scandinavia since the autumn, and had harnessed the whole military machinery of the Reich to it.

Three months of lobbying

The idea came from the navy. On 10 October 1939 Grand Admiral Erich Raeder set out for Hitler the advantages that bases on the Norwegian coast would give Germany, and the dangers if the British got there first. At stake were an exit to the Atlantic for warships that bypassed the British blockade of the North Sea, and Swedish iron ore, which in winter, when the Gulf of Bothnia froze, was carried by rail from Kiruna to the Norwegian port of Narvik and from there by ship along the Norwegian coast. Hitler listened, but, preoccupied with plans for the offensive in the West, he set the matter aside.

The subject reached him by a second route in December. The Nazi party ideologue Alfred Rosenberg, head of the party’s Foreign Policy Office, brought to Berlin the Norwegian far-right politician Vidkun Quisling, leader of the fringe Nasjonal Samling party. On 11 December Raeder received him, and the next day reported the conversation to Hitler in the presence of Keitel and the chief of the OKW operations staff, General Alfred Jodl. Quisling argued that the government in Oslo would secretly consent to a British landing, and offered to prepare a coup d’état with German help. Hitler received him personally twice. According to Raeder’s note, the first meeting took place on the afternoon of 14 December; Rosenberg’s report gives 16 and 18 December. Hitler assured the Norwegian that he would prefer a neutral Scandinavia, but promised his movement money and instructed the OKW to examine how Norway might be seized.

This was how a preliminary study came into being, which the OKW called “Studie Nord” (Study North), or “Study N” for short. It was prepared in December and early January by the National Defence Department of Jodl’s staff, headed by Colonel Walter Warlimont. It was a general outline that envisaged the use of relatively small forces. At the beginning of January it was circulated to the commands of the armed services. The army, absorbed in preparations for the offensive in the West, showed no interest, nor did the Luftwaffe. The Naval War Staff (Seekriegsleitung) took it most seriously. In mid-January its staff produced comments that determined the shape of the later operation: success would hinge on surprise, and the troops were to be carried not by slow merchant ships but by fast warships, so that all the important ports could be seized simultaneously. The navy itself, however, was not of one mind. Its war diary for 13 January recorded the view of the chief of staff that maintaining Norway’s neutrality would be the most favourable solution, although he was convinced that England intended shortly to occupy the country with the tacit consent of the Norwegian government.

Why then

In the second half of January circumstances changed on both sides. On the German side, what mattered most was what was happening in the West. On 10 January a German aircraft carrying an officer with orders for the offensive made a forced landing in Belgium (the Mechelen incident), and on 16 January Hitler, under the impression of this blunder and of the winter weather, postponed the attack in the West until the spring. For the first time since the autumn he had time for another undertaking. The Mechelen affair had also shown him how easily a secret could leak when a plan circulated among many staffs. At about this time Hitler had “Studie Nord” withdrawn from the service commands and further work concentrated in the OKW, at his side.

On the Allied side, pressure on Scandinavia was mounting. Since the autumn of 1939 the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, had been demanding the mining of Norwegian coastal waters to force German ore ships out into the open sea. On 6 January 1940 the British government warned Norway that it might take action in Norwegian territorial waters if Germany continued to use them. On 20 January, in a radio broadcast, Churchill called on the neutrals to join the struggle against Hitler, likening them to men each of whom feeds the crocodile in the hope that it will eat him last. Since the outbreak of the Winter War London and Paris had been considering sending troops to help Finland via Narvik and the Swedish mines, which would incidentally cut Germany off from the ore. Norway and Sweden, holding to strict neutrality, protested, but in Berlin these signals were followed closely. The German navy and Quisling presented them as proof that the British were about to land in Norway at any moment.

The document of 27 January

Keitel’s memorandum, known from the records of the Nuremberg trial as document C-63, was short. It was marked “top secret”, carried the reference “Study N” and a note that it might be passed on only by an officer. It contained three crucial decisions. First, planning passed under Hitler’s personal supervision and Keitel’s direction – that is, to the OKW rather than to the Army High Command (OKH), which had prepared the campaign in Poland and was preparing the offensive in the West. Second, a separate working staff was being created within the OKW, in which each of the armed services was to have its own officer. Third, the operation was given the code name “Weserübung”, “Exercise Weser”, after the river that flows through northern Germany into the North Sea. The name was meant to sound like ordinary manoeuvres and give nothing away.

The staff was headed by a naval officer, Captain (Kapitän zur See) Theodor Krancke, who in 1940–1941 would take the Admiral Scheer on a raiding cruise across the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Working with him were army and air force officers. The group met for the first time on 5 February 1940 and relied to a large extent on the navy’s comments on “Studie Nord”. Raeder later wrote that the preparations carried out in the OKW by Krancke were based on the memorandum of the Naval War Staff. Krancke’s staff worked in secret even from parts of its own high command. Hermann Göring, Commander-in-Chief of the Luftwaffe, learned the details of the plan only in March and, according to Jodl’s diary, flew into a fury that no one had consulted him earlier. The Chief of the Army General Staff, General Franz Halder, complained at the beginning of March that not a single word had passed on the matter between Hitler and the Commander-in-Chief of the Army.

This set a precedent that shaped the whole war. For the first time a campaign was to be directed by the OKW itself – in practice by Hitler and his staff – bypassing the OKH. Later Norway and Finland became an “OKW theatre”, and the division of responsibility between the two high commands persisted until 1945.

From Krancke’s staff to 9 April

The British unwittingly accelerated the German preparations. On 16 February 1940 the destroyer HMS Cossack entered the Norwegian Jøssingfjord and freed nearly 300 British seamen – prisoners from ships sunk by the Admiral Graf Spee – from the German supply ship Altmark. The Norwegian guard interfered with neither the Germans nor the British. Hitler concluded that Norway would not defend its neutrality and ordered the work to be speeded up. On 21 February he received the commander of XXI Army Corps, General Nikolaus von Falkenhorst, who had fought in Finland in 1918, and entrusted him with preparing and commanding the operation. Falkenhorst’s staff took over Krancke’s plan and developed it. It was at this stage that the decision was taken to occupy Denmark as well, since supplies were to pass through it and its airfields, particularly at Aalborg, were needed by the Luftwaffe. On 1 March Hitler signed the directive for Operation Weserübung, which was to “forestall a British incursion into Scandinavia and the Baltic”, secure deliveries of Swedish ore and give the navy and air force more favourable positions against Britain. The attack was to come as a surprise and be presented to the world as a “peaceful occupation” to protect the neutrality of the Scandinavian states.

For the following weeks Hitler set no date. On 13 March Jodl noted that the Führer was still not issuing the order and was “still looking for a justification”. That same day the Winter War ended, and the Allies called off the expedition they had prepared for Finland. They did not, however, abandon their plans for Norway. On 8 April British ships began laying mines in Norwegian waters (Operation Wilfred), and troops waited in Britain to land in Norwegian ports should the Germans react. German warships carrying soldiers were already at sea. On 9 April 1940 the Wehrmacht attacked both Denmark, which capitulated within a few hours, and Norway, where landings in seven ports, from Oslo to Narvik, opened the Norwegian campaign.

Significance

Keitel’s document of 27 January 1940 was not a decision to invade. Hitler took that decision definitively only in March, and set the date at the beginning of April. It was, however, the moment when a plan pushed since October by Raeder, and since December by Rosenberg and Quisling, moved from the desks of the navy and the party to the high command and acquired its own staff, a code name and Hitler’s direct supervision. Under that same name the operation was carried out ten weeks later and forestalled the Allies by a hair’s breadth: British mines were being laid in Norwegian waters the day before the German landings.

Before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg (PL) the defence argued that Germany had merely forestalled a British invasion. The Tribunal rejected this argument. It pointed out that the German plans had been drawn up before Germany could have known of the Allied plans, that the navy’s first memorandum of October 1939 spoke not of forestalling the British but of “improving the strategic and operational position” of the Reich, and that in March Hitler was still looking for a pretext. The attack on Norway was among the charges on which Keitel and Jodl were sentenced to death and Raeder to life imprisonment.

The campaign gave Germany naval and air bases on the Atlantic and secured the route for Swedish ore, but it cost the Kriegsmarine the heavy cruiser Blücher, two light cruisers and ten destroyers. Norway, occupied until May 1945, tied down hundreds of thousands of German soldiers throughout the war. The Norwegian government and King Haakon VII moved to London, and the name of Quisling, who proclaimed himself prime minister on 9 April, became a byword for traitor in many languages.