Norway capitulates

At 5 p.m. on 10 June 1940, in the Britannia Hotel in Trondheim, the Norwegian Lieutenant Colonel Ragnvald Roscher Nielsen and the German Colonel Erich Buschenhagen, chief of staff to General Nikolaus von Falkenhorst, signed an agreement on the capitulation of the Norwegian forces still fighting in the country. On the same day, in the mountains by the Swedish border at Bjørnfjell, Lieutenant Colonel Harald Wrede Holm signed with General Eduard Dietl an agreement on the laying down of arms by the Norwegian 6th Division, which only a week earlier had been driving the Germans from Narvik towards Sweden. The firing had already stopped at midnight on 9–10 June. The Norwegian campaign, which had begun with the German invasion of 9 April, had lasted 62 days. Norway as a state, however, did not capitulate. Three days earlier, on 7 June, King Haakon VII, the Crown Prince and the government had sailed from Tromsø aboard a British cruiser to carry on the war from London. The Commander-in-Chief, General Otto Ruge, who had prepared the capitulation, stayed with his soldiers and went into German captivity.

Dates and the “longest resistance”

The capitulation of 10 June is often described as the end of a two-month struggle in which Norway held out longer than any other country invaded by Germany. The King and government left Tromsø aboard the cruiser HMS Devonshire on 7 June.

The claim of the “longest resistance” needs qualifying. Norway held out for 62 days, from 9 April to 10 June 1940. That is longer than Poland in 1939 (regular fighting lasted from 1 September to 6 October), France (from 10 May to the armistice of 22 June, which came into force on 25 June), Belgium, the Netherlands and, later, Yugoslavia and Greece, which the Germans conquered together with Crete in less than two months in the spring of 1941. The Greeks, however, had previously fought the Italians for half a year, and the Soviet Union, invaded in 1941, was never defeated. What is true, then, is that of the countries Germany conquered in a single campaign, Norway resisted the longest. It must also be remembered that Norway did not defend itself alone: in April and May some 38,000 British, French and Polish troops fought on its soil, and once they had sailed away, further fighting lost its point within days.

Abandoned by the Allies

London decided on 24 May that the Allies would leave Norway, but told the Norwegians nothing. On the evening of 1 June the British minister, Cecil Dormer, informed the Foreign Minister, Halvdan Koht, that in view of the situation in France all Allied troops would be withdrawn. For the government of Prime Minister Johan Nygaardsvold, which had been based in Tromsø since 1 May and had hoped that northern Norway would remain free, it was a blow. A few days earlier the Allies and General Carl Gustav Fleischer’s Norwegian 6th Division had retaken Narvik, and Dietl’s troops were on the brink of defeat.

The Norwegians clutched at one last straw. The former Prime Minister Johan Ludwig Mowinckel put forward a plan to neutralise northern Norway: the Germans would keep the territory they had already taken south of a demarcation line near Bodø, while the north would remain under the authority of the Norwegian government, without Allied troops, perhaps under Swedish guard. On 3 June Koht discussed the plan in Luleå with the Swedish Foreign Minister, Christian Günther, and Dormer secured a postponement of the government’s departure until 7 June to await a reply. No reply came from Berlin. The Germans, victorious in France and aware of the Allied withdrawal, had no reason to make any concessions.

Meanwhile the evacuation, named Operation Alphabet, went ahead. From the night of 3–4 June until 8 June some 25,000 British, French and Polish troops sailed from around Harstad and the fjords near Narvik, together with whatever equipment could be taken. The Polish Independent Highland Brigade, feigning continued fighting, covered the embarkation. Sappers destroyed the port installations at Narvik and the Ofotbanen railway, which carried the Swedish iron ore, so that it could not serve the Germans for many months. In the early hours of 8 June the Norwegian units at the front were ordered to break contact with the enemy, and on 9 June the Germans entered Narvik once more. So ended the Battles of Narvik.

The departure of the King and government, 7 June

The hardest question was whether the King and the government should leave the country. Some Norwegians, General Fleischer among them, believed that the authorities ought to stay and reach some kind of arrangement with the Germans rather than leave the nation at the mercy of the occupier. Fleischer wrote to the King about this, bypassing the chain of command. Haakon himself, according to those around him, hesitated. Crown Prince Olav offered to stay in the country to soften the effects of the occupation, but in view of the King’s age – he was 67 – it was decided that both must leave, to avoid constitutional complications should the monarch die abroad. The British pressed for departure. They had before them the example of Belgium, where King Leopold III had stayed with his army and fallen into the occupier’s hands, and they preferred Norway to follow the path of the Netherlands, whose Queen Wilhelmina had moved to London.

On 3 June the government decided to move its seat to Britain and to take with it all the armed forces that could be evacuated, in order to build a new army there. On 5 June this was approved by the Council of State presided over by the King. The decision rested on the Elverum authorisation, by which on the night of 9–10 April the Storting had empowered the government to conduct the affairs of state until parliament could meet again. It was the same sense of legitimacy with which the King had rejected Germany’s demands on 10 April. The last meeting of the Council of State on Norwegian soil was held at 2 p.m. on 7 June in the bishop’s residence in Tromsø. A proclamation to the nation signed by the King and Nygaardsvold was issued. It explained that, in view of the Allied withdrawal, the high command of the armed forces had advised the King and the government “for the time being to cease fighting in the country”, and that they had considered it their duty to follow this advice. The words “for the time being” and the departure of the authorities abroad were meant to show that the struggle would go on.

On the evening of 7 June the King, the Crown Prince, ministers, officials and Allied diplomats – 461 people in all – boarded the heavy cruiser HMS Devonshire. The ship, flying the flag of Vice-Admiral John H. D. Cunningham, was under orders to bring them safely to Britain at all costs. The following afternoon she passed a few dozen miles from the spot where German battleships sank the aircraft carrier Glorious and two destroyers. Keeping radio silence, she did not turn back. Koht, Fleischer and the naval commander, Admiral Henry Diesen, sailed on 8 June aboard the Norwegian guard ship Fridtjof Nansen. A dozen or so ships of the Norwegian navy and part of the naval air service also reached Britain, giving the government-in-exile the nucleus of armed forces. On 10 June Devonshire entered the Firth of Clyde, and her passengers went ashore at Greenock. From there they travelled to London, where, according to Norwegian records, the first meeting of the government-in-exile was held on 11 June.

Ruge stays

General Ruge refused to leave. He believed that a commander-in-chief could not abandon his soldiers at the moment of defeat. Before the government sailed, the Ministry of Defence authorised him to negotiate with the Germans an end to the fighting in the country, on the grounds of sparing destruction to the counties of Troms and Finnmark, the only ones the Germans had not yet occupied. Ruge used those days deliberately. He delayed the capitulation until the Allies had had time to sail and Devonshire was a safe distance away. At the same time he demobilised as many soldiers as possible and sent them home to save them from captivity; for this reason he took care that his troops did not remain in direct contact with the Germans. He promised, however, that he would not delay so long as to expose more towns to bombing.

Contact with the Germans was established through the Norwegian legation in Stockholm. On the afternoon of 9 June the Germans demanded a ceasefire and the dispatch of two plenipotentiaries with unlimited powers, one to Dietl at Bjørnfjell and one to Trondheim. The Norwegian command agreed to a ceasefire from midnight on 9–10 June. Ruge did not go to Trondheim himself. On the morning of 10 June Lieutenant Colonel Roscher Nielsen was flown in a German aircraft from the Målselv valley to Trondheim, to the Britannia Hotel, where Falkenhorst’s forward headquarters was located. The negotiations lasted from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Ruge gave the negotiators a clear instruction, which Lieutenant Colonel Wrede Holm wrote down. They were not to hide the fact that the Norwegians were in the Germans’ hands and were demobilising their army, but were to declare that the King, the government, the navy and the air force had left the country, that “Norway as a state is and will remain at war with Germany”, and that Ruge was empowered only to settle the Germans’ assumption of actual authority in northern Norway. The Germans passed this on to their command in their morning report of 10 June. The first German draft of the agreement spoke of the capitulation of “the Norwegian armed forces on land, at sea and in the air”, the standard formula for a total capitulation. In the final text it was replaced by a reference to “the entire Norwegian armed forces” (die gesamten norwegischen Streitkräfte), wording that was to become the subject of a long dispute after the war.

The agreement obliged the Norwegians to lay down their arms and hand over their military equipment and prisoners. The Germans would then release their Norwegian prisoners. Regular officers who gave their word of honour not to fight again were to keep their full pay. The Norwegian negotiators secured the right of Sámi reindeer herders to continue crossing the border with their herds, and of the inhabitants of northern Norway to make free use of the sea. At the request of Ruge, who feared the USSR, the Norwegian units in eastern Finnmark remained on the border with Russia under the orders of the county governor until the Germans arrived. The last Norwegian officer there did not hand over command until 23 July.

After the agreement was signed, Ruge sailed to Trondheim and gave himself up to the Germans. He refused to give his word of honour, which was the condition of release for officers, wishing thereby to emphasise that Norway was still at war. Interned first in Trondheim and then at Grini near Oslo, in October 1940 he was taken to Germany on Hitler’s orders and spent five years in captivity, among other places in the fortress of Königstein in Saxony. He returned to Norway on 3 June 1945, and in July he once again took command of the armed forces.

The dispute over the capitulation

After the war the Trondheim agreement turned out to be one of the most contentious documents in Norwegian history. Lawyers defending people accused of collaboration, among them Ragnar Skancke, a minister in Quisling’s government, argued that on 10 June 1940 Norway had capitulated in full, and that since it was no longer at war, no one could be punished for aiding the enemy in wartime. The Supreme Court of Norway rejected this argument, ruling that the agreement was a limited military arrangement for the laying down of arms by the forces remaining in the country, not a political agreement between two states – which Ruge could not have concluded in any case, because under the constitution decisions on war and peace belonged to the King in Council of State. The great majority of historians and lawyers have taken the same view. Norway, unlike Denmark, which capitulated after a few hours on 9 April and whose government stayed in the country and cooperated with the occupier, remained a belligerent throughout the war.

The government in London and the merchant fleet

In London Norway had what many other governments-in-exile lacked: real strength. As early as April the government had requisitioned the merchant fleet, and in London the state shipping company Nortraship was set up to manage all Norwegian ships beyond the Germans’ reach – some 85 per cent of the fleet. Before the war Norway had been the world’s fourth-largest shipping nation, after Britain, the United States and Japan, and its modern tankers made up nearly a fifth of the world’s tanker tonnage. Nortraship, with some thousand ships at its disposal, was the largest shipping company in the world, and its earnings kept the government-in-exile going. The British politician Philip Noel-Baker said after the war that without the Norwegian tankers there would have been no aviation fuel for the Hurricanes and Spitfires in the Battle of Britain. Norwegian seamen paid a high price for this: several thousand of them were killed during the war.

Armed forces also began to revive around the government. As early as 8 June a camp for Norwegian soldiers was set up at Dumfries in Scotland, soon numbering a thousand men, many of them whalers. On 19 June the army high command was re-established in London under Fleischer, and the naval command under Admiral Diesen.

Its place in the war

The capitulation of 10 June closed the Norwegian campaign on the day the war spread to new areas: Italy declared war on France and Britain, and the French government left Paris. For Germany, Norway was a strategic victory. It provided ports and airfields on the Atlantic and the North Sea, a secure route for Swedish ore and, in time, bases against the convoys to the USSR. Authority in the occupied country had been exercised since April by the Reich Commissioner, Josef Terboven, and Vidkun Quisling eventually returned to government as the occupier’s tool. Until the end of the war the Germans kept several hundred thousand soldiers in Norway who fought on no front.

The occupier immediately tried to strip the government-in-exile of its legitimacy. Under German pressure, the presidium of the Storting asked the King on 27 June to abdicate. Haakon VII refused in a letter of 3 July and a radio address on 8 July, pointing out that the demand was not an expression of the free will of the Norwegians but the result of coercion under foreign occupation. The stance of the King, who spoke from London over the BBC, made him a symbol of resistance, and his monogram “H7” became a sign of defiance at home. In May 1945 the Germans in Norway capitulated without a fight, and the King returned to Oslo on 7 June 1945, exactly five years after he had left Tromsø. General Ruge, who in June 1940 had chosen to stay, welcomed him as a free man.