Josef Terboven

Josef Terboven belonged to the NSDAP’s “old guard”: he took part in the Munich Putsch, ran the party in Essen, at the heart of the Ruhr, from the late 1920s, and after the Nazis came to power he combined the highest party and state offices in the Rhineland. In April 1940 Adolf Hitler made him Reich Commissioner for occupied Norway. Answerable to Hitler alone, Terboven was for five years the country’s de facto dictator. On 25 September 1940 he announced the deposition of the king and the lawful government, banned every party except Nasjonal Samling and installed ministers subordinate to himself. He was later responsible for states of emergency, the execution of hostages, the razing of the village of Telavåg, the deportation of Norway’s Jews and the burning of northern Norway. Norwegians remember him as the most hated German of the occupation.

Youth and war

He was born on 23 May 1898 in Essen into a Catholic family. Sources describe his father variously as an innkeeper or as a prosperous farmer. The surname, of Low German or Dutch origin, derives from the name of the family farm, which lay “up there” (daar boven). He attended a Realschule in Essen and in May 1915 volunteered for the army. He served in the field artillery and later in the air service, was awarded the Iron Cross of both classes and ended the war as a reserve lieutenant.

From 1919 to 1922 he studied law and political science in Munich and Freiburg, where he came into contact with the far right. He did not finish his studies, probably for lack of money after his father’s death. In Essen he trained in a bank and worked as a bank clerk until 1925, when he lost his post in a round of redundancies.

NSDAP activist in the Ruhr

He joined the NSDAP in 1923 and in November that year took part in the Munich Putsch. When the party was refounded in 1925 he joined again, with membership number 25,247, founded its branch in Essen, led the local SA unit and ran a small bookshop and a distribution business for Nazi newspapers. From then on the party was his profession. He edited the weekly Die Neue Front, and in 1929 he was sentenced to three months in prison for continuing to publish a banned paper. In 1928 he became head of the independent party district of Essen, which was raised to the status of a Gau in 1930. He led it as Gauleiter until the end of the war. Most sources date the start of his rule over the district to 1928; some give 1930.

In the elections of September 1930 he was elected to the Reichstag for the Düsseldorf West constituency, and he sat in it until the fall of the Reich. In Essen he kept close ties with heavy industry: according to documents from 1934, the Dortmund mine owners’ association had been supporting him financially for years. He was a friend of Hermann Göring, for whom he smoothed contacts with the Ruhr industrialists.

After the Nazi seizure of power in 1933 he became a member of the Prussian State Council and an SA general (SA-Gruppenführer). On 28 June 1934 he married Ilse Stahl, a former secretary of Joseph Goebbels, in Essen. Hitler was a witness at the wedding. His visit to Essen also served to lull the SA leadership: two days later began the Night of the Long Knives, in which Ernst Röhm was killed. On 5 February 1935 Terboven became Oberpräsident (governor) of the Prussian Rhine Province, and from then on he combined the highest party office in his district with the highest state office in the province. In 1936 he was promoted to SA-Obergruppenführer. He had a reputation as an efficient and ruthless organiser, quarrelsome and unable to bear defeat. After the outbreak of war in September 1939 he became Reich Defence Commissioner for Military District VI, which covered the Ruhr and Westphalia.

Reich Commissioner in Norway

The German invasion of Norway on 9 April 1940 did not bring what Hitler had hoped for. King Haakon VII rejected the demand that he appoint Vidkun Quisling prime minister, and the Norwegians fought on. Hitler recalled his envoy, Curt Bräuer, and decided to hand the occupied country to a trusted party man. According to some historians it was Göring who put forward Terboven’s name. On 24 April 1940 Hitler created the Reich Commissariat for the Occupied Norwegian Territories (Reichskommissariat Norwegen) and appointed Terboven Reich Commissioner. He was directly subordinate to Hitler, and his office ranked equal with the Reich ministries. The commissariat took over the Storting building, and Terboven moved into Crown Prince Olav’s residence at Skaugum outside Oslo.

The armed forces in Norway were not under his authority. They were commanded by General Nikolaus von Falkenhorst, who thought little of the commissioner and made sure he did not meddle in military affairs. Terboven did, however, have his own apparatus, including the Security Police and the SD, and he worked very well with the Higher SS and Police Leader in Norway, Wilhelm Rediess. He considered that he held “unlimited powers of command” and ignored instructions that did not come from Hitler.

After Norway’s capitulation in June 1940 he was to bring about a Norwegian authority that would break with the king and the government-in-exile and cooperate with the Reich. All summer his men negotiated with the presidium of the Storting over the creation of a “council of state”. Terboven did not want to let Quisling into power, regarding him as incompetent and harmful, and in the summer he persuaded him to leave for Germany. Quisling, however, had protectors in Berlin, and Hitler demanded that his party be given a share in government. When the negotiations collapsed, Terboven announced on the radio on 25 September 1940 the deposition of the king and of Johan Nygaardsvold’s government, dissolved the Administrative Council, banned every party except Nasjonal Samling and appointed thirteen acting ministers, most of them Quisling’s men. Quisling himself received no office. When on 1 February 1942 the Germans allowed him to head a “national government”, the final word still lay with the Reich Commissioner. Relations between Quisling and Terboven remained bad throughout the war.

Terror

Terboven wanted to harness Norway’s resources for the German war economy, but he devoted more and more of his time to fighting the resistance, since Hitler expected an Allied invasion of Norway and demanded quiet there. At the beginning of September 1941 Reinhard Heydrich visited him at Skaugum together with Walter Schellenberg and pressed for a harder line. A few days later, after a strike in Oslo workplaces provoked by a cut in milk rations, Terboven declared a state of emergency in Oslo and the surrounding area. Two trade unionists, the lawyer Viggo Hansteen and Rolf Wickstrøm, were shot. By a decree of September 1941 he made Norwegians subject to special SS and police courts, which tried cases summarily, in secret and without right of appeal. By estimates they passed some 150 death sentences.

At the end of April 1942 a shoot-out in the fishing village of Telavåg near Bergen left two officers of the German Security Police dead; they had been searching for members of the resistance hidden by the villagers. Terboven personally directed the reprisals. On 30 April the village was burned, its boats sunk or taken away, and the men deported to Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where more than thirty of them died. The women and children were interned for two years. In further reprisal eighteen prisoners who had nothing to do with Telavåg were shot. In October 1942 Terboven declared a state of emergency in central Norway, around Trondheim. Ten prominent citizens were shot as hostages and 24 people condemned by a summary court were executed, and Jewish men were arrested. In the autumn of 1942 the Norwegian police and the Germans carried out arrests and deportations of Jews. On 26 November the ship Donau took 532 people from Oslo, and altogether some 770 Jews were deported from Norway, most of them to Auschwitz. Only a handful survived. Terboven’s own part in this is not fully documented, but historians believe the operation could not have taken place without his knowledge and consent. He was also responsible for the camps in Norway, including the conditions in which Soviet and Yugoslav prisoners died. Some authors attribute to him directly the order that led, in July 1942, to the massacre of Yugoslav prisoners in the camp at Beisfjord near Narvik.

In November 1943, after a fire in the university’s main hall, he ordered the University of Oslo closed and its students arrested. Several hundred of them were deported to Germany. In the autumn of 1944, as the Red Army entered northern Norway and the Germans were withdrawing from Finland, Terboven proposed the forced evacuation and burning of the county of Finnmark. Hitler adopted the plan in an order of 28 October 1944. Some 50,000 people were driven from their homes, and thousands of houses, farms, schools and churches were burned so that nothing would be left for the advancing Russians.

The end

In the last months of the war Terboven wanted to turn Norway into a “fortress” in which the Reich would hold out to the end. After Hitler’s suicide he travelled on 3 May 1945 with General Franz Böhme to Flensburg, where the new head of state, Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, was already seeking to end the war. On 7 May Dönitz dismissed Terboven and transferred all authority in Norway to the commander of the armed forces. That night Rediess shot himself at Skaugum. On 8 May 1945 at 11.30 p.m., half an hour before the capitulation came into force, Josef Terboven blew himself up with about 50 kilograms of explosives in a bunker at Skaugum, beside Rediess’s body. The remains of both men were identified by the Norwegian police the next day. Terboven was buried in Essen.

Significance

Terboven was a typical Nazi satrap: not an ideologue but an efficient, ambitious functionary whose only credential was Hitler’s trust. His rule showed what German occupation of a “Germanic” country, whose people the Nazis officially wanted to win over as a “kindred nation”, meant in practice. Far from winning the Norwegians over, he alienated them from the occupier even more than Quisling did. The rejection of the demands at Nybergsund and the king’s second “no” in the summer of 1940 meant that Terboven never secured any legitimate Norwegian authority for the occupation, and his coup of 25 September 1940 united judges, clergy, teachers, sportsmen and workers against the Germans. The terror he applied did not break the Norwegian resistance. By taking his own life he escaped a trial at which he would have answered for the crimes committed in Norway.