Raeder proposes occupying Norway

On 10 October 1939 – four days after Adolf Hitler had offered peace in the Reichstag to Britain and France, and a day after he had issued the directive for preparing an attack in the west – the Commander-in-Chief of the Kriegsmarine, Grand Admiral Erich Raeder, reported to him at the Reich Chancellery. Besides the current business of the naval war against Britain, he raised a subject that no one in the German leadership had so far put on the agenda: Norway. He explained to Hitler how dangerous a British occupation of the Norwegian coast would be for Germany and what advantages the Reich would gain from bases of its own in that country. Popular chronologies say that the naval leadership suggested to Hitler that Norway had to be occupied. Put that way, the claim runs slightly ahead of the facts: Raeder did not demand an invasion that day, and Hitler took no decision. But it was with this conversation that the road began which led, in April 1940, to the German attack on Norway and Denmark.

Norway in German naval thinking

The experience of the First World War weighed heavily on the German admirals. For four years the High Seas Fleet had stayed shut up in its North Sea ports, because the Royal Navy, operating from Scotland and the Orkneys, had closed its exit to the ocean between Scotland and Norway. The naval blockade, which Germany had been unable to break, contributed to its defeat. In the 1920s Vice Admiral Wolfgang Wegener, author of Die Seestrategie des Weltkrieges (The Naval Strategy of the World War), published in 1929, argued that the mistake had lain in the poor geographical position of the bases: a fleet that meant to fight Britain needed an outlet to the Atlantic, and only ports in Norway or France could provide one. Raeder regarded Wegener with little sympathy, but his ideas circulated in the officer corps and resurfaced once the new war broke out.

The second reason was iron ore. The German armaments industry depended on imports of high-grade ore from Swedish Lapland, from the mines at Kiruna and Gällivare. Before the war Sweden supplied the Reich with some 9–10 million tons a year, roughly 40 per cent of its total ore imports. In summer most of it went through the port of Luleå on the Gulf of Bothnia and on across the Baltic, but in winter the gulf froze. The ore was then carried by rail to the ice-free Norwegian port of Narvik, and from there by ship along the Norwegian coast, inside the belt of territorial waters sheltered by the skerries. As long as Norway remained neutral, German ore carriers could sail this route in safety, beyond the reach of the British warships blockading the North Sea. Had the British occupied the Norwegian ports, or merely mined those waters, the Reich would have lost one of its main sources of the raw material in winter.

Preparing the report

The first impulse came from the fleet command. At the end of September 1939 Admiral Rolf Carls, commander of Naval Group East, wrote Raeder a letter drawing attention to the importance of the Norwegian coast and to the danger that the British might forestall the Germans. On 3 October Raeder instructed the Naval War Staff (Seekriegsleitung) to examine the question of “gaining bases in Norway”. A memorandum drawn up that day posed the questions: which Norwegian ports were suitable as bases, whether they could be obtained without a fight, and if not, whether they could be taken by force against Norway’s will, and how they could then be defended. The Nuremberg tribunal later pointed out that the document said nothing about forestalling the Allies, only about “improving the strategic and operational position” of Germany. On 9 October the commander of U-boats, Rear Admiral Karl Dönitz, gave his opinion. He considered Trondheim the best place for a base and proposed, as a supplementary solution, a refuelling point for U-boats at Narvik.

This coincided with talks the Kriegsmarine was conducting at the same time with the Reich’s new partner. At the beginning of October the Soviet Union, bound to Germany by the August pact and the Boundary and Friendship Treaty, agreed to let the German navy use a bay on the Kola Peninsula, later known as Basis Nord. But a remote bay cut off from Germany could be no substitute for real bases on the Atlantic.

The report of 10 October

On 10 October Raeder put his conclusions to Hitler. As he himself described it in a memorandum written in January 1944, which after the war found its way into the files of the Nuremberg trial, he spoke of how unfavourable a British occupation of Norway would be for Germany: the Royal Navy would control the exit from the Baltic and the approaches to the North Sea, British aircraft would gain bases closer to the Reich, and the supply of Swedish ore would be cut. Against this he set the advantages of German possession of the Norwegian coast, above all bases for U-boats, which would find it easier to break out into the Atlantic from there. He named Trondheim as the best port. According to his account, Hitler saw the importance of the problem at once, asked him to leave his notes and said he would consider the matter himself.

There, for the time being, it rested. Hitler’s mind was then chiefly on the offensive in the west, which he wanted to launch that autumn, and he had no intention of dispersing his forces. The army and the air force showed no interest in an operation that would have required shipping troops across a sea controlled by the stronger British fleet. For the next two months only the navy concerned itself with the matter.

Rosenberg and Quisling

The same subject reached Hitler by a second route, through the party ideologist Alfred Rosenberg, head of the NSDAP Foreign Policy Office. For years he had kept in touch with the Norwegian far-right politician Vidkun Quisling, a former defence minister and leader of Nasjonal Samling, a small fascist party that had never won a single seat in an election. In October and November the navy cooperated with Rosenberg’s organisation over Norway. At the beginning of December 1939 Quisling came to Berlin. On 11 December he was received by Raeder, to whom he presented a plan for a coup d’état with German help, arguing that the government in Oslo would secretly agree to a British landing. The next day Raeder reported this to Hitler. Hitler met Quisling on 14 and 18 December (the Nuremberg judgment gives 16 December), promised him money and ordered the High Command of the Wehrmacht (OKW) to examine the possibility of an operation in Norway.

From study to invasion

The OKW’s preliminary study, called “Studie Nord”, was produced in January 1940. On 27 January Wilhelm Keitel set up a separate staff to plan the operation, which was given the code name Weserübung. The decision was hastened by an incident on 16 February 1940: the British destroyer HMS Cossack entered a Norwegian fjord and freed nearly 300 prisoners from the German supply ship Altmark – seamen from merchant ships sunk by the Admiral Graf Spee. The Norwegian guard had prevented neither the Germans from carrying the prisoners nor the British from freeing them, which Hitler took as proof that Norway would not defend its neutrality. On 21 February General Nikolaus von Falkenhorst was appointed to command the operation, and on 1 March Hitler issued the directive for the occupation of Denmark and Norway. It was to “forestall a British incursion into Scandinavia and the Baltic”, secure the supply of Swedish ore and give the navy and the air force better starting positions against Britain.

The British did indeed have plans of their own. Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, had already proposed in the autumn of 1939 that Norwegian coastal waters be mined to force the ore carriers out into the open sea. After the outbreak of the Winter War the Allies considered sending troops to help Finland by way of Narvik and the Swedish mines. On 8 April 1940 the Royal Navy began laying mines in Norwegian waters (Operation Wilfred). The German ships carrying troops were already at sea. On 9 April the Wehrmacht simultaneously attacked Denmark, which capitulated the same day, and Norway, opening the Norwegian campaign.

Significance

Raeder’s report of 10 October 1939 was neither an order nor a plan. It was the first presentation to Hitler of an idea that the Commander-in-Chief of the navy pressed doggedly over the following months, until he found an ally for it in Rosenberg and a pretext in Quisling. At Nuremberg the tribunal found that the idea of attacking Norway “seems to have originated” with Raeder and Rosenberg, and it rejected the defence’s argument that Germany had merely forestalled a British invasion: the German plans had been drawn up long before the Allied ones and were aimed at gaining bases for the war against Britain. The invasion of Norway was one of the principal charges on which Raeder was sentenced to life imprisonment.

The Norwegian campaign lasted two months. The Norwegians, supported by the British, the French and the Poles (the Independent Podhale Rifle Brigade and warships, of which the destroyer ORP Grom was sunk off Narvik), capitulated on 10 June 1940, when the Allies withdrew from Narvik in the face of defeat in France. Germany won the bases Raeder had sought, but the fleet paid for them: the heavy cruiser Blücher, two light cruisers and ten destroyers were sunk – half of Germany’s strength in that class. They were sorely missed in the summer of 1940, when an invasion of Britain was being planned. Norway remained occupied until May 1945, under the Reich Commissioner Josef Terboven and Quisling’s collaborationist government; his name has become a byword for traitor in many languages. After the war Quisling was sentenced to death and shot in Oslo on 24 October 1945.