Hitler. 1936-1945: Nemesis

of the war.¹⁷

Hitler was in 1940–41 at the zenith of his power. But despite his spectacular triumph over France, he could not bring the war in the West to the conclusion he wanted. His inability to do this would shape the rest of the war. The decision to open the war in the East with the war in the West unfinished would take away from Germany what room for manoeuvre remained. And by the winter of 1941 it would become plain just how catastrophic that decision had been.¹⁸

I

It became clear in early 1940 that, before the western offensive could be launched, it was imperative to secure control over Scandinavia and the northern sea passages. A key consideration was the safeguarding of supplies of Swedish iron-ore, vital for the German war-economy, which were mainly shipped through the port of Narvik in the north of Norway. Hitler had acknowledged to Raeder as early as 1934 how essential it would be for the navy to guarantee the iron-ore imports in the event of war.¹⁹ But he had shown no actual strategic interest in Scandinavia until the first months of 1940. Alongside the need to secure the supplies of ore went, in Hitler’s mind, the aim of keeping Britain off the European continent.²⁰ The navy itself had developed no operational plans for Scandinavia before the outbreak of war. But as the prospect of war with Britain began to take concrete shape in the later 1930s, naval planners started to weigh up the need for bases on the Norwegian coast.²¹

Once war had started, the navy leadership, not Hitler, took the initiative in pressing for the occupation of Denmark and Norway. In October, and again in early December 1939, Raeder, elevated the previous April to the rank of Grand-Admiral, stressed to Hitler the importance to the war-economy of occupying Norway. Eventually, after introducing him to Norwegian nationalist leader Vidkun Quisling on 12 December, Raeder persuaded Hitler to agree to an exploratory study by the High Command of the Wehrmacht for the occupation of Norway. Increasingly worried by the possibility of being pre-empted by British occupation (under the pretext of assisting the Finns in the war against the Soviet Union), Raeder continued to lobby Hitler for early action. In January, he instructed the naval leadership to prepare an operational plan. Hitler became seriously alerted to the danger of Allied intervention in Norway after the Altmark, carrying around 300 Allied merchant seamen captured in the south Atlantic, had been raided on 16 February in Norwegian waters by a boarding-party from the British destroyer Cossack, and the prisoners freed.²² Now the matter became urgent for him. Five days later he sent for General von Falkenhorst, known to have experience of Finland from the First World War. This sufficed for Hitler to put him in charge of the preparations for ‘Weser Exercise’. To retain maximum secrecy, Falkenhorst was initially given no documents or maps to help him plan the operation. Instead, he bought himself a Baedecker of Norway, retired to a hotel room, and returned in the afternoon with proposals that Hitler accepted.²³ Rumours, passed on by the German embassy in Stockholm, of a major British action in the near future, made plain that there was no time to lose. On 1 March Hitler put out the directive for ‘Weserubung’ (‘Weser Exercise’).²⁴ Two days later, he underlined the urgency of action in Norway. He wanted an acceleration of preparations, and ordered ‘Weser Exercise’ to be carried out a few days before the western offensive.²⁵ As fears of a British occupation mounted throughout March, Raeder finally persuaded Hitler, towards the end of the month, to agree to set a precise date for the operation. When he spoke to his commanders on 1 April, Hitler closely followed Raeder’s lines of argument. The next day, the date for the operation was fixed as 9 April.²⁶ Within forty-eight hours it was learnt that British action was imminent. On 8 April British warships mined the waters around Narvik.²⁷ The race for Norway was on.²⁸

The Allied mine-laying gave Germany the pretext it had been waiting for. Hitler called Goebbels, and explained to him what was afoot while they walked alone in the grounds of the Reich Chancellery in the lovely spring sunshine. Everything was prepared. No worthwhile resistance was to be expected. He was uninterested in America’s reaction. Material assistance from the USA would not be forthcoming for eight months or so, manpower not for about one and a half years. ‘And we must come to victory in this year. Otherwise the material supremacy of the opposing side would be too great. Also, a long war would be psychologically difficult to bear,’ Hitler conceded. He gave Goebbels an insight into his aims for the conquest of the north. ‘First we will keep quiet for a short time once we have both countries’ — Denmark and Norway — ‘and then England will be plastered (bepflasteri). Now we possess a basis for attack.’ He was prepared to leave the kings of Denmark and Norway untouched, as long as they did not create trouble. ‘But we will never again give up both countries.’²⁹

Despite the warnings by the Swedes of a build-up of troops and ships in the Baltic, poised ready to take Scandinavia, the German strike took the British by surprise.³⁰ Landings by air and sea took place in Denmark in the early morning of 9 April. A German warship entered Copenhagen harbour; the Danish navy had not even been put on the alert. The aerodrome at Aalborg in the north of Jutland fell to a parachute landing of German troops. The Danish army briefly opened fire in North Schleswig. But the Danes swiftly decided to offer no resistance. The Norwegian operation went less smoothly. Narvik and Trondheim were taken. But the sinking of the Blucher, by a single shell from an ancient coastal battery that landed in the ammunition hold of the new cruiser as it passed through the narrows near Oscarsborg, forced the accompanying ships to turn back and delayed the occupation of Oslo for the few hours that allowed the Norwegian royal family and government to leave the capital. Despite sturdy resistance by the Norwegians and relatively high naval losses at the hands of the British fleet, air superiority, following the swift capture of the airfields, rapidly helped provide the German forces with sufficient control to compel the evacuation of the British, French, and Polish troops who had landed in central Norway by the beginning of May. The Allies eventually took Narvik later in the month, after a protracted struggle, only to be pulled out again by Churchill in early June on account of the mounting danger to Britain from the German offensive in the West. The last Norwegian forces capitulated on the tenth.

‘Weser Exercise’ had proved a success. But it had been at a cost. Much of the surface-fleet of the German navy had been put out of action for the rest of 1940. Running the occupied parts of Scandinavia from now on sucked in on a more or less permanent basis around 300,000 men, many of them engaged in holding down a Norwegian population bitterly resentful at a German administration that was aided and abetted by Quisling’s movement.³¹ And there was a further consequence which would turn out to be to Germany’s disadvantage and have major significance for the British war-effort. Blame for the Allied fiasco in Norway was attributed by the British public not to Churchill, the minister directly responsible, but to the Prime Minister, Chamberlain. Indirectly, the British failure led to the end of the Chamberlain government and brought into power the person who would prove himself Hitler’s most defiant and unrelenting foe: Winston Churchill.³²

The eventual success of ‘Weser Exercise’ concealed to all but the armed forces’ leadership Hitler’s serious deficiencies as a military commander. The lack of coordination between the branches of the armed forces; the flawed communications between the OK W and the heads of the navy and, especially, army and Luftwaffe (leading to the need for alterations to directives already signed and issued); Hitler’s own reluctance, in larger briefing meetings, to oppose either Raeder or Goring, though advocating a tough line in private; and his constant interference in the minutiae of operations control: all provided for serious complications in the execution of ‘Weser Exercise’.³³ And for all his talk of keeping strong nerves, Hitler betrayed signs of panic and dilettante military judgement when things started to go wrong in Narvik in mid-April. Major-General Walter Warlimont, observing Hitler at close quarters in these days, later recounted ‘the impression of truly terrifying weakness of character on the part of the man who was at the head of the Reich’. Citing Jodl’s diary entries, he pointed to ‘a striking picture of agitation and lack of balance’. He recalled on one occasion having to see Jodl, whom Warlimont credited as largely responsible for the success of the operation, in the Reich Chancellery: ‘and there was Hitler hunched on a chair in a corner, unnoticed and staring in front of him, a picture of brooding gloom. He appeared to be waiting for some new piece of news which would save the situation…’³⁴ On this occasion, the crisis soon passed. Hitler could bask in the glory of another triumph. But when the victories ran out, the flaws in his style of military leadership would prove a lasting weakness.

For now, however, he could turn his full energies to the long-awaited western offensive.

The repeated postponements of ‘Case Yellow’ (as the western offensive had come to be called), probably a