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The Nazification of Norway
After the German troops had conquered all Allied resistance on Norwegian soil, the Germans started reorganising Norwegian society to comply with the interests of the German war machine. This mainly involved anything which could contribute to the progress of Germany military needs, but changes which served National Socialist ideology also began to mark developments. In addition to a German commander in chief - to begin with General Nikolaus von Falkenhorst - Norway was also burdened with a political commissioner, Reichskommissar Josef Terboven. Faced with the German forces, and an efficient apparatus for terrorising and oppressing the population, Norway entered a state of semi-paralysis for five long years.
As in all the other occupied countries, the Nazi power profited from the support of local sympathisers. During a visit to Hitler in Berlin in the winter of 1939-40, the leader of the national socialist Nasjonal Samling Party, Vidkun Quisling, had pointed out how valuable it would be for Germany to occupy Norway. Immediately after the invasion, on the morning of 9 April 1940, he proclaimed himself the new head of the government and ordered the Norwegian armed forces to stop battling the Germans. But Quisling's intervention backfired and stimulated the resistance. Thus, the occupying power quickly realised that - for the time being - Quisling did not serve their interests and they chose to base their administration of the country on a certain degree of give-and-take with the existing civilian authorities. Later, the German Nazi Party veteran Terboven was sent to Oslo to find the best way to administer the occupation of Norway. After negotiations with the Storting and leading Norwegians, the result turned out to be the undisguised exercise of German power - featuring a council of commissioners comprised of Norwegian collaborators, with the reichskommissar as the real ruler. In reality, this system lasted up until the end of the war, despite political acrobatics such as the establishment of a "national government" under the leadership of Quisling in February 1942.
In addition to the Norwegian civilians who collaborated with the German occupying power, some 6,000 served with the German armed forces, mainly on the Eastern Front. It did not go unnoticed that the Nobel Prize winner for literature, Knut Hamsun, also supported the Nazification.
Andalsnes, one of the main landing points for Allied forces attempting to counter the German invasion.
Following an initial period of shock and confusion in the summer of 1940, Norwegian determination to resist began to show its strength. The Nazification of society was countered at every turn, especially in the Church and the schools. Thus, Quisling's NS party only got a modest grip on the "peoples' soul", and could only exist under the protection of the German armed forces.
Underground military groups were established in parallel with civilian resistance, and a prime objective was to assist in the Allied and Norwegian intelligence operations. The groups were useful in reporting the movements of German vessels and the transport of troops and materiel, especially in connection with the battles around the Soviet Kola peninsula. In November 1944, Norwegian intelligence was heavily responsible for the sinking of the 41,700 tonne battleship Tirpitz in a fjord not far from Tromsø. When progress was eventually made in arming the underground Norwegian groups, often by parachute drops from Allied aircraft and supplies from the Shetland bus, the military groups became more of a problem for the Germans, particularly for Terboven and the Gestapo. Toward the end of the war, the home front carried out sabotage against the transport infrastructure. Armed clashes occurred all across the country. The biggest and the best known of the battles between Norwegians and Germans occurred in the Matrefjell mountain region, northeast of Bergen, in early 1945.
However, most of the acts of sabotage were carried out by Communists. There activist line had, for some time, been opposed by the rest of the resistance movement, which was subordinate to the war policies of the exiled government in London and the Western Allies.The Heavy Water Attack
An act of sabotage which became famous and possibly had a certain effect on the outcome of the war, was the attack on the heavy water plant at Vemark, in Telemark county. Here, Norwegian soldiers, trained in the UK, were sent into action near the small town of Rjukan, where Norsk Hydro produced heavy water, a liquid chemical which the Germans needed for the development of an atomic bomb. Although the Germans guarded the plant, the production facilities were destroyed. Heavy water which was en route to Germany was also destroyed, at the cost of many Norwegian civilian lives.
When the war ended, the underground resistance forces, Milorg, consisted of 44,000 soldiers. The Machinery of Oppression
The civilian and military resistance in Norway was met with an escalation of the Nazi machinery of oppression. Already in 1940, the first Norwegians were sentenced to death in German courts of war, and execution squads were active from 1941 and onwards. Starting in 1942, more and more Norwegians were shot in reprisal. At the same time, thousands were jailed in Norway or sent to concentration camps in Germany, Poland and France.
The persecution of Norwegian Jews began already in May 1940. But it wasn't until the winter of 1941-42 that Jews were arrested in large groups. The biggest wave of arrests was in October and November 1942. Among the 769 Jews who were deported to Germany, only 25 survived. About half of the 1,800 Jews who lived in Norway when the war broke out managed to find refuge in Sweden.
So did many other Norwegians. At war's end, 92,000 Norwegians were living abroad, and 46,000 of them were in Sweden.
The Germans arrested a huge number of Norwegians. Teachers, officers and students were collectively arrested, and many were captured for their resistance to the occupation and for anti-Nazi activities. A sizable number were sent to German concentration camps where they perished. A total of 40,000 Norwegians were imprisoned by the Germans.Civilian Suffering
Aside from the political and military oppression, daily life was marked mostly by the lack of food and other supplies during the occupation years. With its low degree of self-sufficiency in food production, Norway had relied for years on imports. Imports plunged to a minimum during the war years, and supply problems were compounded by the 400,000 Germans on Norwegian soil. Per capita, Norway was actually the country which had the most German occupiers on its territory.
Statistics bear witness to the scope of the food shortage. From 1942, Norwegians lived on an average of 1,500 calories a day, compared with 2,500 normally. In 1944, the average daily consumption of food sank to 1,315 calories, and in the winter of 1945 the figure was 1,237.
Urban dwellers suffered the most from nutritional shortages during the war. But compared with the deprivations suffered in many other countries, most Norwegians escaped the real distress of the war.A Tougher Situation
Toward the end of the war, hostility between Norwegians and the German occupying forces grew considerably stronger. A prime cause was the German withdrawal from all fronts. Retreating German units from the fronts in the north, the USSR and Finland, withdrew to Norwegian territory. In the autumn of 1944, the Red Army followed the Germans into Finnmark, where it liberated Kirkenes and the northeastern areas. As the occupying troops retreated, they ordered an evacuation of the entire Norwegian population in Finnmark and in Troms south to Lyngen. In Lyngen, three German army corps dug in. Then the entire region north of Lyngen was burned and destroyed. The destruction included 10,400 homes, bridges, power stations, factories, fishing vessels, telephone facilities and other types of infrastructure. The scorched earth area was much larger than all of Denmark.
After the Soviet Red Army crossed into North Norway, a Norwegian military mission and a small number of Norwegian soldiers from Great Britain and Sweden followed. The Russians withdrew from Norway in September 1945, a few months after the German capitulation.Exemplary German Capitulation
As the German collapse drew near, there was serious concern about the choice of tactics which the occupying troops in Norway would choose. But it ended well - the German commander in chief, General Böhme, followed the capitulation orders which he had received from his superiors in Germany on 7 May, 1945. A day later, an Allied mission flew into Oslo, followed by Allied and Norwegian military detachments. In time, power was transferred back to the right hands. The Government returned home from Great Britain and on 7 June, 1945, King Haakon followed.
The German capitulation was carried out in an exemplary and peaceful way, but it took months before all the German troops were repatriated.
It also took some time to repatriate the 141,000 foreign nationals which the Germans had brought into Norway. These included 84,000 Soviet prisoners of war and 13,000 conscripted labourers, mainly Yugoslavs.The Costs of War
When the costs of the war were estimated in Norway, the tally showed that 10,262 Norwegians had been killed, including 3,670 seamen. The Germans had executed 366 and tortured 39 to death. Among political prisoners and members of the underground, 658 died at home and 1,433 abroad.
About 6,000 Norwegians had served the German war cause, and 709 of them had fallen in battle.
During the years of occupation, the Germans had absorbed nearly 40 per cent of the gross domestic product. In addition, there was the considerable material destruction. Finnmark county had been almost totally razed, and a number of towns and communities were damaged by bombings or had been burned by the retreating Germans. An estimated 16 per cent of the national wealth had been lost, and the outflow to the occupying power had been twice as high per capita as it was, for instance, in France. On the whole, however, Norway was one of the occupied countries which suffered the least during the war.
When the war broke out, the merchant navy totalled 1,024 ships and had a combined tonnage of about four million. It's service had been vital to the Allied war effort. During one period, Norwegian vessels were transporting more than 30 per cent of all the oil under shipment from the USA to Great Britain. But the costs were high; in the course of the war the fleet was reduced 2.3 million tonnes.The Betrayal
After the war, legal proceedings were initiated against those who had betrayed their country. About 46,000 persons were punished for treason. Among these, 18,000 were sentenced to prison terms, 28,000 were fined and deprived of their rights as citizens.
A total of 45 Norwegians and Germans received death sentences, 37 of the executions were carried out.
It did not take long for the country to recuperate from the effects of World War II. Industrial production and the gross domestic product were greater in 1946 than in 1938. Three years later, the country's national wealth had also returned to its pre-war level.|
Following is a small example of a somewhat typical action from the Norwegian Campaign, in that Allied air, armor, and artillery assets were non-existent, whereas German forces used air and artillery to good effect. The British commander General Paget had deployed a battalion of the Green Howards (less two companies) to the small village of Otta in central Norway. The goal was to slow the German advance north from Oslo towards a link-up with their forces in Trondheim.
"Otta, which looks not unlike some little North Riding market town, stands about ten miles up the valley from Kjörem on a tongue of land, where the river of the same name flows into the Laagen from the north-west. The main road follows the left bank of the Laagen, with a side-turning across a bridge into the town, while the railway and a subsidiary road follow the right bank. Two steeply rising spurs on the hillside, one on the left bank about one and a half miles in front of the town, the other on the right much nearer in, with sheltered access from the side valley, gave scope for effective cross-fire and would be very hard to storm. Each spur was held by one company; the rest of our troops were posted in and behind the town, where the five surviving anti-tank guns were also carefully sited." German forces moved up both sides of the river towards the village of Otta. British companies were deployed on both slopes with their HQ in the village itself. (Click to view a full-size image.)
"An enemy air reconnaissance at 7 a.m. (28th April) was followed by an air attack which did little damage. At about half past ten, 150 enemy infantry with tanks and artillery advanced against our right flank along the track beside the railway. Heavy casualties were inflicted on them, whereupon they resorted to their usual tactics—a wide deployment to both flanks, artillery action against whatever targets could be located, and the incessant harassing of our forward companies by low-flying aircraft. Tanks were employed again later on both banks, but on the right bank they had very little room to manoeuvre and on the left, where they came along the main road, a single anti-tank gun knocked out three in succession. Another party of the enemy was surprised while crossing the river in rubber boats to attack our forward position on the left bank. A series of attacks on our other forward position was equally unsuccessful. Even the enemy's usual outflanking manoeuvre this time failed of success. Several small actions were fought by the company protecting the more distant spur, in one of which some thirty members of a German officers' conference were surprised and disposed of, and by evening the company, having shortened its lines, occupied a post higher up the hillside backing on to the foot of a precipice: from there it pinned down enemy detachments almost twice its own strength." View of the village of Otta, looking in the direction that the German attack came from. (Click to view a full-size image.)
"Withdrawal, in accordance with General Paget's orders, was timed to begin at 10 p.m., when the forward company from the right bank crossed the River Otta by a ford after the railway bridge leading into the town had been partly blown up. Heavy fire was at the same time opened by the other companies upon the area which we had abandoned; and a general retirement from the town, after the disablement of our remaining anti-tank guns, was carried out successfully by the Green Howards and by the York and Lancaster in the rear. The advanced company in its strong but isolated position on the left bank did not receive the orders for withdrawal, but at half past ten drove off a superior force of the enemy with heavy loss. It then divided into four parties, which moved back in silence and for the most part on hands and knees at a height of a thousand feet or more above the valley floor along a precipitous slope—already famous in Norwegian story for the massacre of a force of Scottish mercenaries in 1612, when the peasantry rolled boulders down on them—and entered the village at 6 a.m. to find that the battalion had left. The company was still complete in numbers and arms and, though fired on by enemy snipers in Otta, suffered no loss as it set out on the thirty-mile march up the valley to Dombaas."
"The break-away this time had been complete, and the enemy made no immediate attempt to follow. The German army reported 'bitter fighting for Otta', and General Paget was able to record that 'The Green Howards on the Otta position fought splendidly... the enemy suffered many casualties in this battle, and his subsequent actions showed little desire or ability to press home an attack'."Sources: |
