The King’s Choice – 10th of Alf R. Jacobsen

DISCLAIMER: This is a non-professional translation, done purely for the love of the subject matter. Some strange wording is to be expected, since sentence structure is not always alike in English or Norwegian. I'm also not a military nut after 1500, so some officer ranks, division names and the like may be different than expected because of my perhaps too-literal translation. Any notes of my own will be marked in red.

This book is more of a political drama and a personal story for the royal family than a military book, but it has its moments of that as well. And it is a treasure trove of personal notes, unpublished stories and reports from those who were in the thick of it. The author has hunted down all the first-hand material he could get, from archives, private collections and family histories of those involved. Many quotes are taken from unpublished diaries and family sagas. The movie based on this book – by the same name, is also good. The movie makers were advised by both veterans who were present and the royal family for the sequences containing them.

Chapter 1

The Attack

Schleswig Land, Northern Germany The blackout made the darkness seem deeper when major Erich Walther mustered the two paratrooper companies on the staging ground. Fog swirled over the frozen ground, but a red glare in the horizon announced the coming of morning. The dull roar of tens of BMW engines came from the runway, who coughed and spluttered before starting up. The transport chief, lieutenant colonel Carl Freiherr von Gablenz was the director of Lufthansa in civilian life, and had scraped together several hundred Ju 52’s from all corners of the German Reich. Twenty-nine of them was at Walther’s disposal, and the smell of exhaust fumes, airplane fuel and lubricant oil lingered over the frozen grass like a powerful opiate. Aunt Ju was a rattletrap contraption of rifled metal and thin steel pipes. But the hull had been welded by German mechanics and represented the best of contemporary engineering. The three radial motors could lift a rifle section of 12-15 men in full gear over a distance of 1000 kilometres. That was sufficient to reach their target – and a lot more. The first battalion faced their baptism of fire, and Walther knew it would be hard going. But the paratroopers were Hermann Göring’s private, hand-picked army, which the corpulent and cynical Luftwaffe officer had placed at the Führer’s disposal. Most of the officers and NCOs were fervent Nazis, and many of them had participated in bloody street fights with communists and other political opponents in Berlin during the emergence of the in the early 1930s. Now they faced the unknown, but the unknown was normal for the policemen, brownshirts and daredevils who made up the core of the First battalion of the First paratrooper regiment. Their spirits had perked once premier lieutenant Herbert Schmidt saluted the paratroopers in the first company. “Never before have my morning speech received such a rousing answer: “Heil, Herr premier lieutenant!” he wrote in Die Fallschirmjäger von Dombås, published by the Ministry of Propaganda in 1941. “The enthusiasm of their cry made the closest windowpanes vibrate. Their faces lit up by the dutifulness which encapsulated them all. Before embarking on their planes, yet another threefold Sieg Heil rent the night – to our dear Führer, to our people and to our fatherland.” For himself, the thirty-eight-year-old Walther was the prototype of the new class of officer who had made his career in Nazi Germany – not through the traditional staff schools or military academies of Prussia, but through loyalty to Hitler and his party. He had started off as a police cadet in the small town of Oppeln in 1922 and had advanced to senior criminal investigator in the Berlin police force when the Nazis made their power grab that fateful summer of 1933. Hitler's handyman Hermann Göring had been made Prime Minister of Preussen, and had, with his finely-honed instinct for power play at once established a private terror group under the Nazi zealot Walter Wecke. Polizeiabteilung zum besonderes Verfügnung Wecke was on paper to work as life guards for Hitler, Göring and other top Nazis, but in the first year of totalitarian regime, there was a need for people who could do other things than shine shoes and close ranks. Opposition and neutrals in the police ranks were to be weeded out, Jews were persecuted, the remaining communists and social democrats were to be crushed, and Ernst Röhm’s homosexual agitators in the SA were to be brought under control. Blood had flowed, and cries of pain from the torture chambers of Colombia Haus had reached across the street to the barracks which housed Wecke’s police-soldiers. But the Nazi grip on power had been secured, and Erich Walther had been there from the start in February 1933 until Hermann Göring was made chief of the Luftwaffe two years later and turned the police unit into Regiment General Göring. Inspired by the developments in the Soviet Union and the USA, they had implemented parachute training. By the late 1930s, the tough streetfighters from the back alleys of Berlin had been transformed into Nazi Germany’s first airborne military elites. The slim and sinewy Walther had been made company chief, and had taken part in the Anschluss, the march into Sudetenland and the conquest of the rest of Czechoslovakia. He was of moderate height, and his brown hair was wild and had to be brushed back often. His eyebrows were dark, his mouth thin and resolute, like in a sparrow hawk. Beneath the officer’s cap, his face radiated authority, an authority born from experience. Walther had seen it all. He was one of Fat Hermann’s chosen men, and that gave him respect. “He was calm and intelligent”, the fallschirmjäger Ernst Mössinger told to the writer Cato Guhnfeldt. “He was not a hard man, though he could become furious and shout orders loudly”. The first battalion had been on guard duty and had not joined in the victorious campaign in Poland in the autumn of 1939. While others had been praised and decorated, the top-trained paratroopers had seen the blitzkrieg from a teeth-gnashing distance. It made Walther and his men burn with impatience. “The mood was excellent”, Schmidt wrote. “Everyone hungered for the first paratrooper duty.” The officers had been taken in on the plan the night before: and Denmark were to be brought to their knees. First battalion staff and the first and second companies were to jump out at Fornebu airport in and secure the airport for the first wave of ordinary infantrymen who would be landing in transport planes soon after. The total force was around 300 men, who would knock out any resistance with light weapons in minutes, clear the runways and stop any counterattack. The operation had been as cut from a textbook in strategic surprise attacks, but there was a weakness: The theory had never been tested. As Hitler’s chief of operations general Alfred Jodl had proclaimed to Propaganda Minister in a conversation in the Reich Chancellery the same day: “It is the most daring enterprise in the history of war. The stakes and risks are monstrous – with an equal chance of payoff! If we can keep our intentions hidden until dark, victory will be half ours already.” Walther and his men were experts in crowd control and street fighting, and Jodl and Goebbels had high expectations. “The attack on Norway is the most difficult because it will happen in the immediate vicinity of the British fleet”, Jodl had said. “But we have the paratroopers in reserve!” The list of small neighbouring countries that had been harassed and cowed by the megalomaniacal gamblers in Berlin was growing. En route, a basic truth had been learned: The main blow had to hit the central government, fast and brutal. Cut the head off your opponent, and the rest would follow. Hitler and his closest advisers did not see the pacifistic cabinet of Nygaardsvold as a problem. They were stuck in the tradition of the broken rifle, and had not even managed to mobilize what was left of the Army after the ravages of the 1930s. “In Oslo, they are slightly alarmed”, an exalted Hitler had told Goebbels while on a walk in the Reich Chancellery garden on the evening of April 8th. “But they still know nothing.” The aging King Haakon was more of an unknown. He was a navy man, married into the British royal family and an enthusiastic admirer of the Royal Navy. It explained why the detailed instructions crafted by Jodl’s staff included a separate piece on the head of state: “It is of particular importance that the Norwegian king is not permitted to escape abroad during the takeover. It will be necessary to survey his location at once. As an emergency measure, he must be stopped from leaving his palace.” To Goebbels, Hitler said it with more cynicism: “If the king behaves properly, he can stay. But we will never give back the country.” They were unmistakeable words: King Haakon was a figurehead of great importance. If he would not bend the knee and surrender to the Nazi regime, then he was to be captured and held hostage in his own home.

At precisely 04.30, the first transports took off from Schleswig Land in an ear-splitting roar. “Blue- yellow tongues of fire burst from the exhaust pipes and created a ghostlike atmosphere on the airfield”, Schmidt wrote. “That historical sight will never be forgotten by those who were present. The first attack on the enemy by the paratroopers was on its way!” Inside the planes circling the northern German plains, there was little time to reflect on future tasks. The first order of business was to take Fornebu for colonel Helmuth Nickelmann and his soldiers from the 163rd division, who were already climbing aboard some fifty Ju-machines who were to take off at 04.50, just 20 minutes behind the paratroopers. “The element of surprise is key”, Goebbels noted in his diary. “Now, we have to control our nerves and keep an icy cool.” High in the sky above Schleswig, premier lieutenant Schmidt was more elated than nervous. “It was a great moment to see plane after plane gather in formation”, he wrote in his book. “To the east, a blood-red sun was rising. We set a course northward.”

Lieutenant colonel Hartwig Pohlman was wide awaken when the train from Berlin crossed the border at Kornsjø lake. He travelled on a diplomatic passport, and was ready to shoot his way out if the border guards got too close. The ruddy veteran of the first world war had lived through the humiliation of being an Allied POW, and that had been more than enough. He was the son of a general, but the time of the generals had passed. In his briefcase, he carried the directives from a new generation of leaders. What they lacked in chivalry, they had in brazenness. The briefcase contained the plans for the rape of a peaceful neighbouring nation, but Pohlman had no regrets. He had been infected by Nazi ideology and saw only his own glorious possibilities. As operations officer of Gruppe 21, he would have to toil in the shadows of older veterans. As courier for Hitler’s Foreign Ministry, he could make himself known in different ways. “I slept well in my First-Class carriage until we passed the border at Kornsjø”, he wrote in a script to his own children. “There was no border control. I was the only traveller in Østfold that day that knew that the peaceful winter atmosphere that laid upon the land would be shattered in less than a day.”

What neither Goebbels, Walther or Pohlmann understood, was that the element of surprise had been lost long ago. It was in chief thanks to the bravery and readiness of captain Leif Welding Olsen aboard the sentry boat Pol III, which had spotted the German main force led by the cruiser Blücher leading an armada of 30 vessels in the moonlit Monday night. Just before 23 he had ordered full speed ahead, fired a warning shot and demanded that the intruders lay by. His challenge was met by a storm of fire from the cannons and machine guns aboard the torpedo boat Albatross, and the fearless skipper had fallen, mortally wounded. Welding Olsen was the first to give his life for Norway in the fight against , but his sacrifice was not in vain. The tracer fire and signal flares had been seen by both the forward observation post at Onsøyknipen at Fredrikstad, Færder lighthouse and the sentry boat Skudd II, who raised the alarm minutes later by an express telegram to the Outer Oslo fjord Sea Defence at Tønsberg. The signal was logged in the logbook at the general staff at 23.23, and reached Oslo message collection central in the basement of the Astoria Hotel just a stone’s throw from the minutes later: “Several vessels forcing their way past Færder!” “I was immediately warned from Onsøyknipen about fighting in the Outer Oslo fjord”, wrote the chief of Oslo’s Anti-air command, captain Jakob Bull-Berg in a report dated September the same year. “Every arm of the military was similarly alerted. As well as the civilian anti-air service which operated the air raid sirens in Oslo and Aker.”

Oslo message collection central was the nerve centre in the defence of the capital and was shrouded in the utmost secrecy. The cellar rooms beneath the neoclassical brick building in Akersgata 21 had been turned into a modern communication centre during the winter. It had direct phone connections to around 70 listening- and observation posts across the entire eastern part of Norway, the Fighter Wing at Fornebu and five anti-air batteries, which were to protect Oslo from aerial attack. “Telephone apparatuses are lined up in rows, and the radios are ready to use”, the Aftenposten newspaper had told in an anonymised report from the cellar, where the phone operators regularly sunned themselves to keep in shape and fit. “On the walls hang large maps with many strange signs. The phones ring, messages are received, and orders are given. There is a lively business down here, but everything is routine in the air raid central in the Norwegian capital.” Air raids had spread fear among militaries and civilians alike, after the bombings of Guernica, the Winter war in Finland and the blitzkrieg in Poland. The newspaper articles were part of a private campaign to upgrade the air defence through announcements and crowdfunding. “We should be certain of a 10% accuracy rate with our 20- and 40mm autocannons”, proclaimed colonel Magnus Hagem to the newspaper. “Since these cannons shoot 100-200 shots per minute, the chance of hitting an airplane is very great. The projectiles themselves are so effective that a single hit, wherever it is in the plane, is enough to make it crash or go in for emergency landing. In these cannons we have gained a weapon that we should trust implicitly.” These were rousing words from the chief of the Air Defence regiment, who was one of the great ideologues of anti-air artillery, and who had graduated second in his class from the War Academy in 1908, only beaten by the top student, Vidkun . There was only one problem with the interview. Those cannons Hagem referred to, existed only on paper. Kongsberg armament factory had made a deal with Bofors in Sweden, but the first 40mm guns would only come off the factory line that summer. The batteries around Oslo were still armed with twelve manual 7,5cm cannons, which Hagem himself had helped construct in 1932, along with two equivalent batteries from the first world war, and around 35 water-cooled Colt machine guns with limited effect against modern warplanes.

The situation among the anti-air arm was characteristic of the military in general. Additional monetary grants had been made in the autumn of 1939 and winter of 1940 for the purchase of newer war materiel, but the grants were too small and came much too late to right the devastating effects of the 1930s salvo of anti-militarism, which had all but destroyed the will to fight, both mentally and materially. Those who wanted to fight, had to make do with highly insufficient funding. “The corps of officers was basically demilitarized” wrote the Military Investigative Council of 1946. “The attitude of the government towards even the most minute upgrades to the military, had to give the military chiefs the impression that there was no serious will to defend ourselves in the governing bodies. The defeatist atmosphere was most suitable for depriving the military chiefs of any necessary confidence and security.” There was no idyll beneath the ground at Oslo collection central either. Open conflict had broken out between cavalry officer Nicolay H. Knudtzon and major Sigvald Hanssen, who had taken up the leadership post shortly before. Many had begged leave from being called to neutrality watch, and the central was chronically short-staffed. On Monday, they had solved an immediate emergency only by recalling five men who had served out their duty back in March. “We were told to be on duty from 20 until 08 the next morning”, wrote the soldiers Olsen and Hegland in a report a few days later. “The evening was calm, with a few calls until around 23.45 when the message came telling of fighting in the Outer Oslo fjord.” Towards midnight, the political and military leadership had been warned telephonically by prewritten lists jotted down by those on duty in the message central and in the General- and Admiralty staffs. These were Minister of Defence Birger Ljungberg, Oslo’s police chief Kristian Welhaven, commanding admiral Henry Diesen, commanding general Kristian Laake, his chief of staff colonel Rasmus Hatledal and others. Those who could not be reached by phone, heard the wailing howls of the air raid sirens, which were triggered just before midnight. “When the air alarm went off in Oslo, 8th of April at 23.59, I, like many other officers was on my way home from Oslo Military Society”, colonel Hagem wrote in his report. “When the city was blacked out (shortly after), I was outside the Hotel Continental where I communicated telephonically to Oslo collection central, who informed me of fighting between German warships and our fortresses at Rauøy and Bolærne.” The situation was almost unreal. Despite the ominous messages of German air- and fleet movements in Storebælt and Skagerrak, which had been coming in all day, the phone call did not trigger any acute feelings of alarm in the fair-haired colonel’s mind. Like the rest of the military elite, he had eaten and drunk well at the Military Society. In the foyer of Hotel Continental, he saw no reason to meet with his subordinates to inspire or cheer. Rather, he went home to his bed.

Chapter 2

Hitler’s ultimatum

Oslo, 9th of April, midnight to 05.00 The time had passed 23 when lieutenant colonel Pohlman asked envoy Curt Bräuer to open the safe in the legation on the Drammensveien road. “The deciding documents are being laid out”, wrote the courier from Berlin. “Rarely have I seen a man be so surprised by my appraisal of the situation as a whole and his own role to play.”

At the fashionable West End of Oslo, Carl Joachim Hambro had gone to bed around 23, at home with his patient and enduring wife, Gudrun. The vital President of the Storting, veteran of the Conservative party (Høyre, more directly translated to the Right party.), the public speaker, the literary critic and newspaper editor was deep in dept and lived a publicly known double life. He worked hard to keep the creditors off his back, but the sorrows of his familial and economic situation had not deprived him of his clarity. In the interwar period, Hambro had been a consequent critic of the current totalitarian evils, which had made Goebbels froth with rage and hate toward “the Norwegian Jew Hambro-Hamburger". Hambro took the abuse as a badge of honour, and would soon have another chance to show his dedication and anti-fascism again. But the first sirens of the night were not enough to get him out of bed. “We had a fair few air raid alarms and blackout drills as a part of our emergency preparation plans”, he wrote in the book De første måneder. (the first months) “I did not take it very seriously.”

In the Prime Minister’s apartments in St. Olav’s street, was woken by a telephone call from Defence Minister Ljungberg at around the same time, who told him that unknown warships were coming in the Oslo fjord. It was the duty of every government to ascertain the safety of their citizens. The news must therefore have created a state of desperation and bewilderment in him, who had avoided preparing the country for war and who had not taken the advice of the General staff to mobilize the same day. The whole life of this cabinet had been based on a hope of preserving Norwegian neutrality between the western democracies and the gangster-regimes of the east and south. Now, that hope was crumbling, and Nygaardsvold faced a political defeat of historical scope, with potentially catastrophic outcomes for the country and people who were relegated to fight back with empty hands – as a result of his own political mistakes. They were grim prospects, but there was no way around it. An emergency meeting of the cabinet had to be called.

While Nygaardsvold fumbled his way through the darkened Palace park towards Victoria Terrace with a cane, Bull-Berg and his operators in Oslo collection central tried in vain to ascertain what had really happened. But the fog had descended on the fjord, and the squadron which had shown itself in a few ghostlike minutes between Rauøy and Bolærne had apparently disappeared without a trace. No one seemed to have enough sense of reality, or fantasy, to link the sighting to the messages of the German armada which had passed the Danish coast some hours earlier. When someone opined that it could be ships seeking shelter from a naval battle between British and German ships in Skagerrak, the relief was palpable. “Everything is calm”, messaged the watchman at Onsøyknipen at 01.30. That was correct, but only partially. In reality, the German cruisers had laid by south of Bastøy island to offload troops which were to attack the coastal forts from the rear, but Oslo was once again in the grip of fair daydreams. Bull-Berg had the sirens call Danger has passed. The emergency measures were cancelled, and the anti-air crews around the city and at the airport could go to bed – except those on ordinary duty.

Victoria Terrasse in Oslo around 1898-1899, still the seat of the Foreign Ministry to this day.

In the meantime, even the main architect of that political misery, Foreign Minister Halvdan Koht had turned up at Victoria Terrace. The self-conscious and wily sixty-eight-year-old nursed his ego in the company of beautiful women, and had chosen to spend that fateful night at the home of the beautiful and much younger sculptor Sigri Welhaven Krag. “He called in the evening and told me he could not make it home to Lysaker in time, because he was needed back at the Ministry”, Krag told the journalist and writer Per Egil Hegge in 1982. “Do you have any steak, he said. I mean, we were at war, and he could have made do with a couple of bread rolls, but professor Koht always wanted steak.” While the secretaries of the Foreign Ministry frantically searched for the Minister by phone, Krag woke her cook. Koht got his steak and was probably still at the table when the air raid sirens blared. He seemingly borrowed Sigri Krag’s telephone and called the Ministry, then the Royal Palace. According to major Bjart Ording, who was the King’s aide, the Foreign Minister communicated in few words: “Foreign warships are coming up the Oslo fjord, and Rauøy and Bolærne are fighting. You can relay this to the king if it suits you.” King Haakon was still awake, and received the message seemingly calm. He answered curtly: “You can wake me if it becomes necessary. Now I will retire.”

The relative peace lasted less than an hour. Between 02 and 03 in the morning, messages came streaming in about German attacks – against Kristiansand, Egersund, Bergen, and Narvik. The squadron in the Oslo fjord, who no one had seen since midnight, was again spotted half an hour later at Filtvet – only 25 nautical miles to the south. “The Cabinet members gathered in my office, and there we received message after message about enemy attacks from every corner of the country”, Koht wrote. “It was the most ghastly thing I ever experienced.” The situation was critical. The German cruisers were only an hours’ sailing from Hønnørbrygga pier in front of Oslo’s City Hall if Oscarsborg let them pass. In reality, they only had minutes left, and the cabinet was forced to act. Nygaardsvold and his men, who had refused to call on the armed forces for the last several days, finally decided to mobilize – more as a last desperate gesture against a brutal oppressor than as a well thought out decision. Panic shone through in their second action of the night as well, which consisted of a telephone call to the British ambassador, Sir Cecil Dormer. The Cabinet had refused several earlier offers of aid from the western powers, and Koht had censured the British minelaying in the Vestfjord with hard words hours before. “I could not just go and ask for help”, Koht wrote. “Because we had not answered Dormer when he offered to equalize an attack on Norway as an attack on England at the outbreak of the war. And we had declined the Allied offer of “safeguarding” some of our cities against the Germans.” The government had put itself in a position where it was too humiliating to ask for direct aid. The telephonic orientation about the German attack was a cry for help, and Koht hoped that the embassy would use their illegal transmitter to call on the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force.

Envoy Bräuer had only had five hours to cram Hitler’s directive, but he was a professional diplomat, and announced himself at Victoria Terrace at 04.30 with a message from Berlin. “He was correct and polite, but there was a cold tone of command in his words”, Koht noted. “He brought an ultimatum of 19 machine-typed pages, which he gave to me.” The note was a perfidious mix of threats and promises: Supreme German forces were ready to march on every important Norwegian city. They came in friendship to protect Norway from a British attack. If the King and Cabinet surrendered peacefully and let their forces enter, the county could keep its political independence. On the opposite side, any resistance would be brutally beaten down by any means necessary. Koht listened to the envoy’s tirade by the flickering light of two candles in the Foreign Ministry’s library. He did not answer, but he was in inner turmoil. “I cannot deny his words fell heavily on me”, it read in his defense script, Fra skanse til skanse (from sconce to sconce) . “But I caught myself and said: Don’t let yourself be frightened. Remember what you so often say: What you do in fright is a stupid thing.” When Koht left the library to discuss the matter with the rest of the cabinet, even Bräuer revealed that his nerves were on edge: “He started walking nervously up and down the floor”, wrote bureau chief Christian Reusch in a later note. “Then he spoke: This war, yes, I mean the war between Germany and England is the most insane war ever to happen. It can only yield one result, that both countries destroy each other.” The cabinet only needed a few minutes to refuse the ultimatum. They were backed into a corner. To accept the German demands would place the country on the wrong side in the fight between democracy and the tyranny of fascism, and that was in reality no option at all. The decision was almost spontaneous, as it was said by Trygve Lie – and joined by others: “We cannot accept this!” To refuse impossible demands was not the same as declaring war. It was rather an attempt to buy time, and Koht chose his words with care when he went back to the waiting Bräuer with the refusal. “We will defend our neutrality”, he said curtly. “Then there will be battle, and nothing can save you”, Bräuer answered. “The battle is already under way.”

What Bräuer had not thought of in his calculations, was the fighting spirit of colonel Birger Eriksen – and the quick thinking of -President Carl Hambro. When the German envoy reached Victoria Terrasse at 04.30, the cruiser Blücher was already a burning wreck, drifting through the Drøbak strait – savaged by cannonfire and torpedoes from Oscarsborg. The rest of the fleet turned and pulled out. The 1500 soldiers remaining on Blücher was to have been marching across the Rådhusplassen square in front of the city hall when Bräuer delivered his ultimatum. Instead, they drowned at Askholmene or dragged themselves soaked and cold onto land – with no weapons or equipment. Fortress commander Eriksen’s heroic decision had saved the cabinet at the last, and saved them to make sure they delivered their refusal. Meanwhile, Hambro stepped up to the plate and gathered firsthand information from journalists at Morgenbladet and NTB. “There could be no doubt about what was happening”, He wrote in De første måneder. “Without any warning, without an ultimatum, the Germans had surprisingly attacked Norway at every strategically important location. Our army was not mobilized. And if the King, the royal family, the Cabinet and the Storting was taken in a coup, Norway would not just be under the yoke of the Germans, but would cease to exist as a sovereign nation with an independent government.” He used his authority as President of the Storting and ordered that the Storting members leave town at 04. “(on the phone) he said that the Germans had reached Filtvet, some of them even Drøbak”, wrote the Head of Office at the Storting, Ole Johan Vassbotten in a later note. “I had to gather the personnel, protocols and more for departure to in a few hours.” When Hambro reached Victoria Terrace a while later, the mood was depressed. Bräuer had just left the building, and the ministers were grasping at straws. The government had acted, but it had no plan. If the Germans had passed Oscarsborg, then they would hear marching boots in the streets in no time. Without any fighting-ready troops, the war would be over before it began. Koht's brave words to Bräuer would be nothing but words. Hambro arrived as a new saviour, and his request to move to Hamar was accepted at once in council. There might be a way out before the Germans arrived – if they could arrange an extraordinary train from Østbanen rail station at record speed. Far to the south, Walther’s paratroopers had taken wing, but in Oslo, the flight was already underway.

Chapter 3

Hambro’s initiative

Oscarsborg and Oslo city centre, one hour later Ony fifteen minutes after the order to cease fire at 04.30, communications officer Thorleif Unneberg had transmitted the first message to the staff in Oslo: “A large cruiser has passed and is burning by Askholmene. The four further vessels are too far out in the fjord to fire upon.” It was a couple thousand meters from Nordre Kaholmen to the burning Blücher, and it was difficult to see what was happening underneath the flames and the oily smoke. But the Drøbak sound had been forced, and they had every right to fear that the ship would continue on to Oslo – once they put out the fires. Soldiers moved both on Askholmene and on the eastern side of the fjord, and at 05.10, the watchman at Skiphelle made a new, unsettling observation: “It looks like people are coming ashore from the burning ship near Oscarsborg.” The situation was chaotic, and no one could be sure what the next move would be. They had to steel themselves against what was to come, and at Oscarsborg they called out the recruits to meet a possible German landing. Rifles and bayonets were brought up, and colonel Birger Eriksen personally phoned to fortress to ask for infantry support. “It goes without saying that the battle-worthiness of these recruits is rather low”, wrote troop leader Ivar Lien in a later report. “But many were members of sport shooting clubs, others were experienced hunters, and some had done volunteer drills, which had sprouted from these uncertain times. All my men seemed calm at least, and they were very eager. I started the instructions and kept my eye on the German vessel at the same time.”

While the recruits trained in reloading and firing around the snow-covered rocks on Kaholmen, the man responsible for the defense of Oslo was uncertain. The dark and thoughtful major general Jakob Hvinden Haug had served in the Field Artilery and General staff for forty years, and was in possession on a cool and clear brain. He was the son-in-law of the well-known gunsmith Lars Hansen Hagen, and after the first world war he had tested his skills as a businessman in the family business L. H: Hagen & Co, which was Oslo’s leading sports shop, and sold weapons and skis to customers all over the world – including the arctic expeditions of Scott and Amundsen. He had not settled into civilian life, and had returned to the Army, where he made a brilliant career in the 1930s – first as General Inspector for the Field Artillery, then as commander of Akershus and chief of the 2nd division, which had depots and muster fields from Hovedøya island to the south up to Lake Mjøsa in the north. He was a prominent Freemason, which only a few years later would take him to the top of the Lodge as ruling master for the entire country. In the service, he had been part of military manouvers in several European countries, but nothing had prepared him for the crisis about to unfold. “I had no orientation from higher-ups about events from the 5th to the 9th of April”, he wrote in a later report. “As late as the 8th of April, I addressed the Chief of the General staff about this, with a request for when I could expect an order for mobilization, but without results.” The passivity of the government had sabotaged Hvinden Haug’s ability to stop a German march on the capital. By general mobilization, more than 10.000 men could be called up to the 2nd division district. In the East Country, he now only had at his disposal the 2nd battalion of Infantry Regiment nr. 5 with 878 men, who had been called for neutrality watch at Trandum since March 30th, and the 4th battalion of Artillery Regiment nr. 2 in Fredrikstad with 135 men. I addition came the Royal Guards, the War Academy, and the Officer schools for Cavalry, Army Artillery and Engineers, all together around 800-900 men, but none of these were ready for war. On short notice, he had only a few hundred men available, and Hvinden Haug had to improvise. When he sent his first order of the night at 05.25, it represented a desperate attempt to shore up any German troop landings with the meagre means at his disposal: “The three companies of Royal Guards are to move down to the harbour area to protect against ship attacks.”

For lieutenant colonel Trygve Frivold Graff-Wang at the Royal Guard’s camp at Majorstua, the order came unexpectedly and totally ill-timed. He had in his disposal the only battle-ready troops in the 2nd division’s central district, but that was only partially correct. Certainly, His Majesty’s Royal Guard was composed of around 600 well-trained young men, but they were not mentally prepared for war – and in no way equipped for field duty. The first company was at Terningmoen military camp for recruit school, and the second company had handed in all their equipment facing discharge the same day. Fourth company was on guard duty at the Royal Palace and Akershus Fortress, and even had 30 men on sick leave due to an outbreak of mumps. In reality, that meant Graff-Wang had one and a half companies ready, without machine guns or heavy weapons. For himself, the sixty-five-year-old lieutenant colonel had been Guard Commander for ten years, and was about to retire in November due to age limitations. With his carefully tended handlebar mustache and bull neck, he was a man for great events: parades, resounding commands and sabers pointed to the sky. But his warrior spirit had been ground to dust by the long years of anti-military agitation, and the order did not stir him to any particular sense of hurried alarm. Graff-Wang did not think he had to hurry, and went about preparations in a sense like a country picnic – with a sheen of seriousness. “Every company is being organized. Ammunition is handed out, the men are being fed and are bringing along plenty of provisions.”

In the airspace above Denmark, the mood was quite different. “Below us, we could see the Army divisions plunge northwards on every road,” wrote premier lieutenant Herbert Schmidt. “We felt a need to open the windows and wave to our comrades down below. We wanted to shout: This time, we are coming too! This time, we too will swing our swords for the Third Reich!” The 29 Ju-machines transporting major Erich Walthers paratroopers flew in tight formation – three and three planes together. Around 100 kilometers south of them came the next wave of an additional 53 planes going northwards with colonel Helmuth Nickelmann’s soldiers from the 163rd division. As the crow flies, the distance from Schleswig Land to Fornebu was around 650 kilometers. With a cruising speed of 250 km/h, it meant that the paratroopers would jump out over Oslo sometime after seven o’clock. Their baptism of fire was near, and expectations were nearing the breaking point. They joked and laughed, and the sound of the engines was almost drowned out by their battle song: Rot scheint die Sonne. “The mood was through the roof,” wrote Herbert Drescher, who was a telegraphist on board the airplane carrying troop commander Wolfgang Graf von Blücher and his men northwards. “For a while, we feared they would tear our machine apart while were still in the air.”

In the meantime, Carl Hambro’s arrival at Victoria Terrace had sparked a frenzy of activity. The Ministers hurriedly rang family members and ministerial staff. Minister of Labour, Olav Hindal roused the general director of the NSB (Norwegian State Railways) and demanded that their emergency evacuation plan was set into action with all haste. The reaction was not late in coming. “I arrived at the track switch station, and the phone was ringing off the hook,” told switchman Fredrik Gulbrandsen, part of the NSB morning crew, who arrived at work on Østbanen (Eastern railway station) at five in the morning. “It was one of the night watch men, and he was disturbed, totally wild on the phone. We had to bring a train no matter the type, as long as it had some sort of first class seating.” “But where is it going to?” Gulbrandsen asked, who wanted to know which track to use. “No, that’s a secret. You can’t know.” answered the man on the other end, who refused to give him any further information. The train station was seemingly quiet, but Station Master Hjalmar Larsen came running from St. Hallvard’s street. “You better go up the tunnel, I suppose the lads are up there,” he said. “And right enough, there they were. They were just following orders. They were supposed to hide.” Chief Conductor Ivar Iversen, who was actually scheduled to go to Lillestrøm on the newspaper train, was commanded to act as train driver with no further explanation. At Track 8, he saw two steam locomotives with seven bogie wagons and the Royal Carriage set up at the back – with the possibility to change both to the Gjøvik track, Østfold track and Hovedbanen. (the Main Rail line from Oslo to Lillehammer, passing Hamar and Eidsvoll.) “There is to be an extraordinary train to Hamar,” explained station master Larsen. “Yes, but I am in reserve and is set to change for a chief conductor at Lillestrøm,” Iversen objected. “There will be no normal traffic today,” the station master answered brusquely. “So you better get ready.”

Østbanestasjonen, the Eastern railway station

The Royal Palace, surrounded by the palace park. Prime Minister Johan Nygaardsvold had personally taken it upon himself to explain to the King why it was necessary to leave, and the monarch grasped the gravity of the situation at once. Adjutant Ording and the servant staff were turned to packing the necessities, while the king called (residence of the Crown Prince and his family in Bærum outside Oslo) to orient the crown prince who had already been appraised of the situation by his own adjutant, friend and sports teacher, Nikolai Ramm Østgård. “It was not the time or place to discuss,” he told Jo Benkow in the book Olav – menneske og monark. (Olav – man and monarch) “My father took the time to review the situation, but after thinking about it, he decided quickly.” He added: “Father always took the time to think things through. It is a contributing factor to that he always did what turned out to be right in every important situation. taking the time to use your head is not the same as wasting time.” The crown prince’s three children were woken up, and at once understood that something extraordinary was happening. “They had bought blackout curtains at Skaugum, and they had been installed,” told Princess Ragnhild. “We were woken in the middle of the night and told to dress for a mountain trip. The most obvious sign something was not right, was that it was our parents who woke us. We had a sort of breakfast behind drawn curtains.” The thirty-seven-year-old crown prince had grown up in the protective atmosphere of the Royal Palace, and had mostly kept the company of palace staff. It had made him shy and introvert, something only partially cured by his friendship with the sportsman Ramm Østgård. But at the same time, he had become a hardened and determined man, and those abilities would be tested to the full in the dramatic weeks to follow. While others buckled and doubted, the crown prince was ready for war from the moment he placed himself behind the wheel of his black Buick with crown princess Märtha in the passenger seat and their three children in the back. There was no way he would bow to a brutal and criminal Nazi regime. “I do not think I have ever driven as quickly from Skaugum to the Palace as on this special morning,” he told Benkow. “I was totally prepared for the fact that someone might try to block the road and stop me. That's why I drove myself. I had decided to run over anyone who might hinder me or try to stop the car.” The independence of a free country was on the line, and the crown prince was ready to defend it to the last. “I did not want to be surrounded or locked up. It was unreasonable to think that my chauffeur would think in the same way as me.” When he passed the Royal Guards at the gate, he stopped the car and rolled down the window. His words blazed with fighting spirit: “Remember to change to live ammunition, boys!”

In Oslo collection central in the basement below Hotel Astoria, the alarm was raised again around four o’clock. The April night was cold, and the fog banks hindered the observation posts in their work. But sound carried far, and the listening devices on both sides of the fjord caught the unmistakable sound of airplane engines far away. Nothing was seen still, but captain Jakob Bull-Berg took no chances, and sounded the air raid sirens once again at 04.24, and sent out the order for blackout once more. “In the time leading up to seven o’clock we received several messages of airplanes, though none came within firing range,” he wrote in his report.

At the Department of Defence close to Akershus, Chief of the General staff, Rasmus Hatledal worked with grim determinism. The fifty-five-year-old farmer’s son from Stryn was the gentleman of the General staff: soft-spoken, loyal and modest. He had dedicated his life to the Army. But he was not a stiff-legged militarist, and had never dallied with the fascist ideas which had caught on among so many of his colleagues in the 1930s. Hatledal was most of all a professional soldier, and that was why he was embittered and despairing. He knew better than anyone what the disarmament policies of the interwar period had led to. He had seen Norway sliding towards a great war, and for months he had fought to save what was left of material and military options. “I have laid awake all night,” Johan Nygaardsvold said the last time Hatledal had tried to wake the politicians from their stupor. “I never knew things were so bad. I want a royal decree of 75 million kroner.” But the money had never arrived, and all his requests to mobilize had been denied – even when he on Monday night had desperately dogged the heels of Defense Minister Birger Ljungberg through the corridors of the Storting and begged him to get going. Ljungberg was a colonel and had been senior commander in Fredrikstad when he surprisingly had been named as the new Defense Minister. Even though many of his contemporaries saw him as a lightweight, he was assumed as a member of the Conservative party to become an ally in the continuous conflict with Nygaardsvold and his pacifistically-minded men. But power was a strong elixir, and Ljungberg had chosen his side with pomp and stubbornness – with the party cadre and against his former superiors in the military. When Ljungberg arrived at Myntgata 1(address of the Ministry of Defense, part of Akershus Fortress – directly translated to Coin street) with Supply Minister Trygve Lie as cicerone in a staff car from Victoria Terrace to proclaim their decision to mobilize, the cup was full to overflowing. “Have you gone mad?” Hatledal screamed when he understood what the Cabinet was planning. There was to be no declaration of war with an open mobilization of all men ready to bear arms, but a silent variety – which meant that the order to mobilize would be sent out by post. It would take three days for the order to go out, and Hatledal had lost his temper for once. The Germans were past Oscarsborg, and it could be minutes before they were mustering on the Rådhusplassen square. But the power-drunk Lie, who had been engrossed in private telephone calls, had put down he receiver and declared: “There will be no discussion! The gentlemen have their orders. We cannot wait for you, Minister Ljungberg. We must go!” Hatledal bit back his anger. The procedure had been started – with all the modifications he could manage. But the reality was the same: The army could not be mustered in front of their depots before the 11th of April at the earliest, and that was far too late.

Many of his younger colleagues had been present at the premiere of the German propaganda film Feuertaufe at the German legation the 4th of April and seen how Stuka bombers levelled Warsaw block by block. The showing was a poorly camouflaged attempt to soften up the Norwegian officer corps in front of the coming invasion, and it had its effects: “The film in itself was rather tasteless,” noted lieutenant colonel Harald Wrede-Holm, who was the intelligence chief of the General staff. “My reflection was: This is how it turns out for those who are not good boys and do what Hitler want.” Hitler’s will had been made known, and the screaming sirens made it clear that the next target for the Nazi bombers would be Oslo. Hotels and schools in the periphery of the city had long ago been designated as reserve command posts, and there was no time to lose. While Hatledal and his staff sent out the amputated mobilization orders at blistering speed to district commands all across the country, all hands were called to pack archive materials and office equipment. “We expected an air bombardment of the Akershus area as soon as it was light,” Hatledal wrote in his war report. “The order was given that the Army Supreme Command would gather at Slemdal. The move started at five in the morning.” In the next hours, a steady stream of lorries moved between Akershus and the improvised field headquarters some kilometers outside the city centre. It was an exodus that brought the entire military command apparatus to safety from any eventual German airplanes. “I left the general staff building at 06.30 as the last of the staff personnel,” Hatledal noted, who arrived at Slemdal Hotel an hour later after stopping by at his home to fetch his toiletries and other personal items. He found no comfort in the reports that had arrived in the meantime. “I was by then fully aware that enemy forces were en route to or had taken Horten, Kristiansand, Bergen and Trondheim. I knew that Oscarsborg was fighting too.”

In the Reich Chancellery in Berlin that same night, Hitler had paced restlessly across the marble floors for hour upon hour. Weserübung was his operation, and he knew better than anyone what was at stake. “How will America react?” Propaganda Minister Joesph Goebbels had asked him earlier that evening, while on their walk in the park behind Brandenburger Tor. “I am not interested in that for the moment,” the despot had answered. “Materially, they can send aid in eight months, with troops, it will take one and a half years.” The essence was in the next sentence that Goebbels had consciously added in his diary: “We must win within this year. Otherwise, the opposing material superiority will be too great.” The Führer had spent his seven years in power at strengthening their self-sufficiency. It had been an uphill struggle that had demonstrated the great basic weakness of the country: Germany had enormous amounts of coal, and a huge industrial capacity, but lacked in nearly everything else: oil, iron, copper, manganese, nickel, aluminium, rubber and most other metals and products that modern warfare consumed in enormous quantities. Hitler's war was therefore a war of conquest to secure the resources he needed to build the Thousand-Year- Reich. The attack on Norway was no different. By controlling Narvik and the Norwegian coast, he could protect the ore veins in Northern Sweden. It was about yearly supplies of more than ten million tons of the richest iron ore in the world, turned into shells and armour plating in the forges of Ruhr. The additions were a deciding factor if he was to reach his political goals: Mastery of Continental Europe and Lebensraum for the master race on the eastern steppes. He had personally intervened and demanded that the armaments industry increase their production dramatically – with a quintupled increase in ammunition production and thousands more of tanks and planes. To reach his goal, he had to secure the iron ore from Luleå in the summer and Narvik in winter. The highly respected Armaments Minister, general Karl Becker, who was a professor of military science at Humboldt University in Berlin, had protested against the Führer’s impossible demands. But Hitler had brushed aside his warnings and given full authority to the loyal Nazi technocrat Fritz Todt to take steps – sidelining Becker. The aging professor had succumbed to a whisper campaign accusing him of ineptness started by the Nazi top brass. He buckled under the pressure – On Monday the 8th of April – the same day that Weserübung neared its climax – he had taken out his service pistol and shot himself in his office. The shot was a warning to the hazardous adventure politics of the Nazi elite. It had resounded among the intelligentsia in Berlin. Hitler had been furious and would rather Becker had been passed over and forgotten. But the generals had been shaken. To soothe tempers and to smooth things over, he therefore ordered that Becker be given a state funeral with full political and military honours. It was a cynical gambit, but it did not allay the mood of nervous desperation that spread across the Reich Chancellery throughout the evening and night. “The afternoon passes in breathless excitement,” Goebbels wrote. “The opposing side seems to gain a glimmer of understanding that something is about to happen. If only night would come! The news are more and more alarming. Hurry, we have no time to lose. Schneller, schneller!”

Envoy Carl Bräuer knew he had failed when he returned to the legation on the Drammensveien road around 05.30, and he was right to fear the consequences. The officers and servicemen that chose to follow Hitler knew that the hunt for scapegoats was the foremost blood sport in Berlin, and Bräuer had seen for himself what the murder of legation secretary Ernst von Rath had done in Paris, triggering a wave of murder and terror. When he reported the Cabinet’s refusal in a coded telegram to Berlin at 05.52, he underscored that the ultimatum had been refused in a “definitive and most insistent way”. The seriousness and haste had been pointed out, but it had not helped: “After a few minutes, the answer came: We will not bend the knee voluntarily, the battle is already under way.” It would take a few hours before the telegram went out from the cipher office to the Foreign Ministry, and in the Reich Chancellery Hitler was in a deep sleep – no doubt knocked out by a heavy sedative injection from his personal doctor. If Blücher and Lützow had been laying at the quay with their heavy 20,3cm cannons pointed at Stortinget and Victoria Terrace, then Bräuer’s position would have been very different. One salvo would have been enough to break any resistance. The bullying tactics would have worked. But the German squadron had been delayed for reasons unknown to Bräuer, and naval attaché Richard Schreiber and the political machinator Hans-Wilhelm Scheidt from the Nazi party’s foreign office had no words of comfort. They had waited for the German warships near Vestbanen (the western railway station, close to Victoria Terrace and the Palace) since early morning and even taken a trip up to the Naval College at Ekeberg up on the hillside to get a good view towards Nesodden. But the fjord was dark and silent, and the first telegram sent by lieutenant colonel Hartwig Pohlman from the legation to colonel general Nicolaus von Falkenhorst at the Hotel Esplanade in Hamburg was downcast: “No ships in Oslo harbour.” The firebreathing von Falkenhorst was known among his subordinates as Wotan (Odin) and was unlikely to accept their rationalizations, and Hitler himself was merciless. There was therefore only one hope that could bring the situation under control. That hope was tied to major Erich Walther and his paratroopers who were soon to land at Fornebu airport.

Prime Minister Johan Nygaardsvold.

President of the Storting, C. J. Hambro.

Foreign Minister Halvdan Koht.

Chapter 4

The flight begins

Oslo, the 9th of April 06.30 to 07.30 The fear of an attack by land from the troops aboard Blücher turned out to be groundless. The rescue crews never managed to fight the fires raging on board. When the flames reached the ammunition room, the whole stock of medium shells went up at once. The violent explosion rent the armoured steel. Water flowed in, and the cruiser rolled over. Two hours after the firefight at Oscarsborg, it was all over. The attack group’s flagship went down bow first between the Askholmene islands and the mainland. “The cruiser north of Oscarsborg sank at 06.23 after countless explosions on board,” relayed communications officer Unneberg to the Admiralty staff. A deadly threat from the sea had been neutralized, and the order for the Royal Guards to secure the harbour was recalled. Instead, captain Axel Petersson and his reduced fourth company was sent by bus in the direction of Drøbak to round up the German solider and sailors who had swam ashore near Søndre Hallangen farm.

Only minutes after the news of Blücher’s demise reached Oslo, a new threat materialized. It was the watchpost at Onsøyknipen in Østfold, who transmitted a message to Oslo collection central from Swedish colleagues who had seen 15 planes flying north earlier that night. Captain Bull-Berg in the cellar beneath Astoria Hotel alarmed the anti-air batteries and the Fighter Wing at Fornebu, who had been ready for action. “Whatever goal these airplanes had, or whichever nation they were from, one did not know,” noted captain Erling Munthe-Dahl in his later recollection of the events. “After what was presented to us, we really did not think they were coming up to Oslo, but to be sure, the Wing sent out a 5-plane team well in advance of when these planes were calculated to arrive.” The forty-two-year-old Munthe-Dahl was one of the pioneers of military aviation in Norway, and had joined the Army Flying School as early as 1920. He was a keen radio enthusiast, and had set the Norwegian record for long-distance flight with a 5000km trip from Kjeller to Kirkenes and back again. He had joined the Fighter Wing in the autumn of 1939 from a position as chief of staff in the Army flight wing and was therefore one of the most versatile and seasoned officers in the Air Force – both as a pilot and as an administrator. “Munthe-Dahl was a comfortable boss, with whom we had a trusting relationship,” the pilot Kristian Schye told the writer Cato Guhnfeldt. “He was not strict in the military sense, but he was well respected none the less.” Second in command of the Fighter Wing and Operations officer, lieutenant Rolf Tradin from Kragerø was only 26 and had just finished his class in the War Academy. “Tradin was an honest leader too, cool and balanced, but quite strict and exacting,” Schye said. His classmate Tarald Weisteen from the flying school added: “Munthe-Dahl could get nervy. He was quick to think something had gone wrong. He was a good fit with Tradin, who was calm, solid and steady, and quite quiet at times. When he laughed, he had a deep and comfortable laugh.” The Fighter Wing, like the Anti-Air Artillery, was a good gauge for the condition of the armed forces in general. It was a small force – only 22 officers and 92 privates – with a huge task: to beat back enemy air forces which attacked the capital. For the job, the Fighter Wing had been given eleven Gloster Gladiator biplanes, of which seven were operative on the morning of April 9th. The Gladiator had a fair speed and good all-round flying capabilities, but with its body of thin aluminium sheets and canvas, it belonged to a type of fighter planes already headed for the scrapheap of history. Out in the wide world, the airplane factories worked non-stop producing a new generation of fighters, with metal bodies, higher top speeds, and strong firepower, which would ground the double-decker planes for good. After intense pressure, the Nygaardsvold government had agreed at the new year 1939/40 to buy 24 modern fighter planes of the model Curtiss Hawk (75A-4, 19 of which had arrived, and later used by the Germans) from the USA, but the order had come in too late. Most of them were still in their packing crates, which meant that the young pilots of the Fighter Wing had to make do with their old canvas aircraft. “The army’s flying arm was in miserable condition,” wrote the chief of the technical department, lieutenant Gunnar Vardan in a biting report. “The workload after many previous years of sin had been overwhelming, especially when we were to bring up something like a real air force in a minimum of time – despite the hostile and sabotage-like mindset of the government and Storting. Even then, we did not expect to set up a useable air force before the spring of 1941.” When the air raid sirens blared at midnight, the Fighter Wing’s airplanes had been scattered and partially camouflaged in different places around Fornebu, which was still under construction. Munthe-Dahl was ordered to have three of them on a five-minute standby at dawn and sent pilots and ground crew to bed at Oksenøen Bruk’s drafty greenhouses, which had been rented as temporary barracks. “When the wing arrived at the airfield (after an alarm at 04.30) it was still dark, but getting lighter,” wrote Munthe-Dahl. “There was a connective cloud cover in differing height over the whole area that we could see, partially down to the hills.” The cloud cover was breaking up when they again heard airplane engines coming closer. Munthe-Dahl ordered two planes up at once, and another three just after 05. For the next half hour, two German recon planes were pursued through the skies, and second lieutenant Finn Thorsager fired several salvoes from the Gladiator’s machine guns – without a definitive hit. “The wing commander was certain that these flights were a continuation of those violations of neutrality that we had seen before, and that there was no real war on yet,” noted Munthe-Dahl when the airplanes were safely back on the runway. When the message of a further 15 planes arrived at the wing’s intelligence office via a direct phone line from Oslo collection central, he followed his instincts – more out of duty than conviction. All seven fighters were sent up to patrol the area between Nesodden and Fornebu. “The Wing wanted to call the team back down again as soon as the immediate danger from the 15 planes was over,” wrote the wing commander, who was conscious of his young pilots. “(We meant) that the guys should get an opportunity to eat, as they still had not had any breakfast today.”

Aboard the fleet of German transport planes, the mood had gone through a total change. The first wave had reached the sea of fog above Skagerrak an hour and a half after takeoff, and most felt extremely uncomfortable. “The weather changed at once, and sight was reduced to fifty metres,” wrote the telegraphist Herbert Drescher. “We flew into steadily thicker cloud banks, and the situation was problematic. Many of the crew were ill-trained for flying blind.” Aboard premier lieutenant Herbert Schmidt’s plane, the song had gone quiet. The pilot chose to climb, and found blue skies at 1200 meters. But under them, the clouds lay like a cotton blanket from horizon to horizon. Schmidt's notes were despairing: “Would we make it after all? We hungered to do out duty, but we could not see the Norwegian coast. Only an impenetrable grey soup!” Lieutenant colonel Karl Drewes was suddenly in the midst of an unsolvable dilemma. The forty- four-year-old group commander from Wilhelmshaven was responsible for getting the paratroopers safely to Fornebu. He sat next to Erich Walther in the cabin and knew how badly the battalion commander and his men wanted to get stuck in. But the fog surrounding the lead plane seemed impenetrable, and he had no way of knowing what waited over Oslo – if the pilots even found their way. If the planes were forced to circle, their fuel stocks would dwindle to dangerous levels. Aunt Ju had a limited range, and soon it would be impossible to return to their starting point. He knew he would ignite the rage of both Hitler and Göring, but he felt he had no choice. He gave the order to turn back – against Walther’s wild protests.

Crown prince Olav’s black Buick hurtled through the gate and parked in the passageway at the Palace. While Olav himself ran inside to talk to king Haakon, the crown princess and the children sat waiting in the car. “ I remember us standing around and waiting in the back of the passageway before we got in the cars which were taking us to Østbanen,” wrote Einar Østgaard in the book Reisen hun ikke ønsket. (the trip she did not want) The ten-year-old was the son of Ragni and Nicolai Ramm Østgaard, Märtha’s lady-in-waiting and Olav’s adjutant. He had been the princesses’ playmate, and followed the unfolding drama with wide eyes. “The two princesses were different in several ways,” Østgaard wrote. “Ragnhild, the oldest, was more introvert and shy, but also more contemplative than Astrid, who was more outgoing and robust – and unafraid. I don’t remember them being anything but good friends, and that they were close with each other and their younger brother Harald.” (Our current king, Harald V) The three kids were dressed in colourful bunads (folk costumes) and thought they were going on a skiing holiday to the prince’s cabin in Sikkilsdalen valley. But they had only packed small suitcases with a few toys and possessions, and the breakfast had been interrupted by the sound of airplane motors. “Father bade us go outside and see what kind of planes they were,” Princess Astrid told. “That’s when we suspected something strange was going on.”

Meanwhile, in the military headquarters of Operation Weserübung at Hotel Esplanade in Hamburg, a heated discussion was taking place among the flying officers around the weather conditions in Oslo. The seasoned long-distance pilot Carl Freiherr von Gablenz, who in his glory days had crossed the wild Pamir mountains of Tibet, had little respect for Drewes’ decision to turn the planes around. But general Hans Geisler was commander for the entire 10th flight corps and trusted his group commander’s appraisal of the situation locally. He ordered the entire transport fleet turned around – including the 53 airplanes carrying Nickelmann’s infantrymen. But it was a long way from Hamburg to the airspace above Skagerrak, and radio conditions were difficult. 26 of the 29 planes in Walther’s group turned around. The last three carrying the battalion staff, two officers and 19 paratroopers on board did not receive the orders and carried on northwards. The closer they came to Oslo, the more the weather improved. “Around 60 kilometers from the city, the clouds are breaking up,” read the log. “We can see the ocean again. Three burning ships coming into view, nationality unknown.” The paratroopers had reached Oscarsborg, and off the Swedish coast to the south, the planes carrying parts of Nickelmann’s regiment held a steady course through the fog. Group commander Richard Wagner had received Geisler’s orders, but he did not want to turn around. Furthermore, the order had been signed by the 10th flight corps – not Transport chief Land, to which the young captain was subordinate. That was the pretext he needed to continue on. As the later report read: “Since the radio message had not been sent from my own organization, every plane in the group kept its position and continued on its mission.”

High above the clouds, premier lieutenant Werner Hansen and his fighter pilots were unworried about the weather. His 8-plane team of twin engine Messerschmitt Bf 110’s had taken off around 06 that morning from the advance base Westerland on the island of Sylt in the North Sea and risen up to a cruising height of 3000 meters. “After flying for one and a half hours at moderate speed, we closed in on the Oslo fjord,” wrote the flying ace Helmut Lent in his report. “The cloud cover broke up. We could see the beautiful Norwegian landscape below us.” The heavy fighters were armed with machine guns and machine cannons, and were to provide fire support for the paratroopers before and after their landing. They had to reach Fornebu before the transport planes – and no later than a quarter to eight. “We floored it and raced towards the capital,” Lent wrote.

At Østbanen railway station, the situation was tense. The motorcade from the Palace had arrived at the entrance just before 07, and the royal family had been met by the President of the Storting, Carl Hambro and the general director of the NSB, Waldemar Hoff and had been led to the royal carriage. “On the station we also met the Lord Chamberlain, Peder Anker Wedel Jarlsberg,” wrote Einar Østgaard. “He was dressed in his old major’s uniform and was to accompany the King as his adjutant.”

Meanwhile, switchman Fredrik Gulbrandsen and the rest of the NSB morning crew had set up the extra train and blocked off Track 8, much to the amazement of the many travelers who had errands in the capital and had arrived on early morning trains from other parts of eastern Norway. When the passengers arrived minutes later, Foreign Minister Koht was hounded by the editor of Norsk Telegrambyrå (NTB, the Norwegian news agency) Sigvard Friid, who wanted a commentary on the night’s events. “This German deed of violence against Norway is quite unheard of,” Koht declared according to the telegram which was distributed by teleprinter to all of NTB’s subscribers across the country. “Germany excuses their actions by saying that if they did not, England and France would have done the same thing. We do not believe that at all.” Before he boarded the train, Koht added: “We will have to hope this condition will not last too long. The order for general mobilization went out tonight.” The train slowly filled with cabinet members, ministry workers and around 100 MPs, who had received and had chosen to act on Hambro’s alarm some hours earlier. One of them was the famed Supreme Court lawyer Christian Ludvig Jensen, who had been foreman of the Norwegian tourist association and the Norwegian mountaineers’ club, and had represented Bærum (at the time known as Aker) for the Conservative party on the Storting since 1937. “At 04.30, I received a call from the Storting office, telling me that Germany had taken possession of Bergen, Trondheim and Narvik in the night, and now laid off Filtvet,” he wrote in his diary. It was hard to take in the seriousness of the situation, but Christian Jensen had packed his rucksack with food and warm clothes, said goodbye to his family and went to Østbanen. It was impossible to know laid ahead, but his diary had a cheerless tone: “There were days filled with excitement and sorrow, hope and disappointment. Our wonderful and peaceful land had without warning become a battlefield.” Except from the royal carriage the train was spartanly furnished, and the mood carried over to the crown prince’s children. “The compartment was dark, the blinds were drawn, and we were several times told to lay down on the floor,” told Princess Ragnhild to the writer Per Egil Hegge. “It was terribly scary . Father and mother were not in the compartment, and it was Mrs. Ragni Østgaard who watched over us.” She added: “I can’t remember how Harald reacted. He was no more than three years old, poor dear, and probably didn’t understand anything other than that the adults were frightened too.” At precisely 07.23 the forty-year-old Ivar Iversen waved the green flag and blew his whistle. The two locomotives spewed out smoke and steam, and the extraordinary train started rolling – from Østbanen to the relative safety further north.

Around the same time, lieutenant Rolf Tradin and his six pilots were at 1800 meters altitude above the Steilene islands at Nesodden, only ten minutes’ flying further south. The twenty-six- year-old had seen his father’s bank crash in the Great Depression of 1929 as a young man. He had fought to rebuilt his life after the failure, but opposition had given him strength and a daring mind. “I became aware of a foreign airplane coming in over the Oslo fjord at around 1200 meters’ height,” he wrote in his combat report. “One plane soon turned into eight, and now I could see column after column of them coming inwards. It was impossible to count how many they were.” Tradin knew that the canvas covering the Gloster Gladiators was a poor thing, and was only marginally able to resist modern 20mm guns. But he and his fellow pilots shared the qualities shown by captain Welding Olsen and colonel Eriksen. They knew that someone had to fight against a massive overpowering force, and they put aside their fear and negative thoughts. “I radioed the others to attack,” wrote Tradin. “I chose the closest plane and let the others choose their own targets.” None of the pilots knew, but far below them the Royal train was on its way to Linderud. The German attackers had come too late – once again.

Chapter 5

The battle for Fornebu

Oslo, 9th of April. 07.45 – 10.00 For lieutenant Helmut Lent and the other pilots aboard the Bf 110 fighters, the attack came out of nowhere. “Suddenly I saw my wing grow restless and geared to starboard – into the sun,” he wrote in his report. “Just as suddenly, I saw a Gloster Gladiator tailing a buddy to the left of me. I reacted automatically and fired off a salvo just in front of the Norwegian’s nose to scare him off.” The time was just about 97.45, and the seven pilots threw themselves at a totally superior force with a courage that has secured them front-row seats in Norwegian war history. The German attackers came in wave after wave in a number that grew to between 50 and 100 airplanes in the next half hour: Messerschmitt Bf 110 fighters, Ju 52 transports and Heinkel 111 bombers, which had been sent to mark German air superiority over the Norwegian capital. The fearless Tradin fired short bursts of his machine guns and saw his shot have an effect: “The first plane I attacked cut down steeply to the left, smoke streaming from its right-side engine. I turned to my next opponent and saw the air was swarming with German planes. Of our own I saw two, each battling their own opponent.” For the Norwegians, this represented the first air combat in history in defense of their own country, but many of the German pilots were young veterans of the Luftwaffe – with experience from Poland and the battles with the Royal Air Force above the North Sea. Lent had already been credited with shooting down four planes, and would increase that number to 110 before he was killed in the autumn of 1944. Now, the man who was to become one of the most highly decorated pilots in Nazi Germany had been ambushed. According to their plans, the Norwegians were not supposed to resist. Their airplanes were of second-hand quality, but they handled them with finesse and daring. “We were suddenly involved in a gigantic dogfight,” Lent wrote. He was later decorated for his merits with the Knight’s Cross with oak leaf, sword and diamonds. “I shot and was shot at, glued myself to a Gladiator’s tail, but had a Gladiator on my own tail. I dove, went up and turned the plane around. My attacks missed. Our zerstörers were faster, but the Gladiators were more maneuverable. We broke off the fight and pulled away. The Norwegians did the same.”

The 5 anti-air batteries at Ekeberg, Bjerke, Holmen, Huk and Gressholmen island lay in a circle around Oslo city centre and were armed with old 7,5cm cannons and Colt machine guns. In addition there were around 10 positions on roofs and other places with machine guns, spotlights and listening devices. Fornebu had three such emplacements, but the weapons were placed in open pits, and lacked sandbags and steel helmets. The greatest problem was a lack of modern machine cannons. They were being produced, but would not be delivered until that summer. The aerial battle was observed with rising uncertainty from the five anti-air batteries surrounding Oslo. The crews had huddled through a merciless winter, and many had been ready for a quick dismissal – not a brutal and surprising war. The Luftwaffe had a fierce reputation, and the batteries were poorly equipped to fight an experienced and brutal opponent. The aged weaponry were sat in open positions, there were no sandbags or shelters, the medical service was all but absent, and most of the men lacked steel helmets. “The policy taken by our government in the immediate period leading up to the 9th of April seemed to me to be irresponsible and unenlightened. No effective steps were taken to fix the lack of equipment and education in the Defence Force,” wrote second lieutenant Knut Lockwood Meyer in a bitter report. When Labour Party Mayor Trygve Nilsen of Oslo lined up to gather funds for the anti-air batteries he declared among other things: “Our city means so much to us that all of us will be ready to make any sacrifice to defend it. It is a crime to our loved ones and the coming generations to not strengthen our defences, without considering other things!” Second lieutenant Meyer commented: “Important representatives on national and municipal levels expressed how very important it was that the capital had an effective anti-air defence. Still, every defence program was destined to go the beggar’s road. Any other consideration was more important to the politicians. The public budgets would not be tarred by expenses that were worth any offer.” Meyer was the commander of Gressholmen battery, which covered the flight path to Oslo with two 7,5 cm cannons and nine machine guns. Normally, the crew would be at 15 officers and 80 enlisted men, but the sick bill was long and the absentee list was longer. When he gathered his crew early in the morning, Meyer had only six officers and 22 enlisted men present – plus 17 recruits who had had six days of exercise. “(around 07.40) we could see air combat at around 2500 meters’ height over the inner part of Bunnefjorden between our own fighters and a superior number of German planes,” he wrote in the report. “One German and two Norwegians could be seen to be damaged. At least the Norwegian pilot regained control and went downwards at great speed toward Snarøya.” Over the next minutes, machine guns and anti-air cannons lit up the sky around the city, but the effect was hard to judge. “Fire was ordered at once, but because of the low height, the fire had sadly little effect,” wrote sergeant Theodor Dyring at Huk battery, which was placed inside the forest near the famous beach spot at Bygdøy peninsula. The anti-air cannons were effective at ranges between 2000 – 5000 meters, and the shells exploded high, above and beyond the German planes. The machine guns hit, but the caliber 7,92 bullets seemed to bounce off the planes. “For the most part, the planes stayed at a height of 300 – 1000 meters, mainly beyond the range of our guns,” Meyer noted. “It seems clear to me that the Germans knew that the Defence Force lacked machine cannons.” Many had difficulty with morale, and it showed signs of breaking at Gressholmen when the attackers came closer. “As soon as we ordered them to open fire, it was shown that most of the personnel were totally unfit for combat. Many had no control at all of what they were doing. We could only fire one of our cannons,” Meyer wrote. The battery was in the middle of the approaching air corridor to Oslo, and was soon subjected to diving attacks. “Cover was ordered. Despite the fact that we had drilled for this many times with satisfying results, some now threw their high-explosive projectiles onto the rocks and ran off in a panic. Other ran and hid beneath the ammunition storehouse, and further others ran all they could until they could go no farther, to the pier at the north end. These last ones were the most difficult to get back. Some heaved and almost broke down. They were stricken by a panicked fear.”

When the attacks started, the extra train with the Royal family, parts of the government and Storting was labouring through the Groruddalen valley. “They went up Brynsbakken hill,” told switchman Fredrik Gulbrandsen, who stood at Østbanen, looking at the small train set. “The black, ugly planes followed them up the hill. They shot with machine guns so that it banged on the roof of the Hovedbanen workshop. It banged like damn.” Aboard the train, Ivar Iversen went on his usual rounds, but the passengers were seemingly calm. “I mostly kept to the back of the train next to the Royal Carriage, where they had a phone set for the conductor,” he later told. “The journey to Lillestrøm was peaceful, and they did not need me much. But I was called for once by one of the compartments. Turns out it was little Harald that had rung the bell. The next time it rang, I just let it ring. The little princesses ran around in the corridor, and we got to know each other a little. Ragnhild told me that they had risen very early. When nanny went to turn on the lamp, there was no light.”

Through the open window at the German legation in Drammensveien road, lieutenant colonel Hartwig Pohlmann had heard the sound of airplane engines far away. He had waited for hours for any sign of life from Blücher, but the signals from the legation’s secret transmitter were no replied to. The morning coffee had been drunk, the newspaper headlines of war had been read and analyzed. Bergen and Trondheim was taken. They fought in Narvik and Kristiansand, but in Oslo the silence was total. The German squadron had not arrived, and the king and government had fled to Hamar. “Finally around 08 I heard the drone of our airplane engines, mixed with shots from machine guns and anti-air cannons,” Pohlman wrote in a later script to his family. “I stormed over to another window which had an overview of the forest that concealed Fornebu. I expected to see white parachutes folding out and glide towards the earth. But there was nothing to see. Only air combat, falling planes, flames and plumes of smoke. The others looked at me quizzically: Was everything to go wrong today?”

In Berlin, propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels had gotten up at 03 after just three hours of sleep. His nerves sat on the outside of his skim, and the master liar had himself set up the strategy for the press campaign which was aimed to silence international opinion. He had woken his staff two hours later for the first briefing on the night’s events and laid guidelines for their further work. The preliminary messages were unclear. “The action in Denmark was completed almost without any combat. In Norway, light resistance,” read his diary. “Something else is hardly expected. Paris and London have not reacted yet. We are already in Copenhagen. The air landing in Oslo has failed because of fog.” The German press were obedient lapdogs, and the Nazi organ Völkischer Beobachter arrived with grand headlines: “Germany saves Scandinavia!” Börsen Zeitung opined that the Norwegians should thank Germany for the invasion that saved their freedom: “England stamps cold-bloodedly on the corpses of the smaller peoples. Germany protects the weak states against the British highwaymen!” Primitive words, but Goebbels was satisfied: “The world is as struck by lightning! I personally proclaim our words to the Norwegian and Danish governments on the radio. Our position is well known: Protection for Oslo and Copenhagen. Oslo is still reluctant and has ordered an evacuation of the capital. Paris and London offers aid, but everyone is laughing. Again we have struck a grave blow to the English prestige.” At the German legation in Oslo, the radio was set to the powerful German transmitter in Berlin, but the proclamation did not stir any cheer or jubilation. “The fanfares resound. Then we can hear Goebbels’ voice making out daring plans known to the world: Oslo is in this moment under secure German control...” wrote Pohlman. “The others again don quizzical looks, while I study my right hand thoughtfully. Suddenly, laughter erupts. But it is a grim laughter, and outside the Norwegian machine guns and anti-air cannons hammer up at German planes racing across the sky.”

The air battle over the sea approach to Oslo lasted for 15-20 minutes. Lieutenant Tradin and his men fought heroic duels and shot down four of the intruders. But the resistance was overpowering, and the Fighter Wing’s Gladiators stood no chance in the battle to save Fornebu. “The number of German planes increased further. There were so many that I had enough targets but still had to maneuver to avoid an opponent on my tail,” wrote the twenty-two-year- old medicine student Kristian Schye from Jar, who had graduated from the Army flying school in 1939. “I was attacked ever closer to Fornebu and attacked or was attacked both above and below the clouds.” The cockpit glass had iced over, and Schye headed towards Kolsås hill. He pumped fuel over his front and soon had a better view. Half a kilometre away he spotted a light German Dornier Do- 17 bomber headed on the opposite course. “I pulled back on the gas, took a half roll and dove onto the plane,” he wrote in his report. “I opened fire at good range and had the plane in my sights until I was about 50 meters away. The plane tipped over sideways and disappeared downwards in a spiral.” The bomber crashed into a field in Bærum, but Schye had gotten himself into trouble. Three German planes opened fire. One of his wings were torn open, and a shower of splinters penetrated the cockpit. “One of the splinters went into my upper left arm, which paralyzed it so much that I could no longer operate the speed lever.” The quick-thinking youth mobilized his last strength and managed an emergency landing on a slope filled with small trees, after cutting a power line on his way down. The Gladiator was totaled, but Schye crept out – dazed and bleeding, but without any serious injury. Fornebu's local defence consisted of three machine gun nests east, west and north of the two runways with seven Colt machine guns and a total crew of 40 men. The guns were placed in open rock pits, the store of ammunition and medical supplies were lacking, and there were few steel helmets to go round. It was basically primitive and inadequate defences, but sergeant Torleif Tellefsen from Grimstad was equipped with an extraordinary cold-bloodedness. The thirty-seven-year-old was the son of a sea captain, but the crisis years following the first world war had smashed into the shipowners of Norway’s southern coast with a heavy blow. After graduating from the Army flying school in 1926, Tellefsen had tried his luck in the USA and served several years in the American air force. They had been hard, vagabond years, but the experience was about to serve him well. The young gunners were tempted to start hammering when the air combat dried up between eight and half past eight, and the German airplanes started circling the airport in ever greater numbers. But Tellefsen only had 17 000 bullets, and did not want to waste his ammunition. Helmut Lent and the other fighter pilots dove down and peppered anything that moved at low altitude. You had to keep your cool, and the finger off the trigger. “The wait from when the enemy Bf 110’s started firing until we could open fire, we spent getting our aim in on our machine guns,” wrote the later Resistance hero from Grimstad. “Often, this was difficult because of all the dust and earth that the enemy projectiles dumped on us.” He added drily: “Some sandbags around the machine guns would have helped prevent this. As well as steel helmets for the machine gunners.”

Aboard one of the Ju 52s circling Oslo, the paratrooper Walther Behn heard how the machine gun bullets cut through the aluminium plates. “We waited for the rest of the section and were getting antsy,” he wrote in a later report. “So far we were only three machines with the battalion staff aboard. As we were staff we were pretty lightly armed.” But the rest of the section never arrived. Major Erich Walther had to concede to the transport chief’s demand to turn back. Instead of leading the attack on the Norwegian capital, the planes had temporarily landed at the newly seized airfield in Aalborg, where he and the rest of the paratroopers waited for the all clear from the meteorologist – frothing in impatient rage. “There was a violent row between Walther and transport chief Drewes at the airfield,” recalled corporal Bruno Melchior, who had hunkered down with the rest of the paratroopers while the planes refueled. “The discussion continued until the officers disappeared into the terminal building.” But above Oslo the clouds had finally cleared, and the oldest remaining officer, premier lieutenant Wilhelm Götte was forced to make a decision. One paratrooper was already injured and the fuel supply was limited. Götte was Walther’s adjutant, and the time had come to act. “The pilot dove suddenly toward the airport,” wrote Behn. “The first man, a medical sergeant, was already at the door, ready to jump.” The jump was to be made at Götte’s orders at 80 meters’ height, but the pilot saw another opportunity – probably inspired by two other transports ahead of him. “The plane went lower and lower,” Behn wrote. “Our machine guns emptied drum after drum. Suddenly we experienced a most improbable thing: We landed! We who for the longest time had dreamt of the first jump over enemy territory, we landed and climbed calmly out as soon as the plane was still!”

In the machine gun nest on the eastern side of the airport, Sergeant Tellefsen’s three Colt machine guns had their aim. “People could be seen in the windows of the transport planes,” he wrote in his report. “We concentrated the three machine guns on one plane at a time, and let the stream of bullets pass from the pilot’s cabin and backwards just below the windows to the tail and back, several times. Not one enemy soldier exited the planes in our line of sight. I saw no enemy soldiers at all as long as I stayed at my post.” It was the lead machine in Transportgruppe Wagner which fared the worst. Captain Wagner, who had defied orders to turn back, was killed instantly along with four of colonel Nickelmann’s soldiers. The bloodbath had a nerve-wracking effect and the pilot took off for Aalborg – in the hope of getting medical aid for the many wounded on board. Despite the fire, around ten German planes managed to land around 08.30 with paratroopers and infantrymen, alongside Bf 110 pilots who were running out of fuel. Many of the planes were hit during the landing, but most of the soldiers jumped unhurt onto the asphalt and sought cover on the outskirts of the runway. “We started unpacking our containers of weapons and equipment,” wrote Walther Behn. “But the salvoes from the Norwegian machine guns brought us back to reality. They forced us to seek immediate cover.”

One of the wrecked German transports. Just outside Lillestrøm station, the extra train carrying the royal family got caught up in the drama. As an answer to the government’s no to Braüer, Alfred Jodl, chief of Hitler’s personal staff had given approval to the Luftwaffe to bomb defence installations around Oslo. A wing of Heinkel-bombers who had terrorized the city in the early morning hours had chosen Kjeller as their target – including the airplane factory and the air force hangars. “The train stopped as usual at Lillestrøm,” wrote crown princess’ Märtha’s lady-in-waiting Mrs. Ragni Østgaard in her diary. “While we stood there, we suddenly spotted several large black planes, coming in from the south. Suddenly, bombs were falling. They fell slowly onto the airfield, and several houses started to burn. The anti-air batteries replied, and it was a terrible din. One had the impression that the shells passed just above the train.” Her husband Nicolai pulled down the curtains and had the children sit on the floor. “Astrid (8 years) cried and was confused. Ragnhild (9 years) cried too, but not as much. She asked me all the time if it wasn’t just a drill. I answered that we could not be sure what it was, but that we at least should be careful and stay away from the windows.” The attack came as a shock to most, who had had a remote view of the morning’s events. Many experienced the brutality of war up close for the first time, and it took several minutes before station master Karoliussen reacted. At close to half past eight, the 150 refugees were led out of the carriages and down into the nearest railway tunnel, which provided a measure of protection from stray bullets and shrapnel. King Haakon seemed unperturbed and carried the three year old price Harald on his shoulders, but Foreign Minister Koht could not handle the dark and crowded tunnel. “I wanted to see what was happening with my own eyes,” he wrote in Fra skanse til skanse. “It was a frightful sight. German planes wheeled and dropped bombs on Kjeller, which was close to the station. There, everything was smoke and fire.” His book was a written defense of his own position, and Koht did not admit to any political responsibility for the reason that the battles were faring poorly. Captain Lars Rosmo at Kjeller had just four anti-air cannons and a handful of machine guns to defend himself with. The Fighter Wing was in the process of being wiped out, and the Curtiss-Wright airplanes, who could have played a part, were still being unpacked and assembled in the airplane factory. “It seemed like the Norwegian planes could not get up and defend themselves,” Koht wrote. “The anti-air guns fired like mad, but I could not see them hit a single enemy plane. Soon the battle would be over, and all the Norwegian planes destroyed. it was obvious that the Germans had the upper hand.” MP Christian Ludvig Jensen was shocked as well, when he saw the bombers in action. “Our land had entered the eye of the hurricane – the centre of battle for the Great Powers,” he wrote in his diary. “The misery of war in all its wrath and gruesomeness was upon us. How would we fare?” Another train carrying a large group of volunteers on their way home from the Finnish Winter War had been stopped nearby, with Jensen’s stepson Kjell Holst on board – without father and son making contact. “Their train should have turned around – that we can say with hindsight,” noted Jensen. “The boys raged against their transportation to Oslo and Aker. They were of better use elsewhere.”

But the flight had created a power vacuum in the capital. The political signals were unclear, and none of the officers in the military elite were of such a format as to fill the void. Commanding General Kristian Laake had lost contact with the General staff, and his naval counterpart, admiral Henry Diesen, had fallen into apathy. The telephone network was overcrowded, the cab lines long and many officers had left their homes and offices in an untrustworthy way – without contacting the fighting sections. “In the morning of the 9t of April, our work was made vastly more difficult by the fact that every senior military officer suddenly disappeared without a trace from the city,” wrote cavalry officer Nicolay H. Knudtzon at Oslo collection central – heavily underlining the word vastly. “After much strain, we found that every senior staff member had left the city for predetermined evacuation zones scattered around the surrounding area. It must be characterized as a mistake that Oslo collection central never received any lists of these addresses with their phone numbers beforehand. Our telephonic requests often came through after the staff had left one evacuation point for the next – without informing us of their secondary location. And so we got nowhere.” It was the Army air corps and the anti-air troops who met the brunt of the German attack. But both the chief of the Anti-air regiment, colonel Magnus Hagem and the General Inspector for the air force, colonel Thomas Gulliksen were marked by a sense of departure. “Colonel Gulliksen seems very nervous and showed himself to be totally without ability to lead his staff and give orders,” wrote lieutenant Odd Bull, who worked in the colonel’s waiting room. The staff itself had been hastily evacuated to Gulleråsen boarding house, which had been appointed as a reserve command seat for the air force, but the senior officers never made it there. From the hotel windows high up in the Holmenkollåsen hillside, the officers were impotently sidelined to watch the German planes stifle the frontline units deployed at Fornebu. “At Gulleråsen we did nothing of note,” wrote lieutenant Gunnar Vardan. “In fifteen minutes’ time we were informed that the General staff was moving towards Eidsvoll, and that we were going too. We had many private cars and went in these plus four lorries for the office equipment.” While naval attaché Richard Schreiber patrolled the docks to welcome Blücher, air attaché Eberhard Spiller had waited since early nightfall for the paratroopers in the villa of the German- born Alfred Kleinmann a few hundred meters from Fornebu. “Schreiber was to gather locals who could guide the troops to the most important buildings: The Palace, offices of government, the Telegraph office and other places of strategic importance,” wrote lieutenant colonel Hartwig Pohlman, who had taken command at the legation, supported by his warrants from colonel general Falkenhorst. “The air attaché was sent to Fornebu at the same time.” Spiller was to call the moment the airport had been secured. But the phone was silent, and Pohlman grew ever more impatient. “Finally the call came!” he wrote around 08.30. “It was the attaché reporting that a few Ju 52’s had landed and that shock troops from the infantry had chased away some of the guards. But it was a difficult situation. Some Norwegian fighters had been destroyed, but they were constantly firing machine guns at the landing planes. The airport was in poor condition, and several planes had been wrecked. The worst part was that the troops did not know what they were doing at Fornebu. None of their commanders had landed.” This was alarming news, and Pohlman had started to form an answer: “Tell the closest officer that...” But the connection was broken mid-sentence, and did not come back – no matter how loudly Pohlman swore. He turned at once to envoy Bräuer: “Do you have a car for me, herr minister?”

As soon as the German planes started landing, Wing commander Munthe-Dahl had called desperately for infantry support. The phone line to the air force’s General Inspector was dead, but cavalry officer Knudtzon at Oslo collection central still had contact with the Royal Guards’ camp at Majorstua. “Message from the chief of the collection central that enemy planes have landed at Fornebu and destroyed two fighters,” it read in the logbook at 08.26. “A portion of the Guard is requested to come to their aid.” Guard commander Graff-Wang had just sent his amputated fourth company to Drøbak, and was under heavy pressure from the Foreign Ministry to post a further 60-70 Guards for guard duty at Victoria Terrace. The order to guard the docks had been recalled. In return, he had been told to move one company to Akershus fortress, where conditions were chaotic. Some cleared their offices, others reported for duty and no one had any sort of overview. Graff-Wang was worried when he called major general Hvinden Haug, but the commander of the 2nd division had no comfort to give. The unoccupied 2nd Guard company was to be sent away at once. As the log read a few minutes later: “Captain Winsnes will go to Fornebu with his second company and make the enemy planes leave or destroy them.” Captain Christian Hulbert Hielm Winsens was with his 47 years one of the oldest company commanders in the Guard and a fervent member of . He was seemingly unaffected by his political leanings, and had the company up and ready to go in buses and cars by 09.15. But at Akershus, Hvinden Haug was suddenly doubting the wisdom of it all. There had been no declaration of war, and his military and political superiors had left the city. When he called the Guard commander once more, his tone was much less bellicose. “If the enemy has superior numbers, do not risk the company’s destruction.” Winsnes was faced with a dilemma: On the one hand, he was to destroy the German planes at Fornebu, which was likely to be a difficult and bloody task. On the other hand, he was to do it without risking his force. That can explain why he didn’t direct his buses onto Drammensveien road and the direct route to the airport. Instead he chose the cumbersome detour over Røa to Øvrevoll horseracing track in Bærum, seven kilometers north of the airfield. There he offloaded his 85 officers and privates and gathered them in a wooded copse. The rest of the way was to be taken on foot, but it was not easy. “The advance was hindered by enemy air activity, so we had to seek shelter all the time,” Winsnes wrote in his report. “When we could advance again, we did so at double time.”

When lieutenant colonel Pohlman reached the airfield, the situation was still unclear. “Some planes were on fire, others were turned over on their backs,” he wrote in his story. “But the landings continued, and infantrymen from the 324th regiment gather in an increasing number of small groups.” Pohlman was met by a very much agitated air attaché Spiller, who explained what had happened: “The planes met bad weather and were split up. Here are parts of companies without officers, officers without companies, and no responsible leaders have yet reached us.” Shots were fired from positions on the edge of the airfield, and the incoming transport planes suffered further hits. Pohlman therefore organized a shock troop with premier lieutenant Götte in the lead and his 19 paratroopers as a core. “They were strapping lads,” wrote the lieutenant colonel. “When you showed them a machine gun nest, they went off like devils and cleaned out the positions almost without firing a shot.”

In the foxhole south of the unfinished terminal, captain Munthe-Dahl and sergeant Tellefsen had observed the German preparations. But their ammunition was running low, and the Royal Guards were far away. “I realized that our position would be compromised if we did not receive reinforcements,” wrote Munthe-Dahl. “At a German advance which could be expected at any moment, we would be cut off from our only line of contact with Lysaker and either be captured or destroyed.” Munthe-Dahl had no choice. The machine guns were disassembled and the men withdrawn towards the highway going to Oslo. The two machine guns belonging to the searchlight troop on the western side of the runway held out for a few minutes longer, but around 09.30 it was all over. The Fighter Wing had fought heroically with totally inadequate means and had been wiped out. Six out of seven planes were lost – one to shooting, two while refueling and rearming, and the rest while landing on ice-covered lakes outside of town. But the pilots and almost all of the crew had survived, and many of them would later play a significant role in the fight against Nazism – both inside and outside of Norway. Luftwaffe had lost five planes in the air, and a large number while landing, both to crashes and shooting. But the overpowering force had been too great, and the planes kept coming – in wave after wave. Fornebu was on German hands before 10 o’ clock. Lieutenant colonel Pohlman left Fornebu as soon as colonel Helmuth Nickelmann from the 163rd division landed. “I instructed him to block the access road to Oslo and occupy Akershus fortress and other important buildings,” it read in the report. “It had to happen within two hours.” Pohlman rode with Götte and the paratroopers on captured trucks in triumph to the German legation at Drammensveien road, where they hoisted the swastika flag – as a symbolic pre-indication of the occupation of Oslo. “The envoy and his staff wished me all the best,” wrote Pohlman, who soon gained a telephonic connection to his immediate superior, chief of staff Erich Buschenhagen of Gruppe XXI at the Hotel Esplanade in Hamburg. “I briefed him on the situation and could almost hear the weight fall off his shoulders. He was agreeable to all my precautions and gave me command of the city – even over those of a higher rank than my own.”

The news from Oslo cheered the people in Berlin. “The Führer was in a better mood today,” wrote Goebbels, which probably was a gigantic understatement. In reality, his diary notes seem to recall an overconfident revival meeting – not a rational situation briefing. Hitler's gloomy deputy Rudolf Hess and the SS-leader had shown up at the Reich Chancellery to congratulate, and the Nazi leadership basked in unrestrained delight at Hitler’s bravado. “The whole thing could be brought to a happy conclusion by dinnertime. Hysterical particulars are brought forwards. The action will stand as the most daring and brazen action in history!” The situation in Oslo was by no means clear, and the royal family and government still eluded them. But Hitler brushed off the naysayers. “The Führer has absolutely no respect for the remaining resistance in Oslo. It will soon cease.” There were obvious reasons for Hitler’s bravado. He had most likely learned of the next move, which had been planned by lieutenant colonel Pohlman.

Part II

Chapter 6

Oslo falls

Oslo and Hamar, 9th of April 1940, 13.00 - 15.00 There was still a glimmer of hope of capturing king Haakon, and lieutenant colonel Pohlman went to the Royal Palace himself, leading a patrol of paratroopers. The radio had said that the royal family and members of the government had fled to Hamar. But false messages are old war tricks, and rumor had it that several members of the political elite had gone to ground around the city. “The lieutenant that received me would have made any maiden swoon: blue weapons coat with epaulets, a scarf and feather cap,” wrote Pohlman, who had not been out of his uniform since the day before.” Behind him stood around twenty Guardsmen in tight formation with guns and fixed bayonets. I smiled in a welcoming manner and reached out my hand. It was unexpected, and the lieutenant had to quickly move his saber from the one hand to the other before he could reply to the greeting.” Pohlman laid out his message of a peaceful occupation and let the section keep their weapons – if the lieutenant would promise to keep them from active combat. “He told that His Majesty had gone away in the morning to an unknown destination. With these words I left him to his duty and continued on into town.” The patrol had confiscated two trucks on the Drammensveien road and turned them into rolling fortresses. “We mounted machine guns on the roof of the cabs and let down the side panels,” wrote Walther Behn, who was part of Pohlman’s improvised group. “We then sat down back to back on the back of the trucks so we could see from every angle.” Despite the delays, the surprise seemed total, and the patrol met no resistance. “Car after car came towards us, followed by hand-drawn carts and children’s prams loaded with essentials. The citizens of Oslo were leaving their city. We were just 21 men, and we made a big city tremble.” There had been some intense moments at the Palace square, with loud boos and whistling from the crowd gathering around the two trucks. “It would not take much to overpower us, but no one took the initiative. We were speechless. Our opponents’ fear of us was a boon companion.”

In the meantime, premier lieutenant Götte and the rest of the paratroopers had silenced the anti-air batteries at Huk and Smestad – without encountering the force of Royal Guards that were operating in the wooded area north of Fornebu. “We captured several guns, thousands of MG-bullets and six prisoners,” the report read. “Two spotlights and an aggregate engine were destroyed.” Guard Commander Graff-Wang and his staff had left their billet at Majorstua in a car by 10.30. Two ours and many detours later, he arrived at Jar train station, which had been transformed into a temporary HQ and medical station. The full power of the capital’s fighting force was concentrated in the surrounding area: 2nd Guards company under captain Winsnes in a forward firing position at Lysaker overlooking the railway line and Drammensveien, the 5th company of Infantry Regiment no. 5 between Lysaker and Jar under captain Jesper Seip, who had arrived by car from Trandum military camp in the morning, and one 7,5 cm anti-air cannon which had been brought from Huk battery by sergeant Sigfried Wilson. “Captain Winsnes ordered me to find a position that would allow me to fire upon the Lysaker bridge,” Wilson reported, who had been ordered to join the Royal Guards at eight in the morning. “This was very difficult, and technically impossible with an anti-air gun, as I could find no place to see the bridge so that I could fire directly upon it. Finally, I placed the gun on a slope, so that I could angle it towards where I thought the bridge was. I sent a message to captain Winsnes that I was ready to fire, but that I could not guarantee where the shots would land.” The third company of Royal Guards, who were supposed to be going home after their service, was dressed up again hastily in the morning hours and had their gear that they had returned given back to them. The company awaited orders in positions near Smestad, 5 kilometers away. But the phone lines were at full capacity, and captain Heyerdahl-Larsen could not contact his superiors. “We passed the time by reinforcing our position,” he wrote in his report. “German bombers passed over us constantly, but we were not bombed.” At Jar station, Guard Commander Graff-Wang was more confused than ever before. He had 200-300 trained men immediately to hand. The road north from Lysaker had been blocked by rolls of paper from the closest paper factory, and the closest fireteams could sweep the main road to Oslo from the heights near the river. Around 13.00 he was still warlike: “I directed captain Seip that his company would be sent in to the right of the second Guard company when the attack was launched.” There was a couple of kilometers between Jar station and the target of the attack, which was the airfield and German troops marching down the Drammensveien road. Scouts had been sent out. But the situation was unclear, and the rumors were bad. “By the incoming messages, one had to assume that there had landed 600-800 Germans at Fornebu and that there were set up at least 6-7 machine guns along the 1800m long land front of the Fornebu area. Add to this plenty of German bombers, which circled their own forces at around 100 meters’ height,” he wrote in the report. Graff-Wang had spent his entire life in the army, and was now confronted with his moment of truth. If he gave the order to open fire when the Germans passed their positions, he would start a bloody and drawn-out battle with big losses on both sides. His forces were inferior. Without heavy weapons and air support, his ability to resist would be short-lived. His superiors had long since fled their temporary command posts at Holmenkollåsen. The General staff had sought refuge at Eidsvoll, and division chief Hvinden Haug was on his way to Kløfta. The telephone lines were dead, and he was isolated at Jar with no hope of reinforcements. At the same time, the order from Hvinden Haug had been clear: If he was faced with overwhelming force, he was to avoid battle and pull back. Should he sacrifice the lives of his young soldiers in a firefight which had only one outcome? Should he take the chance and attack the organizing German forces at Fornebu – in the hope of a surprise result? It was a deadly dilemma, and the Guard Commander could not decide: “The order was over three hours old. I therefore found it to be my duty – before an attack was launched – to see if the situation had changed or/if there were any new orders from the division or higher command.”

The first of the country’s leaders that gave clear signs of a breakdown was prime minister Johan Nygaardsvold. The sixty-year-old son of a crofter from Hommelvik had fled Oslo in a private car along with his family, and met Stortingspresident Hambro at the railway station in Hamar just after 10.00 as a changed person.: crying, mentally and physically worn out and unwilling to carry the political responsibility any further. The picture of the solid and dependable father figure Gubben (the Old Man) had been built up through a long life in the Labour party apparatus. Now he trembled like a leaf in a storm, and even his political rivals felt pity. “It had made a terrible impression on him, that which had happened,” Hambro wrote, who spent the next half hour pacing up and down the platform while Nygaardsvold begged him to take over the Cabinet. “It was like something in his life had collapsed. He had really believed in the will for peace in humanity and in words that were spoken. He thought he could not bear it any more, for all had been taken out from under him.” It was a humane explanation for the prime minister’s change. But the country was in desperate straits, and Hambro declined. For the moment, Nygaardsvold could not be allowed to run from his responsibilities. “A change of any kind would prompt doubts and questions that one could not effectively give answers for,” wrote the lucid President of the Storting. “Furthermore, the Nygaardsvold government had to carry the responsibility for what had been done and what had not been done to prepare the people for the emergency situation we had been thrust into.” Hambro's words cut to the core: The supreme duty of a government was to provide security for the citizens. During the fateful drive to Hamar, Nygaardsvold must have realized that he had neglected that duty, and that was a realization that could break any man. “The thing is quite simply that the prime minister hated the thought of Norway ever going to war,” wrote the complicit government minister Trygve Lie some years later. “It was against prime minister Nygaardsvold’s entire view of life. He was a man that measured a people’s happiness in peace and good living conditions, and war was to him such an evil as to hardly be able to contemplate it.” As a personal peace philosophy, his life’s attitude was laudable. As a political program in a world dominated by bloodthirsty tyrants it was entirely inadequate. His road to happiness for the people had crashed and burned. From the car windows, the prime minister had seen the German planes dominate the airspace – without opposition since the defence funds were lacking. Kjeller burned, and many could be dead. There would be no peace and good life, but the opposite: A life in slavery beneath the brutal oppression of Nazism. It was a terrible, almost paralyzing thought.

When the extraordinary train rolled into Hamar station at 11.15, the royal family was met by Hambro and County Governor Knut Nordanger. While the MPs were taken to a hasty breakfast in the railway station’s restaurant, King Haakon and his retinue was driven to the manorial farm Sælid at Vang. Nordanger had in the morning called the seventy-year-old grand old lady of the house, miss Sigrid Sæhlie, and asked if she could play the hostess. “I said yes – if they would make do with what I had. He told me there would be eight people, but fifteen arrived,” she reminisced some years later. “Luckily, we had plenty of food in the house. I asked my maid to fry and boil as many eggs she could. Then I laid out a plentiful table in the dining room.” The grand manorhouse of more than 500 square meters had been raised by the farmer, distillery owner and Conservative politician Andreas Sæhlie, and had once upon a time been the center of one of county’s largest businesses. It had 1800 decares of land, 350 cows, lots of forest and a distillery delivering ten percent of all the potato spirits sold yearly in Norway. The silken wallpaper, roof paintings, and glittering crystal chandeliers still made the lofty halls shine, but it was a glory of the past. The old man himself had passed away before the turn of the century. The Wine Monopoly had taken over the role of the distilleries, and his five daughters had never married – with one exception. Kristiane Sæhlie, who had arrived at her father’s farm to celebrate her 65th birthday on the 10th of April, and who was among those who now welcomed the royal family. The dainty Kristiane was married to colonel Birger Eriksen, who through his heroic struggles at Oscarsborg some hours earlier had made possible the flight of the royal family. No one yet knew of the colonel’s fate that morning. The phone lines to the fortress had been destroyed when the terror bombing started around nine, and there was every reason to fear the worst. “King Haakon was very depressed when he arrived at Sæhlie,” noted Andreas Eriksen in a memorial piece of his parents. NRK radio only played music, and foreign radio stations had been relegated to playing the propaganda pieces from Berlin and other capitals. Her husband Birger had been apprehensive and frustrated these last weeks, and the lack of truthful news worried them all. “But Mother knew something,” the eldest son wrote. “Years later, she repeated to me the answer she gave to the king’s questions about Oscarsborg: Your Majesty, the fortress has fired and it has stopped a large German warship.”

The royal family arriving at Hamar. The king on the far left, followed by county governor Knut Nordanger, C.J. Hambro, crown prince Olav, princess Ragnhild and prince Harald in a woolen cap. A couple of kilometers away, the sleepy little town of Hamar had been transformed into a hive of feverish discussion, sensation and masses of people. “We woke to a fantastic day,” the Hamar Stiftstidende newspaper wrote in an in-the-moment report. “A day filled with so many changing impressions, of wild rumors and stories that it is hard to grasp with any surety what has happened.” Tuesday the 9th of April was a beautiful spring day. The heavens shone blue upon the ice- covered river Mjøsa, and the sun melted the snow in the roads. People thronged in the city centre’s streets and any whisper of a rumor was soon passed along from group to group. The great war had reached Hedmark, and the traffic was intense. “The endless column of A- and C- cars began early, and it came on without halt the entire day. Dusty and grey, their plates covered in dirt, with baggage and skis tied behind and on top, with women and children inside, packed in blankets and coverlets, they rolled on.” (A- and C- cars are cars with plates from Oslo and Akershus respectively. Basically, the population of the affected areas fleeing north.) Behind closed doors in the theater hall of Festiviteten, foreign minister Halvdan Koht had been going through the German demands since 12.30 line by line for the around 100 MPs who had reached Hamar. He concluded by asking for the acceptance of the Storting for the reply to envoy Bräuer he had given at five o’clock that same morning: “For my part, I am certain that the government has the backing of the entire Storting and the entirety of the Norwegian people in the refusal we gave.” No one spoke up. Hambro, who had mobilized the Storting’s corps of stenographs and technical personnel, promised that the account would be copied and distributed, and suggested a break until 17.00. The worn-out Nygaardsvold, who had been on and off in phone calls had other ideas, and got up quickly: “I think I will ask the Storting to delay its meeting until 18.00.” Hambro, seeing what was coming, tried to protest. He was interrupted by the prime minister, who referred to the fact that the members of the government had been travelling for many hours without the opportunity to speak with each other in formal peace: “There might be different things that at least I wish to put in front of the Cabinet, and which we might speak more of when we gather. I shall say no more now.”

The Stukas which general Jodl had freed for the softening up of Akershus fortress, reached Oslo around midday. Just after 12.15, they came screeching out of the sun and sent three 500-kilo bombs falling toward the fortress square. “The blast wave blew the branches off all the trees and blew the shingles off every roof nearby,” reported Aftenposten. “Several hundred windowpanes in the prison yard and depots broke. But no one was hurt, despite the fact that people standing one hundred meters away were bowled over, and rocks were hurled far into town. Several large mirrored plate-glass windows broke in Rådhusgata street.” If was an effective demonstration of the capacity of the Luftwaffe, and the violent explosions further demoralized the hundreds of officers who sought refuge behind the fortress walls. “From eight o’clock there was a never-ending stream of commanding officers and troops into Akershus – partly to report for duty, partly to ask how to get to their mustering grounds,” wrote the ageing Major of the Grounds Hans Petter Schnitler, who had been named fortress commander when general Hvinden Haug left the city. It was an exposed position which made the totally unprepared colonel the last supreme military leader left in Oslo. But he was totally cut off from the outside world, and could do little – except to wait for the inevitable. “Messages arrived – when the phone line was not blocked – from Oslo anti-air command of the enemy movements, so that we were halfway up to date about conditions. We received no orientation from anyone else after the divisional staff left Akershus.”

At Sælid farm, the hours ticked slowly by. The king and crown prince tried to rest, while crown princess Märtha and lady-in-waiting Østgaard turned the dials on the radio in hope of hearing some news. “But the radio was in poor condition, and we could not hear properly, so we just sat and waited,” wrote Østgaard in her diary. “It was a long day. We did not unpack, the whole thing seemed so uncertain.” Only the princesses Astrid and Ragnhild seemed to have recovered from the traumas of the train trip. “The children came around quickly,” told Sigrid Sæhlie. “They ran out into the melting snow, into the barns and stables and declared that this was a fun place, so they wanted to stay. But in the upper entry hall, the two nannies sat crying.” The wait was interrupted when prime minister arrived unexpectedly by car from Hamar and asked to speak to the king. “He looked shaken,” said miss Sæhlie, who let them have the grand sunroom for their talk. For king Haakon and crown prince Olav, the prime minister’s message was probably a most unexpected and highly embarrassing surprise. Nygaardsvold had not taken Hambro’s advice on the train platform. He insisted on resigning and delivered the resignation of the Cabinet. This was quite the situation for king Haakon. The country faced a military crisis of possibly fatal dimension. Now he saw the outlines of an additional political and constitutional crisis which could make the whole situation much worse.

After the dust and splinters from the bombs had settled, the main gate of Akershus fortress was blocked by the paratroopers’ trucks. Lieutenant Wilhelm Götte’s patrol had reached the military nerve centre of the city – carrying the chief of the 324th infantry regiment, colonel Helmuth Nickelmann as a passenger. “Close to half past one the shock troop went back into Oslo city centre,” reported Götte. “On the way, we passed the vanguard of the German infantry, who had already reached the legation on the Drammensveien road.” The forty-six-year-old Nickelmann had grown up in the disputed Prussian border areas with Poland, and had fought in the trenches of WW1 as a young officer. He had been wounded five times and saw no future for himself in the army. In 1920 he instead joined the police force in the border town of Schneidermühle, where he gradually gained a leadership position. When he sought back to the infantry after Hitler’s power grab, he brought along 15 years of experience of policing turbulent circumstances. He was therefore well prepared for the most pressing mission of the day: to gain control of the capital with the small forces available to him before the fleeing government could mobilize and strike back with the two divisions which existed outside the city on paper. Nickelmann was still troubled by pains in his right leg on account of his war wounds, and it was no great secret that he used alcohol as a painkiller, in large amounts. There was nothing wrong with his Nazi zeal, however. “He embodies the national socialist ideas and understands how to transmit these ideas to others,” his later service statements read. “He was not calm,”, explained his rival Pohlman. “Nickelmann’s five companies were not a lot for a large city – especially considering that two Norwegian companies were camped in the immediate vicinity with access to every necessary intelligence and transport sources. We succeeded because we used audacity and lovability to replace the powers we lacked.” When Nickelmann knocked on colonel Schnitler’s door, the first company had reached Akershus after a lightning march through the city – with police official Haakon Schönning and a detail of mounted policemen as guides. “The German colonel told me that he had come in the spirit of friendship to protect Norway, and he hoped that it would be unnecessary to spill any blood,” Schnitler wrote in his report. The Major of the Grounds’ only order was that he “was to act on his conscience,” and he was visibly relieved when Schönning suggested to move the negotiation to the police headquarters at Møllergata 19, where Police Chief Kristian Welhaven awaited them. “The colonel could not shake off his fear, and still did not know what to do,” noted the cynic Pohlman, who had arrived at the police station. “I tried to explain to him that he now had to act independently. A heavy responsibility was on his shoulders.”

It was not at all strange that Schnitler and the rest of the Norwegians were confused. The Minister of Justice, Terje Wold, had personally that morning instructed Welhaven to remain at his post, receive the German troops and protect the interests of the citizens in the best possible way. “I understood from his manner of speech that there would be no fighting in the defence of Oslo,” Welhaven wrote. Nygaardsvold himself had added to the impression that the soldiers were not to fight when he was called twice during the Storting’s meeting in Hamar about the bombs falling on Oslo. First, it was rittmester Nicolay Knudtzon who called to Festiviteten from Oslo collection central in the basement of the Astoria Hotel with the following message: “Oslo is being bombarded. Anti-air support partially out of action.” A few minutes later, Knudtzon’s superior officer, major Arne Tellefsen in the Østlandet anti-air command furiously called the prime minister and said that he could not gain contact with neither the commanding general, the chief of the General staff, or the chief of 2nd division “or with any (other) superior officer.” Tellefsen had asked the already straining prime minister about what he should do. “I did not know what to say, but I said – possessing no military knowledge and having no one to consult with – that I thought it best if he pulled what troops he had left out of Oslo and tried to link up with what men general Hvinden Haug had stationed above Grorud,” the prime minister declared to the Storting just before their break at 12.30. He added – obviously confused and depressed: “I said I would take the blame, so that if he was ever charged with it, that the responsibility would have to fall on me first. But I could not reach any senior military officer in the country. I do not understand how this has come to be. He said that they had shot down four airplanes over Oslo, and now the Germans were driving around in the streets in trucks with machine guns on them.” Exactly how Nygaardsvold expressed himself is no longer possible to find out, but there was no doubt in how he was perceived. Just before 13.00, the following order went out from Oslo collection central to the anti-air batteries: “Cease fire, crews stay in position.”

The developments within the city lifted the burden from Guard Commander Graff-Wang's shoulders. His soldiers had seen German sections marching from Fornebu towards the city for close to an hour – without firing a single shot. The situation was unreal and absurd. As described by a traveller on the Sørlandsbanen railway after they passed Lysaker at around 13.30: “From our window seats, we saw an infantry company marching inwards on the Drammensveien road. They marched in close order on both sides of the road with a patrol a few meters in front. They were well equipped with machine guns, sidearms and hand grenades, but it did not look like they expected resistance. Fellow travelers who could see our the other side of the train told that they at the same time saw Royal Guards in firing positions on the slope on the other side of the railway line. They laid there watching the Germans passing on the Drammensveien road 50 – 100 meters south of them, but they did not fire. Perhaps the train blocked their view while it passed. The Germans passed into the city unchallenged anyway. It seemed that Oslo had been given up without a fight.” After many futile attempts, Graff-Wang had finally managed to contact Schnitler at 14.15, who was still at Møllergata 19. A row broke out when the Guard Commander out of hand declined to meet at the police station. “I cannot leave my command post at Jar,” the Commander had said. “I think, that you as commander of the troops in Oslo should come to the city,” Schnitler intervened, who obviously wanted Graff-Wang to take the responsibility. “By the orders of the divisional chief, I have command of one Guard company, company Seip and one anti-air cannon,” said Graff-Wang, who wanted to keep away as long as he could. The time was around 14.30 when Schnitler laid out the result of his negotiations to Nickelmann and Pohlman: “He informed that he in conference with Police Chief Welhaven and the German military authority had agreed with the latter to cease hostilities around Oslo and that the city was to be surrendered to the Germans. The last decision had been made after a conference with the prime minister, who was at Hamar. The Guard Commander and his subordinate force would not be attacking Fornebu.”

It was almost three in the afternoon. The battle of Oslo had been given up before it had begun – with an enormous war booty for the occupiers: The Army munitions depot, the Army’s grain’ and forage depot, the Army provision depots, the Army Supply depot and a slew of other military and civilian stockpiles and depots with thousands of tons of equipment, ammunition, fuel, grain and hay. It had happened in just a few short hours, without anyone really understanding what had happened. Even Pohlman was struck with joy and wonderment: “It was really astounding that we could subjugate a kingdom of such width – with the meagre forces at our disposal.

Simultaneously at Hamar, the king and crown prince raced towards Festiviteten theatre in the Sæhlie family’s elegant red Horch automobile. They knew nothing of the military disaster unfolding in the kingdom’s capital. For now they had to head off a political crisis that could lead to the country having no legal government. It was not just the tottering Nygaardsvold that had to be reined in and persuaded to continue on. Envoy Bräuer had tired a new song, and , the peculiar leader of Nasjonal Samling was in the process of completing the treasonous coup he had been planning for the last few months. That was a development within it the seed of new crises.

Chapter 7

Walther and Pohlman’s raid

Oslo, Hamar and Elverum, 9th of April, midday to evening Early in the morning of the 9th of April, there was a gentle knock on the door of Vidkun Quisling’s room at the Hotel Continental in the centre of Oslo. “I closed the inner door behind me and opened the outer one,” wrote Harald Franklin Knutsen in the book Jeg var sekretær (I was Quisling’s secretary). “Out in the hallway there was a young, pale gentleman, I assumed he was in his thirties. He was clad in a grey suit, a slightly darker grey coat and a black velour hat. He bowed politely and said in German: My name is Hans-Wilhelm Scheidt. Do I dare ask you if You know where I can meet major Quisling? I know him from Berlin.” The suspicious Knutsen denied Scheidt entry, but was himself invited via telephone to a larger and more luxurious suite in the same hotel just a little later. “Scheidt introduced me to a slightly older gentleman who paced back and forth in his pyjamas while nattering on in a mixture of German and Norwegian. His name was Hagelin. The door to his side room was open, and in there, two ladies in morning dresses was fanning about. They were Hagelin’s German-born wife and sister-in-law.” Knutsen had just met the main actors in an outlandish play that was to develop from a farcical melodrama into a full-blooded tragedy – for those implicated and for those thousands of Norwegians that were dragged along. The well-spoken and gesticulating man in the pyjamas was the soon-to-be sixty-year-old Albert Viljam Hagelin. He was born in Bergen, but had spent all his adult life in Germany. The dark-haired Hagelin was a musical man and could have had a career as an opera singer with his vocal talent. But he also had a nose for business, and had earned a fortune in the intrawar years importing coffee, running hotels and in money placements. The much younger Scheidt had a technical background, but had been taken in by Hitler’s ideas early on. He had joined the Nazi party in 1929, then 22 years old, and had climbed the party ladder from position to position – until the mid 1930s, when he had caught the eye of the fanatic and Jew-hating Alfred Rosenberg, who was the chief Nazi ideologue and leader of the party’s foreign policy office. Scheidt had become the case worker for Scandinavia, and Rosenberg’s emissary in Oslo – with a special mission to care for Nasjonal Samling. Outwardly, Scheidt and Hagelin were wildly differing, but they were unified in the same perfidious vision: Norway as part of the German Reich, with Vidkun Quisling as a Norwegian Führer. “Only a national government in Norway under Quisling’s leadership can secure Germany’s threatened flank,” Hagelin had written in the late 1930s. “Such a national government will at once take up arms on the side of Germany.” The problem was that Quisling’s national socialist movement had been reduced to a sect that would never reach the levers of power through legal means. For himself, the highly intelligent, sphinx-like party leader had become more and more isolated. At the same time, he had no social antennae, and seemed to lack any form of empathy or self-insight, which in a given situation could become a dangerous emotional cocktail. As an officer and former Minister of Defence, he had committed high treason on at least two occasions in the last six months – firstly during a conversation with Hitler in Berlin when he asked for support for a coup, and later when he divulged military secrets in a clandestine meeting with the Abwehr officer Pieckenbrock in Copenhagen. In his political fantasies, Quisling saw himself as the saviour in case of a British invasion. He would emerge as a glorious war leader, drive out the Englishmen and secure Norway’s place at Germany’s side – in the battle against the plutocrats, Jews and Bolsheviks, who in the twisted world of the Nazis had their hands behind the scenes in every country. After the British minelaying in Norwegian waters the day before, he had obviously thought his time had come, and his thoughts were put to paper on a flyer which had been distributed in Oslo the same evening: “Now, everyone can see what the party politicians and their misrule and brought Norway into. They must not be allowed to play their games and deliver Norway unto England and France to save their own hides. The Nygaardsvold government and the other party politicians spearheaded by Hambro and Mowinckel must at once be removed from any further position to govern the country. Nasjonal Samling is the only movement which can save Norway’s freedom and independence through this coming great war. It is now our national right and duty to demand the powers of government.” There was just one thing wrong with his script: The British had not landed. The Germans had, and that was a huge wrench in his plans. During his visit to Berlin in December 1939 he had been promised a main role, but would the Führer remain true to his word in such a changed situation? Would Quisling be allowed to shine on stage as the country’s new leader – without attracting the wrath of Hitler? There was one bright spot. The Nygaardsvold government had declined the offer of a peaceful occupation and had sought refuge at Hamar – with Sweden as a possible next stop. A political power vacuum had appeared in the capital, and it created opportunities for those who dared to try. When he started on the text of a proclamation later in the day in the company of Hagelin and Scheidt, his confidence was back: “By fleeing the capital, the government has left its post in the most perilous hour and left the Norwegian people to fend for itself without leadership. I this situation, I have, with the advice of the German Reich’s authorities, decided to take unto myself the governance of Norway.”

In the meantime, lieutenant colonel Pohlman had a different view of the situation. The truck raids through the streets of Oslo had convinced him that there was little will to mount a resistance, and that honour and fame still awaited those who let audacity and recklessness rule. “I met no sign of hostility,” he wrote after talking to soldiers and civilians who swarmed around the German vehicles. “Rather, people were impressed with the speed of our action. They were even more impressed that we were much nicer people than the British would have them believe. We were seen as funny and good-humoured.” Pohlman’s world had a short route from thought to action. When he again met with premier lieutenant Wilhelm Götte at Victoria Terrasse around 14.00, the plans were laid. A new and reinforced patrol would expand their area of operations – from the city centre and northwards on the roads leading to lake Mjøsa. “The shock troop was ordered to run reconnaissance toward Hamar,” Götte wrote in his report. “How deep we were to penetrate into the country was not specified. Since we had to expect tougher resistance, we were given half a machine gun troop as reinforcement.”

Around the same time that Götte’s armoured trucks rolled out toward Grorud and Gjelleråsen hill, captain Øivinn Øi came the opposite way. The thirty-eight-year-old priest’s son from Hadsel in Nordland belonged to the General staff’s adjutant corps and was colonel Johan Beichmann’s right hand man. “He was an eager and skilled officer and a warm and honest comrade,” Beichmann wrote some weeks later. The colonel had carried king Haakon’s coronation train during the 1905 ceremony and had graduated from the War Academy at the top of his class the next year. Now he was in charge of the Adjutant staff and had followed the General staff along with captain Øi from Slemdal Hotel to the new position at Eidsvoll high school, 70 kilometers north of Oslo. The spring melt had begun. The roads were packed, and the cars carrying the top brass had arrived before midday. “We got on setting up at Eidsvoll high school at once,” Chief of Staff Rasmus Hatledal wrote in his report. “The staff was dispersed throughout the buildings. Phones were supplied.” Those few words covered a growing feeling of defeat. Oslo had surrendered almost without a fight, Luftwaffe ruled the airspace, and the meticulously laid plans for mobilizing men and materiel had been shattered. They would have to improvise, but improvisation takes courage, fantasy and communication. The problem was that the rapid redeployment had made it impossible to establish an effective line of communication. Commanding general Laake had still not reached his staff, and Hatledal had only had sporadic contact with his underlying sections. The situation at the moment was chaotic and complex. He had no idea where the Germans were or how strong they were. Neither did he know how far the amputated mobilization had come along, and what forces he could muster for a counterattack. The chief of staff groped in the dark, and it coloured his state of mind. “Hatledal, whom I until now have admired as a jolly good fellow, intelligent and knowledgeable, now seems totally worn out,” wrote Minister of Supplies Trygve Lie, who arrived at the high school around 13.30 as the first Cabinet member after having lunch with the local squire, Jørgen Mathisen at the nearby Eidsvoll Verk. “I could get no word from either him or the others. It felt like a machine seizing up. Without saying so, they gave them impression that they felt that almost everything was now hopeless.”

Chief of the General Staff Rasmus Hatledal

That observation would be incorrect applied to Øivinn Øi. The young captain had written about the nature of the strategic ambush in a clairvoyant lecture at Oslo Military Society the year before, and had at once been heckled as a warmonger in the neutralistic press – with the government organ Arbeiderbladet (The Labourer’s newspaper) leading the campaign. “The loading and transfer of troops are kept secret, the fleet arrives unexpectedly at a point on our coast and starts landing procedures at once,” Øi had noted in the description of a thought-out attack on Norway. “At the same time, air power based in their home country attack our airports, seaplane- and naval stations and seek to hinder or disrupt the gathering of our land- based forces. For the attacker, he has to land his troops and make defensive positions before we can intervene with larger forces. For us, the thing is to intervene as soon as possible – while the enemy is in a weakened state while he is still landing his troops.” It was a brilliant analysis, and Øi had pointed out with no thought for German or Soviet sensibilities that the strategic ambush was tailor-made for totalitarian states which in accordance with their mentality “lived in a kind of permanent state of war,” where one did not need to “mix parliament and public into foreign policy and economy”. He added: “Special missions will be given to the most modern soldiers of our time, the paratroopers. Partly, one will use them as detachments to destroy communications centres, partly to occupy points of strategic interest, and to operate behind enemy lines.”

Operation Weserübung was playing out exactly by Øi’s recipe, and the captain burned with impatience. He wanted to act, and the opportunity came when a cab was going to Oslo from Eidsvoll around 14.00. “Captain Øi asked for permission to follow along. It was granted after talking it over with the chief of staff,” wrote Beichmann. “His mission was to establish communications with 2nd division, which was reported to be stationed at Kløfta, and if possible to report the size of our front lines. This was of greatest importance to ascertain, as the maps were unclear.”

After a short stopover at squire Håkon Mathisen at Linderud farm, Øi steered the cab through the northern boroughs of Oslo until he met a fellow officer on the Blindernveien road, near Marienlyst. From his reaction, Øi must have received some important information. “The captain came running,” told cab driver Arne Guttormsen in a police interview the same day. “He told me that Oslo had been occupied by the Germans. It was of utmost importance to get back to Eidsvoll as soon as possible.” Guttormsen shifted gears and raced off toward Trondhjemsveien (the main road out of Oslo northwards), but came to a stop a few kilometers later. The paratroopers that Øi had warned of in his lecture – represented by premier lieutenant Götte’s motorized detachment – had blocked the bridge over the Alna river at Grorud. They searched cars for fleeing members of the Norwegian political and military elites. “There was a long queue of cars,” Guttormsen told. “A small detachment of German military men came marching along the line to control the cars further back. Two of them stopped by the witness’ vehicle.” When Øi understood there were German soldiers present, he asked Guttormsen to floor it. He was in full uniform and did not want to be captured. But the car was boxed in, and the two paratroopers asked if he spoke German or English. What happened over the course of the next minutes expresses an unbowed, almost desperate will to resist. Øi was on his own against the Germans. But he had important messages for the General staff and reached for his gun – obviously trying to shoot his way out of the situation. “The two soldiers had SMGs and stopped the captain from using his revolver. He then slapped one of them on the cheek.” In the fistfight that followed, Øi was dragged from the car. When he again reached for something in his pocket, he was gunned down in cold blood. “A Norwegian policeman arrived,” Guttormsen explained. “He got hold of another policeman, who helped the witness to put the deceased back in the witness’ car.” The policeman was part of Welhaven’s riding corps and had been commandeered as a guide for Götte’s paratroopers. He was now sent back to Akershus fortress along with the body of Øi, a Norwegian prisoner and a German soldier sitting on the front of the car with his pistol raised. “During the arrest, the officer resisted with his weapon,” the German report stated coldly. “He was shot in self-defense.”

At Festiviteten theatre hall in Hamar, king Haakon and Crown Prince Olav sat in continuous meetings with government representatives, the Storting Presidency and central members of the political opposition. “I went to my room at Grand Hotel in the hopes of getting some sleep after a quite strenuous day,” Hambro wrote in De første måneder. “But no sooner had I arrived at my room, than the telephone rang. The king and crown prince had arrived to confer with me.” It had been almost nine hours since king Haakon and the others had left the Royal Palace. The gaunt figure, who had grown more and more Norwegian after 35 years on the throne, had always been a man of few words. He had been silent for long periods during the dramatic happenings of the day, but that did not mean he had nothing to say. When he now began to speak for the first time, the words came with such a strength and clarity that they gripped all around him, which mattered even more now, with such a crisis surrounding them. “His own tastes, his own comforts were totally subservient to his royal motto: All for Norway,” Hambro wrote in a later article. The fear and despair had overtaken the Cabinet leader, but the needs of the nation had to go before all other considerations. The king had stood fast. He refused to accept Nygaardsvold’s request to leave his position – supported by the President of the Storting and several leaders from the Left and Farmer’s party leaders. “We believe that the government cannot lay down their positions in these times,” Hambro declared in a summary of the views of the King and opposition. “So much hangs in the air at this moment that we cannot risk that the question of government hanging in the air as well. No new government can or should be named in the moment between capitulation to a foreign power, or an establishment of a highly convoluted stance of war.” This was the king’s first refusal, and Nygaardsvold had reluctantly acceded – after having grasped two concessions: The government was to be expanded with three consulting Ministers from the other political parties and that it was given the authority to treat with envoy Curt Bräuer over the conditions of an eventual capitulation – half a day after the same man had been kicked out the door from Victoria Terrasse, without results.

It was just after the bomb attack on Akershus fortress – at 12.40 - that Bräuer, with a fine sense of timing had called at the half-empty offices of the Foreign Department and handed over his wish for renewed negotiations to the oldest remaining director general, Waldemar Malthe Johannesen – noting to him that the Danes had accepted all the German demands and placed their neutrality under the guard of Nazi Germany. “I repeat that Germany with its treatment has no wish to touch the territorial integrity or the political independence of the kingdom of Norway either now or in the future,” the envoy assured. These were sweet tones after a day spent on the run, but crown prince Olav had made his case strongly when it came up during the evening’s emergency meeting at Festiviteten. “I cannot accept that the government accepts Bräuer’s invitation to negotiate,” he had declared both for himself and the king. “The country will, no matter what happens, not escape the horrors of war. How can one have faith in Hitler’s words? He has broken treaties, deals and promises of every kind. Until now, the government line has been firm. Even if this is a difficult situation, there is at least a chance to save the country and its future if one holds firm to the decision from the previous night.” The ambassadors of France and Great Britain, who too had fled to Hamar, had already promised military aid. It would not arrive tomorrow, but it would come. They had to hold on. King Haakon added: “When Denmark has given up, it does not mean that king Christian agreed to it. I know my brother and am certain that he would choose the Norwegian line – if he had had the same possibilities to escape subjugation. I agree with my son, but I will loyally bow to the decision of the government and Storting.”

While the tug-of-war for the fate of Norway continued on in Hamar, the next wave of Hitler’s paratroopers had reached Oslo. The frustrated battalion leader Erich Walther had spent three harrowing hours in occupied Aalborg and had first gained access to a new flight at 12’o clock, without any knowledge of his adjutant’s acts further north. Along with around 150 paratroopers from the 2nd company, he landed at Fornebu around 14.00 and had immediately left for the German legation at Drammensveien, where the mood was still soaring high. “Walther was uncommonly hungry for action,” wrote lieutenant colonel Hartwig Pohlman, who still pursued his target doggedly: The king and cabinet was to be arrested and forced to capitulate. “He and his paratroopers were shamefaced and angry at the morning’s farce, which they had been forced into through no fault of their own. They were lovely fellows, and were ready to haul the Devil and his grandmother out from Hell. Those were skills best put to use.” Between 15.00 and 16.00, the unknowing procurator Johan Kobro was stopped by German soldiers at Skillebekk and forced to drive to the legation. Shortly after, the same happened to the film importer Stein Jensen, who had his Dodge parked nearby. The column that was assembled finally contained three cars, two buses and a lorry. In the first car, belonging to the German legation, with the number plate A-54 sat battalion commander Erich Walther alongside air attaché Eberhardt Spiller, who had volunteered as a guide. In the next car sat the thirty-two- year-old company commander, captain Kurt Grösschke from Berlin, and in the rest of the vehicles were stowed around 150 heavily armed and combat-eager paratroopers.

SPOILER: Don’t read the picture text if you don’t want to spoil what happens in this chapter.

Walther’s raid:

Walther’s paratrooper force drove from Oslo at around 16 the 9th of April and went northward along the main road to Hamar, where the force turned east toward Elverum. It was halted at Midtskogen and pulled back to Hamar, where air attaché Spiller was left at the hospital. During their retreat over the Minnesund bridge and Eidsvoll, they disarmed between 50 and 100 Norwegian soldiers, confiscated several tons of equipment and some 50 cars. Along with Spiller, the force had suffered three deaths and a few wounded. The force returned to Oslo at around 14 Wednesday 10th of April, after traveling a distance of 300 kilometers there and back again.

“Around 16’o clock, major Walther and the 2nd company set out from the legation in commandeered vehicles,” it read in the paratroopers’ report. “The target was to run reconnaissance and arrest the government, which was said to stay in Hamar.”

Vidkun Quisling had slipped deeper into treachery as the afternoon wore on. Egged on by Pohlman or naval attaché Richard Schreiber, he had forced entry into the Department of Defence and had taken up residence in the Minister’s chair. In Skagerrak, the transport fleet carrying the 196th infantry division closed in on the Outer Oslo fjord under the command of general Richard Pellengahr. As long as the coastal forts at Bolærne and Måkerøy still held, the new division could not reach Oslo, where reinforcements were sorely needed. Aided by the Minister’s telephone, Quisling tried several times to contact the fortresses to get them to surrender. But the phone lines were dead, and the self-appointed Fører (Norwegian for Führer) did not reach them.

Walther’s adjutant Wilhelm Götte had been shot in the arm during his struggle with captain Øivinn Øi. He had nonetheless chosen to continue on with his two trucks until Kjellerholen bridge at Lillestrøm, almost halfway to Eidsvoll. Three kilometers west of the bridge, they met a small troop of team leader students from the Cavalry commander school, who were on their way from Oslo to Gardermoen camp on horseback. “Twenty-two men and one officer were captured, along with two bicycle messengers,” the report stated. “Götte now decided to return back to Oslo.” When the lieutenant neared Grorud at around 17 with his prisoners riding in front, he was met by a surprising sight: battalion commander Walther’s vehicle column had been reinforced with a further two buses from the municipal transport authority. “The soldiers in the first bus in the column became so nervous that they broke the windows so as to be able to use their machineguns faster,” claimed the Norwegian witnesses. But for Walther and Götte, it was a heartfelt reunion. The boss and his adjutant had not seen each other since their departure from Schleswig Land 13 hours earlier, and they had much to discuss. The prisoners were freed. When the column drove on at 18.00, Götte’s two trucks drove in front as a forward patrol. “From there on, the expedition was undertaken as a joint venture under Walther’s command,” the report stated.

When the Storting reconvened in Festiviteten at 18.30, the front lines had become easily visible. Despite the resistance of the royal family, Nygaardsvold had forced through his demand of negotiations with Hitler’s representative. But the telegraphic answer to director general Johannessen had been crafted with intelligence and finesse by President Hambro: “Ask You to at once notify the envoy that the government puts the question of a peaceful resolution with Germany to the Storting. Can give final answer late afternoon or early tomorrow morning. Require stop fighting in the meantime.” When Hambro held the word during the debate, he made it clear that he had acceded to send the acceptance of negotiations under considerable pressure – and against his own conscience. “After having heard the statements coming from both the members of the Cabinet and the Storting, I found that in the current mood there it would be inadvisable not to establish contact with the German government as soon as possible to halt the continuing hostilities. When I could join in recommending the sending of this telegram, it is not in the least from the perception that if those in the Storting chooses the difficult and dangerous road of not bending in submission, there will quickly become a chaos in all that we can call exercising the powers of government in Norway.” It wasn’t easy to understand what Hambro meant – except that Nygaardsvold would have made it clear during the discussions that he would not lead a fighting government in war – despite the decision made the night before. Hambro himself had no illusions of what the result of such a negotiation would be. “In all the countries occupied by Germany, there has been the way that those who have been the leaders of the so-called national social worker’s parties soon have become the executors of power.” He admitted all those problems Nygaardsvold had pointed out: the lack of food and money, a state apparatus without archives or staff, a defence force with few soldiers and little in the way of equipment. “I accept these realities, and I am not convinced one could win the necessary majority among the people and the Storting to continue this defensive policy, to use such an expression. That it would be the more painful policy in this moment, I am certain. That it would be the safest policy in the long run, I am personally convinced of. But I am of the stance that in such a far-reaching case, which could mean a great amount of suffering for a large part of our people, there would have to be a massive majority that would choose the harder path. In that, I am personally ready to support the prime minister’s demand.”

Hambro’s rhetoric was masterful, but it was too late. The prime minister had made up his mind to negotiate, and he had the majority behind him. In a surprising turnaround since the previous night’s impulsive action – which is still not well known or understood – he declared: “When we said no this night, and acted, as one would say, heroically, to fight and defend our freedom and independence, that was a bright spot, and it can’t be extinguished the next day. But I am not so certain how the whole action will be judged, if we end up as a king and government with no country and no people.” Most of the prime minister’s heroic idealism had drained from his posture. The angsty pragmatic had taken over. “It is unavoidable that one must think of our current position, and especially today after we have come all the way up here and have been working all day – maybe a bit dejectedly at times – then I have had to weigh our current situation. I see it like this, without any adornments, that basically our entire coastline is in enemy hands along with our great ports and cities. Germany has already gathered large air forces, and if they need more, it is a small task to bring them here.” The Nazi superiority in arms was overwhelming, and the prime minister had little faith in the capabilities of the Norwegian military. “On our military position, I am not the man to speak to, but following the statements from the Minister of Defence, we are not well off. We are being pressed from every angle. I can honestly not see any other way out for us than to be forced further and further east until we end up in Sweden.” These were not the words of a fighting prime minister, and the conclusion gave itself: “I will have to recommend that if we receive a satisfying answer to the telegram referenced by the president, then the cabinet and presidentship will name a three-man committee to negotiate with the German Minister about under what stipulations Norway can still exercise its sovereignty.” Exactly when the government learned of Quisling’s intrigues in Oslo, is not known. But around 19.15, when he held his long speech, Nygaardsvold was obviously ready to go very far to accommodate a negotiation: “ One of the demands would probably have to be that we firstly would have to get Quisling out and rather in. We cannot accept having Quisling in Oslo as some sort of Kuusinen while they at the same time offer us the governance, and that they neither now or in the future will harm our territorial rights and political independence.” Later, many have taken the prime minister’s words as a sort of witty expression to show that he is back to his regular self again. That is an impossible conclusion if you look at the most recent and precise minutes of the meeting. What the stenographers put down can hardly mean anything else than that the prime minister who said no at 05 in the morning, was willing to accept Quisling into the government at 19.15 - in the hopes of managing a negotiation.

The fours buses, the lorries and civilian cars carrying Walther’s heavily armed patrol drove northwards in an endless queue on slush-soaked roads. The column was spotted by the 2nd division’s temporary HQ at Kløfta, but no one had reacted. At around 19.00, the vehicles stopped at Jessheim to top up on fuel and buy chocolate and cigarettes from a nearby kiosk. It was the local telegraph manager, Peder Berrefjord, who finally reacted and called up the General staff at Eidsvoll. “Four buses with German soldiers passed Jessheim at around 19.15 either toward Gardermoen or northwards,” noted lieutenant Anthon B. Nielsen in the staff logbook. The message was conveyed by telephone to chief of staff Hatledal, who was waiting for the Storting’s meeting to end outside the theater hall in Festiviteten at Hamar. “Colonel Jørgen Jensen stood next to me while I spoke on the phone,” Hatledal later wrote. “I read back loudly the message I received and saw Jensen enter the Storting hall.” The politicians were in the middle of debating if it was safe to return to Oslo, and representative Carl Wright had just asked Minister of Defense Ljungberg about the size of the forces still available to mobilize. The time was close to 19.40 when Hambro received Berrefjord’s message – via Hatledal and Jensen. “While the discussions were ongoing, I had delivered to me a message that a German forward element was just fifteen kilometers from Hamar,” he later wrote. Hambro reacted immediately and cut off the discussion. The protocol notes: “The President finds that he should announce the message that an extraordinary train to Elverum stands ready and should be driven off in five minutes. German forces are underway to capture the Storting and has passed Jessheim.” Hambro’s words sparked a panic in the crowd. “I had just hung up when MPs and Cabinet members stormed out of the meeting hall,” Hatledal wrote. “A couple of them spoke to me and said I had to stop the Germans. I answered that I would do what I could.” Colonel Jørgen Jensen put it more sharply: “Never before have I seen old men run so fast.”

Chapter 8

The Battle of Midtskogen

Elverum and Nybergsund, 9th of April 17.00 to Wednesday 10th of April 03.00 Colonel Hans Sommerfeldt Hiorth at Elverum had received an odd telephone call on the evening of April 9th. The call was transferred as a prioritized military message from Oslo. The voice on the other end did not present itself by name, but by title only: Chief of State. “After many years of comradeship, I recognized the voice. It belonged to Vidkun Quisling,” said a shaken Hiorth half an hour later. Many years of comradeship was a mild understatement. The sixty-two-year-old regimental commander had been one of Quisling’s most prominent supporters in the military, and team leader Nasjonal Samling in Elverum until 1938. He knew all that was worth to know about the NS-Führer’s political ambitions, but the order that followed took that many steps too far: “If the king and his household are passing by you, they are to be arrested. The Marxist government must not be allowed to flee to Sweden!” Hiorth was shaken, and immediately called to him the closest available officers: acting commander of the shooting- and winter school for the infantry at the exercise camp Terningmoen nearby, major Olaf Helset, the chief of the first company of Royal Guards, captain Arne Hagtvedt and the regimental adjutant, lieutenant Gunnar Ruud. “I take you three as witnesses that I do not intend to follow this order,” declared colonel Hiorth during the meeting, which will have to be counted as one of the most extraordinary among the many extraordinary meetings that took place on the 9th of April. “I have been a member of Nasjonal Samling, but I left two years ago and have nothing to do with the party any more. I am and will be faithful to the King and Country. If the King and his household arrive, we will defend him with all we got.”

It is hard to see this phone call detached from what was happening at the same time in the German legation in Drammensveien 74 in Oslo. Fired up by Scheidt and Hagelin, Quisling had spent the day sketching out a manifesto to justify his planned coup d’etat. According to the manifest, the transfer of power would be “advised by” the German envoy, which at least meant that Bräuer was in on it. At one point in the afternoon Scheidt would therefore have had to have brought the manifesto to the legation, but battalion chief Erich Walther had just arrived with his paratroopers who in the adjoining street and garden prepared for his action against the king and government. “A young man entered the room and presented himself as Hans-Wilhelm Scheidt, colonel in the SA from herr Rosenberg’s office,” wrote lieutenant colonel Pohlman, who after 24 hectic hours still had had no time to immerse himself in the political and diplomatic intrigues of the Norwegian capital. By the power of his position, Scheidt informed him that he had negotiated with Quisling, who would take over as chief of state and name a new government. “I looked over at Bräuer in bewilderment and asked: Who is in charge of German foreign policy now – Foreign Minister Ribbentrop or Reich leader Rosenberg? The envoy just shrugged his shoulders.” Pohlman wanted to know when and how Scheidt had arrived in Oslo, but the party functionary did not answer. “You can see for yourself that my papers are in order, herr lieutenant colonel. My mission has been signed by Reich leader Rosenberg. That will have to be good enough for you.”

But Bräuer still waited for an answer to his inquiry to director general Johannessen about new negotiations. If the answer was yes, it would keep the king and government close to Hamar, which again would make the paratroopers’ job easier. He had handed over his accreditations to the king six months earlier and had been accepted as the official representative of Germany by the legal government. If he lent his name to the engineers of the coup, his status and authority would disappear. The way of negotiation would be closed, and that could not be in Berlin’s best interest. Scheidt had to go back, his case unresolved. If Quisling went through with his coup, any mention of the envoy would have to be struck from the papers.

It seems a fair assumption to make that Scheidt either was told or learned about the coming military action against Hamar while at the legation. One can also reasonably assume that he shared his suspicions with Quisling, which again can aid in explaining the telephone call to colonel Hiorth. A race for power had begun. If Quisling and his allies could capture the king before Walther’s men arrived, much would already be solved. He had boasted about the reach of Nasjonal Samling in the military in Berlin. A successful arrest of the government would help convince Hitler that he was not just full of hot air, but that many of the Norwegian officers were on his side.

We do not know exactly what Quisling told his friend and former party companion at Elverum, or how much Hiorth understood or suspected. The colonel’s reaction was both spontaneous and extraordinary. On the one hand, he confessed the contents of the phone call to his subordinates and declared his loyalty to the Nygaardsvold government, which he had lambasted in writing and speeches for years. The other was more important and sensational: He ordered Helset and Hagtvedt to block the road between Hamar and Elverum at Midtskogen.

The Royal Family had returned to Sælid farm around 19.30 and sat down to a dinner table filled with platters full of steaming halibut. But the peace was short-lasting for the pressed family. First, adjutant Østgaard was called to the phone by the police chief of Hamar, Reidar Beichmann, who told him that four buses of German soldiers were approaching Hamar from the south – obviously with ill intent. Then, President Hambro called and told them that the panicking members of the Storting had been granted an extraordinary train, which would leave for Elverum a few minutes past 20.00. King Haakon laid down his cutlery and asked: “When do You wish us to leave, Østgaard?” “I mean we should go at once,” the adjutant replied. Prince Harald was asleep, and was carried out into the waiting Horch, but princess Astrid was not happy about the breakup: “So we won’t get dessert either?” King Haakon said his farewells to the Sæhlie sisters and thanked them for their hospitality. Oscarsborg was still silent, but Blücher had gone down with hundreds of men. If it became known that Sigrid and Kristiane at the same time had sheltered the king and his family, there was reason to fear repercussions. “This might get dangerous,” the king said when the cars drove off. He feared that the farm might be bombed.

Before the Storting broke up from Festiviteten, NRK broadcast an extraordinary transmission that triggered a wave of shocked outrage, anger and confusion across the country. Most people had waited for hour upon hour for a statement from the government, but the government had not decided for peace or war and had nothing to say. Those listening to the radio had instead been fobbed off with endless streams of grammophone concertos – until the announcer to everyone’s surprise said that Vidkun Quisling would speak. “Two minutes past half eight, Quisling took the word,” wrote Hans Fredrik Dahl in En fører for fall (a führer’s fall) ”The voice was tinged with the seriousness of the situation, almost screeching. The Nygaardsvold government had fled. Only the Nasjonal Samling movement could save the country. Quisling had therefore formed a government.” He read out the names of his Ministers and continued: “All Norwegians are encouraged to keep calm and mindful in this for our country so difficult a situation. By common labour and everyone’s good will we will carry Norway safe and free through this great crisis. I add that with how this situation has developed, any resistance is not just futile, but will be equated to the criminal destruction of life and property.” The former Minister of Defense had gone through with his coup and announced his high treason on an open microphone: All weapons were to be put down and the Germans to be welcomed. At Hamar, the power had been disconnected. The chief of the General staff, Rasmus Hatledal, did not catch Quisling’s speech. But the call from the politicians to stop the Germans acted like a booster shot. The wait was over. He could act. “Now, some exciting hours began, which I will never forget,” he wrote in a later report. “I had no helpers, I did everything by myself. The electric light was out. I sat with a candle stub and a telephone.” First, he called colonel Hans Hiorth and ordered him to block the road between Hamar and Elverum. The colonel gave a reassuring answer: The work was already underway! It was around 90 kilometers from Jessheim to Hamar. If the German column moved at normal speed, he had at least two hours from the last observation at 19.15 - maybe more because of the massive amount of traffic and poor roads. There was still time to erect a roadblock further south. “We had to, if possible, block the road along Lake Mjøsa. I asked colonel Jørgen Jensen if he had the manpower to do it, but he did not,” Hatledal noted. “Instead, I got hold of the director of roads, Andreas Baalsrud. He fetched a road engineer, who meant that a road warden he had, possibly could blow some rocks and trees down into the roadway between Espa and Tangen.”

In the Reich Chancellery in Berlin, the mood was still euphoric. Congratulations kept streaming in, and Mussolini praised the Führer in a jubilant turn of phrase: “Only like that can a war be won!” The fanatical eminence grisé Alfred Rosenberg was met by Hitler, who grinned from ear to ear. “Now, Quisling can have his government! We should be glad the fleeing government did not drag him along.” Both Scheidt and lieutenant colonel Pohlman had called their superiors and received their blessings for their actions, which now were countersigned by Hitler himself.

The chief of staff of Gruppe XXI, colonel Erich Buschenhagen, had received a call about major Walther’s paratrooper raid and had given an orientation about it at the situation conference for the Army supreme command at 18.15: “The Norwegian government has gone to Hamar,” noted the chief of the general staff Franz Halder in his personal diary. “The paratroopers are on their way after them.” It meant that the hunt for the royal family and government officials was not a personal adventure concocted by the officers in Oslo, as colonel general Nicolaus von Falkenhorst had falsely claimed afterwards. As soon as the phone connection had been restored between Oslo and Berlin on the afternoon of the 9th of April, the raid had been approved by Falkenhorst, the Army top brass and then certainly by the absolute leader of Operation Weserübung, himself. The first paratrooper regiment was the Nazi brass’ elite detachment, and Walther and Götte had fought side by side with the brownshirts in Berlin since the early 1930s. They had the absolute trust of the party leadership, which helped explain Hitler’s jubilant mood. The king and cabinet would soon be in the care of the paratroopers, and the problems in Oslo would be over. “The Führer is happy,” wrote Goebbels in his private diary. “He describes the accomplished mission as the greatest and most important result of our policy and warfare until now. In Oslo, the government has stepped back. Our helper Quisling has taken the wheel and calls for order. When this war is over, the German Reich will remain standing. Our historic mission will be greatly fulfilled.” For dinner in Hitler’s private suite in the Reich Chancellery, macaroni, ham and green salad was served. As a starter, they passed around sandwiches in the Scandinavian style. “It was most fitting for the situation,” noted the historian David Irving.

But across eastern Norway, darkness was falling, and Walther’s commandeered buses toiled heavily along the gravel roads leading towards Mjøsa. When the column was to cross the slender steel bridge across the river Vorma at Minnesund, they came to a full stop. “The buses were too wide,” wrote the driver Walther Wike, who got stuck on the curve of the bridge. The paratroopers were commanded out and spent the next hour lifting the four buses through the bend. “I was led on. A man walked backwards in front of the bus and made sure it steered clear of the bridge.” The buses were ten ton boxcars made of aluminium from Strømmens Værksted with a 130 horsepower Hall-Scott motor which devoured almost 10 liters of petrol per 10 kilometers, and corporal Bruno Melchior was already dreading their return journey. “It was much darker, and we knew we had to lift the buses the other way as well. The gravel road northward became narrower and had more twists and turns. To our right, the forest rose tall and impenetrable up the mountainside, and to our left we could see a span of endless white between the trees and bushes.”

The Minnesund bridge in 1925. There is a one-way road for cars on each side of the railway track.

Around 15 kilometers further north, road warden Sørli and sheriff Oppegård along with some volunteer hands had found a suitable place to place their explosives near Strandlykkja. “We finished well before 21’o clock,” the sheriff wrote in his report. “I was in uniform and stopped every motorized vehicle coming from the south.” At Hamar, Hatledal waited with bated breath for a message that the road had been blocked, but no such luck for the chief of the general staff. He had given orders that Oppegård was to wait to set off his dynamite charges until the cars from the general staff had passed northwards. But his subordinate officers had had no patience. They had left the main road before Minnesund and driven towards Elverum by way of Kongsvinger. “When the clock neared 22.00 the general staff still had not appeared,” wrote Oppegård, “Something must have happened to change the original plan.” The sheriff got in his car and found the closest telephone at Mjøsvang boarding house. While he waited for the dial tone, he was horrified to see the German column driving past. At Festiviteten, Hatledal was agitated and perplexed. The misunderstanding had been cleared up, but he could not get in contact with the explosives team. “The road to Hamar was open! I called the road engineer. No answer. Called like mad 10-20 times. No answer. Called colonel Jensen. Not available. Called the road engineer again. No answer. Had in the meantime another conversation with colonel Hiorth. Construction of the roadblock at Midtskogen was well under way.”

Hiorth’s order had been set to earlier by Guard lieutenant Oskar Aasen, who identified two bridges across the Terningelven river as most fitting for a blockade position – Midtskogen (Middle-of-the-forest)and Sagstuen(Sawmill cottage), which lay 2-3 kilometers apart on the road to Elverum. “I was ordered to build the roadblocks with my fourth troop and received tools from the Rifle school, large saws among other things,” Aasen wrote later. “I assume we drove off at around 17-18'o clock.” The Royal Guards had reported for duty in March and had come on skis from Jørstadmoen camp a few days earlier to start sharpshooter training with machine guns and mortars in the Winter school’s difficult terrain. They were young and fit, but so far had no experience in warfare. Thus, the three machine gun troops in the company had been posted around the camp as anti-air measures, while the fourth troop under Aasen were on firefighter duty since the Guards had not yet fired their mortars. “At Sagstuen, half the troop was left in the command of a team leader. I continued on to Midtskogen with the rest. There was enough timber for the roadblocks lying by the roadside. We drove it out on the truck.” The tactics were taken straight from the manual. “The main roadblock was to be at Sagstuen,” wrote then-major Olaf Helset. “At the frontal barrier at Midtskogen, we were to force an attacker to move off the roads. The snow was knee deep and more.”

It was barely 30 kilometers from Sælid farm to Elverum, and the royal family’s small motorcade passed the roadblock at Midtskogen close to 21.00. “Of the journey, I remember that we were stopped on the road,” wrote Einar Østgaard. “A soldier peeked into the car, he wanted to make sure there were no German soldiers inside.” The flight had lasted 14 hours, and the nervous strain took its toll on everyone. The German paratroopers could be just nearby, and the royal family was not just bent under the load of its constitutional demands, they also had to care for small children. “Harald was only three years old at the time,” King Olav told Jo Benkow many years later. “He had changed homes no less than five times in the space of 24 hours. Norway was not a place to stay for small children under such circumstances. His sisters, the princesses, were young as well. Ragnhild was almost 10, and Astrid only eight years old.” It was dark when the cars turned into the birch-lined lane leading to yet another of the area’s large manorial farmsteads, Gaarder. The owner, Supreme Court lawyer Gudbrand Aakrann, was in Oslo. But his maid, Andrea Trangsrud had fetched the lawyer’s sister, who was married to the forester Tor Smitt Amundsen and lived in the crofter’s cottage. “Crown prince Olav jumped out of the car at once and doused the light above the entranceway,” wrote Terje Kristoffersen in Menneskejakt over Hedemarken (Manhunt across Hedmark) ”When they entered, Andrea lit the lights in the living rooms. She suddenly felt a hand over her own hand and a voice that said: “It’s for the best that we keep to darkness tonight.” The maid meant that the lights had to stay on for the king, but the voice was persuasive: “I think it’s best that we don’t turn on the lights.” The crown prince had taken command and wanted to minimize the risk of discovery. For himself, King Haakon asked for a bed to lay down in. “He looked terribly tired,” Trangsrud reminisced. “He was almost swaying when he mounted the stairs to the first floor.”

At Elverum people’s college close by, the President of the Storting, Carl J. Hambro opened the Storting’s third emergency meeting in a short amount of time. The time was 21.40 and the meeting was to be the last for more than five years. The representatives from the Conservative Party, Johan Ludwig Mowinkel from the Liberal Party and Jon Sundby from the Farmer’s Party were chosen as members of the negotiation committee that hoped to meet envoy Bräuer. Eight further men were appointed special councilors to the Cabinet. The President made the gathering aware of Quisling’s speech in the radio and was at once asked by the Conservative politician Anders Kjær if there was any connection between his proclamation and the ongoing negotiations between the Germans and the Nygaardsvold government. Hambro’s vigilance and will was seemingly unaffected by a day and a night without rest. He answered immediately: “There are no negotiations between the legal government and Germany, but we hope that there will be such negotiations.” Hambro understood Bräuer’s dilemma: “It is given, that the German Minister, accredited by this government, has no access to formal or international governing figures and cannot appoint any other government than the one constitutionally formed by the King. But that there could be complications, the president has no doubts about.” It was as if the news of Quisling’s treachery quickly had steeled those who had needed it most. For the first time that day, even Nygaardsvold regained some of his fighting spirit. “I have a pessimistic view of our entire military position, I have to admit it. But after I experienced that we would have a Kuusinen-government (a , after the Soviet- appointed Finnish leader Otto Ville Kuusinen) in our country, I am certain of – even if the Norwegian government will have to go to Sweden – that we will have to try to keep the Cabinet together.” Nygaardsvold did probably not envision any fighting in the future, but a long wait under Swedish protection. He rounded off his speech like this: “I will ask you, men of the Storting, when you now go to your homes, to bring a greeting to our people. These are hard and fierce times, perhaps fiercer than any in our history. But I feel that the people are with us in seeking our goal, a free Norway. And if they do, then I hope for a happy conclusion to the terribleness we are experiencing now.”

Major Walthers column increased their speed once they passed Tangen railway station. There was just 20 kilometers left until Hamar, and the turbine buses could go up to 50 km/h in places. The road laid clear before them northwards along Lake Mjøsa, and air attaché Spiller hardly needed his Shell road map which he had brought along. The violet spring sky was cloudless, and the forest laid in half-shadowed darkness. Lights could be seen from farms in the distance, but there were no military forces to be seen. They did pass two junior officers and three enlisted men near , but these were disarmed and placed in the lorry. The paratroopers had been travelling for close to seven hours through an area thickly studded with defensive positions. So far not a shot had come their way, and it was highly irregular. “We did not encounter the enemy once on the entire trip,” the report stated.

In the meeting of the Storting only miles away, the old pacifist and enemy of the armed forces, of the Liberal Party once again sowed doubts about the reality of their situation. With great foresight and an assured style, Hambro had formulated a writ containing the general power of authority for the Cabinet to “keep the Country’s interests and meet those decisions on behalf of the Storting and government that seem prudent for the security and future of the country” - valid until the Storting could convene once again. The writ was primarily to cover the period until the negotiations with the Germans were concluded, but Mowinckel was unhappy. “I am surprised that we are being sent back to our homes,” he said. “I honestly thought that after the day’s flight from place to place that the Storting was to return to Oslo to continue its duties there.” He was answered by several people, but his party mate Christian Stray was probably the most precise: “I am certain we all sympathize with the thought that the Storting will not budge. But the question begs itself, that are we allowed to have such a naive perception, that those who are now in Norway will gently and quietly let the present storting sit here and negotiate. I do not believe it. We had a meeting of the interparliamentary union this summer. Several of those delegates are now in German concentration camps.” Hambro summarized: “If it goes the way that Mowinckel wishes, and we all hope, but maybe not believe quite so firmly, our difficulties will be of a limited and clear-cut sort. I then presume that the government and storting will continue in much the same fashion as the government and Rigsdag in Denmark, inside the narrow confines given to them. But I agree with Mr. Stray that we will be blind indeed if we assume that is the only possible outcome.”

No one could say what the next days would bring. Tyranny had reached the country, and an elected official could risk prison and incarceration just because he or she was elected by the people. They were grim views, but Hambro chose to round it off with hope. The gathering got to their feet and sang two verses of “Ja, vi elsker”. The meeting ended at 22.25.

When the national anthem rang through the rooms of the people’s college, the royal family had made their most difficult decision. “A message came from colonel Hiorth that the Germans were expected at the roadblock at any time at the roadblock around three kilometers from Elverum,” noted major Wedel Jarlsberg in the Adjutant’s book of memories. “Departure was at once set for 22.00 so that crown princess Märtha with the children, major Østgaard and household would travel across the Swedish border to Hotel Sælen. His Majesty the King, crown prince and adjutant travelled to Nybergsund with arrival at 01.00.” The first leg of the 70 km journey passed between tall plowed edges to the small village near Trysil, where father and son said their goodbyes to the rest of their family. “It was terribly sad to go away from father and grandfather,” princess Astrid told later. “We knew nothing of what was to come, everything was chaotic. We noted that mother was sad and worried, but the adults were good at keeping calm for our sake.” It was still 30 kilometers until the border, and the relative safety of the neighbouring country. Sweden was under pressure from Berlin, and many members of the Swedish upper class sympathized with the Nazis. But Märtha was after all the daughter of princess Ingeborg and prince Carl and counted on being well received along with the children. “I thought it best that they made it to safety in Sweden,” king Olav told Jo Benkow. “I assumed that a Swedish princess would be welcomed with open arms in her own country. That was not exactly how things would play out.”

German paratroopers on the road to Hamar. Major Walther and the paratroopers reached the Stange bridge just before midnight. It was a 1200 meter long filled-in roadway which led the highway across the Akersvika water and into Hamar’s city centre – with little possibility of cover. The city was the last known refuge of the government and royal family, and tough resistance was to be expected. The column drove on with no lights, and the paratroopers were at the ready. “We were suddenly fired upon from the city,” the report stated. “The bridge itself was closed off by zigzagged vehicles.” It was the chief of the 2nd dragoon regiment, colonel Jørgen Jensen, who on Hatledal’s urging had improvised a barrier in all haste. Two old lorries from Hamar’s foundry had been parked in the roadway, while a guard section of 17 men and six machineguns covered the northern end. But the Norwegians had bad luck once again: In their haste, they had brought along old 12,8 gram bullets, and not the new 14 gram bullets, which the machine guns needed. The weapons which were to fire upon the road bridge were useless. “It was a full stop, and the Germans jumped out,” noted the press-ganged Norwegian bus drivers. “Red and white signal flares were fired off.” The lorries were pushed over the edge. Patrols were sent across the ice on both sides of the bridge, while others looked for mines in the roadway. Just over a kilometer away, rittmester Johan Aamoth could see the cars in the light from the flares, and they seemed to stretch on in an unending column up the hill on the other side. “We are ready to open fire,” he reported to colonel Jensen on the field telephone. “It’s not easy to say if we can win this. We will do our best, but they seem to be many.” The colonel lacked the unbending will to fight. Faced with the possibility of superior enemy numbers, he ordered the retreat. He himself left the regimental offices and fled headlong with his staff to . Hamar fell without any further fighting. In the next half hour, Walther’s men were posted around the police station, the post office, the telegraph and the railway station. The paratroopers were on edge, and fired at anything that moved in the dark. A railway worker on a bike who didn’t stop quickly enough was hospitalized for the next five months with gunshot wounds to his legs. “I explained to the staff in my best school English that they had nothing to fear as long as the connection was out,” wrote corporal Bruno Melchior, who was left alone to guard four men and women in the town’s telegraph and telephone central. “At the same time, I tried to convince them that our plan had been to preempt the British – not to make war on Norway. The ladies made some coffee, but the mood remained tense.”

In Oslo, envoy Carl Bräuer had in the meantime received the government’s answer through two channels – director general Waldemar Malthe Johannessen and police chief Kristian Welhaven, who was in telephonic contact with Minister of Justice Terje Wold. The salient point was that hostilities should be halted until a result was reached in the negotiations, a point currently being challenged by the paratrooper raid. The feedback from Welhaven was not exactly uplifting. “After speaking with Bräuer, the police chief again had to wait for a while, while the minister went into another room,” Minister of Justice Terje Wold had reported earlier that night. Welhaven and Wold could not know who Bräuer spoke to. But from what was learned that day, it seems obvious that he chose to confer with lieutenant colonel Hartwig Pohlman before he gave his answer. Pohlman was the ’s superior representative in the legation, and with his superiors’ blessing had sent Walther and his men north to hunt the king and government. He categorically denied recalling them. As Bräuer said when he returned to the phone: “These things work automatically, and I have to way to stop them. I still await the government’s final answer with great interest.” Welhaven added: “He was polite, but cold.”

Inside the German legation, the mood had to have been charged. The Nygaardsvold government were eager to negotiate, but not under major Walther’s gun barrels. The envoy had at the same time been saddled with the party leadership’s poodle, Quisling, who he viewed as a fantasist and dilettante – with no support among the people. Bräuer had a desperate need for a clear set of instructions and called Berlin in the hopes of making contact with Foreign Minister Joachim Ribbentrop. But the former champagne dealer was celebrating their victory in the Reich Chancellery and after a while he gave up the phone to the Führer himself. “Hitler was not prepared to listen, but spoke like a machine-gun,” wrote professor Magne Skodvin in Striden om okkupasjonsstyret i Norge (The war for the occupational administration in Norway) ”Things had gone well in Norway. There was no reason to be hasty, and Germany would hold to Quisling. Using the Nygaardsvold government was out of the question. Would Germany turn to the government that had ordered Norwegian forces to fire upon it? Bräuer could have the audience with king Haakon, meet at his headquarters and do anything to get him back to Oslo – like for example to remind him of his brother Christian and the choice he had made for himself and Denmark. But it was unconditional that Quisling become prime minister. Other things could be discussed, but not Quisling.” Bräuer claimed that he had tried to talk against the rapid-firing stream of words. But his objection that the king was a constitutionally chosen monarch that had to act in counsel with the chosen representatives of the people was brushed aside with despotic cynicism. “Such thinking was for peacetime, Hitler had said. But this was war, and blood was being spilled. For the Norwegian king, the main objective had to be to save his throne for his dynasty. Bräuer would have to insist on speaking with the king alone - without the intervention of any cabinet members.” The Führer’s word was law in the Nazi dictatorship, and Bräuer could only wait and hope. Walther's paratroopers were closing on their target. If they managed to capture the king and cabinet, their problems would be solved either way.

The roadblock at Midtskogen was closed at 23.00 - to the hefty protestations of those drivers who arrived too late. “We were stopped by Norwegian military men who were in full swing building barricades,” wrote the NTB journalist Nils Lone, who had rented a taxi in Hamar alongside two of the bureau’s office ladies. “As well as trees and barbed wire, the cars which had arrived had to service as barricade material. The Finnish minister in Oslo did not get through with his car either. He however was fortunate enough to be taken to Elverum in a Norwegian car on the other side of the barrier. I and my two ladies had to go the long distance to Elverum on foot.” Major Olaf Helset had understood that the blocking of traffic would become a problem and had put one of his best officers to man the roadblock, the thirty-year-old captain John Rognes. “He was the right man in the right place when it came to stopping the traffic and put in their place anyone who tried to force the men to open the barricade in the wake of the government.” At his arrival, Rognes had at once seen that the wooden logs made for too spindly a barricade. He found his solution among the cars filled with angry passengers, who were left stranded on the other side. “Protest from a man from the arsenal. The Field Uniform General’s two cars containing archive materials and office furniture had to pass. Protest from the quartermaster of the dragoon regiment, who was collecting ammunition at Hamar,” noted the vigourous and unbribeable Rognes, who would go on to become one of the pioneers of . He continued, telegram- style: “No way. Best material we could get. Nice, heavy three-ton trucks. Imploring speech to the field uniform general’s two drivers. Sit up, shift to first gear, greatest possible speed on the road to the bridge! Before the bridge, turn hard to the right. The other one to the left, hard out into the ditch.” The quartermaster chose to turn around, but Rognes shanghaied an empty truck on its way to Elverum. “New imploring speech. Drive ahead, good speed. Crash the car in between the two trucks in the ditches! If it breaks, we’ll find a new one.”

At Hamar, major Walther and air attaché Spiller quickly learned that the king and cabinet had fled and were now in Elverum, 30 kilometers away. A handful of soldiers were left in the strategically important buildings in Hamar’s centre, while the rest of the column continued on eastward. In the log they noted: “At 00.45 the detachment was underway once again.”

Prime minister Nygaardsvold was wrung out and had gone to bed in Elverum’s Central Hotel when Hambro knocked at his door. He had been tasked with going to Sweden to seek international support, and wanted to say goodbye. There was no spare chair in the room, but Hambro sat down on the edge of the bed. It was a short and sad meeting. Nygaardsvold once again started to cry, and asked to be relieved of his heavy burden as prime minister. “I once again explained to him why I felt it was impossible, shook his hand and said goodbye.” On his way eastward, Hambro’s car got stuck in a snow-filled ditch, and the president of the Storting was left standing in the snow awaiting help. He hitchhiked with an over-filled motorcade belonging to the British embassy, and reached Nybergsund with a female stenographer sleeping across his lap. In the salon of the local tourist station, he found the king and crown prince, sitting alone with adjutant Wedel Jarlsberg. “I think it began to dawn on us that we had had very little food for the last 28 hours, and it was bitterly cold,” Hambro wrote. “The hostess made us cups of hot coffee.” The refugees talked in hushed voices of their situation and Quisling’s new government. “While we were talking, the crown prince fell asleep across the table. The king smiled, and said: The young are happy. They can always find sleep.”

An anti-air position at Elverum train station manned by Royal Guards. Many small anti-air positions were set up on the 9th of April in fear of German airplanes dropping paratroopers.

Chief of staff Hatledal’s immediate telephonic initiative from Festiviteten at Hamar earlier that evening had set off several reactions. The around 40 Royal Guards posted at the barricade at Midtskogen with two machine guns, were fit youths. But they were recruits with only five weeks of training to look back on. They had never fired their machine guns – and certainly not in deadly combat against a brutal and experienced enemy. Major Helset at once started to scrape together an extra force at once, which could be sent in as reinforcements. “At around 19-20, I gathered those who had arrived from the regiment along with our own auxiliary helpers and organized the force as a small company of two troops,” Helset later reminisced. They were members of an anti-gas attack class, available NCOs, civilian workers from Terningmoen and after a while, around 15 volunteers from the local rifle club, who had been alerted by telephone. “The camp boys were woken up and were given arms,” wrote teacher Harald Jektvik, who had participated in the anti-gas class. “Then they were sent on to the mess hall where they were taught how to load a gun. There were around twenty of them, and they probably got no more than ten minutes’ training in how to use a gun.” The hastily thrown-together company finally consisted of 66 men under the command of captain Mikael Gaalaas, and with captain Kristian Barlinn and the local Nazi sympathizer, captain Oliver Møystad as troop leaders. “Gaalaas was a practical and efficient field officer,” Helset wrote. “The other two had just served as company leaders in a battalion of winter recruits. I knew them both to be practical field officers.” The General Inspector of the Infantry, general , had in the meantime arrived at Terningmoen camp after completing an inspection tour of Northern Norway. He filled up the mess hall glasses with soda and held a short appeal: “There is a detachment of Germans coming towards Midtskogen who want to capture the king and cabinet. You are to defend a line at butcher Næss’ farm and block the road to Elverum. When the Germans close in on the roadblock, they will exit their vehicles. That's when you get them! Tonight we fight, lads.” In the hour leading up to midnight, the extra men were grouped along the road, facing in front of the barrier, which had grown with around 50 meters because of additional abandoned cars. Every man had been given a Krag-Jørgensen rifle and 40 rounds. The stars shone down on the cold snow around Midtskogen. The traffic had stopped. Now they had to wait and keep their nerves in check. Chief of the General staff Rasmus Hatledal and commanding general Kristian Laake were the last people to get through the roadblock just before 23.00. After talking to the officers and inspecting the position, they continued on to Central Hotel in Elverum. Laake went to bed, but Hatledal was kept awake by a most troubling message: Foreign Minister Koht had ordered that they should not fight at Midtskogen. “I was greatly puzzled, and called the people’s college at once to find out the why of it,” Hatledal wrote. “On the phone I got hold of the Foreign Minister’s secretary. He confirmed that Koht had ordered that the fight was to be called off. The reason was that he was expecting a German to come up on Wednesday to negotiate. Because of that, there would be no reason to fight and spill blood at the barricade.” Koht had had trouble finding transport from Hamar to Elverum, and had been let off at the wrong place. He never reached the final meeting of the Storting. His cup ran over when he sank to his knees in a puddle and got water far up his legs. He had been awake for almost 48 hours when he finally found his way to the people’s college and dove into bed. “I told the secretary that this was a case of such utmost importance that I had to speak to the Minister at once,” wrote Hatledal, who was shocked and enraged at Koht’s intervention. “The secretary answered that the minister had gone to bed and fallen asleep. I insisted I had to speak to him. I waited on the phone. A while later, the secretary came back and said that the minister would not get out of bed. It would be as he had said. The fighting was to be called off.” But the time was close to 02.00, and at Midtskogen, the silence was broken by coughing engines coming closer. Major Walther and his men had arrived.

Captain John Rognes was hidden by the gate at Midtskogen farm when the front beams played across the plowed snow and the deep barrier. “The Germans! I look over to captain Gaalaas. It seems like he expects that Barlind and Møystad’s teams will open fire at the team leaders’ initiative. I am not so sure,” he later wrote. In front of the two officers, the approximately 90 Guards and volunteer riflemen lay in a horseshoe-shaped formation on both sides of the road. Some of them were just a stone’s throw away from the buses when the column slowly hit the brakes and stopped, a few hundred meters west of the collection of abandoned cars, barbed wire and timber. “A rifle is in my hand,” wrote Rognes. “I load and fire a shot toward the lights. Then it begins. Rifle fire from the left, more and more shots coming from the right. Shouts and the sound of people running. German speech, I understand: Feige Norweger, die zuerst schiessen!” (“Cowardly Norwegians, who fire first!”)

The tactical situation: The German column stopped in front of Lysgård, a way off from the roadblocks. They were immediately fired upon by the volunteer sections under captain Barlinn, which were placed north and south of the road. The Guard forces with the two machine guns were placed in the driveway up to Midtskogen farm itself, and laid down fire over the top of the barricade. Blücher's troop advanced east to attack Midtskogen from the flank (see arrows on the map), Zuber’s troop followed the road past the barricade, while others advanced against the volunteers south of the railway line.

The weak resistance on their long journey north had made the paratroopers too bold, and the rifle ambush came as a shock. The paratroopers leapt from the buses and cars and sought cover in the ditch by the roadside, but their discipline was intact. A few minutes later, they returned fire. “At 02.10, the detachment met a roadblock around four kilometers west of Elverum,” noted Walther in a report. “We came under fire from machine guns and rifles on all sides. A heavy machine gun swept the road ahead of us.” Company leader Kurt Gröschke jumped out of his commandeered Dodge and took tactical command. Machine guns were set up and provided covering fire across the barricade, while first troop under lieutenant Hans-Georg Zuber moved forward under the cover of the plow- edges of the snow on both sides of the road. The second troop under lieutenant Wolfgang Graf von Blücher crawled through the metre-deep heavy snow to outflank Oliver Møystad’s men, who were hidden at the edge of the forest and beneath the closest barn bridge. John Botnheim’s team was subordinate to Møystad, and had the parked buses right in front of them. “Powerful roars and commands could be heard: Heraus!” wrote Botnheim, who started firing his Krag-Jørgensen. “Now everything happens at once. A signal flare hits the barn bridge and lights it up, bright as day. I shout duck when the first salvo of machine gun fire comes tearing towards us with tracer rounds. Ricochets spray from the stone wall behind us.” Von Blücher’s men had reacted with astonishing quickness, and Botnheim only managed to fire three shots before they had to abandon the position. He and the rest of Møystad’s troop retreated into the forest. At the driveway to Midtskogen farm, Rognes noted that the flanking fire dropped off when the forward teams retreated. “I saw the blue light of torches. People advancing towards the cars which made up the barrier,” noted the infantry captain. “I saw eight lanterns, and there were people without lights near the cars. I called out: Machine guns, fire!” But the water-cooled Colt guns had not done well in the cold. The oil and water had partially frozen, and it took some time before Guardsman Thorstein Brenna could get the closest gun working. “The mechanism sings, and then it rips off. 250 shots in one series. One can breathe again!”

The hail of fire came as a new surprise for lieutenant Zuber and his troop, which suddenly found themselves in the midst of the field of fire. “The whole troop was forced into cover, but the bullets punched through the snow,” Zuber later told the writer Andreas Hauge. “We had walked into a trap.” Amid a halt in the firing, a man suddenly stood up and ran toward the barrier. It was air attaché Eberhardt Spiller, who had come up unseen and had joined the first troop. “His behaviour was totally suicidal,” Zuber said. “When the fire opened up again from the machine gun, he was hit. He was laid out screaming in the middle of the road, five meters from the barrier.”

At the buses, Gröschke and his support troop had advanced forward, carrying their heavy machine guns on carriages, and two of Zuber’s men had crept past the barrier along a ditch. The flares hung over the farm, and the guns played up once again. “It was a wonderful sight,” wrote major Helset, who laid in cover a short distance away. “I was a teacher at the Infantry rifle school and had a certain skill in judging such situations. What I immediately thought, the way the firing unfolded, was they we would lose a major part of our force. I was glad we had warned Elverum hospital that they had to be ready for a big rush later in the night.”

The firefight lasted for almost an hour. In the end phases, the battle was over Midtskogen farmhouse itself, where Brenna’s machine gun kept going until the very end. Blücher's troop had been trudging through the deep snow and closed in on the farm from the east, while Zuber’s men crept closer to the gate and were soon in grenade range. Red and white flares hung above the fields, tracers zinged across the night sky, and the barn was on fire. “The whole German fire orchestra was playing,” wrote Rognes, who was in cover behind the main house with Gaalaas and a handful of men. “It lit up well.” He turned to his company commander and said: “Should we give it up and get away?” But Gaalaas answered, ice-cold: “There’s time to shoot a few more of them yet! Let us wait and see.”

But the paratroopers gathered for a final charge, and the defenders had achieved their objective: Walther’s column had been halted. If the paratroopers wanted to continue on, they would have to first clear the road – and then assault the main position at Sagstua, two kilometers away. There would be another battle, and it would be harsh. At around 03.00 came the signal to break up. Captain Oskar Aasen’s Royal Guards and the rest of the volunteers crossed the open fields to the east and made it to the safety of the forest – without losses. Only two men had to be left behind: the seventeen-year-old Guardsman Fredrik Seeberg , who had been badly wounded in the chest, and driver Ola H. Dahl, who only had minor wounds. “We didn’t feel too great at the time,” said lieutenant Aasen, who threw himself down behind the closest pile of manure every time a few signal flare lit up the terrain. “We guessed the Germans would move on towards Elverum. We followed a forest road towards Sagstuen. We expected the next firefight to happen there.”

Fredrik Seeberg survived despite life-threatening injuries and lived until August of 2018 – despite the fact that – in his own words - “My lungs were on the outside of my body”. He acted as an advisor for the Midtskogen sequence in the film the King’s Choice. He too was brought to a hospital, where the doctor declared that he would be dead if he had gotten there 15 minutes later. Chapter 9

The King’s choice

Elverum and Nybergsund, Wednesday 10th of April 1940 Deep raids behind enemy lines were the paratroopers’ special brand of work, but 150 kilometers in gas-guzzling aluminium buses was not just audacious. It was bordering on suicide. Certainly, Gröschke’s company had made it out well from the ambush. Only one man had fallen in the hail of bullets, the twenty-year-old corporal Herbert Bergweiler. But air attaché Eberhardt Spiller had been shot in the stomach, chest and upper arms, and was fighting for his life. Their guide had been disabled, and two kilometers on, a new roadblock waited for them. “The snow was rotten and up to 80cm deep,” wrote major Erich Walther in his report. “In the terrain, one could only move slowly and with great difficulty. According to the prisoners, the position had been defended by 200 riflemen with five heavy machine guns. All except two had escaped.” Walther was a hard-boiled Nazi, but he possessed a cool and calculating brain. Around him, the barn and cowshed were on fire, any he could hear the panicked lowing of fearful cows through the smoke and flames. The troops were tired after 24 hours underway on planes and in cars, and ammunition stocks were dangerously low. There would be a fight at every roadblock, and Walther knew that he and his men lived on borrowed time. He had orders to capture the king and cabinet, but he had no idea where his quarry was. They could be around the next bend, or they could be a 100 kilometers away. Half an hour after the fighting ceased, he gave the order to turn back. “The Germans returned exhausted from their hour-and-a-half long fight,” wrote the forcibly commandeered driver Johan Fredrik Kobro, who waited by the parked column close to Bjerkheim Café and General Store. “Wounded men lurched against the car, which became smeared with blood on the fenders and wheel hubs.” The cars and buses were reversed to a nearby gas station, where the tanks were refilled. At 03.45 the column was on its way back to Hamar.

In the meantime, the conversation between king Haakon, crown prince Olav and Carl Hambro in the salon of Nybergsund tourist hotel had quieted down. “We tried to convince the King to go to bed and get a few hours’ sleep. He answered that the few rooms that were there had been taken by MPs who had arrived before he did,” wrote the President, who acted resolutely. Two of the rooms were cleared and given over to father and son, who at long last could go to bed. “Major Wedel, 65 years old at the time, took the seat cushions from three chairs, laid them together, rolled up his cape underneath his head and laid down on the floor. Everything was natural and matter of course. It was as if they were on a trip and went to sleep in a hunting cabin.”

Despite the fact that Bräuer had declined to call a halt to hostilities, the cabinet and the Storting’s negotiations committee had agreed to a meeting between the king and the envoy the next day. “After some discussion, it was decided that we would answer that the King was willing to meet the minister at Elverum the following day at 11’o clock,” wrote Minister for Churches and Education Nils Hjelmtveit in Vekstår og vargtid (Growing-years and wolf-times) "They telephoned to Nybergsund to tell the King he had to wait there.” Most of them had gone to bed around midnight, but sleep would not come. “Every minute of 23 and a half hours had been filled with excitement, with nervous uncertainty and of fear of what would come next. And amid this, one laid plans for the battle to come,” wrote the forty- seven year old teacher from Hordaland, who had been plagued by heart disease, and had announced his withdrawal from the cabinet after five years as minister. “It was nothing to wonder at, that sleep came slowly despite the tiredness we felt, and that it was filled with bad dreams when it came.” The rest was short. When the first shots were fired at Midtskogen – only five kilometers away – Nygaardsvold and five other ministers were woken up and hustled into a bus belonging to the traffic police. The local driver had been gruff and headstrong, and wanted to take the road past Rena to get to Nybergsund. That was a circuitous route which almost delivered them into the arms of Walther’s troops. “On the bridge over the Glomma river we were stopped by a military guardpost, which told us we could not go that way, because they were fighting just a kilometre ahead,” wrote Hjelmtveit. “We could hear gunfire.” The mood in the bus was dark, but the driver refused to continue on. He was going to work in the morning, and needed sleep. Anger is the dark twin of anxiety, and Nygaardsvold had exploded. “I had to lay it on quite heavily before I could explain to him that both he and his vehicle had been commandeered by the government,” he later said. “I told him that his bus route was probably never going to be active again – because war had come. That was a far more serious thing than when he and his mates had fistfights with the men of Trysil.”

Minister of Justice Terje Wold was among the youngest and most warlike of the ministers, and had already asked police chief Welhaven in Oslo to arrest Quisling for treason. The forty-year old lawyer and lay judge from Evenes was deeply skeptical of German intentions, and had encouraged the cabinet to split up to evade collective imprisonment. “Wold said that he thought it was too bad that the cabinet all sat there like a lump,” told the Liberal party member Neri Valen after the war. “It was better for them to be more spread out.” Wold had followed his conviction and checked out from the Central Hotel after the final government conference. Along with the well-known farmer from Bø in Telemark, the unready and irascible attorney had driven northwards – with the gunfire from Midtskogen as a ghoulish musical accompaniment from far beyond the trees. At 03.00, they pounded on the door of sheriff Agnar Renolen at Rena. “Mrs. Sheriff was ill,” said Valen. “Still, we got to share the marriage bed, Wold and me.”

While the government fled further into the forests close to the Swedish border, the paratroopers’ column was headed the other way – towards Hamar, which had a large and reasonably well-equipped hospital. Air attaché Spiller was dying. He needed urgent medical assistance and had been sent ahead in the legation car along with a medic sergeant to care for him. “The hospital lay in darkness when the sergeant banged on the doors,” wrote paratrooper Walther Behn. “Anxiety and aversion showed in the face of the night shift nurse when he told her his errand. “ The nurse had refused to accept the patient, which made the sergeant open his gun holster. “He protested profusely, and threatened to use his weapon. After that, they accepted Spiller, but the sergeant had to carry the wounded man into the hospital by himself.” Major Erich Walther and the main force reached Hamar by 04.30. And gathered up the paratroopers that had held the town under control for almost five hours. “They had disarmed several prisoners,” noted Walther in his report. “Amongst others, there were four officers which were captured carrying two bags containing documents detailing orders and information on military positions.” Half an hour later, he and the motorcade continued south – probably after contacting lieutenant colonel Hartwig Pohlman in Oslo about their retreat. “I was sleepy and tired when I sat down in the bus,” wrote corporal Bruno Melchior, who had spent the night in the telegraph office. “I had to jump over a pile of captured weapons in the middle of the bus to find a space.” In the meantime, chief surgeon Nils Bøckman had been wakened and called to the hospital. When he put Spiller on the operating table, he found a bloodied note in his pants pocket. The note listed four names: König Haakon, Nygaardsvold, Sundby, Hambro.

A bright spring morning had risen over Trysil, and king Haakon and crown prince Olav had been awakened to breakfast at around six, after three hours of sleep. The Storting president’s car had been dug out of the snowbank, and Hambro readied himself to cross over into Sweden on his way to Stockholm. “The king came out of his room and gave me a letter to his sister, princess Ingrid,” he later wrote in a piece for the Morgenbladet newspaper. “The crown prince gave me a message for the crown princess, who was at Sælen tourist hotel, forty and some kilometers east of the border.” Normally, the members of the royal family were surrounded by servants and adjutants that fixed most of the prosaic details of daily life. But they had left Oslo in haste, and had to make do without their usual support apparatus. What once was a matter of course, had become difficult, which was clearly demonstrated when Hambro said his goodbyes. “None of us had had the time to bring cash from Oslo,” wrote Hambro, who had to ask the head of state for help. “The crown prince and his father managed to scrape together 200 kroner, which they gave me as a starting fund in Sweden.”

Despite the uncertainty of who held power in Oslo – Nygaardsvold, Quisling or Wehrmacht – and uncertainty if there were peace or war – officers and enlisted men had started streaming in to their mobilization sites around Østlandet on the evening and night of April 9th. When the fifty-five-year-old rittmester Richard Andvord reached Gardermoen, the camp buzzed with improvised life. “As soon as he learned of district command’s orders to gather all able-bodied men, he went about all necessary preparations,” Otto Munthe-Kaas wrote in Krigen i Norge 1940. The order had come from major general Hvinden Haug, who had accepted that Oslo and Kjeller were lost, and instead had drawn up a first line of defence along the Nitelva river, around 20 kilometers outside of Oslo. There was a desperate need for manpower, and Hvinden Haug had made the retired colonel Jens Christian Meinich local commander, in the hope of expediting the delivery of weapons and equipment. “With the very little time left at our disposal, with the immense pressure we had to shift to achieve our objectives, and with the few aids we had at our disposal – no archive, no lists of names, and no writing implements – the staging had to be as militarily sparse as possible,” wrote Andvord, who during the night uniformed and entered around 500 men into Dragoon regiment no. 1. Altogether, the temporary commander Meinich could muster around 1100 officers and privates at Gardermoen and nearby Trandum, but Hvinden Haug had had fresh doubts thrust upon him. “I want to say that the situation on the evening of April 9th was very unclear,” he wrote in a later report. “No contact could be reached with the Army supreme command. I had the impression they were negotiating with the Germans. I felt there was grounds for a certain carefulness as well as the fact that we had to hurry the mobilization process as fast as we could.” He himself had seen Walther’s buses pass by his temporary HQ at Kløfta on their way north. He did not want to be ambushed, and had once again taken to the road – to a position at Hammerstad boarding house, four kilometers north of Eidsvoll. The raid seemed to support the messages that the bridges over Nitelva were taken, which made Hvinden Haug once again revise his plans. The first defensive line was moved a further 40 kilometers north – to Andelva river, which wound its way 13 kilometers from Lake Hurdalsjøen to the river Vorma. Colonel Meinich was ordered to send his men from Gardermoen the same way. “With their non-homogenous makeup, the forces had little value,” noted Hvinden Haug. “As I read the situation, I found it best to transfer them to Hedmark county until the current circumstances were clearer.” The major general knew a German force was operating along his line of march, because he had seen Walther’s motorcade himself. But he did not know whether they were at war or peace. It was a painful dilemma which showed in the order he gave Meinich: “In case the force meets any vehicles with foreign soldiers, fighting is to be avoided if possible.” There was a great lack of vehicles, and most of the men had to march on foot. But three sections – Battalion Andvord, with 250 – 300 men, Squadron Qvist with around 120 men and Battery Hellum with around 75 men – were given trucks. They started on their journey from Gardermoen to Hamar along Highway 50 around 03.45, tightly packed on the trucks and with their weapons stowed away.

The paratroopers’ failure had given envoy Curt Bräuer’s plans to negotiate their second wind, and the details were set in the early morning in a series of telephone calls between director general Johannessen at the Foreign Office in Oslo, Foreign Minister Koht at Elverum and the rest of the Cabinet, which had joined the king and crown prince at the tourist hotel in Nybergsund. “It was decided that the king – who travelled with the Lord Chamberlain – was to take up residence at a farm near Elverum,” wrote Hjelmtveit. “There, he would wait for instructions of the final time for the conference.” Personally, king Haakon was unhappy about the decision. He had no faith in the Germans, and did not believe in their will to negotiate. “He wasn’t very happy about it, but he understood it might give us a chance to avoid major problems,” said crown prince Olav, who had been present throughout the morning’s discussions. “Both prime minister Nygaardsvold, and especially foreign minister Koht were all for the king meeting Bräuer. Koht had said on the telephone that such a meeting could be useful. Father then agreed (to meet the envoy).”

The motorized sections from Gardermoen had passed Minnesund around 05.00 and one hour later, they were spread out across several tens of kilometers on the highway on the eastern side of Lake Mjøsa. Colonel Jens Meinich drove in front in his private car. “When we passed the first section, we sped up,” wrote captain John Høiland, who was in the back alongside rittmester Bjørn Christophersen. “We wanted to gain some time to prepare the first resting point, which had been set at Romedal.” The neat Meinich was 66 years old and had resigned from active duty as regimental chief on Fredrikstad two years earlier. He was the son of a shipping magnate and had a long and varied career both in and out of the armed forces to look back on, as president and secretary general of the Norwegian Red Cross among other things. He had been a military attaché and had represented Norway when the Geneva convention’s rules for the treatment of POWs had been revised. “We had a couple hundred meters left to go before we were to turn up towards Tangen when we were faced with a long column of trucks, buses and cars,” wrote Høiland. Meinich and his men had met Walther’s paratroopers, and it was a meeting destined to soon become a military catastrophe. “The doors were ripped open, and we were hauled out. The Germans looked totally wild, black faces, waving pistols, SMGs and machine guns, howling and screaming.” The car was turned around. Major Erich Walther took Meinich’s spot in the front of the car and placed the colonel and Høiland in the back. “It was with a heavy heart I thought of all the men following behind us, unknowing of what they were getting into,” noted the young captain. “They drove on blindly, with no security and no clarity. We had no possibility of warning them of the danger.”

In Oslo, the dark blonde and dainty Mrs. Ursula Spiller was informed of her husband’s fate in the early morning hours. The diplomat’s wife was only 27 years old, and sat alone with two children in a foreign country, but she had the will to act. “First, I got help from the legation to call Hamar, which we succeeded in – a miracle under the current circumstances,” she later wrote in a family chronicle. “The doctor I spoke to, told me there was not much hope. Eberhard was conscious, but the wound – gunshot to the chest – was too serious.” There was only hours to go if she wanted to see her husband while he still lived. But Hamar was 120 kilometers away, and she had no chance to get there in her own car. “The legation had to help me again, and it worked. The envoy himself was gearing up to travel to Elverum to negotiate with the king, this time on Hitler’s orders. He collected me, and we went off around 10.30.”

At Rena, minister Terje Wold had risen from sheriff Renolen’s marriage bed in a terrible mood, and it did not improve as the morning wore on. There was no food at the sheriff’s farm, and Wold and Valen had to trudge through the melting snow to the village café to find breakfast. When he learned that the Army supreme command was holed up at a nearby farm, he at once called chief of staff Rasmus Hatledal in to a meeting. “Do you not think it would be better if Minister Ljungberg had been here at Rena, and not me?” the minister had asked, brusquely. “I can hardly render judgement on how the cabinet manages its members,” answered Hatledal. It was well known that the Minister of Justice could be both discourteous and moody, and the measured answer made him angry. “He became very irritated, yes almost enraged, and demanded that I would be so kind as to give him a direct answer to his question,” wrote Hatledal, who chose his words with care: “When the minister provokes me, I would have to say that I too, think that the most natural thing would be for Minister Ljungberg to keep in touch with the Army command.” “Well, at least get going and stop the Germans!” We’re doing our best, even if so far we have little to show for it. We did turn back the Germans at Midtskogen despite the fact that Minister Koht ordered us to call it off.” Wold brushed his comment aside in a way that Hatledal found to be “cutting and despicable”, and continued: “And you have to remove every officer not up to the task!” “I have to authority to remove officers,” the chief of staff replied, and added: “We will have to try to make do with what we have.” A cleft had opened between the Army leadership and the government, and soon it would be impassable. The director general of the Justice Department, had been present for the conversation. He was 15 years older than the minister, but he was being treated as an office boy. “While we talked, the phone rang all the time. The ringing so annoyed the minister that he ordered Platou to shut off the phone,” wrote Hatledal. Platou did not succeed, and the phone kept ringing – to Wold’s growing annoyance. “Once again he was sent off like an errand boy. This repeated itself several times. As for myself, I was treated like a naughty schoolchild, who deserved to be scolded.” Hatledal's honour as an officer had been injured, and he had complained to Platou about the “unusual and wanton” way he had been treated. “Don’t care about it,” Platou had answered. “It’s his way. He's that way to the ministry staff as well.”

At Strandløkka station around 40km south of Hamar, Walther’s battalion had at the same time driven into rittmester Richard Andvord’s battalion, which was heading north with 300 men on 20 trucks. “I spied colonel Meinich and captain Høiland in the front car,” wrote the surprised cavalry officer, who ordered a full stop. He didn’t have time to understand what was happening before his car was surrounded by screaming, heavily armed Germans. “Lieutenants Zuber and Blücher managed to advance to the end of the column with 20 men,” Walther noted in his report. “The surprise was total, and the entire battalion was convinced to leave their trucks – without firing a shot.” over the course of the next half hour, they turned the trucks around on the narrow road. The Norwegians were disarmed, officers and all guns were brought along. “The greater part of the enlisted men were left behind without weapons, without commanders, without food, and without understanding much of what just happened,” wrote captain Høiland. “It was a bad sight to see when we continued our strange journey: Our boys were lined up along the railway line, hands in the air, staring after the Germans and their commanders, who were disappearing south to engineer new disasters for the coming columns, who drove on towards us, unknowing.” It was 15 kilometers until the Minnesund bridge, and the rest of the motorized detachments from Gardermoen had no chance – with all weapons stowed away, and the men totally unprepared. Rittmester Adam Qvist had as a rider taken the silver medal in the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics, and was the main riding teacher for the war academy. He was later to volunteer for the Waffen-SS and as SS-Stürmbannführer and leader of the Norwegian Legion to receive the for his efforts on the eastern front. Now, he and his 120 men were quickly surrounded and disarmed by the Germans paratroopers, who barked like wild animals, firing up into the air. “When the enemy appeared with machineguns in position, it was totally out of the blue,” he wrote in a terse report. The catastrophe was complete when shortly after, captain Martin Hellum suffered the same fate alongside his 75 artillerymen and four 7,5cm field cannons. The forty-five-year-old farmer’s son and sportsman from Lier had worked in fire insurance for the last 13 years, and never had a chance to react. “When we got out of the vehicles, we already had German automatic weapons aimed at us from point blank range. We had no option but to surrender.” The clock has passed 10.00 when the paratroopers could glimpse the steel span over the southern outlet of Lake Mjøsa. The last kilometers had been a triumphal march. Divisions of over 500 men had surrendered without firing a shot. The column had grown, and now numbered close to 50 vehicles with large amounts of weapons and ammunition. But Oslo was far away, and they could count on the alarm being raised by now. Shots could fall on them at any moment, and the first opportunity came at the Minnesund bridge, which the buses could not pass over unassisted. “I was wide awake,” wrote corporal Bruno Melchior, who had taken some Zeiss binoculars off one of the Norwegian officers. When he looked through it towards the other side of the bridge, he saw the sight he feared the most. “Norwegian soldiers were scurrying around, advancing on both sides of the road.”

Outside Nybergsund tourist station, the spring sunshine was melting the ice on the gravel roads when crown prince Olav followed his father to the waiting car. They had a quiet, serious conversation. “What they spoke of, none of us knew,” wrote Supply Minister Trygve Lie, who watched their farewell from the stairs. “But it was a moving moment, that much was clear to all of us. The king could not resist giving the crown prince a big hug before getting into the car.” Crown prince Olav had expressed his strong wishes to follow along with his father to the fateful meeting with envoy Curt Bräuer, but king Haakon had said no. His son would have to wait for the outcome alongside the cabinet. In an interview with the TV veteran Per Øivind Heradstveit many years later, he explained the king’s reasoning: “We feared that my father would be kidnapped by the Germans. That's why he did not want me at the meeting at Elverum.” Behind the mask, king Haakon was a realist, and his skepticism of the Nazi intentions has been honed further by their advance on Midtskogen. Betrayal, lies and double-dealing were inextricably linked to Hitler’s regime. The king harboured no illusions of was could happen, but he was willing to take the risk. “He feared that the trip to Elverum could result in him no longer having the freedom to act,” Olav said a few years after he had acceded to the throne. “We both spoke of what this could mean for the both of us. That's why my father hugged me. We did not know when we would meet again.” The soldiers that Bruno Melchior had spotted through his binoculars on the western side of the Minnesund bridge, belonged to the 4th company of Royal Guards, who early in the morning on April 9th had been bused down to Drøbak to fend off an assumed threat from the Germans coming ashore from the burning cruiser Blücher. Guard Lieutenant Lars Bjærum soon discovered that the threat was nonexsistent. The Blücher had sunk. Among the rocks on the shore, there were around one thousand drenched and weaponless Germans, who had lost all will to fight after their swim through the icy water. “The Germans were mainly naked, as they tried to dry their clothes on the rocks, and many were wounded,” wrote Bjærum, who along with his colleague Erling Blix and 60 Guards took control of the shipwrecked men without any trouble. “Those who were sick remained behind in the care of German doctors. Those unhurt were led in a line following the company’s advance. Many went barefoot, as they had lost their boots.” Amongst the prisoners was the chief of the 163rd division, artillery general Erwin Engelbrecht, air general Wilhelm Süssmann, rear admiral Oskar Kummetz and several other prominent Nazi officers, who had their chance to occupy Oslo spoiled by the efforts of Oscarsborg. They were marched without protest to Søndre Hallangen farmstead, where they were served milk and fires were lit. The company commander, Axel Petersson, had caught some big fish, but the forty-four-year-old Guard captain had a problem. He had no idea what to do with the prisoners, and the connection to Oslo had been broken. “In reality, the transport of Germans represented a lot of work for few men, who also had to fulfil a lot of medical duties,” he wrote in a later report. “Many of those saved from the ship were in a bad condition, and mostly without clothes. We had brought a great supply of bandages, which was used up quickly.” Petersson had thought about bringing the prisoners to Gardermoen. But when his messenger returned from Oslo in the evening, the news were depressing: The capital was lost, division commander Hvinden Haug had left the city and Guard commander Graff-Wang was returning to his barracks at Majorstuen from Fornebu – without launching his planned attack. “The oral order from division was that the company was to withdraw to Lillestrøm at once, and not to worry about the prisoners.” To the Germans’ great surprise, the company had left Søndre Hallangen farm at 19.00 - without bringing along any of the captured top officers, who reached Oslo in stolen buses and cars later that evening. Captain Petersson and his men had reported to Hvinden Haug at Hammerstad boarding house in the morning of April 10th, and a few hours later been ordered to block the bridge at Minnesund. “The company is loaded onto buses and at once driven to Minnesund general store on the western side of the bridge,” wrote Petersson. “While in transit, lieutenant Hans Holmsen was ordered to advance to the bridge’s eastern end with a troop, defend the bridge and cover the others, who were to make roadblocks after collecting tools to do so.”

Circumstance made it so that Holmsen’s troop neared the bridge at just the same time that Walther’s column hit the brakes on the other side. “The Germans took it easy, ate, smoked and observed,” wrote captain John Høiland, who followed the developments from colonel Meinich’s car, deeply depressed. “In front of the commander’s car, they had driven up a truck with six machine guns. All were ready to fire.” Company commader Petersson had seen the soldiers and the endless column of vehicles on the other side. But he had orders to hold the access road, and that order he held to stubbornly. He sent a small troop forward at the double, and followed them himself. “As soon as the troop had gone partway onto the bridge, the machine guns barked out a few series on the other side,” wrote lieutenant Bjærum. “Two trucks with mounted machine guns drove forward along with a car carrying a Norwegian officer.” The ricochets sang off the steel beams. One Guardsman was wounded, and the rest hit the deck. When Petersson came up to them, he met colonel Meinich, in the care of Walther. “I asked his what this was supposed to mean, and got an answer that there was naught to do but surrender,” he wrote in a later report. “The Germans had weapons in position. They had a strong force and several Norwegian captives. Any eventual resistance would have the prisoners suffering the consequences.” Petersson followed Meinich’s entreaty. The 4th Guard company was disarmed. The paratroopers left their heavy municipal transport buses they had brought to Midtskogen behind on the other side of the bridge, and instead took the Guards’ buses – with Petersson’s officers and many enlisted men as new captives. At 11 they had passed the greatest obstacle. The column proceeded southward at speed.

King Haakon and adjutant Wedel Jarlsberg reached Elverum around the same time in miss Sæhlie’s red Horch and set up in yet another of the area’s beautiful big farmsteads, Grønli. Widow Olga Møystad was the wealthiest timber owner in the region, and served them lunch. But the king could not find any peace, and went to the people’s college where he was to meet Bräuer early, at 12.30. Air raid alarms had gone off during the morning and midday, and German planes had been seen at high altitudes. “There had gone out a general notice for voluntary evacuation, and by early afternoon there was almost no one in the streets,” reported Hamar Stiftstidende newspaper. “The area was deserted. Later in the afternoon, the businesses closed as well. The silence was not altogether comfortable. You go around and wait: What will happen now? Is it the quiet before the storm?” In Nybergsund, the crown prince and members of parliament tried to solve urgent tasks, but they found it difficult to concentrate. “The day was spent working and discussing different things,” wrote Church Minister Nils Hjemtveit. “The excitement around the conference between the king and the German minister was quite large however, and we all thought about it most of the time. Would the minister offer acceptable terms for the Norwegian people, or would he just bring the same demands?”

Major general Jakob Hvinden Haug lived through some harrowing minutes when Walther’s colums stopped near to his HQ, searching the nearby farms. “My chief of staff, captain Nils Sæbø, was captured when he was refilling petrol by the road, a mere 50 meters from Hammerstad boarding house,” the general major noted, who feared discovery at any minute. But the Germans left the boarding house alone and continued on south. “I now only had my divisional adjutant left from my staff.” Only a few kilometers away, major Eystein Torkildsen and his battalion of 190 officers and enlisted men were getting into positions at the new line of defence at Andelva river – after having marched from Gardermoen the same night. Hvinden Haug had declared a state of war and had ordered the central bridge at Piro blockaded. When the Germans drove up with Norwegian and white flags waving from the front car, captain Ørnulf Simonsen and his first company waited for them with loaded rifles on both sides of the road. “At once and totally surprising for the Germans, they opened fire,” Simonsen wrote in his after action report. The shots fell with deadly effect. The paratrooper Otto Redlin fell over, dredfully wounded. The same happened to sergeant Samuel Isaksen, who had just been captured, while the overeager lieutenant Wilhelm Götte, who already had gunshot wounds in the arm from his altercation with captain Øi, broke his hip. He slipped on the ice and was run over by the following car. “The column halted, and an officer in a Norwegian uniform came out onto the road and shouted: Stop shooting, stop shooting! Norwegian officer here!” When the salvoes stopped a few minutes later, captain Simonsen came to the road to meet colonel Meinich and a German negotiator. But it was a ruse, and major Walther was not interested in negotiations. “Several Germans rushed out with their SMGs aimed at my troops and demanded Hände hoch!” wrote Simonsen, who was caught off guard. “Several shots were fired because they didn’t react fast enough. The German commander personally aimed his gun at my breast and asked in a furious tone if I had given the order to fire: Warum schiessen Sie doch? Wir kommen als Freunde!” (“Why do you shoot? We come as friends!”) The Germans spent some time refueling at a local gas station. When the column continued on toward the bridge over Andelva a few hundred meters further south, Simonsen and a second lieutenant was forced to walk in front, carrying a white kerchief on the end of Meinich’s sabre. “I went forward to meet the German commandant, who was together with a group of Norwegian officers,” reported lieutenant Jarle Valle, who covered the bridge with 80 men from the battalion’s 2nd company. “He demanded full surrender and asked to avoid any bloodshed. The Norwegian officers implied that they had been placed to the front of the column, and that the German force was large.” Walther gave the young lieutenant 15 minutes to get his superiors’ approval to let them past. After that they would open fire, and the bridge would be stormed by three German regiments, who he supposedly had under his command. “It was a monstrous bluff,” wrote corporal Bruno Melchior, who followed the talk from one of the trucks. “But the commander looked at his watch. The negotiator would have to hurry if he was to hold to his time limit.” Valle sought out battalion commander Torkildsen, who again contacted Hvinden Haug. But the divisional commander did not want to trigger a bloodbath, and saw no way to salvage the situation. Bad turns had followed bad turns, and the captives would pay the price if he gave the order to open fire. “I found that I should accept the Germans passing through our lines on the condition that nothing was done to lieutenant Valle’s men,” he later wrote. The Norwegian soldiers got up and stood at order arms while Walther’s trucks rumbled over the bridge. When the same happened at Skedsmo, the military subjugation seemed complete. At Hvinden Haug’s orders, 500 men from the well-armed and almost intact battalion Hans Løken let the Germans and their prisoners pass without firing. “The soldiers stood by their weapons at the side of the road,” wrote corporal Bruno Melchior. “When we looked back on the heavily fortified Norwegian corridor, we could not believe our eyes. It was almost impossible to see how we were not already in captivity.” At 12.30 they passed Nitelva river. There were no more obstacles. The road to Oslo was clear.

The king outside Elverum people’s college Envoy Curt Bräuer reached Elverum people’s college at 14.45, several hours late. The roads were a mess, the traffic had been intense, and he had put off Mrs. Ursula Spiller at Hamar hospital. “He apolgized for his lateness,” noted Foreign Minister Halvdan Koht, who welcomed him into the spartanly furnished school hall. Sparks flew, right from the start. The fifty-one year old Prussian Bräuer had had more than 20 years of experience at Auswärtiges Amt and the foreign office stations in South Africa, Belgium and France, and was an experienced diplomat. But his intelligence was not overwhelming, and he did not have a well-developed sense of intuition. “Some of the first things he said, was that he chided the government for not keeping to our side of the negotiations and not halting combat,” Koht wrote. “The fortress at Bolærne had continued to fire.” There were reasons why Bräuer - like Quisling the previous day – wanted Bolærne to surrender. There was a critical lack of troops in Oslo. As long as the fortress held, the Germans did not dare to send the transport fleet carrying general Richard Pellengahr’s division into the fjord. The reinforcements carrying vehicles and heavy weapons would keep away, which spoiled any further large-scale offensives. The aging professor Koht, naturally, could not know why the surrender of Bolærne was so important to the envoy, but what he lacked in political soul- searching, he made up for in verbal bellicosity. “That was defensive, and that was legal,” he said. “It was worse what the Germans had done. They had sent troops to capture the king, the cabinet and the Storting.” Bräuer had met his match, and beat a hasty retreat. If he wanted to salvage the negotiations, he could hardly admit to the raid being a part of Hitler’s double-dealing policies. But Spiller had died after he reached Hamar hospital, and it made him the perfect scapegoat. He answered glibly: “That was the personal project of the air attaché. And he died for it.” It was a bad start, and it did not go any better. The king wanted witnesses present, and denied negotiating with the German diplomat personally. But Bräuer had been personally instructed by the Führer, and insisted on talking to the king one-on-one. Only when he threatened to leave without laying out his offer, did the king relent. “Their conversation lasted around 10 minutes,” wrote Koht. “The king told me later that Bräuer began to speak of the great respect they had for the king in Germany. Besides, he laid at the king’s feet the responsibility he would have to carry, if the youth of Norway were to bleed to death in a hopeless war.” Bräuer had once again misjudged his opponents. The silent and friendly monarch had been part of Europe’s youngest parliamentary democracy for the last 35 turbulent years. Now he was being threatened and humiliated by a representative for a lawless tyranny looked upon with fear and revulsion by the rest of the world. It was a heartbreaking moment. The aggressor blamed the victim for his crimes, and that was more than king Haakon could bear. “The German minister laid the responsibility for the entire war on my shoulders,” he noted in his diary. When Koht was called in a few minutes later, the king was closed off and silent. “He said very little during the conversation,” wrote Koht. “I think he was so gripped, so shaken, that it was hard to get any words out of him. He kept nodding to me to answer Bräuer’s words. And he nodded at my answers.” It quickly became apparent that Bräuer had not come to negotiate on any other grounds than that which he had used earlier. “On the contrary, the terms were intensified,” Koht wrote. “Especially the terms of a Cabinet headed by Quisling.” The tug-of-war negotiation went on for a couple of hours – the Cabinet’s negotiations committee participating near the end – but Bräuer had nothing to give. “Quisling had to lead the government. That was explicitly given by Der Führer, and further impressed upon him in the course of a phone conversation of 25 – or was it 35 – minutes.” When the German diplomat left Elverum people’s college at 16.15, the fronts had hardened. Bräuer had gained no concessions. The king had declared that he, as a constitutional monarch, would have to talk it over with the cabinet. If the German envoy would wait at Eidsvoll railway station, he would get an answer later in the evening. Neither the king nor Koht were known for letting their feelings show, but the meeting had been a gigantic pressure on their nerves. Bräuer had, with the self-righteous instinct of an assailant, plunged his finger into the victim’s heart: Blood would flow if the king refused, and many young lives would be lost. But he was not to blame – the assailant was. The king and his government stood for democracy, humanism and legality. Bräuer did not, who represented tyranny, wantonness and brutal violence. But could they resist, the way things were militarily? Could they, with a clear conscience, ask their youths for the greatest sacrifice – when Mephisto enticed them with peace and prosperity? “It was clear that he was in need,” wrote Koht, who sat with king Haakon in a school room after Bräuer had left. “He was almost crying. He told me it was terrible for him to take on the responsibility for the blood that was going to be spilled in a war. I too, was gripped. I understood his pain, and looked fearfully at what was to come. In that moment, we were just two men, joined in suffering. Without thinking, we gripped one another. I knew no words of comfort. I could only exclaim: Oh king!”

The king had gathered himself when he reached Nybergsund a couple of hours later. “He asked for an immediate council,” Hjelmtveit wrote about the decisive hour that followed. “He was deeply shaken by the cold and superior way that dr. Bräuer had laid out his claims.” The sixty-seven-year-old monarch had had little sleep the last 24 hours, and Nybergsund tourist station was a small, rural place to sleep, without any great comforts. But he spoke long and insistently with words that will forever shine in our nation’s history. “On me it has been lain a great impression that those calamities that will befall our country and people will be lain at my feet if their terms are refused. And that is a heavy responsibility, so heavy that I dread to carry it. The government will make the decision, but my position is clear. I cannot agree to the German demands. It would go against everything that I see as my duty as king of Norway since I arrived in this country almost 35 years ago.” There was dignity and power in his words, but all could see the cost. The king cried openly, and had to have long breaks to regain his composure. “I have gone about creating a tradition in the new Norwegian kingdom, a tradition which corresponds with the Norwegian spirit and its way of thinking. I wanted to create a constitutional kingdom in loyalty to the people whose call I took up in 1905. I cannot break that line.” In the simple, quiet room, he spoke straight to the heart of the assembled ministers. “We were all deeply gripped by the power in the king’s words,” wrote Hjelmtveit. “Clearer than ever, we saw the man behind the words. The king, who had drawn a line for himself and his works, a line he could not cross.” The conclusion carried the same adamant firmness: “I do not want it to be decisive for the government. But I have gone into myself and weighed my position, and I cannot name Quisling, that I know have no support among the people in general, or in its representatives, the Storting, as prime minister. If the Cabinet therefore will decide to agree to the German demand, then there is no other way for me than to abdicate.” The die had been cast, 36 after the flight had begun. The enemy had gained a face, the nation a leader. Even if the fight was to be hopeless, fighting was necessary – for the rule of the people, against tyranny. The king’s noble words steeled those who still quailed and those wracked by anxiety. Following a short debate, the mood was one-sided: Bräuer’s demands were to be refused. As Hjelmtveit wrote: “If we through five years of cooperation had learned to respect our king, then with these words he grew even further as a great, straightforward man of character, that he stood out as a leader, a worthy figurehead to rally around in such a terrible time for our people.”

The king’s refusal, now in the National Archive. Translation: State Council with the King.

---- The crown prince was present.

Prime Minister Nygaardsvold, along with the ministers Ystgaard, Hjelmtveit, Lie, Strøstad, Frihagen, Hindal and Ljungberg present.

Foreign Minister Koht along with the ministers Wold and Torp not present.

The council advised the King to refuse that German ultimatum which Germany (in the copy shown) has given to appoint major Quisling as Prime Minister.

The King accepted the state council’s advice.

Signed Haakon

Below signed by Johan Nygaardsvold and Bredo Rolsted, Cabinet Secretary.

Bräuer received the message via telephone in the station hall at Eidsvoll at around 20.00 and relayed it to Berlin: After a two-hour conversation with the king, Foreign Minister Koht has relayed to me the following on my way back to Oslo: The king will not name a Quisling government, and the decision has been unanimously decided by the Cabinet. On my question (of whether the fight would go on) Koht answered: ‘Resistance will be given for as long as possible.’”

Major Erich Walther and his around 150 paratroopers were at the same time being feted as heroes in Oslo City Hall, which they had taken as temporary barracks. He had failed his main objective. But his return journey had been a triumph, and around 80 Norwegian officers and enlisted men had been interned as prisoners in the University hall. “The unit travelled 400 kilometers with drivers of whom half did not have driving licences,” the report stated. “With no connection rearwards, they plunged 200 kilometers into enemy territory. They took 1000 prisoners, and more than 3000 Norwegians were disarmed.” The numbers were blown up, but the list of war booty was still long: Three 7,5cm field cannons, 56 grenade chests, 28 machine guns, 600 rifles, 60 pistils, 220 000 rounds of ammunition, 30 cases of machine gun ammunition, 300 rucksacks, 26 vehicles, riding equipment for 600 horses, a field kitchen, a truckload of foodstuffs and piles of other equipment. That equipment replaced some of what had been lost aboard Blücher, and major Walther was satisfied: “No one had slept for 48 hours, and they all went to sleep in the evening.”

Mrs. Ursula Spiller had also returned. She had never gotten to speak with her husband, who had died in his sleep a few hours before she got to him. A man from the local undertaker’s office drove her back from Hamar hospital to the attaché villa at Slemdal in Oslo. “I went back to Oslo with the coffin in a hearse,” she wrote in her family chronicle. “Do not ask me how I managed that gruesome trip, I do not know it myself. Behind me in the coffin lay my dead husband. Ahead of me an uncertain future.”

Adolf Hitler had declared to Bräuer in a midnight telephone call on the 9th of April that “resistance was to be crushed without pity” so that country and people were destroyed – if the king did not appoint Quisling. At the morning conference the next day – long before the envoy reached Elverum – he made it clear that he was serious. He didn’t care about the results of any negotiations and would not wait. Quisling was his man, and the Führer wanted to deal with it quickly. The order that general Alfred Jodl sent from the Reich Chancellery to colonel general Nicolaus von Falkenhorst in Hamburg at 14.00 brooked no argument: “The old Norwegian government is to be arrested.” To his minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, he was already raving about how the North was to be recreated: Norway and Denmark would not be protectorates, but enter into a northern germanic country union with a common foreign, industry and customs policy – obviously with Quisling as a local Führer in the north. Germany would establish central military support and take responsibility for security issues for the two countries, who would disband their armies. “One admires more and more the audacity and overview of the Führer’s actions,” Goebbels wrote in his diary. “First one must act, and then one can philosophize! That is ancient roman wisdom, here in a new modern wrapping. Norway still has small pockets of resistance. The country is formally at war with us. That will not last long.”

Chapter 10

Bombs over Nybergsund

Nybergsund, from Wednesday 10th to Thursday 11th April The king’s refusal had been a definitive turning point, but there was still a ways to go from word to act. Prime Minister Johan Nygaardsvold held a beautiful speech in closing, but there were still doubts if he and some other cabinet members really wanted to fight. “The administration now turns to all of the Norwegian people and ask it to keep up a legal government in the country – Norwegian constitution, Norwegian freedom and Norwegian independence,” went the first proclamation, which was sent out the next day. “Things may look dark for Norway in this moment, and the assailants may destroy much. But the government has a sure hope that a new and bright future will come one day. It pledges the whole of the Norwegian people to keep to the Norwegian heritage of freedom in faithfulness to those great ideas that has carried the country through the ages. Long live the fatherland! Long live a free Norway!” The proclamation had been penned by Koht, in his assured way, but contained no word of war or military measures – despite the imminent need for such things. The Army supreme command sat isolated at Grandlund hotel at Rena, 50 kilometers away. Commanding general Kristian Laake had not been invited to join the negotiations as a military advisor, and had barely spoken to the Minister of Defence since the morning of April 9th, the same day that he turned 65. He had waited for the Cabinet members outside Festiviteten in Hamar, but in the panic that followed, any proper conversation was impossible. He was dressed in civilian attire, which did not give any great impression of a man of action. “For me as an officer, it was depressing, to put it mildly, that the commander of the Army arrived at Hamar in a civilian coat and umbrella,” King Olav later said in an interview. “It was more than depressing.” Thirty-six hours had been lost since the invasion started, and the connection between the political and military leadership had still not been made. For every hour that ticked by, the ability to resist was weakened. In the rooms at Granlund hotel, where 150 staff officers tried to work, the mood was increasingly bitter, angry and pessimistic. “I have tried to cheer them up over there,” said the military historian colonel Johannes Schiøtz, who had met MP Christian L. Jensen and some of his colleagues in the morning of the 10th of April outside the hotel. “They do not take the situation lightly, but we cannot give up until it is absolutely necessary. The Germans caught us totally off guard and halted our mobilization, but things are looking slightly brighter. We have to resist for as long as possible. Even if it’s for no longer than eight days, aid may have arrived by then. You got to cheer them up as well!” Jensen had tried, but the feeling of hopelessness and defeat was not easy to turn around. The mobilization had failed, and many had listened to Quisling’s exhortation on the radio to stay home. Some of the most important depots were in German hands. The pieces of the Army lacked weapons, medical equipment, food and ammunition. “We have repeatedly asked for funds to maintain depots spread throughout the country,” said chief of staff Rasmus Hatledal. “Nothing ever came of that.” Jensen was troubled when he left Granlund hotel. “With this knowledge, it was not easy for us civilians to see the developing situation in an optimistic way,” he wrote in a script to his children. “But colonel Schiøtz’ words still rang in our ears, and the weather was wonderful.”

Hatledal's enlarged consumption of sleeping pills took their toll, and he was still outraged about the Minister of Justice’s behaviour that morning. There was a fundamental lack of trust, and it could not last. When the rumors started going around that the government wanted to negotiate with the Germans, general Laake decided to take the initiative. “I told the general chief of staff to call in Wold,” he said to the military investigation committee after the war. “The goal was to clarify the military situation to the administration, which until then, we had had no contact with.” It turned into a terrible clash across the hotel salon’s rustic furniture, where Laake had gathered his chief officers. The juror from northern Norway (Wold) had no respect for gilded rank stripes or epaulets and went after the officers like they were indicted crooks. When he, deeply unfairly, accused them of spoiling the mobilization, the anger almost boiled over. “The younger officers became so embittered that I feared they would start shooting,” said Quisling’s ex-party member, major Adolf Munthe in the autumn of 1940. The sober chief of intelligence, Harald Wrede Holm, tried to convince Wold that the administration had to make a statement at once. “People did not know if the Nygaardsvold administration existed or not. Quisling had said that the administration had stepped down, and it had not been contested. Neither the people in general or the army knew who to turn to.” Wold parried immediately like it was the officers’ duty to declare war and to make political statements: “But we have heard nothing from the commanding admiral or general either!” The country stood at the edge of the abyss. But the communication between those who would lead the people in a fight to the death had broken down. The officers felt humiliated and that the minister wanted to deflect blame onto them. “It was imperative for him to deflect the blame from this difficult situation from the administration and onto the military officials,” wrote Wrede Holm. Commander-in-chief Laake had a hard time breaking out of his passivity. His situational description was black as night, and he begged for the negotiations with Bräuer to continue – until the British help arrived. Both Wold and his companion, MP Neri Valen, broke in and demanded action. “But several of the officers answered that they had been to Germany and knew the German mentality. They painted a picture of how the Germans would crush all resistance.” Wold was silent when he left the hotel with Valen. He was clearly shaken by both the officers’ rage and their defeatist attitude. But there was something else that bothered the minister. “While in the meeting, the minister had gone to the phone several times,” explained Valen. “When he returned from his final conversation with Trygve Lie towards the tail end of the meeting, he did not say much. His attempts to convince the general staff to fight on, petered out.” Wold made sure that the officer following them from Granlund hotel to the sheriff’s office was out of hearing range before he confided to the MP. “He told me that Lie had told him things looked grim. The Germans supported Quisling, and the administration saw no other way out than to flee to Sweden. But the officers were not to hear of it. It was to be a secret.” Valen's analysis was thus: “Through his conversation with Lie, Wold knew that the administration viewed further resistance as futile. Then there was no further use in him trying to tell them to fight on.”

In the German headquarters at the KNA-hotel in Oslo, the situation was equally dark. Chief of operations in Norway, infantry general Nicolaus von Falkenhorst had flown in from Hamburg at around 18.00 the 10th of April in a terrible mood, and lieutenant colonel Hartwig Pohlman and everyone else walked on eggshells around him. “He has been grumpy all day, and I have not had an easy time of it,” chief of staff Erich Buschenhagen had told Pohlman in a telephone call. “His mood will not be any better tonight, as he hates flying. Break all the legs and treat him well, and I’ll be along in a couple of days.” The fifty-five-year-old Falkenhorst was born in the slavic city of Breslau in Prussia (now Wroclaw in Poland) and belonged to the bedrock core of officers in the Wehrmacht – with almost 40 years’ experience from the Kaiser’s armies, the reichswehr of the Weimar republic and Hitler’s new army. He was not a military rising star, but had climbed the ladder of Prussian pecking order rung by rung. In contrast to many of his colleagues, he came from a family with no land and no money, and that could lead to inferiority complexes. “One lacked in him a certain frankness,” wrote Pohlman, who would grow to hate his boss. “It was possibly inherited from his clearly Slavic descent. Only as a young lieutenant in the 7th grenadier division did he change his name from von Jastreczemski to Falkenhorst, and his contemporaries only called him Starosten (an old term for a Slavic leader, it can also be a play on starling instead of falcon, author’s note.).” As chief of the 21st army corps, von Falkenhorst had taken the fortress city of Graudenz during the Polish campaign in the autumn of 1939 and helped occupy the western parts of old Prussia. “But he had not been recommended by his superiors to lead the occupation of Norway. That was Hitler, who had found his name in the reports after the landings in Finland in 1918 and spontaneously made him operational commander.” Pohlman praised Falkenhorst’s solid experience as a general staff officer “But he lacks consequence and persistence to a certain degree in his style of leadership and when giving orders. He was also well-known for talking a lot, and jumping between subjects. Often, his conversational partners could not get a word in, without him ever seeming to be aware of it.” There were obvious reasons for the general’s bad mood. The campaign in Norway was not progressing as planned, and the details of it were beginning to reach Berlin. “The Norwegians have shot the beautiful Blücher to pieces,” noted Goebbels in his diary. “They will pay dearly for that!” Hitler and Göring’s paratrooper elite had failed to capture the king and cabinet, and envoy Bräuer’s efforts at negotiation had petered out into the sand. “The Norwegian administration is still not under control. They cannot even be found! What a country!” During the evening, messages arrived of new setbacks in Narvik. The euphoric mood of the previous day had been replaced by short tempers and depression. “Our losses are seemingly not small, but we cannot get any connection. The evening passes in paralyzing uncertainty.” Falkenhorst carried the final responsibility, and he had every reason to fear Hitler’s wrath. The oral reports he received during the evening from operations officer Polman, general Engelbrecht, admiral Böhm and envoy Bräuer, who had arrived at the hotel directly from his expedition to Hamar, did not ease his mind. A war was brewing between the Army and the Navy over who was to blame for Blücher’s destruction and the miserable situation in Oslo, but Falkenhorst would not listen. “He got angry when survivors from the Blücher told of their harrowing experiences,” Pohlman wrote. “Mostly, he brushed them off brusquely.” Bolærne had surrendered that same morning, but the reinforcement convoys had suffered noticeable losses and would not dock until Thursday the 11th of April. It would take several days to offload the vehicles and organize the remaining units, which would further delay the conquest of the central eastern areas. In the meantime, he had to solve Hitler’s latest and most pressing mission: the arrest of the Nygaardsvold administration.

When Terje Wold reached Nybergsund a few hours after his dramatic meeting with Army command, the king’s refusal had again changed the mood: They would keep fighting. It was a decision that was agreeable to the minister’s instincts, but he was “very depressed” after the visit to Rena with those who were supposed to lead the fighting in the field. “He did not think they were up to the task,” wrote Nils Hjelmtveit. “He felt that they were ready to give up the whole thing, and he had at times feared that he would be held captive by the staff.” It was a full-blown crisis with only one solution: The commanding general would have to be changed for someone who could clean house and regain trust. The choice fell on the General Inspector for the Army, colonel Otto Ruge, who since he got back from his inspection tour the previous night, had time and again encouraged them to fight. “However it might turn out, we have to fight, in consideration of those who will come after us,” Ruge had declared to any and all politicians that would listen. “To give up without a fight will ruin our nation’s self-esteem.” While Trygve Lie went hunting for the new military leader by telephone, Laake was called in to accept his dismissal. In the meantime, the administration chose to keep the Swedish option open. Terje Wold was sent across the border with four rucksacks containing two million kroner in cash, which he next morning placed in an account at Gothenburg Bank’s branch office in the village center of Transtrand. The money contained the cash reserves from the Norwegian State Bank’s brance office at Hamar, and could only be accessed by Wold himself, Prime Minister Nygaardsvold, Foreign Minister Koht or Finance Minister . Earlier European wars had left behind a slew of refugee politicians and princes who begged their way. It was a fate the administration wanted to avoid – if it was forced to leave Norway.

Hitler's order to Falkenhorst was threefold: He was to neutralize the Nygaardsvold administration and so make sure that resistance in eastern Norway stopped. He would also beat down all resistance in the Oslofjord area to secure the arrival of reinforcements and restore the train connection between Oslo and Trondheim – with relief of the trapped forces in Narvik as a final goal. He received his first intelligence brief from envoy Carl Bräuer, who took part in the discussions at the KNA hotel that evening. “On my return to Oslo, I spied roadblocks and minor troop movements near Hamar and Eidsvoll,” he reported to Berlin. “I passed my impressions directly to the commander-in-chief.” Operations officer Hartwig Pohlman, who was charged with translating the directives into concrete instructions for the underlying units, had gotten Hitler’s orders directly by telephone from chief of staff Buschenhagen in a form that brooked no misunderstanding: “The king, the administration and (the British envoy Cecil) Dormer are to be shunted out by any means necessary.” for Pohlman, who lacked both maps and writing help, the night was long: “I worked long into the small hours before I could jump into bed, deathly tired.” The results showed themselves the next morning: 400 men of the 3rd gebirgsjäger division under major Hans von Poncet, who had been landed from the cruiser Lützow two days earlier, were sent north via train. At the same time, major Erich Walther and his paratroopers were mobilized anew. “We were woken up at 05.00,” wrote Walther, who had slept on the floor of Oslo City Hall since the previous evening. “The unit was to thrust north and east with two subordinate infantry companies.” The first troop under lieutenant Hans-Georg drove off first, and was followed by approximately 300 men in ten buses and trucks. Walther had learned from his experiences the day before, and wanted to avoid the bridge over Minnesund. He therefore crossed the Vorma river at Svanfoss, around 30 km south of Eidsvoll. “The bridge was intact. We continued the advance toward Hamar on the east side of the river.”

In Nybergsund, king Haakon and crown prince Olav had spent the night at Heggemoen farm, a few kilometers south of the village. “They came late at night and were very tired,” the farmer Martin Nyhuus told the writer Thorbjørn Bakken. “Mother said that the king was so tired that he took the bedsheets from her hands and told her that he would make his own bed. He wanted to sleep as quickly as possible.” The first military precautions had been taken. The cars had been given a lick of white paint, and guards had been posted. Escape routes had been mad through the metre-high snow, and the king and crown prince slept in separate buildings. “I remember the crown prince coming down into the kitchen early in the morning to get some water,” told Nyhuus, who was just six years old at the time. “He stood there, his shirtsleeves folded back and with his suspenders hanging off his back. Later, I carried the king’s suitcases. Those are things one remembers.” The flag captain of the Norwegian American Line, Kjeld Stub Irgens, who came bearing pretty words and promises from an increasingly desperate Quisling was sent packing back to Oslo, his case unheard, while general Laake was granted honourable discharge in the king’s council at 09.00. The air raid siren went off during the meeting, and the escape routes were used. “I remember hiding under a spruce tree,” said Nyhuus. “I think it was the first time I saw an airplane. It came in so low that the treetops bent under the air pressure.” It was general Falkenhorst who had ordered a reconnaissance mission over Østlandet as a part of the major attack that was brewing. The paratroopers’ raid had failed in part because Walther didn’t know where the king and cabinet were staying. That would not be repeated, and Falkenhorst had put the 10th flying corps on high alert. No means were below Nazi Germany’s dignity. In Berlin, the legendary chief of the Foreign Office’s justice department , Friedrich Wilhelm Graus, was given a perfidious mission. He called the legation in Oslo and asked envoy Bräuer to invite king Haakon to new negotiations. The perfidious part was that the Germans were not interested in any further negotiations. They wanted to use the invitation to reveal the king’s location. As Gaus said it to Bräuer: “You must inform Falkenhorst of every detail once the meeting has been agreed to.” In Berlin, the architect of the plot was pleased. “The Führer does not take the intrigues of the old Norwegian government seriously,” Goebbels noted in his diary. “All resistance will now be crushed.” But in Norway, the will to fight became ever clearer. General Falkenhorst had just after arriving demanded the right to send two military trains carrying troops and supplies from Oslo to Trondheim – through the Norwegian lines. But the board of NSB had laid out the case for chief of staff Rasmus Hatledal, who contacted the administration. The administration declined, and Hatledal instructed divisional commander Hvinden Haug to make sure that bridges and tunnels between Lillestrøm and Eidvoll were blown up. “The district engineer aided the blowing up of the Bøn tunnel and also blew up a bridge over the Andelva river.” wrote major general Hvinden Haug. “Explosives were requisitioned from the local general stores.” Major von Poncet’s gebirgsjäger battalion had detrained at Dal station and advanced along the railwayline. But two companies from Battalion Løken - who had been humiliated during Walther’s retreat the previous day – had taken up position around the blown tunnel. During the ensuing firefight, two German gebirgsjägers were killed, and two officers captured. The railway was blocked. Poncet chose to retreat to regroup and find other means of transportation. One setback followed the next, and the Norwegians’ defiance seemed to be endless. At the KNA hotel, Falkenhorst’s mood grew steadily worse, and at 11.30 a new order went out to the 10th flying corps: “After a preemptive air attack on Elverum, one company of paratroopers will jump out to cut off access to Sweden for the nearby troops and to capture the Norwegian administration.” The king had refused any further negotiations, and the call to armed resistance had been broadcast across Norway and other countries. It was more than Hitler could bear, and everything was to be put in toward a decisive, destructive victory. “I was just about to sit down for dinner when the order came to return to the airfield base Schleswig Land,” wrote lieutenant Herbert Schmidt, who had turned back in the sea of fog over Skagerrak the 9th of April, and had waited listlessly for new missions at Stendal, which was the paratroopers’ main base. “I sounded the alarm, and everyone ran off. The rumors came in of a big push, which would take us far into Norway on the hunt for the king and the fleeing government.” The second company of Walther’s paratrooper battalion was already underway from Oslo towards Hamar along back roads. The first company was now to be dropped a few Scandinavian miles (one Scandinavian mile is 10km.) further east and block off the roads leading to the border.

It was an idyllic morning in Nybergsund. The spring sun made the snow-covered fields sparkle, and meltwater dripped from roofs and trees. Lunch was served at the tourist station, and crown prince Olav shopped for sunglasses in Mr. Ødegaard’s shop. Prime Minister Nygaardsvold dropped in too, hunting for a size 44 shirt, but they only had size 43 left. “He took it with a bit of gallows humour,” told salesman Ivar Nysæther. “I’ll take the shirt, he said. I’m sure we all will have to tighten our belts in the future.” The flow of refugees was still great, and the gravel roads of the small community buzzed with life. “Here, for a while was Norway’s political center with king and administration,” wrote count Carl Douglas, who was first secretary at the Swedish legation in Oslo. “But it was not easy to see anything one expects as typical in such a center in wartime. It was all rather an impression of something idyllic and rather confused. Ministers and high officials promenaded around, squinting at the sun. Now and then they retired to the hotel or the café to ‘confer’. Cars came and went or parked where they found space.”

It was two of the Luftwaffe’s most experienced bomber wings, Kampfgeschwader 4 and 26 who was appointed to bomb the king’s and government’s position and the mission was carried out with the usual German thoroughness. Three Heinkel 111 bombers were in late morning sent out on an armed reconnaissance over Hedmark county – with one of the group commanders of KG 4, colonel Hans-Joachim Rath as leader. The forty-six-year-old Rath was one of Germany’s pioneer flyers, and would make general before the end of the war. “The formation attacked Elverum military camp,” wrote the later Knight’s Cross recipient in his quite unprecise memorandum after the war. “It was taken badly by king Haakon, who was present.” The attacks was carried out at a height of 1000 meters, and Rath could naturally not know who was present. But the five bombs which hit Elverum and Terningmoen killed one soldier and lit raging fires. It was almost seven Scandinavian miles from Elverum to Nybergsund, and the refugees didn’t register the attacks – except that the telephone connection was destroyed. “It was like we were completely inside a blanket of thick fog,” wrote minister Nils Hjelmtveit. “We could not keep up with events around us. We therefore had to prepare for that an attack could come at any moment.” At Rena, the staff officers could see the black smoke pouring from Terningmoen. The recently appointed major general Otto Ruge had just arrived, and was trying to make up the status. “The officers were quite dejected, as one can reasonably expect,” he wrote in his diary. “Nothing of what the general staff had proposed, had been carried out. The mobilization plans were overturned, and the telegraph and telephone connections broken everywhere. One knew very little of how the rest of the country fared. The general staff had been on the move the entire time. Most of them looked sleepy and unshaven.” Ruge wanted to prosecute a defensive fight, and fall back to the north – until the allied aid arrived and a counterattack could be effected. The first officers were sent out with instructions to underlying units, and the staff was ordered to break up. “The Østerdalen valley was not a place to stay for the army command. It had to move to somewhere more centralized – the area around Lillehammer.”

In the meantime, the ten buses carrying the 2nd paratrooper company and the infantrymen closed in on Minnesund along the road on the eastern side of the river. “Suddenly, we ran into a roadblock,” Walther wrote in his report. “The vehicle in front carrying Sepp Biehl’s group drove at high speed toward the closest tree and came under fire from civilian shooters and a heavy machine gun set up on the slope.” It was a bloody battle close to Hemli farm, with captain Gröscke and the lieutenants Blücher and Zuber in the lead. “By machinegun fire and grenades, we killed all the civilians at the barricade,” Walther wrote. “On our side, oberjäger Kaminska was rendered useless by a gunshot through his shoulder.” A machine gun nest was broken up, and around 20 Norwegians were taken prisoner. But Hvinden Haug’s orders to blow up the crossings had gone out in time. Holtåa bridge a few kilometers north had been undermined with 27 kilos of dynamite taken from the local sawmill. When Gröscke’s troop closed in, the charge was detonated. The bridge fell into the deep cleft and made any further attempt at advancing futile. For the second time in 24 hours, Walther was forced to turn around.

The observations of colonel Rath, available air photographs and the messages coming from Bräuer and German agents in Trysil, was enough for Falkenhorst and the Luftwaffe staff officers. The decision was taken at noon: The final attack would deploy 19 Heinkel 111 bombers from KG 4 against Elverum and 11 like machines from KG 26 against Nybergsund. As stated in the Luftwaffe’s situational report the same evening: “Between 16.00 and 16.30, eleven bombers took off to attack Nybergsund, where the government’s hiding place was assumed to be.”

King Haakon, crown prince Olav and the members of the cabinet had sat down to the dinner table at Nybergsund tourist station at around 17.00. Apricot porridge with cream was served for dessert, but minister Hjelmtveit was not especially hungry. “I went to the telephone operator and asked secretary Finn Larsen if the connection to Elverum was up and running again,” he wrote in Vekstår og vargtid. Larsen could not connect, and instead tried the central at Tørberget, a couple Scandinavian miles west of Nybergsund. Suddenly, Hjelmtveit could hear the operator lady screaming. “She saw two huge flying machines coming eastward just nearby.” Hjelmtveit reacted spontaneously, ran out and opened the door of the nearest car. “I gave our improvised signal, a series of short blasts of the horn, and ran on down the road.”

Journalist Nils Lone of Norsk Telegrambyrå heard the honking, and glanced out of the window of the Cooperative Farm building, where the bureau had established a field editorial office. “I saw three airplanes coming over a ridge toward Nybergsund. The king, crown prince and administration were late in getting out. Several of the cabinet members crawled into hiding around halfway to their goal. The crown price ran on into the edge of the forest, and the king hitched a ride on the outside of a car. He declined riding along any further, but threw himself down into the snow when the airplanes were right above him.” With their 23-metre wingspan and their roaring engines, every one of the black Heinkel- machines were a ghastly sight. Each of them carried a deadly two-ton payload and the drums of their seven machine guns held thousands of bullets. “The first bombs whined through the air long before I reached the cover I had prepard for myself earlier that day,” wrote Hjelmtveit, who dove behind a brick wall, and crawled in underneath a stack of firewood. A bit further on, Nygaardsvold just got in cover behind an outhouse. “With a tearing, piercing whine, the bombs cut through the air and exploded with such noise that the ground shook.” The first wave of airplanes passed the small gathering of houses in a manner of minutes. “We heard the bombs explode among the buildings,” reported Lone. “When I ran onto the road, I saw the Cooperative going up in flames.” The same went for the NTB bus, which had been parked at a petrol station, a storehouse and the schoolhouse. The flames rose into the sky, and the smoke could be seen a long way off. The beautiful spring day had turned into an inferno, and dazed people tried to crawl deeper into the woods before the airplanes returned. Nygaardsvold kicked in a piece of the outhouse wall, and found several cabinet members inside. “There they stood for one and a half hours, while the airplanes came rushing by again and again,” it read in the autobiography I malstrømmen. (In the maelstrom) ”Every time, they thought that now the outhouse and themselves would be hit and destroyed. Only 25-30 meters away, three large bombs fell, which blew up earthen craters deeper than a man’s height and six-eight meters in diameter. Nygaardsvold reckoned that what saved them from showers of earth and wooden splinters was the outer wall of old, crude timber. The air pressure was still so great that it threw him against the other wall of the tight passage.” Amidst a lull in the bombing, Foreign Minister Koht had hitched a ride with secretary Larsen, and got out of the town centre. “I cannot deny that it was frightful to follow the bombers as they passed back and forth over our heads. Sometimes they came in so low that it looked like they were touching the treetops. One could see their faces and see how they aimed at us with their machineguns. The bombs fell, and bullets whined around us.” An incendiary bomb fell only 20-30 meters from Hjelmtveit’s hiding place. “Earth and rocks showered over me. Later I saw that my coat had been burned through in five-six places. I suffered a small burn on one hand.” Every time the airplanes passed over, they peppered the buildings and forest with machine gun fire. “The bullets whined past my ears with an unceasing ‘piff-piff’, and I saw how they whipped up the snow around me. It was certainly not a tonic for the nerves.” The nightmare ceased after an hour. Nygaardsvold and the others from the outhouse exited Nybergsund by car. The Prime Minister sought cover in the snow underneath a tree, when he was laid out in a coat, suit and walking shoes. “I do not think I could have done any more, even if one stood over me with a revolver,” he wrote in his diary. Koht had the feeling that the attack had lasted for a small eternity. “I had a strange feeling that I was a wild animal in the woods, that killers were hunting, and had every right to kill.” At around 19.30 - a good while after the airplanes had disappeared – people began coming out of their hiding places. They were met by shocking destruction: People cried, buildings and cars were on fire, and smashed inventory and splinters filled the streets. Explosive bombs had left deep craters, and all the windows in the tourist station were blown out. “I thought to myself, as I waked toward the crossroads, that there could hardly be many people left alive,” wrote Hjelmtveit, who was on the edge of a total breakdown. He was wrong. The simple preparations with warning systems and escape routes had saved both the residents and the visitors. Only two people were lightly wounded, the rest had survived. The situation in Elverum was far worse, which in the space of an hour had been bombed to pieces by 19 airplanes from KG 4. the central building mass at Leiret was in ruins, whole city blocks burned down, and 40 people died. When Koht found king Haakon and crown prince Olav, both were shaken but unharmed by the attack. “I sat a while and talked to the king on a fallen tree. His voice filled with shocked fury when he told me he had found many bullet holes in the farm he had stayed in. It was obvious they had meant to kill him.”

Both Hitler and Falkenhorst probably thought that their mission had been accomplished. The following note was entered into Gruppe 21’s war diary: “Attack by 19 planes from KG 4 at barracks camp and parts of Elverum town. Result: Elverum destroyed, the place went up in flames.” Of the contemporary bombing of Nybergsund, the formulations in the Luftwaffe’s evening report were even more definitive: “Between 17.45 and 18.45 six large and small houses at a crossroad were hit by 8 500kg explosive bombs, 35 250kg bombs and 12 incendiary bombs. Every house went up in flames. The place was devoid of life signs. Neither a vehicle pool nor single cars could be seen. There were no defences.” Deploying the paratroopers was no longer necessary. Lieutenant Herbert Schmidt’s company, who had waited for the all clear signal at Schleswig Land airfield for hours, were sent back to Stendal. Both major Walther’s and major von Poncet’s forces returned to Oslo without any further attempts to break through to Hamar.

The brutality of the attack had created a numbness among the populace, later replaced by a naked fear. The tourist station had been destroyed, and people were dirty and wet after their stay in the snow. One had to get away before the Germans returned. But the Luftwaffe’s bombers had long range, and possibilities were few. Initially, the king, crown prince and cabinet members were driven a couple of Scandinavian miles further north, to sheriff Harald Johansen’s farm at Innbygda. “I was on the phone in the sheriff’s office when one car after another turned into the farmyard,” noted office lady Ragna Nordgaard in her diary. “I went out, opened the door, and asked the king to come inside. He asked for help so he could wash his hands. He had been lying in the forest at Nybergsund during the bombing.” Miss Nordgaard followed the king up to the first floor and set out a washbasin. “I was shaken. I fixed washing-up water and helped him with his shirtsleeves. He talked, but I didn’t understand him so well. After he dried himself off, he held my hands and thanked me.” Most of them needed help with drying clothes, and the sheriff’s office lady brought out every stocking she could find. The following improvised council was held under a sign of desperation. The Prime Minister’s fighting spirit had suffered another blow. He could not bear it anymore and wanted to seek refuge in Sweden. His personal anxiety acted up as irrational fits of rage. When Terje Wold protested against giving up, he was told to shut up: “Don’t say anymore, Wold! Stop!! Or I will get even angrier,” Nygaardsvold had shouted.

The administration was deeply divided. The ministers Hjelmtveit, Søstad and Ystgaard supported Nygaardsvold, while Wold, Koht and Lie wanted to stay. The German pressure on the Swedish government was already heavy. A flight to Sweden would probably lead to internment – with a following capitulation. Defence chief Otto Ruge’s job was already very difficult. Without the king and legal government backing him up, it would become impossible. For about an hour in the sheriff’s office at Trysil, Norway’s future once again hung in the balance. Nygaardsvold kept to his own, while the warriors wanted to join Ruge in the valley. When the Prime Minister could not gain any additional supporters for his course, he gave up. The flight plans were put aside for good. Sixty-five dramatic hours has passed since the attack had started. There would be many new crises, but the final decision had been made. The government would stay in Norway, take up seat near to the military staff and build the necessary political fundament for the military effort.

To men did not waver. King Haakon urged the government to stay and let them know he would be most disappointed if they ran away to Sweden. Crown prince Olav was even clearer: “The administration has twice decided to fight. It must not give in after the first blow.” Their manner was once again the deciding factor. As Trygve Lie noted: “The crown prince was as calm as ever. He had nerves of steel.” Even when the king after yet another sleepless night on the run stood at the Swedish border at Drevsjø, and desperately needed rest, his words resonated with willpower. Foreign Minister Koht had asked the Swedish government for permission to cross the border and was accepted. But when the Swedes would not guarantee a safe return to Norway, he did not cross. “I am totally worn out by a lack of sleep and rest and the last days’ nervous strain,” the king declared to the journalist from Svenska Dagbladet, Gunnar Knudsson. “Since I left Oslo on Tuesday, I have not been out of my boots and have hardly slept a wink. It seems to me like civilization is breaking down. Nowhere is safe for me anymore.” It was a heartbreaking cry for help, which the Svenska Dagbladet laid out across seven columns: King Haakon chased from place to place. Totally worn out after the German air raids. In the text it read: “King Haakon, crown prince Olav and the Norwegian cabinet is being chased from place to place by German airplanes. Wherever they end up, they are followed by air raid alarms, and it was a totally worn-out monarch that finally was forced all the way to the Norwegian-Swedish border. Not even here did the monarch, who is being hunted like a wild beast, find any rest. He had to flee further on through unknown Norwegian roads and ever unsure refuges. The old monarch is nonetheless unbowed. In his uniform, he looks to be Norway’s most athletic general, even if he has had no chance to change out of it for four days. Despite the privations, he has kept his good mood. He passes on easy jokes when it is fitting.” Knudsson gave an authentic snapshot of an acute, almost catastrophic situation. The king’s final reply came from a person that was hard-pressed, but unbowed: “My ministers may visit Sweden, and my subject can be evacuated there. I must stay in my country as long as one inch of it is still Norwegian.” As long as one inch of it is still Norwegian! Those were words worthy of a king.

Part III

Chapter 11

Captain Austlid’s sacrifice

Dombås, Saturday 13th of April to Friday 19th of April The first concrete sign of British aid came Saturday evening of 13th April, when the destroyer HMS Somali sailed into the fjord with a welcome message: The senior Allied war council had decided to land a force on the coast of Møre og Romsdal county, march on the Trøndelag counties and cut off the Germans in Trondheim in a pincer movement. After conferring with Norwegian naval officers, captain Randolph Nicholson sent the following telegram to the Admiralty in London – before going back out to sea: “Strategically, the Romsdal fjord is the most important point on the west coast by admiral Tank-Nielsen's reckoning. It is because of the access to roads and railway lines (in Åndalsnes) and the existence of large ammunition depots in .” HMS Somali and the rest of the flotilla of six destroyers was observed by a German reconnaissance plane, which shortly after sent the following erroneous message to Berlin: “British forces have landed at Åndalsnes.”

When the message reached Adolf Hitler in the Reich Chancellery the next morning, total chaos erupted. “The hysterics are frightful,” wrote the operations manager for OKW, general Alfred Jodl in his diary after the morning’s situation conference. “From now on, every detail is to be directed from this place.” The day before, the battleship HMS Warspite had entered Vestfjorden at the head of a British squadron and destroyed the German destroyers at dock in Narvik. Hitler’s favourite general, Eduard Dietl, had become isolated in the ore town with his 2000 gebirgsjägers along with the same number of ill-equipped sailors from the sunken vessels. As long as the British blocked the entrance to the fjord, it was impossible to bring aid to Dietl by sea, and the distance from Oslo to Narvik was too great for them to be supplied reliably from the air. If the British now marched on Trondheim, the battle for Northern Norway and the Swedish iron ore seemed lost. These prospects made the Führer’s nerves snap. “He swung between screaming headlessness and manic/depressive silence,” wrote the chief of the OKW planning staff, general Walther Warlimont, who had come by the Reich Chancellery. “When he was not passing out confused suggestions, he sat sunken in a chair in Jodl’s office brooding silence.” After long and angry discussions, the following categorical order was sent out to general Nicolaus von Falkenhorst in Oslo: “The most important task is to secure the supporting location of Trondheim and defeat the British forces landed at Åndalsnes. Dombås is to be secured and occupied by all available paratrooper forces. Gruppe 21 wil at the same time conquer the railway line Oslo – Hamar - Dombås and the two railway lines to Åndalsnes and Trondheim for fast movement of troops. All measures are to be used.”

The order elicited cheers from premier lieutenant Herbert Schmidt and his First Paratrooper company, who had been flown in from Germany to Fornebu the night before. For five frustrating days, the paratroopers had been waiting to get into combat and were filled with Nazi fervour. “The airport sprang to life,” he wrote in Die Fallschirmjäger von Dombås. “People immediately ran to the transport planes, which were taxiing onto the runways with roaring engines. Es geht los!” The unit, which consisted of 185 paratroopers, were billeted at Stabekk school at arrival in Oslo. The weather had been wonderful for the last several days, but in the night of April 14th, a low pressure system covered the Østlandet area. Heavy clouds rolled in from the west. There was a strong wind, and rain and snow blanketed the school’s windows. “It was not the kind of weather for action,” noted Schmidt, who prepared for more waiting. “We ruled out flying. The time was spent improving our quarters and collecting comforts and supplies.” Hitler wanted differently. Just before Schmidt was to sit down to dinner, he was ordered to an immediate conference with Falkenhorst’s staff at the KNA-hotel. “Chief of staff Buschenhagen with several commanders and staff officers were gathered in the Luftwaffe communications officer’s office. The air was thick with excitement.” It was the communications officer himself, colonel Robert Knauss, who spoke up: “English troops have landed at Åndalsnes, supported by strong fleet elements and are marching into the country. Their advance is to be stopped, but the Luftwaffe cannot do it, because of the weather. It will fall to the paratroopers, that’s an order from Berlin.” The forty-seven-year-old officer had been operations director in Lufthansa, and had become world famous when he organized the first Berlin-Peking return flight in 1926. Since then, he had become one of the architects of the Luftwaffe, and a leading proponent of terror bombing civilian targets from the air. His book Luftkrieg 1936: Die Zertrümmerung von Paris had become a best seller, and described the fall of France after one week of bombing it’s capital. There is good reason to believe that Knauss helped plan the terror bombing of Elverum and Nybergsund. He now gave precise information to Schmidt of a new operation behind Norwegian lines – of a different character. “The important railway junction at Dombås must be taken. The railway track must be blown up and the roads blocked. The position must be held until the main force reaches you from the south.”

Tiny spoiler The King's escape route: The king left Oslo by train on the 9th of April at 07.23 and reached Nybergsund after midnight after staying at the farms of Sælid in Vang and Gaarder at Elverum. The crown princess and the children traveled on to Sweden, while the king and crown prince stayed at the local tourist station. After the bombing on April 11th, the flight continued on to Innbygda and Jordet. The prime minister and his men went ahead over Rena to Elverum and got through to Hamar, whence they headed north to Otta and Lesjaverk. When the king and his followers were to follow them later, they were stopped at Rena out of fear of a new German attack. They turned, went back to Jordet and followed the road north to the border station Lillebo near lake Drevsjø. When it was made clear that they could not stay in Sweden, they drove back to Rena by way of Jordet. From there, their path went along the open roads northwards to Koppang, Åsheim, Tynset, Alvdal and – transferring to train at Hjerkinn station. After the gruelling trip, the king and his men reached Otta at 23.30 Wednesday the 13th of April, where they held the first state council in 60 hours the next day. A few hours later, the paratroopers landed at and blocked the highway south of Dombås. Until the Germans surrendered on the 19th of April, the king and cabinet stayed at Sandbu in Vågå. They continued on to Molde the 23rd of April and was evacuated to Tromsø on the 29th - leaving for England on the 7th of June, when the fighting ceased. In the meantime, the king, crown prince and most of the cabinet members had reached the upper reaches of the Gudbrandsdalen valley after several taxing days on bad roads. King Haakon, crown prince Olav and his adjutant, Nikolai Ramm Østgaard had been granted a new car, with police officer Bjarne Ingstad of the Police Intelligence Service as a driver, and had arrived at Hjerkinn in the Dovre area on the afternoon of Saturday 13th April, around the same time as the German fleet in Narvik was sunk. A stream of transport planes from Fornebu to Værnes passed over the little train station, and Ingstad took no chances. The snow was still metres deep in the mountains, and the road to Dombås had not been plowed. “A cargo train going south was the first opportunity,” wrote Egil M. Kristiansen in the article Kongens sjåfør, de dramatiske aprildagene i 1940,(The king’s chaffeur, the dramatic April days of 1940) which was based on Ingstad’s diary notes. “Afraid that the king would be recognized, they outfitted him with Ingstad’s winter coat, a sixpence hat and sunglasses. Then they entered the train’s postal wagon.” It had been almost two days since the king and his retinue split from the Prime Minister at Innbygda village in Trysil, and there had been no contact since. Before the train drove off, adjutant Østgaard called the Army command at Øyer near Lillehammer to warn them that the king was underway. Ruge himself took the call, but Østgaard feared the call would be bugged, and worded himself in cryptic terms. “I got a call from somewhere,” Ruge wrote in his memoir. “The call was about if I would procure a couple of cars from a major whose battalion I had inspected at Trandum this winter. I answered by telling the battalion commander to fuck off and find his own transportation.” It was not suprising that the new commander-in-chief was in an explosive mood. The mobilization had failed, and the attackers had seized many of the most important arsenals. The holding action he was organizing, would have to be waged with improvised forces lacking in SMGs, hand grenades and heavy weapons. Communications and medical services were lacking, and food supplies would have to be based on voluntary assistance from farms behind the front lines. It cost enormous amounts of money to keep even a ragtag army in the field, and Ruge had so far not received a red cent from the purchase of goods and services. He had complained to Nygaardsvold, who had sent the Minister of Commerce, Anders Frihage, to the National Bank brancg at Gjøvik to collect their stock of cash. When the telephone call came, Frihagen had arrived at Øyer with 12,4 million kroner in bags. The forty-seven-yeard old banker from Sunnmøre demanded a count and a receipt, and Ruge and Hatledal were bent over the stacks of newly-minted notes far into the night. “I’ll probably never see so much money in one place again,” noted Ruge. “I remember that me and Hatledal slept on moneybags that night.”

In Oslo on Sunday the 14th of April, the weather had worsened even more. “Rain and hail interspersed with bouts of snow,” wrote premier lieutenant Herbert Schmidt. “An icy wind swept over Fornebu. At times, the fog banks came down onto the runways. One could not see the surrounding mountains.” Normally, any flight would have been cancelled, but the phone lines between Oslo and Berlin were glowing red hot. The Führer demanded action and would not listen to any objection. When a Ju 52 transport was ordered northward at around 14.00 to reconnoiter over Dombås with the company commander and lieutenant Fritz Becker on board, the pilot, premier lieutenant Walther Wrocklage, refused to take off. “The decision was made because of a particularly furious hailstorm sweeping over the airport,” wrote lieutenant Becker, who had joined Wrocklage in the flight office to explain the situation to the transport chief, lieutenant colonel Karl Drewes. In the meantime, more armchair generals had joined the mix – in an obvious attempt to placate Hitler. The new leader of Luftkommando Norge, general Karl Kitzinger, wanted to show off his handle on things, and had sent his chief of staff, flying general Hans Silburg to Fornebu to fix the situation. The forty-six-year-old Silburg was a naval officer, and had served as a pilot in the Imperial Navy’s small flight arm during the first world war. He had held on in the Reichswehr through the crisis years, and had held to a vagabond career as an officer on auxiliary ships and councilor on anti-air measures. After Hitler’s rise to power, he had entered the new Luftwaffe and held a series of administrative position, which did not afford him any esteem among the paratroopers. “Silburg suddenly saw that his time had come,” wrote lieutenant Ernst Mössinger in a furious article in the veteran’s association’s magazine Die Deutche Fallschirmjäger. “He wanted to be seen as a breath of fresh air, and as the man who could make it all work. In his world, there was no bad weather which could resist an order from the Führer, and lack of target investigation because of time problems was nothing to care about.” When the lieutenants Becker and Wrocklage reached the flight office after a brisk walk through the hailstorm, Drewes had capitulated. Only five days before, the transport chief had risked Hitler’s wrath by ordering the turnaround in the foggy soup above the Skagerrak. He dared not do so again after Silburg’s thundering speech, and teeth-chatteringly submitted to a new and definitive order: The company was to take off at once – no matter the weather conditions.

Prime Minister Johan Nygaardsvold and four of the government ministers had passed Dombås the night before and had spent the night at the old and grand Lesjaverk farmstead, just seven Scandinavian miles from the relative safety of Åndalsnes. “We went to sleep feeling relatively safe,” noted the Prime Minister. That feeling of safety evaporated Sunday morning, when the phone rang. It was Commerce Minister Frihagen, who on a crackling phone line told them that the king and his followers had arrived by cargo train at Otta, and stayed at Heggelund boarding house. The Prime Minister’s presence was requested, as it had been more than 60 hours since the last state council with the king present. Nygaardsvold balked, but could hardly refuse the king’s wishes. A return to Otta would bring his closer to the German lines, and his anxiety was never far away. It manifested in new bouts of rage when he arrived at Otta a few hours later. “He cussed out parts of his entourage, who, frightened by a sheriff and a railroad worker, had gone on an insane odyssey up and down the Østerdalen valley.”

At Fornebu, company commander Herbert Schmidt had gathered his troop- and team leaders in the lee of a transport plane. The wind was screaming, and there was just one map of the target area. “Schmidt tried to brief us on the situation and the tasks at hand,” wrote lieutenant Fritz Becker. “But the words were drowned out in the roar of the engines, and the one map was hard to focus on.” A few minutes later, lieutenant colonel Drewes came running over, demanding an immediate takeoff. It was getting dark, and the transport chief worried that the fifteen Ju 52’s would not be able to find their way back to Fornebu. “Time had run out. The briefing was cut short, and we climbed aboard.” At around 17.00, the first airplane took off, with premier lieutenant Wilhelm Metscher at the stick, and Drewes as a co-pilot. “We tried to fly as close to one another as we could in the abominable weather. It was our only chance if we wanted to stay in conctact.” In the cabin, which had room for twelve paratroopers, company commander Schmidt stared into the greying darkness. “We were encapsulated by the fog. The rain clouds closed in around us. The mood was good, but we all had one thought: Would we succeed this time, and complete the great task given to us? We had to, we had to!” A few kilometers further south, his second in command, lieutenant Ernst Mössinger, was not as enthusiastic: “I was hardly the only one feeling oppressed and worried in this situation. It was not just the weather. It was also because we had only had a brief peek on the one available map. We knew nothing of the enemy and did not know the terrain. We had marked landing sites west and southwest of Dombås, but that was more wishful thinking than any realistic planning. We flew into the unknown.”

At around the same time, the first state council since Nybergsund was held in the red-painted Heggelund boarding house, which laid a few kilometers from the railway line that cut through Otta. The king arose for the first time as a war leader through a call to action, broadcast the same night from the transmitters at Hamar and Vigra: “In this time of hardship, which my country and people have not seen for a hundred years, I direct a plea to all Norwegian women and men to do all that one can do to save the freedom and independence of our dear fatherland.” In the call, sketched out by Trygve Lie, the king showed that Nazi Germany had pitilessly bombed civilians, and visited great harm upon women and children. For understandable reasons, he could not reveal exactly where he and the administration were located. “The German armed forces have executed a violent attack on us when we were in a small, unfortified and unprotected location. Explosive bombs, incendiary bombs and machine guns was used on the civilian population and us in the most pitiless and brutal way. The attacks could only have one goal, that was to exterminate everyone who had gathered to solve Norway’s problems for the better.” The end contained both humility and obstinancy: “I thank those that today, together with myself and the administration, stand at their post in the battle for Norway’s independence and freedom. I ask everyone to remember those who have given their life for the fatherland. God keep Norway.” The king was still exhausted after the difficult trek across the mountain, and chose to stay at Heggelund with the crown prince. Nygaardsvold and the rest of the ministers got in their cars to go back to Lesjaverk – and from there on to Åndalsnes.

The paratroopers’ first setback happened around one hour after takeoff. Several of the transport planes had chosen to follow the railway line north, and were cruising along at 100 meters altitude. The planes were fired upon by rifles and machine guns, and over Lillehammer, one machine carrying five crewmen and seven paratroopers from the communications team caught fire. “We lost altitude fast, but wondrously, the pilot managed an emergency landing on a field outside the city,” wrote oberjäger Schröter in his report. “We got out, but came under fire from every angle.” When the firefight ceased a while later, one crew member had been killed, and two others wounded. The ammunition had been spent, and Schröter himself had been shot in the leg. “We were surrounded and had to surrender. The wounded were taken to the hospital, while the rest were placed in the local prison.” When the rest of the airplanes reached Dombås between 18.30 and 19.00, they were met by a storm of fire. “I heard how the bullets smacked into the bodywork,” told Metscher, who dropped lieutenant Schmidt and his staff around 8 kilometers south of Dombås. “Later, the mechanic said he had counted 169 bullet holes.” Schmidt himself felt the jump as a sensation of freedom. He had reached his target and thought of glorious possibilities. “Under us lay a wonderful wintery landscape dotted with beautiful houses and cabins. We landed on a slope, and men and weapons containers were swallowed up by the snow.” After scrabbling round on all fours for an hour, the company commander gathered his approximately 35 men on a forest road. A passing car filled with foodstuffs was commandeered. The advance on Dombås could begin.

At Otta, Prime Minister Johan Nygaardsvold exhibited signs of growing nerousness at around the same time. A party cadre headed by Martin Tranmæl had plans for the war effort and had asked for a meeting. Time was passing, and the prime minister grew ever more impatient. “Finally, Nygaardsvold snapped,” it read in his biography. “He rushed to his feet and said that they could do what they wanted, but the administration could not travel around the country with a giant entourage following them around. Then he left suddenly.” It was no more than 35 kilometers from Otta to the small town of Dovre, and a further 15 kilometers from Dovre to Dombås, where the highway bent off westwards, toward Åndalsnes and the coast. But the cabinet members had started out too late. The closer their cars came to Dovre, the louder they could hear the sound of the German transport planes. Nygaardsvold was convinced a new bombing run was brewing, and ordered them to stop at the village’s beautiful church. After a while spent hiding behind the church wall, they tried to get into the church. The main door was locked, but they found an opening in the back. “It led into the mortuary,” wrote Egil M. Kristiansen. “They stayed there until the sound of airplanes had faded away.”

In the meantime, lieutenant Fritz Becker and his 26-man troop was in trouble. They had been dropped along the railway line approximately 15 kilometers north of Dombås. The wind blew hard and the paratroopers were up to their chests in snow several meters deep. “It was very hard to gather people and weapons,” he wrote in his report. “When I had gathered them all, only 18 men were fighting fit. The rest had suffered smaller or greater damages and were placed in an unoccupied cabin.” Becker had cut the phone line betweem Dombås and Trondheim and found some people in a farmstead a bit further north. He took a world atlas to act as a map and five pairs of skis and a sled to transport their ammunition and equipment. “Returning to the cabin, we prepared to leave. But we could go no further than 200 meters. The skis disappeared in the deep snow, and a snowstorm made progress impossible. We hurried back.” A few kilometers further away, communications- and intelligence officer Gerhold and his men were assaulted by the same snowstorm. “Most of them had to cut their way out of their parachutes, as strong winds and deep snow made it impossible to stand up,” he wrote in his report. “We could not orientate ourselves, and lacked maps. We dug snow caves to wait out the worst of it.”

At Dombås tourist hotel, captain Ivar Navelsaker had been alarmed by the telegraphist at Otta by 18.30, which sent the following report: “Approx. 10 planes passing northwards.” A few minutes later, one could hear the droning of engines, and soon the black-painted planes circled over the village at low altitude. “At once, the Norwegians began to shoot, shots rang from every hilltop,” told teacher Harald Renolen, who was near the hotel. “Soon, we saw something that looked like rings up in the air. One man with good eyesight shouted that they were parachutes.” Navelsaker commanded the 2nd battalion of Infantry Regiment no. 11 and had arrived at Dombås the night before at the head of a well-equipped force of 750 men. At once he sent two trucks full of soldiers south along the highway to where the paratroopers seemed to have landed.

Half an hour later, lieutenant Herbert Schmidt spotted the patrol. He did not expect resistance, and continued on carefully in the hope that he had located some of his own men. Callsigns were given, but not replied to. “Suddenly, machine gun fire sparked from several directions! In seconds, the troops threw themselves down,” he later wrote. “The echoes from the shots sounded in the quiet valley. It was impossible to know where it was coming from. Suddenly I felt a sharp pain in my hip and thigh. I fell backwards with a gruesome thought: I had been hit!” In the muddy water of the ditch, Schmidt saw his blood leaking from his torn pants leg. He lost all feeling in his lower body and could not stand up. “I was leading inferior forces in battle against the enemy and had managed to become wounded! It was just what was lacking!” he wrote in a self-pitying column. The darkness crept over them, and the fire had ceased. Schmidt was patched up by the team medic and placed in the car. “We pulled back a few hundred meters under covering fire. We would not give up. I ordered them to establish a barricade across the road for the night.”

Around 15 kilometers south of Schmidt’s reduced paratrooper company, the Prime Minister and his hangers-on had left Dovre church and again started out on their journey toward the relative safety of the coast. But the cars had been stopped after a few minutes by major Herman Friele Arentz, who happened to be in the area. The fifty-six-year-old Bergen man was one of the premier car sports enthusiasts in the country, and known editor of the magazines Motorliv and Motorjournalen. The major belonged to the Engineer corps and had been sent by Ruge to find suitable sites for future ammunition dumps. He told them that continuing on the road would lead them straight into the German position. “Major Arentz found shelter for the prime minister in the loft of an evacuated house,” wrote Egil M. Kristiansen. “There were not enough chairs, but Trygve Lie laid down on the floor and fell asleep.” Arentz organized a guard team outside the house, made up of hunters from Dovreskogen rifle club. But people were scared and easily paranoid after the unexpected drama of the Sunday. “There was something secretive about the major, and we got suspicious,” wrote Einar Hovdhaugen, who belonged to the guard team. “Was he good Norwegian, or was he a traitor? Could we trust him? The situation was strange to us, and we were nervous.” When the riflemen threatened to leave unless they got to see who was hiding out in the house, Arentz invited them to an informal inspection. “We climbed the steep stair up to the loft, rifles ready to fire. Here I come with the world’s most suspicious people, the major said. Broad and smiling, Nygaardsvold stood in front of us, and on the floor, sat or laid most of the royal Norwegian government, with cases and rucksacks under their heads. Most of them looked tired.” The Prime Minister did not shy from the seriousness of the situation. The cabinet was trapped between the German main force to the south and the paratroopers to the north. “Not even at Nybergsund was the situation as bad as it was now. We are going to Åndalsnes, but German paratroopers are blocking both the road and the railway.” They decided to quit the farm at once, and the five ministers were escorted by the guard team to Brennhaug, 10 kilometers further south. But the time was close to five in the morning, and the hotel was closed. Instead, the refugees were offered a place to rest at Stordal farm, a good distance up the mountainside. “We went along, but it was one of the most difficult hikes I have ever been on,” wrote Nygaardsvold. “It was dark like the inside of a bag, almost bare of snow, but it had a terribly slippery ice cap on top of it. After a long march, we finally arrived and could lay down for a few hours.”

The last transport planes reached the area around Dombås between 20.00 and 21.00 Sunday evening. On the ground, the men of Navelsaker’s battalion had been warned, and the planes flew into a hail of bullets. In the confusion, seven men dropped almost on top of the village centre. Two were killed, two wounded, and the rest surrendered without a fight. It was even worse for the Ju 52 carrying sergeant Gonscherowski’s unit of twelve men. After taking several hits at only 70 meters height, the plane sheared off to the left and crashed in a copse of trees, less than a kilometer from the railway station at Dombås. “We were too low to jump out,” wrote the experienced NCO, who had a death grip on the open door. “I shouted to the paratroopers to hold on. Seconds later, spruce twigs flew past the door opening. The plane hit the ground with full force.” Gonscherowski lost consciousness. When he came to, the machine was almost vertical in the snow. The cockpit was smashed, the wings torn off, and one of the crewmen was dead. The other three had broken their legs and were carefully pulled out into the snow. Gonscherowski himself had major head pains, and eight of his eleven men were wounded. “My first thought was to grab the weapons container. But it was stuck and would not budge.” The tail gun was dismantled and brought along. The surviving crewmen were tended to and wrapped up before the sergeant and his maimed unit crawled through the deep snow to a rocky outcropping a few hundred meters away. The situation was miserable. They had no weapons or equipment – except for the handguns that every paratrooper had in a hip holster. When the last troop of 26 men under the later Knight’s Cross recipient sergeant Alexander Uhlig, was dropped in the Lesjadalen valley, 20 kilometers northwest of Dombås, the scandal was complete. “After jumping out, the units were spread out over an area 35 kilometers wide and 15 kilomeers deep,” it read in a report. “In normal terrain, it would be extremely difficult to gather the company. Such as the situation was in the deep snow around Dombås, it represented a catastrophe.”

The message that German paratroopers had landed both in the Gudbrandsdal valley – in the back on the main Norwegian force – reached commander-in-chief Ruge at Øyer around 20.00 Sunday night. It was a dark time for the major general, who only an hour earlier had had to place his closest confidante, chief of the general staff Rasmus Hatledal on sick leave. “I had been suffering from sleeplessness since the Christmas of 1939,” Hatledal wrote after the war. “I had not slept almost a single night without sleeping medicines, and now they did not help me any longer,” The colonel was totally worn out and had fallen asleep during a situation meeting Sunday afternoon. Besides, he had been plagued by a rare nervous disease after a wound that had crippled one of his hands. “I saw that only a long period of rest could save him,” Ruge wrote. “It was a difficult time when I had to tell this to my old friend, who no doubt was one of the best officers in the army.” The chief of staff had started sobbing and said: “So, even I will fail, when I’m needed the most.” Hatledal had represented the fighting spirit in the upper echelon of the old General staff, more than any other. For several days before the invasion, he had fought to mobilize the army, and had personally called up more men than what the government had agreed to. He had ordered the building of the roadblock at Midtskogen and for hours had tried to destroy the road east of Mjøsa when Walther’s paratroopers were advancing. Counseling the government, he had stopped the German demand for a military train to Trondheim, and had lit a fire under general Hvinden Haug to get him to blow up bridges and tunnels north of Oslo. But his strength had run out, and he could not escape it. At around 19.00, Hatledal had said his goodbyes and went on the hard road homewards. “It was the first time I saw grown men cry during the war, and it made a strong impression on me,” wrote Ruge. “Later, when all of our plans went astray, and we had to give up first southern Norway and then northern Norway, I saw other, stronger men cry. I have shed tears as well.” It was a moving moment in the old bell ringer's house outside Lillehammer, but Ruge kept his cool. Navelsaker's battalion was already in Dombås, pressing the Germans from the north. It was vital to get a push going from the south too. Later in the evening, he therefore ordered that one company from Infantry Regiment no. 5 under captain Eiliv Austlid was to be sent from Hamar to Dovre by train immediately.

Austlid was born in Ullensvang in Hardanger, but had grown up in Ørsta, where his father administrated a people’s college. He had graduated from the War Academy in 1923. Like many of his colleagues, he had left the Army in the 30s and tried his luck at farming in the booming farmlands around Stange in Hedmark. The calm and thoughtful westerner had made Søndre Såstad farm a good home for his five children, and quickly ended up in trusted positions in the local unions – as foreman of Stange farmer’s union and the Stange farmer’s party. “He was an extraordinarily skilled and dutiful man,” said Ivar Grøholt, who served in Austlid’s company and later became a local leader of Milorg in Hedmark. When the force was mustered at Hamar railway station, it had been reduced to half a company: three officers and 37 corporals and privates. “The unit consisted solely of machine gun personnel,” it read in a report from the Institute for Defense Studies. “The machine guns were a support weapon, which was meant to provide covering fire for advancing riflemen. But they lacked riflemen. In addition, the force, which had been hastily mobilized at Elverum five days before, already suffered major psychic stress from the bombings the 11th of April.”

The day broke over Dombås, icy and cold. Monday the 15th of April, and Schmidt’s paratroopers, in their soaking wet grey jumpsuits had ended up in a wintery inferno. North of the strategically important railway, lieutenant Fritz Becker tried at 05.00 to get his 18 unharmed men safely to the railway tracks, 800 meters away. But the skis cut holes in the hard snow, and the paratroopers flopped around like fish on land. “We were only two men who mastered the snow,” he later wrote. “We grabbed weapons and equipment from the others and brought it all from the cabin to the rail track. That took time.” Becker got lucky and found four draisines on a side track. “I mounted the machine gun on the one in front and spread weapons, supplies and men among the other three. We went downhill and did not need to use any power of our own. My plan was a surprise thrust into Dombås and to take it unawares.” When the carts entered the tunnels just north of Dombås, one of them derailed. Becker slowed down and sent a patrol ahead to check the tracks. The patrol never returned. In a curve south of the tunnel, someone opened fire and the paratroopers had to fling themselves aside.”The snow became our prison,” Becker wrote. “We tried to get our machine gun into a firing position on top of the edge of the snow, but it disappeared under the snow. Every time we tried to return fire, we had to get up on our knees. That made us perfect targets for the enemy. I realized after a while that we were caught in a trap. If we continued fighting, it would lead to the total destruction of my unit.” Becker started negotiations with second lieutenant Paul Jørgensvåg, who commanded the Norwegian force. When he was assured that there were no British forces in Dombås, he surrendered without any further fighting.

Communications officer Gerhold, who had landed nearby, had been marching through the deep snow for 14 hours. The men were totally exhausted and broke into an empty cabin when they spotted Norwegian patrols some kilometers away. The troop’s machine gun had been lost in the crash near Lillehammer, and the remaining paratroopers only had ten rifles between them to defend themselves with. Gerhold raised a white kerchief and asked for parlay. “On the Norwegian’s word of honour that there were no Englishmen in the area, we surrendered.” When sergeant Gonscherowski’s exhausted paratroopers just after were surrounded close to the wreck site, a further twelve men were captured. Nazi Germany’s elite soldiers were feared by all, but they were totally unprepared for the strain of a snowy Norwegian winter.

For the soldiers of the Møre battalion at Dombås, the night had gone by without sleep. Skis had been supplied by a public appeal, and a group of tailor from had made 3000 white camo suits in two days – foregoing payment. The machine gun posts were manned, and patrols were out at all times. “The hunt for the Germans continued day and night,” wrote battalion commander Navelsaker. “There were no front lines. It was a tough time for the boys, and little time for rest.” The mild officer from Nordfjord had no idea how many paratroopers he faced, and he did not know where the main force was either. At seven Monday morning, he sent captain Arne Sandnes southwards to clean up. “We had messages that some Germans had come down to Ulekleiv,” wrote the thirty-five-year- old company commander from Bygland, who had been a wood shop and gymnastics teacher in the 30s. “The order was that the company was to send around 80 men down to get these guys.” Ulekleiv lay around five kilometers south of Dombås, but the rail track had been blown up by some hours earlier by a German patrol. The company, supported by a machine gun troop, was transferred onto five trucks which continued down the highway at low speed.

It was a team led by corporal Kochanowski who had touched off the dynamite underneath the tracks and crippled the rails. “From there, the first step had been taken to stop the British advance,” wrote lieutenant Herbert Schmidt, who despite his bleeding leg still commanded from an improvised stretcher. In the night, they had made a porcupine-like position of roadblocks and forward machine gun nests on the hilltops around the farms at Ulekleiv. They had laid out a Swastika flag and had written a message in the snow with gravel: Munition. Verplegung. Wir halten!” A short distance away, 26 men led by sergeant Bobrowski had heard the dynamite go up and in the morning had made their way to Ulekleiv. “Schmidt had a gunshot wound in his hip and lay in the corner of a cabin,” Bobrowski wrote in his report. “My group was assimilated into lieutenant Mössinger’s troop and stayed there until the fighting was over.” Adding Bobrowski’s troop, 63 of the 185-man strong company had arrived: the officers Schmidt and Mössinger and 61 NCOs and privates. “We did not have to wait long for our opponent,” wrote Mössinger. “We could see them between the trees in their white ski suits.” It was the vanguard of Company Sandnes which was making its way carefully along the highway. To save ammunition, Schmidt had ordered them not to fire until the Norwegians were well within range. “Suddenly, automatic weapons barked from several heights at 300-400 meters distance,” Sandnes reported. “We could not see any enemies. One team leader was shot, and two wounded.”

The communications equipment had been lost, and Schmidt could not contact Gruppe 21 in Oslo. A Ju 52 transport had been sent up that morning to find out what had happened – with lieutenant Hans-Georg Zuber as an observer. Zuber had participated on the raid at Midtskogen, and saw the Swastika in the snow – just when the shooting started. As soon as the plane had dropped its ammunition supply, it joined in battle with its machine guns. The Norwegian force was peppered from low altitude. “Lieutenant Gjærde, who commanded the expedition, found it best to withdraw when he was being shot at by planes,” noted Sandnes.

Shortly after the firefight ended, captain Eiliv Austlid had reached the village of Dovre, about 10 kilometers further south. On a local phone line the Germans had not cut, he at once called the Møre battalion’s headquarters at Dombås tourist hotel. “11.12: Captain Sandnes tells me that his men have retreated with some casualties,” Navelsaker noted in the log. “Message to captain Austlid at Dovre that we have been thrown back and are taking up positions at Dombås.” The forty-year-old infantryman was suddenly faced with a hard choice. The German paratroopers had beaten back a Norwegian force of 80 men. He himself only commanded half that number, armed with four water-cooled Colt machine guns. But his men were new to uniform and had never fought a battle – excepting when Elverum had been levelled a few days before. Would he still try to fight off the intruders, who obviously had built up a reinforced position along the highway south of Dombås?

Prime Minister Johan Nygaardsvold and his gaggle of ministers had slipped down the icy hill from Stordal farm to the highway and once again set their course northward. “We called to Dovre to ascertain how things were,” wrote Nygaardsvold. “Sure, the night had been silent. But in the morning, the Germans were to be attacked from the north and the south, so they would soon be ended.” Their motorcade reached Dovre at around the same time that Austlid did, and the ministers lodged in the old Kirkestuen boarding house. “We were served milk, and Trygve Lie found a pot of stew in the kitchen that we reheated. So we had breakfast that day too.” It is probable that Austlid was presented to the Prime Minister at the boarding house. “The boys were happy and cheerful even though it was early morning. They were travelling upwards to get the last of the Germans.”

For captain Austlid and his men, the meeting with the fleeing cabinet members was of a far more fateful character than the notes in the Prime Minister’s diary reveal. Nygaardsvold himself was physically and mentally worn out, and he had several times let slip that his anxiety was hidden just beneath his skin. They had to get to the safety of the coast – near enough no matter the cost. The night before he had laid it out for the volunteer riflemen why the situation at Dovre was even more acute and dramatic than the bombing of Nybergsund. It would not be strange if he now delivered the same speech to Austlid now. “The meeting with the Prime Minister gave Austlid’s mission a new dimension,” states the report from the Institute for Defence Studies (IfS). “With this, the mission no longer only meant that he was to clear the road to Dombås. He was also to make sure that the members of the administration got safely and quickly westwards. This must have been a heavy burden for the captain.” Austlid wanted to send out a forward patrol to check if the way was clear, but the ministers were impatient. Trygve Lie, who had been given a dressing-down by the Prime Minister on Sunday for needless ‘tough-guy’ behaviour, once more spoke out of turn. “He told us we had no time to wait for a patrol,” the soldier Sverre Storholt told to the writer Egil M. Kristiansen. “You, who belong to Norway’s elite company, should not be afraid of four freezing Germans. Just drive! That was our order.” At around 12.00, the small force left the village of Dovre, and started on the 15 kilometer rise toward Dombås, which progressed through an open forest of spruce trees. The truck carrying second lieutenant Arvid Hagen’s troop and two machine guns went first. Two hundred meters behind them came the truck carrying second lieutenant Jon Floden’s troop. Captain Austlid’s private car brought up the rear. “The captain now not only had the enemy to worry about,” wrote IfS. “A few hundred meters behind Austlid’s small column came the administration’s cars. Their goal was to reach Åndalsnes as quickly as possible. Captain Austlid was to make sure they passed the German paratroopers safely.”

Schmidt's troopers had gathered two sacks of food and several chests of ammunition after their fight with captain Sandnes’ company, which had been airdropped into the snow from the Ju 52. But the results were not good. “The chests had been ejected without parachutes,” noted lieutenant Mössinger. “90 percent of the bullets had been damaged. They were useless.” Schmidt had drawn up an outline of their positions on the wall of the farmstead , which was their headquarters. Supported by this sketch, he gave his orders to Mössinger, who, assisted by sergeant Dobrowski made sure they were carried out.

Austlid’s battle: Lieutenant Schmidt’s paratroopers had barricaded themselves at Hagevolden farm midway between Dombås and Dovre, with barricades and forward positions on both sides of the road. Austlid's force came under fire from both the main position and a forward post on a ridge on the right side of the road at Bjørkholen. Austlid fell when he together with some men tried to storm the imposing position on the ridge.

When Austlid’s trucks came crawling in from the south at low speed, the paratroopers were ready. “It was an enemy machine gun company that was to try and flush us out from our position,” wrote Schmidt. “They wanted to show us we were isolated. Our retreat was blocked by thousand- metre high mountains to the east and west. Again we let them come close before we opened fire.”

On the first truck, second lieutenant Arvid Hagen had seen movement between the trees up on a moraine ridge on the right side of the highway. “I ordered a halt, and to get down off the truck,” he later wrote. “It was totally flat around us, and no other cover than the road ditch, which was filled with water and soggy snow.” The first salvoes came toward them as soon as they had gotten their machine guns into position on the gravel road. “Before everyone could get to the ditch, one was hit in the thigh. He was laying partially on top of me. While we fired at the hilltop, the Germans opened fire from a new hilltop (around 700) meters further away on the same side of the road. The gunner called for more ammunition. One of the boys jumped onto the truck, but was killed before he could get up.”

Just behind, captain Eiliv Austlid had seen Hagen’s troop being caught in a deadly ambush. The soldiers lay squeezed together under heavy fire from several directions on a flat plain. They could not advance or retreat. They would be slaughtered if they tried to get away. With no regards for his own safety, the company commander made a decision which will always stand proudly in the history of the war. There was only one possibility if the first troop was to survive: The German position on the ridge had to be stormed and taken. “Between the road and the hill on which the Germans lay, was an open field,” told soldier Bjarne Nymoen. “Austlid gave the order that he would bring some men, so that he could outflank the Germans on the hill. The machine guns were to provide covering fire while we ran across the field. We were four men: the captain, Grøholt, Særnmo and me.” The heroic charge almost succeeded. Austlid and his men managed to cross the snow-covered field without getting hit. “Under the hill, which was quite steep, the captain told us to crawl upward in one line. He would be on the left side, nearest the road.” Austlid was only a few meters from the German position when a gunshot rang out between the trees. “We were almost at the top when he sunk down, sighing,” Nymoen said. “He tried to speak. To me it sounded almost like up, but I’m not sure. Then he rolled back down the hill.” To second lieutenant Hagen, any further fighting seemed useless. The fearless company commander and five of his men had been killed, and a further four were wounded. They waved a white flag, and the fire halted. A few got away, but the Germans captured 28 men, took three of the machine guns and their entire stockpile of ammunition.

Two of those who got away, alerted the district doctor Gunnar Seland about the need for medical aid. In the evening, Seland went toward Dombås with medicines and bandages along with the legendary pathologist Leiv Kreyberg, who was organizing Otto Ruge’s medical duties. “We came on foot, waving a small flag with the Geneva Cross, calling out “Medic,” wrote Kreyberg. “Suddenly, some German soldiers sprang out from the ditch and stopped us.” Kreyberg was in uniform, and was held back on the road. They blindfolded Seland and brought him to the German position. He administered first aid to the four wounded Norwegians, and examined Schmidt’s and some other Germans’ wounds. The company commander’s wound was less serious that he had thought, and Schmidt allowed himself some bread and water for the first time since they had departed from Oslo the day before. When Seland headed back, he brought along the wounded Norwegian prisoners. “The doctor said that operations were needed, and I complied,” wrote Schmidt. “He left his supply of bandages and medicines behind. It was the first time I encountered the Norwegian attitude, which I later came to appreciate. A wonderful people, who fought with dignity and nobility.” Down on the road, Kreyberg conversed with lieutenant Ernst Mössinger, who six days after the invasion still believed the German propaganda and was surprised that the Norwegians showed resistance. “Warum schiessen sie doch, die dumme Bauern!?” (“Why do you shoot, you stupid peasants!?”) “German peasants would also shoot, if enemy soldiers dropped from the sky carrying weapons,” Kreyberg said. But Mössinger was thoroughly brainwashed, and brought out his answer: “Aber wir sind ja Freunde!” (“But we are friends!”)

The two cars carrying the Prime Minister and his people had stopped once the firing started. “I stayed 400-500 meters behind the rearmost truck,” wrote Nygaardsvold’s driver, Kristian Wendkvern Thomassen, in a letter after the war. “At Hagevolden, where there is a quite long straight stretch of road, I saw couple of men jumping off the truck at the same time I heard gunfire. I backed the car up immediately, and returned to Kirkestuen at Dovre.” Yet another close call. For the fourth time since April 9th, the government had been saved – first through the efforts at Oscarsborg, Midtskogen and in Nybergsund, now through captain Austlid’s sacrifice at Dovre. “The government had chosen to fight their attackers six days earlier, and had already been subjected to three attempts of capture and destruction,” wrote the scientists at IfS. “The paratrooper attack on Dombås must be seen as a fourth attempt at the same thing. With this background, it is reasonable to say that the fate of the nation was on the line. Protection of the government was central to stop the Norwegian defence efforts breaking apart. Because of this, captain Austlid continued his march on Dombås.” The scientists described the tactical situation and continued: “Captain Austlid had few choices and quickly decided to storm and take the plateau to the east. This led to Austlid’s death. A collective evaluation of the circumstances, and not least of the terrain his force was in, speaks of a very brave leader who was ready to act and put all his power into completing the mission he had been entrusted.”

A few hours later, captain Arne Sandnes made another attempt to break through Schmidt’s barricade from the north – despite the German’s murderous efficiency. Again, the concern for the blockaded government men was the deciding factor. “I mentioned to the battalion commander that I did not think it good that the king, crown prince and government was at Otta without any sort of military protection,” wrote minister Anders Frihagen in a report. He was the only cabinet member that had reached Dombås before the paratrooper attack – with 1,1 million kroners in his car. It was the rest of the cash reserves from the National Bank at Gjøvik, and was the cabinet’s travel fund. “It was decided that a company was to be readied to clear the road southwards and be a guard and escort for the king and government.” When the column of two trucks and several cars closed on Ulekleiv, they again entered a storm of gunfire. “The projectiles smacked into the cars and swept along the road,” wrote Frihagen, who along with his driver threw themselves out of the car and into the ditch. The troops panicked, threw down their weapons and sought refuge in the woods. “The lieutenant tried to stop them, but the Germans with their automatic weapons controlled the entire plain. Two men fell in front of us, then two more dropped off our car, only a few meters away. All of our people seemed to vanish, but the Germans kept firing series towards the cars on the road. One of the two fallen closest to us, groaned for a while, in great pain. Then he, like his comrade beside him, grew still.” Frihagen and the driver lay in the icy water until nightfall. A while after midnight, they crept, tired and frozen through the snow to the closed Hjerleid craft school nearby. They broke in, made a fire, and contacted the Norwegian forces at Dombås the next day. The minister was saved, but the cash had been lost.

Later in the day of the 16th of April, lieutenant Herbert Schmidt was told of what had happened by an elated sergeant. “A hostile private car tried to force the barricade and had run off the road when it came under fire,” wrote the wounded company commander. “Closer investigation revealed that it had been a money transport. The load was collected around dinnertime and counted. We could barely believe it. We held almost two million kroner in our hands.” The money were stashed in the barn and the information passed from guardpost to guardpost. “The news spread like wildfire from man to man. A treasure was ours! We talked about how it would be to hand over the money in Oslo. Everyone was elated that we had managed to wrest from the enemy a well-known and important weapon: Money.”

As long as the Germans held the barricade, the government had to abandon any plans of reaching the relative safety of the Romsdal valley. Instead, after a stay at Otta, they were invited to stay at Thomas and Rudolf Olsen’s beautiful country house Sandbu in Vågå., where the shipping magnate family had restored 15-20 old buildings and collected large amounts of medieval art and antiquities. Together with king Haakon and his following, the administration found their first safe haven up on that peaceful mountain pasture since their flight from Oslo in the morning of April 9th. “We were served good food, we could bathe, and we could wash some of our clothes,” Nygaardsvold wrote in his diary. “Most of all, we prized the feeling that we could go to sleep in well-made beds with a sense of safety we had lacked since leaving Oslo. But all this did not help to clear away the burning questions which always arose: How can the Allies stop the German advance? When can we hope to go to either Oslo or Trondheim?”

Falkenhorst's plan had been to airdrop major Erich Walther and Gröschke’s paratrooper company around Lillehammer as soon as Schmidt and his men could take hold of Dombås. Their goal was to take Ruge’s headquarters by surprise and force the Norwegian forces in southern Norway to capitulate. But in Berlin, the scheming head of the Luftwaffe, Hermann Göring had other plans. Norway was and would be a sideshow, and the paratroopers were to be given a key role in the decisive attack on France, Holland and Belgium, which moved ever closer. He categorically denied to drop Walther’s force at Lillehammer and would not reinforce Schmidt’s beleaguered force south of Dombås. “We failed solely because Göring denied the use of any further forces,” Falkenhorst wrote after the war. “In the middle of the operation, he even moved the units at my disposal to the Western front.” The convoy carrying parts of the 163rd and 196th divisions had offloaded nearly 5000 soldiers, 250 vehicles, 500 horses and 3000-4000 tons of equipment in Oslo after the 11th of April. Thousands more soldiers made landfall in the following days. That made it possible for Falkenhorst to up the pressure on the improvised Norwegian main force, which fought hard along both sides of Lake Mjøsa. Hamar did not fall until the 18th of April, and Lillehammer three days later. That was far too late for lieutenant Schmidt’s paratroopers, who looked in vain towards Dovre for the reinforcements that Falkenhorst had promised them.

In Berlin, Hitler swung between euphoric hope and black depression. The order that general Dietl would evacuate Narvik and make his way across the border to Sweden had been written up. But the officers of the Wehrmachtführungsstab tore it to pieces and exhorted Dietl to hold on. To Goebbels and other top Nazi party members, Norway was now spoken of in hateful terms. “The Führer spurns the character of the Norwegians,” the minister of propaganda noted in his diary. “A cowardly and decadent upper class and a suffering people. It explains their love of England.” The hate showed itself in ever more violent actions. When British forces landed in large scale at Åndalsnes and Namsos from April 18th and on, he ordered that the two small towns were to be bombed without mercy. His protegé in Oslo, Vidkun Quisling, had failed too. Instead of becoming a national führer, the NS-leader appeared as a cowardly traitor, reviled and rejected by most. Monday the 15th of April, Hitler bent under the pressure from envoy Bräuer and several other members of the Foreign Office, who claimed that Quisling was a political catastrophe which only helped to strengthen the resistance. The coup planner was forced to step aside for an administrative council led by county governor Ingolf Christensen. Hitler took no more political chances. Only a few days later, he sent a Nazi party strongman to Norway, Josef Terboven from . (Known as ‘The most hated man in Norway’, even to this day) The hard boiled Nazi leader was to become Reichcommissar with sweeping powers. As operational chief Alfred Jodl noted in his diary: “Our political action has failed. In the view of the Führer, the situation must be solved with violence.”

At Dombås, Herbert Schmidt’s paratroopers had moved a few kilometers south to new quarters at Lindse farmstead. Commander-in-chief Ruge had sent reinforcements to Dovre, and the Møre battalion had made repeated attacks from the north. But they lacked discipline under fire, and the isolated German unit defended itself skillfully. Only when the Norwegians sent up one of the AA guns which had taken part in the defense of Oslo and a British howitzer from Åndalsnes, did Schmidt lose his courage. The ammunition was running out, and the Norwegian shells hit ever closer to the stables the Germans had holed up in. “We were in a tight room along with around 10 horses and 20 cows,” wrote Schmidt, who was still bedridden. “A terrible racket came at each explosion. The cows lowed in fear and pulled at their ropes to get free. At the same time, our last ammunition was shot off through the windows.” Schmidt would not sacrifice his remaining men, and asked major Alf Kjøs to negotiate a ceasefire. The later Conservative party leader was one of around 50 prisoners which were held hostage in a nearby barn. He found a white bedsheet and tied it to a branch. “I waited for a break in the firing and ran out of the barn. I waved the bedsheet (from a ridge) and the fire stopped.”

The time was 11.00, Thursday the 19th of April. When Schmidt surrendered, his force had been reduced to 45 men, of whom 6 were wounded. Twelve paratroopers had been killed, 20 wounded, and around 120 taken prisoner. It was a bitter defeat for Hitler’s elite force, and lieutenant colonel Hartwig Pohlman did like Falkenhorst – he blamed the Luftwaffe: “They had no understanding of the mission. We could neither reinforce nor resupply Schmidt’s company.” For the untested Norwegian forces, the battles at Dombås had been a hard trial by fire. Around 25 officers and enlisted men had been killed, and tens more wounded. But the road and railway were opened after five bloody days. Tuesday the 23rd of April, the king and cabinet reached Molde – shaken, but alive. They had escaped all of Hitler’s assassination attempts. The fight could go on.

Epilogue

The paratroopers had come to Norway seeking glory and fame, but it did not go as Walther, Götte, Schmidt, Gröschke and the others had hoped. The attack on Fornebu had barely succeeded, but the raids against the royal family were stopped at Midtskogen and Minnesund by small groups of determined recruits and volunteers. Lieutenant Herbert Schmidt had rightly held his position at Dombås for five days. But two thirds of his company were captured after just 24 hours, and the rest faced destruction when the white flag was hoisted. If the Army had been mobilized and led by men who were mentally and materially prepared to fight, the bold and nonchalant attack on Oslo could have been beaten back. But Fornebu had not been blockaded. Neither major general Hvinden Haug or police chief Welhaven had the wit or understanding to surround and isolate the German legation on the Drammensveien road, which became the nerve centre for the Wehrmacht’s working in those first chaotic hours. The main responsibility must rest with the Nygaardsvold administration. Through its antimilitaristic and pacifistic policies up until the outbreak of war undermined the will to fight and taken away our armed forces’ options to make any effective resistance. When the war inevitably came and the flight was underway, it sent no clear declarations, neither to the people or to those who were left behind to see to the defence of Oslo. Quite contrary, the actions of Hvinden Haug, Welhaven and the anti-air leadership show that they understood the messages coming from Prime Minister Nygaardsvold and Minister of Justice Wold in the morning of April 9th as a decision not to fight. It happened at a time when lieutenant colonel Pohlman and lieutenant Götte only had a handful of men and a few trucks at their disposal. Blücher had been sunk and the German main force indisposed, most of the paratroopers had turned back, the infantrymen lacked heavy weapons and there was great confusion. A resolute counterattack in the first hours would at least have delayed the fall of Oslo and given the Army a chance to establish stronger lines of defence outside the city, moreso than those hastily cobbled together between Eidsvoll and Lillestrøm on the 9th and 10th of April. Much responsibility must also be put on the then-leadership of the Army. The evacuation of Akershus fortress for the positions in the hillside of Holmenkollåsen at 06 is understandable – given the fear of bombing runs. But the second headless breakup the same morning, which brought the military staffs 70 km from the city, smacks of naked panic. Those who were fighting on the front lines were left to their own devices. Oslo's fate was decided while the officers were stuck in traffic going north to Eidsvoll.

For battalion commander Erich Walther, the Norwegian campaign reached a temporary end at noon, Thursday the 18th of April, when he and the paratroopers of second company were flown from Fornebu to their base at Stendal, 200km south of Hamburg. It was not a joyous move. Two attempts at indisposing the royal family and the government had failed, and lieutenant Schmidt and the rest of first company was besieged with no contact. It was open war between Wehrmacht and the Kriegsmarine about who was responsible for Blücher’s doom. There was great bitterness toward the Luftwaffe, which lacked the will to support Schmidt’s isolated men in the snows of Dovre. The conflicts had reached Berlin, and the displeasure around what had happened, was clearly expressed when Walther’s unit was mustered before takeoff to Oslo. None of the paratroopers were found worthy of distinction. Air general Karl Kitzinger, himself being investigated for dereliction of duty by the war courts, only had 12 second class iron crosses to allocate among the 150 soldiers who had taken part in the fighting around Østlandet. Three weeks later, the night to the 10th of May, Walther and his troopers dropped over Rotterdam alongside the rest of general Kurt Student’s paratrooper units. The attack on the Low Countries and France had begun. A new violation of international law against a neutral neighbouring country, but the Dutch were well prepared. Only after three days of bloody battles and terror bombing of the old seafaring city did they capture the bridges across Oude Maas. Both battalion commander Walther and company commander Wolfgang Graf von Blücher received the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross, but the victory came at a price. Many hundreds of the paratroopers had been killed or wounded, and that was just the beginning. When the paratrooper division took part in the next major attack – against Crete in the Mediterranean sea toward the end of May 1941 – the bloodbath reached horrible levels. More than three thousand of the paratroopers were killed and over two thousand wounded in the span of two weeks. The cream of Göring’s elite unit found their graves on the Mediterranean island. That included many of those who had had their baptism of fire in Norway, among others staff adjutant Wilhelm Götte and the 24-year-old lieutenant Blücher and his teenaged brothers of 19 and 17. In the next four years, the paratroopers moved from theatre to theatre: the Eastern Front, Northern Africa, Sicilia, Italy, France, and at the last, the ruins of the Third Reich. Thousands were killed, among them the Knight’s Cross recipient from Dombås, Herbert Schmidt, who fell in Normandie in the spring of 1944. But Hitler and Göring refilled the ranks from the many who in blind faith to the Führer saw the paratrooper corps as a possibility for glory. Toward the end, the stream of medals became a flood. Before the war ended, the paratroopers had accrued a total of 159 Knight’s Crosses and 221 German Crosses in gold – far more than any other unit in the German army. Walther himself was one of seven recipients of the Knight’s Cross of the Iron cross with oak leaves and sword, while his company commander from Midtskogen, Kurt Gröschke, received the Knight’s Cross with oak leaves (as one of twenty-two). Gröschke ended up as a colonel, and died in his sickbed in 1996. The former policeman Erich Walther became major general in 1945 and chief of the so-called Hermann Göring 2nd panzer grenadier division. He was captured by the Soviets on the 8th of May 1945 and six months later was convicted by Stalin’s secret police to 25 years of hard labour for war crimes. Two years later he died of hunger and pneumonia in the Buchenwald concentration camp, 44 years old. Almost 50 years later, in January of 1996, his judgement was overturned by the Supreme Court of the new Russia. This might seem odd. But the soldier, who had been wounded several times and survived more dramatic situations than most, was rehabilitated. According to the Russians, he was blinded by propaganda, but supposedly not a criminal.

Lieutenant colonel Hartwig Pohlman had believed that the capture of Oslo would bring fame and glory. For 60 hours, he had been Wehrmacht’s representative in the Norwegian capital, and together with Nickelmann and Götte had secured the city. With the blessing of his superiors he had organized the raid against the royal family and the cabinet members – in the hopes of accomplishing Hitler’s fait accompli. But the military actions had failed, and Hitler’s demands for Quisling as head of state had screwed up the rest. There was an intense need for scapegoats, and envoy Curt Bräuer was the first to go. He was recalled from Oslo to Berlin already Tuesday the 16th of April and was never to return. His diplomatic career was ruined, and he was sent to the Eastern Front. When Pohlman returned from a visit to the Gudbrandsdalen valley at the end of the month, he did not know that group commander Falkenhorst had hung him out to dry in front of the Army high command as “useless” and had demanded a new operations officer from Germany. “I was unpleasantly surprised when my messenger at breakfast laid before me an order that meant an immediate transfer to the 81st infantry division on the Continent,” he wrote in his family saga. The lieutenant colonel saw himself as the conqueror of Oslo, and had a rightful hope of medals and maybe a promotion. The unexpected order could hardly be seen as anything but a demotion, and Pohlman demanded an immediate meeting with chief of staff Buschenhagen. “It was an embarrasing moment for him. We had worked well together and he was sorry for was had passed. But the supreme commander and myself were apparently of such different personalities that any further cooperation was impossible.” Pohlman decried both Falkenhorst and Buschenhagen for playing games. “They had not with one word implied that there was friction between us. They had even given me great praise over the telephone for my efforts on the 9th and 10th of April, and Falkenhorst had shaken my hand heartily and said words of praise to me on my birthday.” But the decision had been made, and no amount of protest helped. Pohlman was flown from Oslo on the 3rd of May as a bitter and defeated man. Against his wishes, he had attended a farewell dinner – for a promise of a letter of recommendation. But Falkenhorst once again revealed his double nature. When the letter reached Berlin, it was a negative statement. “I was told after the war that Falkenhorst later was sorry for the way he had treated me. It could not repair the damage he had done to my military career.” Pohlman had dreamed of becoming a general – like his father. But Falkenhorst’s negative judgement followed him throughout the war. He received no accolades for his efforts in Oslo, and he ended up as a colonel and a fortress commander in France.

The second conqueror of Oslo, colonel Helmuth Nickelmann, could not escape Falkenhorst’s wrath either. When the Norwegian campaign ended and they started planning the invasion of the Soviet Union, Nickelmann and the rest of the 163rd division was transferred to Lapland. In the bloody battles among the Finnish forests between Salla and Alakurtti in August of 1941, Nickelmann’s regiment became stuck. “Despite a clear order to attack, the 324th regiment has not moved for a day and a half, which speaks to a regrettable lack of leadership skills and fighting spirit,” wrote general Hans Feige in a destructive report. “It is also incomprehensible that the regimental commander left the frontline battalion and withdrew to his old position, 3,5 kilometers away.” Feige wanted the colonel transferred, and Falkenhorst took action. “I have cancelled Nickelmann’s position as regimental commander and transferred him to the Führer’s reserve,” he wrote to Berlin. “In the future, he would be best suited for the reserves or as the commander of a training facility.” But the gout-ridden veteran of the first world war would not break. He worked hard, buttered up his Nazi contacts, and was rehabilitated in the winter of 1943 and promoted to major general. He saw active duty in the Vlassov army on the Eastern Front, as city commander of Nice and in the final desperate battles around Berlin, where he was captured by the Red Army. He was released from a Soviet prison in 1956 and died seven years later, 70 years old.

Falkenhorst remained supreme commander in Norway until December of 1944, when he was sacked and replaced by the Nazi general Lothar Rendulic. He was arrested by the British after the war and charged with war crimes. He was sentenced to death by shooting in the autumn of 1946, but it was changed to 20 years imprisonment. Falkenhorst was released in 1953. He died in 1968, 83 years old.

The Nygaardsvold government reached the Romsdal valley on the 23rd of April, and was shortly after followed by king Olav and crown prince Olav. The quality of the British troops landed in central Norway was too poor to halt the German advance. Southern Norway was given up the 1st of May, and the country’s leaders evacuated to Tromsø. Just over a month later it was over. The French and British armies faced a fatal defeat on the Continent, and the Allied expeditionary forces had to give up Narvik and northern Norway. The 7th of June 1940, the king, crown prince and government set course for Great Britain to an existence in exile which would last for five years. But the groundwork had been laid for continued resistance to the Nazi tyranny had been laid, and the king’s attitude and deportment in those first desperate days was never forgotten. A monarch went away, but it was the People’s King who returned.