Last Hope Island

by Lynne Olson

  Aboard the German heavy cruiser Blücher, General Erwin Engelbrecht, who commanded the attack force heading for Oslo, reviewed his orders with his subordinates. In just a few hours, more than a thousand troops, equipped with minutely detailed maps and photographs of the Norwegian capital, were to disembark from the Blücher in Oslo’s harbor. Their assignment was to slip into the sleeping city and storm government buildings, the state radio station, and the royal palace. Before noon, King Haakon, Crown Prince Olav, and the rest of the royal family would be under arrest and the Norwegian government under German control. A band, also on board the Blücher, would play “Deutschland über Alles” in the city’s center to celebrate Germany’s triumph, while German military officials took over administration of the country and its two most important material assets—its merchant marine and its gold.

  When a Norwegian patrol boat spotted the flotilla and had the temerity to issue a challenge, the boat was machine-gunned and sunk. Farther up the fjord, two small island forts, alerted by the patrol boat, also fired on the ships, but the heavy fog made accurate sighting impossible and the vessels swept on untouched. Shortly before 4 A.M., the convoy approached Oscarsborg Fortress, an island stronghold built in the mid–nineteenth century and Oslo’s last major line of defense. The Blücher’s captain was as unperturbed by the sight of the fortress as he had been by the pesky patrol boat. On his charts and maps, Oscarsborg was identified as a museum and its two antiquated cannons described as obsolete.

  The maps and charts were wrong on both counts. The fortress was operational, and so were the old cannons, fondly called “Moses” and “Aaron” by their crews. The fog lifted a bit, and as the darkened silhouettes of the ships came into view, a searchlight on the mainland suddenly illuminated the Blücher. Moses and Aaron erupted at point-blank range, their shells crashing into the 12,000-ton heavy cruiser. One shell smashed into the Blücher’s bridge, destroying its gunnery and navigational controls, while another slammed into a storeroom filled with aviation fuel. Shore batteries also began firing. Within seconds, the Blücher was ablaze, the flames leaping high into the air, burning off the fog, and lighting up the snow-covered banks of the fjord.

  With a great roar, the ship’s torpedo magazine exploded, and less than an hour later, the Blücher, commissioned only seven months before, rolled over on its side and sank. Nearly one thousand men went down with her, including most of the elite troops assigned to capture the royal family and government officials. General Engelbrecht was one of the several hundred survivors who escaped the burning oil covering the fjord’s surface and swam frantically to shore.

  Throughout that day—April 9, 1940—Hitler’s audacious, meticulously planned invasion of Denmark and Norway had gone almost exactly as planned. By early afternoon, virtually all the Führer’s major objectives along the 1,500 miles of Norwegian coastline had been taken—all, that is, except Oslo, the political, economic, and communications center of Norway and the key to the operation’s eventual success.

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  AT 1:30 A.M. ON APRIL 9, the man atop Germany’s most wanted list of Norwegians was awakened by his aide-de-camp. “Majesty,” the aide said urgently, “we are at war!” The news came as no surprise to King Haakon VII. He had been expecting—and dreading—it for years. In 1932, he had told the British admiral Sir John Kelly, “If Hitler comes to power in Germany and manages to hold on to it, then we shall have a war in Europe before another decade is over.”

  Hitler had come to power, but Norway’s political leaders had ignored the king’s repeated urging to strengthen the country’s shockingly weak defenses. Like other Scandinavian nations, Norway had long since abandoned its bellicose Viking heritage: peace, not war, was deeply rooted in its psyche. Norwegians had little admiration for military heroes, of whom their country, in any case, had few. Much more esteemed were the winners of the Nobel Peace Prize, chosen annually by the Norwegian parliament. “It was very difficult to be a military man in prewar Norway,” noted one of the few army officers on active duty in April 1940.

  In the late 1930s, this seagoing country’s navy had only seventy ships: its two largest were the oldest ironclads in the world, affectionately called “my old bathtubs” by the naval chief of staff. The tiny Norwegian army, armed with vintage rifles and cannons, had no submachine or antiaircraft guns. The cavalry was supposed to be equipped with tanks, but the money appropriated by the government was so infinitesimal that only one tank had been purchased, “so that Norwegian soldiers could at least see one sample in their lifetime.” Field maneuvers had not been held for years—they had been abolished as a way of saving money—and many brigade commanders had never even met their men.

  Norway’s military vulnerability, however, was of little concern to its government leaders. The country had been at peace for well over a century, had successfully maintained its neutrality during World War I, and intended to remain neutral in the future. Money should be spent on social reforms, Norway’s leaders believed, not on building up the military. In the view of most Norwegians, “war was the kind of thing that happened in other parts of the world,” noted Sigrid Undset, a Norwegian novelist who won the 1928 Nobel Prize in Literature. “How many of us had ever seriously believed it could happen in Norway?”

  Having made a close study of Hitler, including reading Mein Kampf in the early 1930s, the sixty-seven-year-old king was far less sanguine. If war broke out, his peaceable northern kingdom, though militarily defenseless, would have great strategic importance. Facing Britain to the west, it provided a gateway to the North Atlantic. To the south, it had access to the Baltic Sea and the German coast. Not least, it controlled the northwest sea route through which iron ore from Sweden was shipped to Germany, the ore’s main customer. And then there was Norway’s far-flung merchant marine fleet, a glittering prize for Hitler or any other belligerent.

  But whenever Haakon raised these and other points, government leaders disregarded them—and him. Most Norwegian officials scorned the monarchy as a useless relic of a bygone age and believed it should have no influence in government matters. Many thought there should be no monarchy at all. As much as he loved Norway, Haakon sometimes felt unwelcome there, at least in government circles. Not infrequently, he felt like the foreigner he once had been.

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  UNTIL HE BECAME KING OF NORWAY, Haakon VII, the second son of the crown prince of Denmark, had barely set foot in the country. He did not learn to speak Norwegian until the age of thirty-three, shortly before his reign began. Known as Prince Carl in Denmark, he had been a modest, unassuming young royal who grew up believing he would never be king of anything, for which he was profoundly grateful. His mother had reportedly pressured him to marry the young Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands, but he had resisted, wanting nothing to do with the pomp and formality of official court life. Instead, he wooed and won his first cousin Maud, the sports-mad daughter of King Edward VII of Britain, who was as anxious for a quiet life, out of the limelight, as he was.*1 At the time of his marriage, Carl, who sported a tattoo of an anchor on his arm, was an officer in the Danish navy and planned to make it his career.

  But in 1905, Norway’s declaration of independence from Sweden turned the life of the sailor prince upside down. The century-old union between the two countries had never been an equal one: Sweden, whose kings ruled both nations, had been the dominant partner from the beginning, and Norway had been growing increasingly restive. To lessen the chance of forceful Swedish opposition to their peaceful rebellion, Norwegian leaders said they would welcome a junior member of Sweden’s royal family as the country’s new monarch. Prince Carl, whose maternal grandfather was the king of Sweden and Norway, was the obvious choice.

  The prince, however, was appalled at the idea. Not only did he want to remain in the Danish navy, he knew virtually nothing about Norway and its people. He was also acutely aware that many citizens of Norway, which had abolished its aristocracy in the nineteenth century, were in favor of a republic, not a monarchy
. Under heavy pressure from his father-in-law, Edward VII, among others, he finally agreed—but only if Norway held a referendum on the issue. When 88 percent of the electorate voted for a monarchy, Carl was crowned, taking the ancient Norwegian royal name of Haakon. (His wife, English to the core, refused to renounce her given name: she was known as Queen Maud until the day she died in 1938. She continued, as she always had done, to address her husband as Charles, the Anglified version of Carl. “I actually have plans to make him completely English,” she confided to her diary early in their courtship.)

  With Haakon as monarch, Norway boasted the most egalitarian kingdom in the world. Sir Frederick Ponsonby, an aide to Queen Maud’s father, once said that Norway was “so socialistic that a King and Queen seemed out of place.” After a visit to Oslo in 1911, Theodore Roosevelt wrote to an acquaintance that the insertion of a royal family into the most democratic society in Europe was like “Vermont offhandedly trying the experiment of having a King.”

  King Haakon VII with his wife, Queen Maud, and son, Crown Prince Olav.

  Haakon, who frequently described his position as that of “a very democratic president for life,” was known to his people as “Herre Konge” (“Mr. King”) rather than “Your Majesty.” The royal family lived simply, with Queen Maud often doing her own shopping. In his frequent tours of the country and travels abroad, Haakon impressed those he met with his friendliness and wry sense of humor. Once, at a gathering of the British royal family at Windsor, he noticed a youthful distant cousin of his, Lord Frederick Cambridge, standing awkwardly by himself in a corner. He marched over and vigorously shook the young peer’s hand. “You don’t know me,” he said. “Let me introduce myself. I’m old Norway.”

  As close as he was to his British relatives and as much as he loved their country, Haakon was horrified by the refusal of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s government to confront Hitler over his repeated aggressions in the 1930s. After World War II began in September 1939, Norway, like other neutral European countries, made clear that it wanted no part of a military alliance with a nation that, along with France, had handed over much of Czechoslovakia to the Führer and then, having declared war against Germany for invading Poland, had failed to do anything to aid the Poles. “All the small nations now understand that we in the future have to look after ourselves,” Haakon wrote chidingly to his nephew, Britain’s King George VI.

  Until the spring of 1940, the war was a conflict in name only. Chamberlain and most officials in his government had no interest in and no intention of fighting a real war. They had imposed an economic blockade against Hitler and seemed to think that this would be enough to bring him to his knees.

  Winston Churchill, Chamberlain’s first lord of the admiralty and the British Cabinet’s only bellicose member, strongly disagreed with Chamberlain’s “phony war” strategy. From the war’s first day, he demanded that Britain take the offensive against Germany—but not on German soil. The confrontation, he said, should come in the waters of Norway. He repeatedly urged the British government to stop the shipment of Swedish iron ore, vital to Germany’s armament industry, along Norway’s coastline. When both Norway and Sweden protested that idea, Churchill was infuriated by their reluctance to become battlefields for the warring powers. “We are fighting to re-establish the reign of law and to protect the liberties of small countries,” he told the War Cabinet (a claim that both Poland and Czechoslovakia might have found hard to stomach). “Small nations must not tie our hands when we are fighting for their rights and freedoms….Humanity, rather than legality, must be our guide.”

  After hesitating for months, Chamberlain finally gave in to Churchill’s pressure. At dawn on April 8, 1940, British ships began sowing mines along the Norwegian coast. Hitler, who weeks earlier had said he would forestall any British move on Norway, had already ordered his high command to implement carefully prepared plans for the following day’s surprise attack and occupation of both Norway and Denmark.

  In most respects, Germany’s land, sea, and air assault on the two Scandinavian countries was a brilliant success. Before it began, Hitler had decreed that the kings of Norway and Denmark must be prevented from escaping “at all costs.” In Copenhagen, the Germans had no trouble finding King Christian X of Denmark, Haakon’s sixty-nine-year-old brother, who capitulated as ordered. But bad weather and the sinking of the Blücher had upset the split-second timing of the assault on Oslo. When German troops finally entered the royal palace, government buildings, and the Bank of Norway that afternoon, they found only frightened low-level government employees and piles of papers burning in furnaces and fireplaces. The bank vaults lay empty, with no trace of the country’s gold bullion. The king and government leaders had vanished, too.

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  WHEN THE RESIDENTS OF OSLO awoke on April 9, they found their world, so neatly ordered the day before, in chaos. Although the Germans had not yet entered the city, Luftwaffe bombers crisscrossed the sky overhead, and the muffled crump of bombs could be heard in the distance. Columns of thick black smoke from the burning government documents spiraled upward. Beautiful Oslo, with its verdant parks, hills, and forests, now lay open to an enemy it never knew it had.

  A few hours earlier, as the Blücher had steamed toward Oslo in the predawn darkness, German minister Curt Bräuer had confronted the Norwegian foreign minister, Halvdan Koht, with a demand for Norway’s surrender, emphasizing “how completely senseless all resistance would be.” Though dazed by the sudden attack, Koht had the wit to remind Bräuer of Hitler’s remark about Czechoslovakia’s capitulation after Munich—that “the nation that bowed meekly to an aggressor without offering resistance was not worthy to live.” With that, he rejected the German demand.

  Before joining the king and other government officials aboard the special train that spirited them away that morning, Koht told a radio journalist that Norway was at war with Germany, that the king and government had escaped, and, incorrectly, that a general mobilization was now in effect. In response to his announcement, which was broadcast throughout the country, thousands of young men, suitcases in hand, headed for the nearest military center, only to be informed that it was all a mistake. “Reservists and volunteers left recruiting stations in tears when told there were no arms for them,” a British diplomat recalled. In the Norwegian capital, dazed crowds gathered in front of newspaper bulletin boards, swapping fears and rumors.

  Some Oslo residents, however, already had all the information they needed: the Germans were coming, and they must flee the capital before the invaders arrived. Sigrid Undset hurriedly packed a couple of suitcases and left. The fifty-seven-year-old novelist had been a strong and vocal critic of Hitler since the early 1930s; her books had been banned in Germany shortly after the Führer took control of the government.

  A young German émigré named Willy Brandt was also in danger. The twenty-six-year-old Brandt, who had battled Nazis in the streets even before they came to power in Germany and had been deprived of his citizenship as a result, had found asylum in Norway seven years earlier. After studying at the University of Oslo, he had become a journalist and was closely allied to top figures in the country’s ruling Labor Party. He was also heavily involved in the work of German émigré groups trying to stimulate opposition to Hitler in their homeland. Early that morning, he had been awakened by an urgent phone call: he must get out of the city as quickly as possible. A few minutes later, he was, as he wrote later, “in flight again”—whisked away to a safe house in the suburbs of Oslo, where he was picked up by a couple of leading Norwegian politicians and driven to safety. Brandt, who would become one of Germany’s most eminent postwar chancellors, was eventually spirited out of the country to neutral Sweden. He spent the war there as a journalist and propagandist for “the cause of a free Norway.”

  Oslo residents watch as German troops march into the city in April 1940.

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  KING HAAKON AND THE government leaders, meanwhile, escaped to Hamar, a town eighty
miles north of Oslo. As their train left the capital early that morning, a long line of trucks idled outside the Bank of Norway, a black granite building near Oslo’s harbor, waiting to be loaded with hundreds of boxes and barrels containing the lifeblood of Norway’s economy: fifty tons of gold bullion totaling $55 million ($915 million today). Far more foresighted than government officials, the bank’s director had made plans months before to evacuate the gold reserves to a secret bombproof vault in the town of Lillehammer, 114 miles north of Oslo, in case of attack.

  In Hamar, the Norwegian parliament immediately went into session in the local movie theater, while hundreds more people—civil servants, businessmen, journalists, and foreign diplomats—poured into the little town, occupying all its hotel rooms and crowding its slushy streets. Government ministers bought up Hamar’s entire stock of paper and pencils to transact Cabinet business, and government clerks began unpacking the crates of documents they had brought from Oslo. “I think we all, subconsciously, expected to settle down comfortably there,” recalled Florence “Daisy” Harriman, a former New York socialite turned social reformer whom President Franklin D. Roosevelt had appointed U.S. minister to Norway. “We were not yet ready to imagine that the King and Government would be hunted like wild animals.”

  In midevening, the fragile sense of security was shattered when the parliament’s president, Carl Hambro, interrupted a debate to announce that German forces were heading toward Hamar and that a train was waiting at the station to take the king and government away. Officials grabbed their hats and coats and ran for the door. Ten minutes later, the train departed, heading for Elverum, a town higher in the mountains and closer to the Swedish border.