Liverpool’s Most (In)famous Phantom Resident

Posted on by Sloane Snodgrasse
Regional History

There’s nothing like unearthing a hitherto unsuspected and improbable sounding historical connexion to give a boost to a city’s tourist industry. In the case of Liverpool, UK—the city that the Beatles, the Mop-Top “Fab Four”, launched onto centre-stage on the world’s pop culture map—that nexus may not be an altogether welcome one if it connects it to the most reviled political figure of the 20th century.

(Image: www.lonelyplanet.com)

One story that has been quietly doing the rounds of England since the early 1970s is that Adolf Hitler—long before his elevation to German führer and his failed shot at world domination in the 1930s and 40s—visited Liverpool and spent several months in the city during his formative years. The myth of Hitler’s visit has sustained itself over the years and even found favour with some Liverpudlians despite the complete paucity of proof to support any such claim.

Alois Hitler ⇧

What we do know with some certainty
Adolf’s elder half-brother Alois Hitler visits Dublin in the early 1900s where he meets a young Irish woman, Bridget Dowling. They elope to London, marry and move to the Merseyside city in search of work. Alois lives in Liverpool between 1911 and 1914. A son is born in Liverpool (William Patrick Hitler, 1911). The evidence for this primarily comes from the city census of 2011, Alois Hitler is listed on the residential register – although the register records his first name as ‘Anton’. The Hitlers live at 102 Upper Stanhope Street, Toxteth, L8 1UN (a suburb of Liverpool). One degree of separation to AH, definitely, but so far nothing that places the Nazi mass-murderer in person in the city of Liverpool.

(Source: www.dailymail.co.uk)

Adolf gets Merseyside?
It is Hitler’s sister-in-law that draws the dots between Adolf in Upper Austria and the family in Liverpool. In the late Thirties, Bridget Hitler, long-parted from Alois and no longer domiciled in Liverpool, writes her (unpublished) memoirs which recounts a stay by young Aldolf with her family in the Upper Stanhope Street home⌖ (supposedly between November 1912 and April 1913). Bridget’s revelation was the first time anyone had an inkling that Hitler had ever been to Liverpool or England. There was nothing on the public record and no one else has ever corroborated Bridget’s claim [‘Adolf Hitler Liverpool links discussed again in new TV documentary’, Liverpool Echo, 08-May-2003. www.liverpoolecho.co.uk].

Hitler’s alleged Liverpool holiday only comes to light and reaches a wider audience after historian Robert Payne discovers Bridget’s unfinished manuscript in the New York Public Library while researching his own book on Hitler in the early 1970s. The claim gets taken up by Liverpool’s daily papers…in particular editor Mike Unger runs the story hard, in 1979 he edits Bridget’s book and publishes it as The Memoirs of Bridget Hitler [‘Hitler, 23, fled to Liverpool to avoid service in Austrian army’, (JohnThomas Didymus), Digital Journal, 26-Nov-2011, www.digitaljournal.com]

Draft-dodger führer?
In her memoirs Bridget explains Adolf’s reason for coming to Liverpool as an attempt to avoid being conscripted into the Austrian army (unsurprisingly Bridget’s portrayal of her brother-in-law is not a flattering one)◘. Another theory for the unexpected visit is that Hitler, a “wanna-be” artist, is on the rebound—having been rejected from art schools in Austria—and travels to Liverpool as its a city known for its artists and art schools [‘Hitler Living in Liverpool’, The History of Liverpool, www.historyofliverpool.com].

Hitler, Liverpool man-about-town
Lots of wild and occasional wacky tales have been told about Hitler’s time in Liverpool. People come out of the woodwork with anecdotes about supposed Merseyside encounters their great-grandparents had with the future German reichkánzler. The myths abound, Hitler is ‘remembered’ drinking at Peter Kavanagh’s Egerton Street pub and barracking for “his team” Everton at Goodisall Park, or alternately some have depicted him as a ‘Kopite’ (a fan of rival Liverpool FC); he gets banned from the Walker Art Gallery; the Liverpool ice rink at Wavertree keeps a pair of his skating boots on display, etc [‘Did Hitler ever visit Liverpool, and if so, why?’ (Notes and Queries), The Guardian, www.theguardian.com]. As Prof Frank McDonough observes, for many Liverpudlians it seems “the fiction is much more interesting” (‘Hitler Liverpool links’).

(Source: www.irishcentral.com)

Fanciful rather than factual
Though the Liverpool Echo is sympathetic to Frau Hitler’s account, most serious scholars reject the claims about her brother-in-law’s Liverpool sojourn as pure fabrication, flimsily-written and without foundation. Others attribute Bridget’s motives to an opportunist scheme by her and her son to cash in on the Hitler phenomenon (see also Endnote) [‘Brigid and Willy Hitler: The Nazi dictator’s Irish family who tried to make money off his rise to power, (Rachael O’Connor), The Irish Post, 05-Sep-2019, www.irishpost.com]. Refuting Bridget’s tenuous claims that Adolf spend 1912-13 (Hitler’s so-called “lost year”) in Liverpool, Third Reich historian Ian Kershaw places Hitler instead in a Viennese men’s hostel during the same time period [‘Your Story: Adolf Hitler – did he visit Liverpool during 1912-13?’, Legacies – Liverpool, (M W Royden), www.bbc.com].

⇩ Bridget and William

Endnote: Hitler’s scouser nephew
Whether or not Hitler ever made it to Liverpool, we do know that he had significant interactions with his nephew (more precisely half-nephew) in Nazi Germany. William travelled there after Hitler’s acquisition of power hoping (as his mother did before him) to exploit the family name and his connexions to his advantage in the Third Reich. The relationship between führer and scouser nephew however is a tempestuous one. William is unhappy with the cushy job Hitler arranges for him and the latter in turn becomes disaffected with his “loathsome nephew”. In the late 1930s William returns to England where he does an about-face, denouncing uncle Adolf. Next William moves to the US where, accompanied by his mother, he tours the country giving ‘insider’ lectures about his “madman uncle”. When America enters the world war William enlists in the navy and serves in the fight against Nazism. After the war mother and son change tack once again… changing their name to “Stuart-Houston” they turn their back on a life of publicity-seeking and disappear without trace into Long Island (NY) suburbia [‘Hitler’s Irish Nephew’, Dublin City Council, 19-Jun-2020, www.dublincity.ie].⇧ Hitler and his ‘renegade’ enemy nephew

PostScript: The fake Hitler jottings
The “Hitler in Liverpool” saga is a little reminiscent of a later, much more famous deception also purporting to shed new light on Hitler, the Hitler Diaries controversy of the early 1980s. The ‘discovery’ of hitherto unknown diaries of the führer was ultimately exposed as a hoax (perpetrated by a small-time, recidivist “con man” from East Germany)⊠, but only after West Germany’s Stern magazine and Murdoch’s The Sunday Times both got badly burned in their avaricious haste to try to capitalise big-time on the story scoop. The diary forgeries claimed a further victim in Hitler expert Prof Hugh Trevor-Roper whose reputation gets irreparably impaired by him prematurely authenticating the diaries as being the genuine Hitler article before a proper analysis of the documents is carried out.

_____________________________________________
⌖ ironically the Hitler house gets flattened in a German bombing raid during WWII

◘  Bridget takes the credit in her memoirs for suggesting to Hitler that he trim his moustache to the iconic style he is famous for, and for fostering his interest in astrology

◍ the circulation of fake photos showing Adolf Hitler standing in front of well-known Liverpool landmarks are part of the myth-making

⊠ described by handwriting expert Kenneth W Rendell as “bad forgeries but a great hoax”

Germania, Mega-City Stillborn: Hitler’s Utopian Architectural Dream we

Posted on by E Curb Nottus
Built Environment, International Relations, Regional History, Society & Culture

In Robert Harris’ speculative novel Fatherland—a “what if”/alternative view of postwar European history set in 1964—Adolf Hitler is very much alive, having won the Second World War. Through his “Greater German Reich” the Führer rules an empire stretching from “the Low Countries to the Urals” with Britain reduced to a not-very-significant client state. In the novel’s counterfactual narrative Hitler’s architect Albert Speer has completed part of Hitler’s grand building project for Berlin – including the 120m high “Triumphal Arch” and the “Great Hall of the Reich” (the “largest building in the world”). We know that none of the above scenario came to fruition, but we do know from history that part of Hitler’s plans post-victory (if he won) was to radically transform the shape and appearance of his capital city Berlin.

Weltreich or Europareich?
Under a future German empire, Berlin, to be known as Germania※, would be the showcase capital. Historians are divided over whether the Nazis’ ultimate goal was global dominance (Weltherrschaft)—in which case Germania would be Hitler’s Welthauptstadt (‘world capital’)—or was more limited in its objective, intent on creating a European-wide reich only (as posited by AJP Taylor et al). Either way, Hitler’s imperial capital was to be built on a monumental scale and grandeur which reflected the “1,000-Year Reich” and its stellar story of military conquests and expansion – in effect a theatrical showcase for the regime [‘Story of cities #22: how Hitler’s plans for Germania would have torn Berlin apart’, (Kate Connolly), The Guardian, 14-Apr-2016, www.theguardian.com].

Nazi utopia  
Showing off Germania to the world for the Führer was all about one-upping the capitalist West. Immense buildings symbolising the strength and power of Nazism convey a message of intimidation, a declaration that Hitler’s Germany could match and exceed the great metropolises like New York, Paris and London. Accordingly, the Hamburg suspension bridge had to be on a grander scale than its model in San Francisco, the constructed East-West Axis in Berlin had to outdo the massive Avenida 9 de Julio in Buenos Aires [Thies, Jochen, ‘Hitler’s European Building Programme’,  Journal of Contemporary History, July 1, 1978, http://doi.org/10.1177/002200947801300301].

Hitler & Speer: (Source: www.mirror.co.uk)

The architect/dictator
Hitler put Speer in charge of the massive project but always fancying himself as having the sensibility of an architect, Hitler retained a deep interest in its progress✪. Rejecting all forms of modernism▣ Hitler’s architectural preferences were rooted in the past – “Rome was his historical model and neoclassical architecture was his guiding aesthetic” [Meng, M. (2013). Central European History. 46 (3), 672-674. Retrieved October 24, 2020, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/43280636]. The Germania building projects writ on a gargantuan scale, were an unmistakable statement, a means for the dictatorship “to secure (its) place in history and immortalise (itself) and (its) ideas through (its) architecture [Colin Philpott, Relics of the Reich: The Buildings the Nazis Left Behind, (2016)].

(Source: http://the-man-in-the-high-castle.fandom.com/wiki/)

On the Germania drawing board
Taking pride of place, the architectural centrepiece of the Germania blueprint, was the Volkshalle (‘People’s Hall)✦, a staggeringly large edifice inspired by the Pantheon in Rome—a dome 290m high and 250m in diameter—which had it been completed would have been the largest enclosed space on Earth, capable of holding up to 180,000 people. Linking with the Volkshalle via an underground passageway similar to a Roman cryptoporticus was to be the palace of Hitler (Führerpalast). The monolithic domed People’s Hall would have dwarfed and obscured the close-by, existing structures, the Reichstag and the Brandenburg Gate.

Among a host of other uncompleted buildings in Germania was the Triumphal Arch (Trumpfbogen), at over 100m high three times the size of the iconic arch in Paris it was modelled on. Hitler’s utopian Berlin metropolis was scheduled for completion in 1950, the onset of war however delayed construction which then ceased for good after the Wehrmacht suffered serious setbacks on the Russian Front in 1943 [‘Hitler’s World: The Post War Plan’, (Documentary, UKTV/SBS, 2020]. The Nazis planned thousands of kilometres of networks of motorways spanning the expanding empire (linking Germania with the Kremlin, Calais to Warsaw, Klagenfurt to Trondheim, etc). These too remained unrealised under the Third Reich (Thies). Another project reduced to a pipe dream was the Prachtallee (Avenue of Splendours), a north-south boulevard which was intended to bisect the East-West Axis.

Model of ‘Germania’

Costing Germania
The projected cost of all the regime’s building projects has been estimated at in excess of 100 billion Reichsmarks (Thies). But for the Nazis, how to bankroll a building venture of such Brobdingnagian proportions, was not a major concern. Their reasoning was that once victory was attained, the conquered nations would provide all of the labour and materials necessary for the construction projects (Connolly).

A slave-built Germania
German historian Jochen Thies’ pioneering study, Hitler’s Plans for World Domination: Nazi Architecture and Ultimate War Aims’ (English translation 2012), argues that as well as reintroducing the architectural solutions of  antiquity for its mega-city, the Nazi elite sought to replicate “the society and economy of that time, i.e. a slave-owning society”, as the basis for Hitler’s “fantasy world capital” (Thies). For a venture of such scale the program firstly needed ein großer Raum (a large space), requiring thousands of ordinary Germans, both Jews and Gentile, to be forcibly evicted from their homes which were then bulldozed✮. Concentration camps were established deliberately close to granite and marble quarries to facilitate the building projects…in proximity to Berlin, the Nazis used Jewish prisoners at Sachsenhausen concentration camp (Oranienburg) for the slave and forced labour force⌖ [‘Inside Germania: Hitler’s massive Nazi utopia that never came to be’, Urban Planning’, (Chris Weller), Business Insider, 24-Dec-2015, www.businessinsider.com].

Germania – a Nazi utopia to see but a nightmarish dystopia to live in
The plan if it had been realised would have seen huge swathes of the city torn down to make way for the mega-construction mania. With a multiplicity of ring-roads, tunnels and autobahns, Germania would have been pedestrian-unfriendly, lacking in amenities for city-dwellers, sterile, not green (outside of the grand stadium there was no parks or major transit lines)…a city almost completely bereft of human dimension – what was once an attractive living space would have disappeared under the Third Reich’s urban planning imperatives (Roger Moorhouse in Weller).

Nuremberg: Macht des dritten Reiches (Source: The Art Newspaper)

Of course Berlin wasn’t the only city in the German Reich singled out to get an extreme physical makeover. Four other cities were also awarded special Führer City Status and earmarked for the same grandiose Nazi treatment – Linz (where Hitler grew up), Hamburg, Munich and Nuremberg. The last city, made famous for holding the mass Nuremberg party rallies, its Zeppelin Field Grandstand, now a racetrack, had a capacity for up to 150,000 party faithfuls.

Endnote: A neo-German city on the Vistula
The newly acquired lands of the empire were also subjected to the NSDAP urban transformation template. Warsaw was to be rebuilt as a new German city (the Pabst Plan⊞) – a living space for a select number of ‘Ayran’ Germans, while its more numerous, “non-Ayran” Polish residents were to be shepherded into a camp across the River Vistula, a separate but handily located slave labour force for the ‘renewal’ (i.e. rebuild) of Warsaw…had the Pabst Plan proceeded historic Polish culture in the city would have been obliterated in the upheaval (‘Hitler’s World: The Post War Plan’).

⧾𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪⧾

 

※ ‘Germania’ was the name ascribed to the lands of the Germanic peoples in Ancient Roman times

✪ Hitler had always been intrinsically interested in architecture, back in his Linz days the failed artist had been advised to take up architecture instead

▣ the same applies to art, Hitler rejected the modern movements like Cubism, Surrealism and Dada, labelling them “degenerate art”

✦ also known as the Große Halle, the ‘great hall’

✮ leading to a housing crisis in Berlin, aggravated by some over-zealous officials who destroyed houses prematurely and unnecessarily, simply in the hope of earning the Führer’s approval (Thies)

⌖ as demands for labour intensified, the Nazis widened the pool of forced labour to include PoWs and anyone deemed deviant by the state, ie, beggars, itinerants, Gypsies, leftists, homosexuals  (Connolly)

⊞ Pabst was the Nazis’ chief architect for Warsaw

Hugo Boss, Gentlemen’s Outfitters to the German Nationalsozialistische Arbeiterpartei

Posted on by Sloane Snodgrasse
Commerce & Business, International Relations, Military history, Racial politics, Regional History, Retailing history

Hugo Boss … luxury watches, fragrances, men’s suits and fashion wear and accessories, Nazi uniforms. Wait! Run that last one past me again? Yes, it’s true. Hugo Boss AG＊, that doyen of international fashion houses with annual revenue exceeding €2.7 billion (2018) and over 1,100 stores worldwide, provided the German Nazi Party, with their uniforms during (and prior to) the Third Reich. Although you wouldn’t know so from a perusal of the Hugo Boss website which keeps a firm lid on the company’s unsavoury past❂.

The clothing company was started in Metzingen (southern Germany) in 1924 by the eponymous Hugo (Ferdinand) Boss…it commenced supplying the NSDAP (National-Socialist Workers Party) with their brown military uniforms, according to the company’s own claim, in 1924 (the year in which Hugo Boss was founded)∅. Initially Boss designed and provided the standard Nazi brown-shirted outfits including Stürmabteilung (SA) uniforms,  Nazi workwear, and Hitler Youth uniforms. In the Depression Boss’s company was like many, many businesses severely hit and Boss was forced into bankruptcy in 1931. That year was momentous for another reason, HF Boss joined the Nazi Party, an event that was to turn his fortunes round dramatically. At the same time the failed businessman also joined the SS (Schutzstaffel) as a “sponsoring member”.

By appointment to the Führer
Membership of the party meant more contracts for Hugo Boss as a favoured supplier of Hitler. Under the Nazi dictatorship Boss’ sales grew from 38,260 RM in 1932 to 3,300,000 RM in 1941 (Timm). Boss’ motives for joining have been attributed to “economic opportunism” and its clear that he saw the business advantages of tying his colours to the Nazi flagship, but there’s equal little doubt that his commitment to the Nazi cause was heartfelt (a photo of him with the Führer was said to to be one of the tailor’s most prized possessions)❊ [‘Hugo Boss’ Secret Nazi History’, (Fashion and War), M2M, (video, YouTube)].

🔻A Boss ad placed in the SS newspaper

Nazi fashionistas
From 1937 on, the relationship acquired an exclusivity, Hugo Boss made clothing only for the Nazis, including the black uniforms worn by the elite Nazi force, the SS (Boss didn’t design the uniforms worn by Himmler’s SS Corps, two party members unconnected to the company designed them). Boss continued to heavily advertise his fashions in the SS newspaper, Das Schwarze Korps, and fashionably chic the uniforms were! One of the pillars of the Nazis’ ideology was the pseudo-scientific belief in Aryan superiority, this involved showing the world what the “new man” looks like. There was no finer exemplar of this than the Wehrmacht military man, and this is where Boss provided the finishing touches. The firm’s stylish, sharply cut uniforms conveyed the desired outer appearance, the SS corporate identity that Hitler and the Nazis wanted to project to the world (Fashion and War).

HB as slave-labour drivers
From 1940 Boss used slave labour at it’s Metzingen textile factory, predominantly comprising women and later supplemented by the infusion of Polish and French POWs. The company  (sans it’s founder), after decades of dodging accusations, finally came clean about it’s shameful Nazi collaboration, after being pressured into issuing a mea culpa in 1997 for the gross mistreatment of the workers. Later the corporation commissioned a book on it’s dark past association❏ [‘“Hitler’s Tailor” Hugo Boss apologises for using slave labour to make Nazi uniforms’, (Lauren Paxman), Daily Mail, 24-Sep-2011, www.dailymail.co.uk].

(Source: www.militaryuniforms.net/Pinterest)

A discounted form of justice
After the war Boss was tried along with other German collaborators by a regional Denazification tribunal. The man known as “Hitler’s Tailor” claimed in his defence that he only joined the Nazi Party to save his firm. The court found Boss to have been a “beneficiary of the system” and fined him 100,000 RM, made him sever all connexions with his own firm and stripped him of the right to vote, join a political party or professional organisation. However, on appeal, the fine was reduced by 75%, the other restrictions were lightened and his culpability was downgraded to ‘follower’ of the regime. Before the findings could be ratified by the French Military Government and the punishments imposed, Boss died in 1948 (Timm).

(Photo: Hutton-Deutsh Collection/Corbis/Getty Images)

Endnote: Supping with the 卐 devil
Hugo Boss AG was far from the only company to profitably cohabitate with Hitler and the NSDAP. The list of big corporations doing mutually advantageous business was extensive, both within Germany and outside  – including Volkswagen, Bayer, Coca-Cola, Nestlé, Kodak, Ford, General Motors, IBM, Siemens, Chase National Bank and Associated Press [‘Companies with Ties to Nazi Germany’, (Debra Kelly), Grunge, (Upd.17-Dec-2019), www.grunge.com].

┷┷┷┷┷┷┷┷┷┷┷┷┷┷┷┷┷┷┷┷┷┷┷┷┷┷┷┷┷┷

＊ Aktiengesellschaft (German limited company)

❂ either that or trying to conceal or gloss over the inconvenient truth of the corporation’s history, eg, “in the 1930s it produced uniforms for various(sic) parties around the time of the world war”, www.bangandstrike.com

∅ the firm’s advertising in the 1930s stated that it was a “supplier of National Socialist uniforms since 1924”, however research suggest that this overstates by four years the length of Boss’ association with Hitler and the Nazis [Elisabeth Timm, ‘Hugo Ferdinand Boss (1885-1948) und die Firma Hugo Boss: Eine Dokumentation’, (Metzingen Zwangsarbeit – Forced Labour), MA Thesis, 1999]

❊ it was a ‘reunion’ of the two humble German corporals from World War I

❏ author Roman Koester wrote: “it’s clear that (Boss) did not just join the party out of economic calculation…he was a convinced Nazi” (Hugo Boss, 1924-1945. A Clothing Factory During the Weimar Republic and Third Reich)

Hitler in Norway: Raw Materials for Matériel, Geopolitics, Ideology and Propaganda

Posted on by funambulator@live.com
International Relations, Military history, Regional History

Norway, Sweden and Denmark (www.geology.com)

At the onset of world war in 1939 the principal adversaries of Nazi Germany and Adolf Hitler were clearly seen to be the United Kingdom and (initially at first) France. So, why did the Third Reich focus so much on Norway in the global conflict?

War strategy was part of the answer. German military planning ante bellum had pinpointed Norway’s geo-strategic importance. It was also aware of the danger of a blockade of Germany’s sea-lanes posed by the British Navy. By controlling Norway’s long (16,000 mi) coastline, Germany could control the North Sea, providing the optimal maritime attack route for an assault on Britain. It would also ease the passage of Germany’s warships and submarines into the Atlantic Ocean. As far back as 1929 German Vice-Admiral Wegener outlined in a book the advantages of seizing Norway in a future war to expedite German naval traffic [C N Trueman, “The Invasion Of Norway 1940”, www.historylearningsite.co.uk . The History Learning Site, 20 Apr 2015. 5 Feb 2020]. The Nazis believed that Norway’s strategic ports were the key to control of the Atlantic and to the overall success of Germany in the war (‘Nazi Megastructures’).

Norway’s proximity to Sweden was another factor in Germany’s focus on the Scandinavian country, arguably the main consideration in Hitler’s and the Nazis’ calculations. Buried in the north of Sweden —mainly at the Kiruna and Gällivare mines— were vast quantity of high-grade iron-ore. In 1939 Germany imported ten million tons of the mineral from Sweden, all but one million of it from these mines [‘The Nazi Invasion of Norway – Hitler Tests the West’, (Andrew Knighton), War History Online, 01-Oct-2018, www.warhistoryonline]. This raw material provided the steel for the German war machine – its armaments and equipment (weaponry, tanks) and aircraft.

Kiruna mine 🔼

As Sweden was (like Norway up to April 1940) a neutral country in war-time and was freely selling iron-ore to the Germans, why did Hitler need Norway? The problem was the port of Luleå on the Gulf of Bothnia in Sweden, from where the Nazis transported the precious loads of ore…in winter it would freeze over. To meet the exigencies of “total war” the Nazis needed to keep the production lines rolling, the war schedule couldn’t afford long delays in the delivery of the iron-ore. The solution lay in Norway – the northern port at Narvik by contrast didn’t freeze over and was accessible all year round. Logistically, the Germans could easily re-route the Swedish iron ore via the Norwegian coast (Trueman). What made this more pressing for the Germans was that Britain spurred on by Winston Churchill was planning to mount a expeditionary force to capture the Swedish iron-ore mines to deprive their enemies of it [Tony Griffiths, Scandinavia: At War with Trolls, (2004)].

In April 1940 Germany, concerned that Britain was trying to engineer Norway into the war, implemented Operation Weserübung, invading both Denmark and Norway at the same time. Neighbouring Denmark for Germany was a staging post and base for its Norway operations. Denmark capitulated virtually immediately but Norway, with some limited and not very effective help from the British, French and Polish, held out against the massively superior might of the Nazi Heer, Kriegsmarine and Luftwaffe for over two months.

🔼 Quisling inspecting the Germanske SS Norge troops in Oslo

The Norwegian surrender came, inevitably, after the Allies withdrew their support. The German Wehrmacht stayed in occupation of the country for five years guarding the precious iron-ore route. Hitler, wanting to project a veneer of legitimacy, installed a pro-German Norwegian puppet regime under Vidkun Quisling, a fascist collaborator and leader of Norway’s Nasjonal Samling party✱. Quisling, evoking an ancient Viking concept, the hird✧, formed his own paramilitary organisation [Tony Griffiths, Scandinavia: At War with Trolls, (2004)], however real power lay with the Hitler-appointed Reichskommissar Josef Terboven.

Hitler had another, ideological motive for extending the scope of his Third Reich empire to Norway. The Nazi Führer was an ardent admirer of Viking and Norse culture. Nazi ideology rested on a belief in so-called “Aryan superiority” which elevated Nordic people such as the Norwegians. This ideology was reflected in SS recruitment posters circulated in Norway (and Denmark) during the German occupation…propaganda aimed at an historic appeal to Norwegian manhood, conflating of the Wehrmacht soldier spirit with the valour and exploits of Viking warrior culture [‘Vikings: Warriors of No Nation’, (Eleanor Barraclough, History Today, 68(4), April 2019, www.historytoday.com].

The Nazis’ program of Lebensborn –intended to create “racially pure” offspring was practiced in Norway, resulting in somewhere between ten and twelve thousand babies being born to Norwegian mothers and German fathers⊚ (‘Vikings: Warriors of No Nation’).

🔼 (L) Quisling, (2nd from L) Himmler, (3rd from L) Terboven

Hitler’s preoccupation with Norway, its natural resources and its supposed Aryan virtues, was to have critical and fateful repercussions for the “big picture” war strategy of the Third Reich. The Nazis fortified Norway more heavily than any other nation it occupied during the war, several hundred thousand German soldiers (regular army, Waffen and Schutzstaffel – SS) were stationed there – a ratio of one German soldier for every eight Norwegians! [‘German occupation of Norway’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]. When the Allies launched their decisive D-Day operation in 1944, these unused, excess troops in non-combative Norway may very likely have been vital to the German efforts to stem the Allies’ major offensive at Normandy.The Nazis used ancient Viking rune symbols on their uniforms and flags, like the SS’s sig rune insignia (above)

——————————————————

✱ adding a new word, ‘quisling’, to the lexicon. The charade was maintained with Hitler declaring that occupied Denmark and Norway were under the protection(sic) of the Nazi state, Hitler‘s Scandinavian Legacy, Ed. by John Gilmour & Jill Stephenson, (Introduction) (2013)

✧ in Old Norse, originally a retinue of informal armed companions, analogous with a housecarl, a household bodyguard

⊚ the most famous of which is Frida (Anni-Frid) of the Swedish pop group ABBA