Were well-connected Germans able to park their sons in Norway during WWII?
Upvote:-1
The Germans and the Russians were killing each other in Northern Norway through most of WWII. The Russians were preparing to annex Finnmark at the end of the war, but a ruse perpetrated by some army officer (can't remember if it was a Brit or a Yank), convinced them to back off. There is a statue of a young Russian soldier with his Ppsh41 submachine gun...maybe in Kirchenes. The German battleship Tirpitz was sunk by bombs in a fjord outside Tromso in Nov 1944. German naval bases in Northern Norway supported the battlecruiser Scharnhorst and other ships, submarines, and warplanes that harassed the convoys going to/from Russia.
Upvote:10
The German high command (OKW and OKH) was never of a single mind on anything but, not being privy to the intense pressure applied by Stalin for a second front in France, many high ranking officers believed that the Western Allies would begin the re-conquest of Western Europe by invading Norway and then blocking transport of the Swedish iron ore which were almost as vital to the German war effort as the oil in Ploesti.
This importance in the minds of both Hitler and the Wehrmacht can be seen by tracking number of divisions stationed in Norway over the curse of the war:
Sep. 1940 7
Mar. 1941 7
Sep. 1941 7
Mar. 1942 8
Sep. 1942 11
Mar. 1943 12
Sep. 1943 13
Mar. 1944 13
Sep. 1944 11
Mar. 1945 13
So while Norway eventually ended up being a safe haven for German soldiers, this was far from a foregone conclusion while the war was in progress.
With a ballpark figure of 10,000 men per division, 500,000 men would be roughly 50 divisions. That figure is out by a factor of 3 to 5 in regards to infantry and armour forces. Naval and Air forces were of course also stationed in Norway, but those were primarily offensive forces engaged in combat against the Murmansk Convoys and, to a lesser extent, the North-West approaches to the British Isles by merchant marine convoys. (The South-West approaches used so extensively during WW I, passing south of Ireland, were unusable for much of WW II because of the vulnerability to air attack from France by the Luftwaffe.)
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