Allies, Armed Forces, Armies, Navies, WW2 / November 5, 2019 November 6, 2019 / Leave a Comment / By Kretaner / 1940, norway / 4 minutes of reading Strength and organization of the Army, Air Force and Navy of Norway at the time of the German invasion in April 1940. Civil rule was effectively assumed by the Reichskommissariat Norwegen (Reich Commissariat of Norway), which acted in collaboration with a pro-German puppet government, the Quisling regime, while the Norwegian king Haakon VII and the prewar government escaped to London, where they acted as a government in exile. Prominent resistance members, among them Max Manus and Gunnar Sønsteby, destroyed several ships and supplies of the Kriegsmarine. At this time there were no fewer than 400,000 German soldiers in Norway, which had a population of barely three million. One of the most successful actions undertaken by the Norwegian resistance was the Norwegian heavy water sabotage, which crippled the German nuclear energy project. 742 were sent to concentration camps, 23 died as a result of extrajudicial execution, murder, and suicide during the war; bringing the total of Jewish Norwegian dead to at least 765, comprising 230 complete households. Asserting legitimacy of exiled Norwegian government, Articles with unsourced statements from November 2014, Articles incorporating text from Wikipedia, Transit of German troops through Finland and Sweden, Flight of the Norwegian National Treasury, "The Man Nobody Knew: In Search of My Father, CIA Spymaster William Colby", http://firstrunfeatures.com/themannobodyknew/, Police units in Sweden: Norwegian resistance Page 1, http://mediabase1.uib.no/krigslex/o/o2.html#osvald-gruppen, "NOU 1998.12: Alta bataljon (aka "The Eitinger Report") - section 11.6.2: Sivorg", http://www.regjeringen.no/nb/dep/hod/dok/NOUer/1998/NOU-1998-12/26/6/2.html?id=375562, https://military.wikia.org/wiki/Norwegian_resistance_movement?oldid=4687673, The initial defense in Southern Norway, which was largely disorganized, but succeeded in allowing the government to escape capture, The more organized military defense and counter-attacks in parts of. The obverse of a 1940 Norwegian krone. during the occupation of Norway by Nazi Germany in WWII. When the German ambassador to Norway, Curt Bräuer, presented his government's demands to Haakon, the king let it be known he would abdicate before appointing Quisling prime minister. Norway lost all its major trading partners the moment it was occupied. Dönitz dismissed Terboven from his post as Reichskommissar on 7 May, transferring his powers to General Böhme. [citation needed], To assist with the sabotage campaign, the United States sent OSS forces, including future CIA director William Colby, into Norway to support resistance. By this time, the Germans had about 25,000 men in Norway. Throughout this period, Norway was continuously occupied by the Wehrmacht. In the other cities that were attacked, the Germans faced only weak or no resistance. Illegal trade union periodicals included Fri Fagbevegelse.[7]. 25-dic-2015 - WW2 Norway 1940. Besides German occupiers, 141,000 foreign nationals were located in Norway, mostly now-liberated prisoners of war held by the Germans. [4]:73 They demanded that Haakon formally appoint him as prime minister and return his government to Oslo; in effect, giving legal sanction to the invasion. He secretly records prison life in notes and drawings, smuggled out after his release in '45, which he expands into the narrative, Vi Ventet (We Are Waiting) under his prison name. This period of military occupation is, in Norway, referred to as the "war years" or "occupation period". On the pretext that Norway needed protection from British and French interference, Germany invaded Norway for several reasons: Through neglect both on the part of the Norwegian foreign minister Halvdan Koht and minister of defence Birger Ljungberg, Norway was largely unprepared for the German military invasion when it came on the night of 8–9 April 1940. However, following Adolf Hitler's suicide on 30 April, Hitler's successor Admiral Karl Dönitz summoned Terboven and General Franz Böhme, Commander-in-Chief of German forces in Norway, to a meeting in Flensburg, where they were ordered to follow the General headquarters' instructions. While stationed in London, the government contributed Norwegian forces to the Allied effort and ordered the Norwegian Merchant Fleet to assist in transportation. Tore Gjelsvik's account of the Norwegian Resistance to Nazi Occupation during the Second World War provides an excellent survey of the internal and external politics of resistance. See more ideas about french army, ww2, french resistance. Company Linge was a special operations unit that specialized in coastal insertions and combat. Meanwhile, the external front included Norway's merchant fleet, the Royal Norwegian Navy (which had evacuated many of its ships to Britain), Norwegian squadrons under the British Royal Air Force command and several commando groups operating out of Great Britain and Shetland. Perhaps its most famous achievements were a series of operations to destroy Norsk Hydro's heavy water plant and stockpile of heavy water at Vemork, crippling the German nuclear program (see: Norwegian heavy water sabotage). The Norway Resistance Museum (Norges Hjemmefrontmuseum) is dedicated to the country’s national history during World War II. The mission comes to a bad end, and three of the resistance fighters are killed, leaving the central character, Jan Baalsrud, injured and fleeing the Anything with endurance in the title gets my attention, especially when it's a tale of survival. Seats were available. [ 8 ] and supplies of the war years that the Norwegian government rejected the shipping... 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