Burn After Reading (10 page)

Raeder undertook to sell Quisling to Hitler. On December 16, the major was presented to the Fuehrer. It was a moist, sentimental meeting—the spirit of Nordic brotherhood dripping like dew—but it was not quite satisfying to Quisling. He found the Fuehrer evasive, even negative. Above all else, Quisling was appalled to find that Hitler took his pact with Stalin rather seriously and refused to be drawn into talks about a possible Russo-German clash.

Behind Hitler's hesitation was both ignorance and ruse. He knew little about this fellow Quisling and had not thought seriously of an extension of the war in the direction of Norway. He did not want to show his hand to this foreigner about whom he knew nothing except Raeder's and Rosenberg's word. Quisling might be a double agent, an Allied tool to obtain information about his plans—straight from the horse's mouth.

When Quisling returned to the Chancellery two days later, he found Hitler in a more accommodating spirit. He now agreed that a special staff be appointed under Raeder to explore the potentialities of Quisling's military recommendations. The political exploration was to be done by Rosenberg. In Oslo, Commander Schreiber, the Naval Attaché, was to do the plotting with Quisling. From the Norwegian's point of view, the Fuehrer's most important concession came at the end of the second meeting.
He promised two hundred thousand gold marks for Quisling from the secret funds managed by Counselor von Grundherr in the Foreign Ministry. But the Foreign Ministry still refused to subsidize Quisling whom they regarded as a crackpot, willing to sell his country but incapable of delivering it. Rosenberg never managed to pry the funds loose.

For all practical purposes, the Quisling story ended there. He lingers on in odium as the man who handed his country to the Nazis on a platter, but, in reality, Quisling had no share in the rape of Norway when it came, not because he was not willing, but because the Germans did not need him.

Until January, 1940, Admiral Canaris knew little if anything of Quisling's perambulations, so closely was the wayward Norwegian held by Rosenberg and Raeder. The
Abwehr
entered the conspiracy against Norway as the result of a report from one of its V-men stationed at Metz in France. On January 4 this agent discovered that the
Chasseurs Alpins
, a division of crack mountain troops, had been withdrawn from the Maginot Line and shipped to England on the first leg of a trip to somewhere in Northern Europe—possibly to Finland to aid the Finns in their war with the Russians, or to Norway to seize Narvik.

The report was brought to the attention of the chief of the Hamburg outpost, Franz Liedig by name, a Navy commander on the retired list. Liedig immediately carried it personally to Canaris who, in turn, took it to Hitler. This piece of information may well have sealed the fate of Norway since, as we have seen, Hitler had not been much interested in that country, but he was determined to keep it out of Allied hands at any cost.

From then on, Canaris kept a finger in the Scandinavian pie. In February, when planning for the “Operation Weser Exercise,” as it was called, got under way in earnest, and a special task force of planners was set up at
Wehrmacht
headquarters—camouflaged as “Commando for Special Employment No. 31”—the admiral managed to plant Commander Liedig as the top intelligence officer of the enterprise.

Liedig had an efficient network going in Norway. Its
members were chiefly coast watchers at Oslo, Bergen, Christiansand, Stavenger, Narvik and other ports. Their job was to observe the movement of ships and especially to report promptly the departure and routing of convoys bound for England. This was no easy task. Convoy information was dispensed only to the skippers of the ships and then only a few hours before sailing. But Liedig's network operated with phenomenal skill and success. He boasted that reports from his agents enabled the
Luftwaffe
and the U-boats to sink one hundred and fifty thousand gross tons of Allied shipping within a few months in 1939–1940.

Upon receipt of his instructions from Commando 31, he went to Norway and personally organized an expansion of his network. The old coast watchers had to go to work also as collectors, and a second network was set up to procure additional information. Commander Liedig soon had Norway well covered.

While preparations for the “exercise” progressed, the over-inflated balloon of Quisling was losing air rapidly. Even Rosenberg had to concede that much and there was little he could do about it. Hitler probably did not even think of Quisling when on March 1, 1940, he ordered the
Wehrmacht
High Command to prepare for the occupation of Norway and Denmark; and he certainly acted without the slightest consideration for the hapless Norwegian when on April 1, he ordered the invasion to begin at 5:15 a.m. on April 9. On the contrary, a puzzling last-minute development in Oslo must have recalled to him his original doubts about Quisling.

On March 26, Commander Schreiber, the German Naval Attaché, reported from Oslo that Norwegian anti-aircraft and coastal defense units had been suddenly given permission to open fire without waiting for higher orders. Schreiber, who had kept more or less aloof from Quisling, suggested that there must have been a leak somewhere and hinted vaguely that it could have been in Quisling's circle. After Schreiber's report, Quisling was cut off from any information. On April 4, he hurried to Denmark for a secret meeting with a senior German officer. The general forced from him the confession that his own grandiose plans
had failed to mature. After his initial bluster failed to move the German, Quisling went down on his knees to plead with the general to hurry up and start the invasion. Until then, the general had regarded him only as a crank—now he turned away from him with contempt: even he could not stomach such abject treachery.

Both Quisling and his mentors lost their influence on the operation. Rosenberg was eliminated and Raeder was superseded by General von Falkenhorst who refused to have anything to do with “that crackpot.” Minister Braeuer, following his instructions from the Foreign Ministry, conspired on a far higher social level. He tried to draw King Haakon VII into a pro-German plot and cultivated Foreign Minister Koht whom he thought to be sympathetic to the German cause and who might form a pro-Nazi coalition government.

At 4:00 a.m., on April 9, Commander Schreiber, the Naval Attaché, donned his uniform and went down to the harbor to greet the incoming German warships. “Everything that I can do here,” he wrote in his diary before he left, “has been considered and prepared down to the smallest detail.” On his drive to the harbor, Schreiber passed the British Embassy and saw a thin ribbon of smoke rising from the garden. “They are burning their papers,” he said to himself with a smug smile.

He waited in vain. Far out in Oslo Fjord, the Norwegian batteries heeded their instructions and challenged the Germans as soon as they sailed into view. The ships which Schreiber had come to greet were at the bottom of the fjord or stopped cold with mortal wounds.

At 9:30 a.m., Schreiber despaired, rushed back to his office and tried to raise Berlin by radio, but he could not establish contact. Schreiber now issued orders to burn his papers. He expected the police to break into the house momentarily because Quisling had failed to come through with his vainglorious
coup.

At last, after noon, a
Luftwaffe
airlift brought in German soldiers who occupied the stunned and sullen city. The
government fled toward the north. The King went with the government.

At 5:00 p.m., when Oslo was virtually secured by the Germans, Quisling came out of his hole. So minor was his influence that most of the German generals did not even know he existed. When General Eberhardt arrived and established himself in the Grand Hotel, he found Quisling in a suite on the third floor of the hotel, claiming that he was the new Premier of Norway. Eberhardt had never heard of the man before. He called Braeuer in the German Legation and said, “There is a crank here on the third floor who says he is the chief of a new Norwegian government. Shall I throw him out? Or shall I arrest him?”

But by then, Braeuer's own game was also played out. The King was gone and Koht refused the Nazi invitation with indignation. There was nobody left but Quisling. Braeuer told General Eberhardt: “It is all right. He's a fellow named Quisling. He
is
the new Premier, so leave him alone.”

The terror regime over which Quisling presided actually became a liability to the Germans. It did not subdue the Norwegians and so he proved a flop for the second time. Without Quisling's terror, there would probably have been no effective resistance; as it was, the people of Norway rose to harass their oppressors without a moment's let-up and eventually to evict them, leaving Quisling alone to be shot.

When Philip of Macedonia, the father of Alexander the Great, was told that a certain city in his army's path was impregnable, he asked: “Is there not a pathway to it wide enough for an ass laden with gold?”

It was the fate of Vidkun Quisling to be nothing but an ass.

In Denmark the Germans had no Quisling; they had someone far better, Commander Franz Liedig. Liedig went far beyond the usual scope of a mere intelligence officer; he blossomed out in the role of the conqueror.

Liedig was an avaricious reader of everything that bore on
the work of the secret service, and among his favorites was a little book published in 1931 by the Italian Curzio Malaparte, called
Coup d'Etat: The Technique of Revolution
. The first chapter of this book, entitled “The Bolshevik Coup d'Etat and Trotsky's Tactics,” presented a largely apocryphal account of the seizure of Petrograd by the Bolsheviks in October, 1917.

According to Malaparte, Lenin planned to overthrow the Russian democratic regime that had followed the Czar by mass demonstrations and the conventional means of revolution; but Trotsky claimed he could achieve the same result with a handful of terrorists and saboteurs, simply by paralyzing the government through cutting it off from the outside world. In his account of Trotsky's
coup,
Malaparte described in fascinating (though fictitious) detail how Trotsky accomplished the task; how he sent out his men to practice the
coup
in “invisible maneuvers” ; how his agents located the sensitive focal points of the government—telephone exchanges, power stations, even pinpoints like individual railroad switches—and how they eventually struck. Instead of moving the masses, as Lenin proposed, Trotsky's men blew fuses, threw switches, and within a couple of hours they had completely isolated the government which had to surrender in its impotence.

This was exactly how Liedig planned to conquer Copenhagen. In a report of one of his agents he discovered that the nerve center of the whole Danish Army was in an ancient fortress on the outskirts of the capital. He figured that if he could seize the fort right at the outset of the campaign, he would be able to paralyze the Danish Army completely and make resistance impossible.

Liedig's plan was accepted and this was, in fact, how Copenhagen was “captured.” He needed only a small contingent of soldiers for the
coup,
and a few agents to assure that the roads leading to the fortress had not been mined. He put the troops into a floating Trojan Horse, a German freighter which sailed peacefully into Copenhagen harbor with nothing to
indicate that her “cargo” consisted of German storm troopers specially trained for the
coup
à la Trotsky.

One thing could have wrecked Liedig's scheme. A colleague of his within the
Abwehr,
the determined anti-Nazi Colonel Oster, was exasperated by the prospect of Hitler's continuing aggrandizement, and betrayed, not Liedig's shrewd design of which he knew nothing, but the imminent invasion of Norway and Denmark. On April 1, only eight days before the projected D-day, Oster sneaked information to the Danish Naval Attaché in Berlin about the invasion plans; and on April 4, he alerted the Norwegian Military Attaché.

The Norwegian was apparently incredulous, at best, since he did not even forward the information to Oslo. The Dane relayed the message to Copenhagen but his superiors simply refused to believe it.

On April 9, 1940, Denmark fell to the Germans, exactly as Commander Liedig had planned and scheduled it.

In capturing Copenhagen, the Germans also fell into possession of something which might have been the most important booty of the war—had they only known it. That “something” was a laboratory at the Copenhagen University, directed by Dr. Niels Bohr, the celebrated Nobel Prize physicist. To the Germans he was just an egghead and they let him alone. Dr. Bohr on his part, busied himself with teaching and lived quietly to encourage the Germans in their indifference. But behind closed doors, in the utmost privacy of his private laboratory, he worked on a mysterious project whose secret would have been worth millions to the Nazis. He was collaborating with his American friends on a program of atomic research. The Bohr laboratory was as important a way-station on the road to the atomic bomb as anything that then existed anywhere in the United States and Britain. It was, indeed, an integral part of the project, except that it was behind the brown curtain, within the reach of the Nazis.

For years during the occupation, Dr. Bohr continued his
fantastic double life in science. He had a small supply of heavy water, a precious possession for this particular research. Had the Nazis found out about it, they would probably have been alerted to Bohr's secret. To conceal it, he kept the heavy water in a large beer bottle and stored it in his refrigerator with the rest of his beer.