Chapter 9

(APRIL 1940 GERMANY INVADES DENMARK AND NORWAY)

“Two well-known Austrian folk figures, Count Rudy and Count Bobby, are standing in front of a globe and Rudy asks, “What are all these pink spots?”

Bobby replies, “Those are England with all her colonies.”

“And what about the purple spots?”

“Those are France and her colonies.”

“Well, then,” Rudy asks, “what is that great big green area over there?”

“Oh, that’s the United States of America.”

“And how about the enormous orange one?”

“That’s Russia.”

“Do you happen to know what this little, teeny-tiny brown spot is?”

“That’s Germany.”

At this point Rudy becomes quite pensive, and then very quietly asks the question of the century, “Do you think Hitler knows that?”

― Georg Rauch, An Unlikely Warrior: A Jewish Soldier in Hitler’s Army

My boss in New York City, a gorgeous redhead called Roxanne, sent me a telegram up in Bremerhaven that it was not a good idea to return to Berlin at this point in the unfolding war.

I had felt relatively safe because I had kept a low profile in Berlin but I knew the informers in the neighborhood of empty Jewish houses had been reporting my contacts with the Polish females from the munitions factories and that I had had been seen giving food and other suspect assistance to random females wearing a yellow star. That was not yet a crime but to house them without reporting it to a block commander was a crime and I took care to not be seen doing anything of the sort.

Bremerhaven was a port city and it was more like a boom town of economic upswings and constant labor shortages to move the supplies to all the fronts of the newly established Third Reich.

I had to share a small hotel room with a union boss that always had a bottle of British whiskey near at hand to refill his glass that had seen better days. I don’t know where he got the stuff and how it seemed to magically appear along with cigars and other perks of his union leadership role. He constantly had visitors with the distinctive pin of the Nazi party on their lapels and hard eyes that hid secrets normal people had absolutely no interest in or at least pretended to have no interest in if they wanted to survive.

His name was Otto and I have to admit that despite his devious persona, he was a likeable sort of fellow with only avarice as his main fault.

I transited up to Oslo on a tramp steamer that flew a flag of Panama, was owned by hedonistic children of a Greek tycoon and manned by a crew of Spanish sailors wanting to stay away from the civil war that had devastated their country. It was a rust bucket to be sure, but it chugged along with the blasé disregard for the chaos around it and probably stayed afloat because no self-respecting submarine captain would waste a valuable torpedo on its decaying hulk.

Oslo was a city in panic with people shuttering their businesses and leaving for the countryside to visit distant relatives and avoid the danger.

My berth on the steamer was a step up from the shared hotel room in Bremerhaven but I have to confess that my new quarters in the newspaper building in Oslo was unexpectedly plush in comparison to either. Unfortunately, I had arrived right at the time when the entire staff was preparing to make the move out of the city and I had to stay with them because they were my cover against the Gestapo.

I am inserting a war front page from the New York Times for 9 April, 1940 to show the rapid unfolding of the Second World War and how if you just blinked you would miss a vital part of the puzzle that constituted the plan of the Third Reich to rule the world.

NEW YORK TIMES HEADLINE

The headline of the New York Times on 9 April 1940 was a full eight columns of detailed news reporting on the startling invasion of both Denmark and Norway by Nazi Germany. The times had always been a favorite newspaper of mine in my New York days, but I was much too young to have been fortunate enough to actually read those bylines and stories about the developing chapters of the “European” war unfolding right in front of American eyes at the dinner table for the magnificent sum of three cents.

One of the stories was about the sinking by torpedo of a German troopship carrying hundreds of soldiers all dressed in field combat uniforms of the German Wehrmacht. That same story also disclosed that a supply ship of unknown tonnage was sunk at the same time in the same general vicinity apparently loaded with a vast amount of munitions from the size of the reported explosion. It was assumed but not directly stated that the submarine involved was British since neither Denmark or Norway had warships on patrol in that area at that time.

Another story discussed the recent non-aggression pact between Germany and Denmark signed so closely before the attack that the ink was still wet.

It was estimated that this invasion force involved more than one hundred warships and was part of a Nazi plan to secure their northern flank before further advances into European domains. The official German position was that they were merely trying to defend the smaller countries from the desire of the British government to use that region against the peace-loving forces of the Third Reich in their quest to pacify the entire continent of Europe.