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to no avail.
"Prague," the Fuhrer responds stubbornly, almost mystically, "is
the key to winning the war." Generaloberts Heinrici's hard-pressed
troops must "do without." 4
One may also perhaps imagine Heinrici and the other assembled
generals perhaps casting a doleful glance at Norway on the situation
map, where thousands of German troops are still stationed,
occupying a country that had long since ceased to be of any
strategic or operational value to the defense of the Reich. Why
indeed did Hitler maintain so many German troops in Norway up to
the very end of the war 5
These paradoxical German troops deployments are the first
mystery of the badly written finale of the war in Europe. Both
Allied and German generals would ponder it after the war, and both
would write it off to Hitler's insanity, a conclusion that would
become part of the "Allied Legend" of the end of the war. This
interpretation does make sense, for if one assumed that Hitler were
having a rare seizure of sanity when he ordered these deployments,
what possibly could he have been thinking Prague Norway
There were no standard or conventional military reasons for the
deployments. In other words, the deployments themselves attest his
complete lack of touch with military reality. He therefore had to
have been quite insane.
But apparently his "delusional insanity" did not stop there. On
more than one occasion during these end-of-the-war conferences
with his generals in the Fuhrerbunker, he boasted that Germany
would soon be in the possession of weapons that would snatch
victory from the jaws of defeat at "five minutes past midnight." All
4
They did in fact "do without" and yet managed to put up a fierce
resistance against overwhelming odds in the initial stages of Zhukov's final
offensive on Berlin.
5
The standard versions, of course, are that he wished to maintain the
supply line of iron ore from Sweden to Germany, and that he wished to
continue to use the country as a base to interdict the lend-lease supply route to
Russia. But by late 1944, with the huge losses of the German Kriegsmarine,
these explanations no longer were militarily feasible, and hence do not make
military sense. One must look for other reasons, if indeed there are any beyond
Adolph Hitler's delusions.
5