rise-and-fall-of-the-third-reich-william-shirer-pdf

Chapter 20THE CONQUEST OFDENMARK ANDNORWAYThe innocent-sounding code name for the latest plan of German aggression wasWeseruebung, or ”Weser Exercise.” Its origins and development were unique,quite unlike those for unprovoked attack that have filled so large a part of thisnarrative. It was not the brain child of Hitler, as were all the others, but ofan ambitious admiral and a muddled Nazi party hack. It was the only act ofGerman military aggression in which the German Navy played the decisive role.It was also the only one for which OKW did the planning and co-ordinating ofthe three armed services. In fact, the Army High Command and its GeneralStaff were not even consulted, much to their annoyance, and Goering was notbrought into the picture until the last moment – a slight that infuriated thecorpulent chief of the Luftwaffe.The German Navy had long had its eyes on the north. Germany had nodirect access to the wide ocean, a geographical fact which had been imprintedon the minds of its naval officers during the First World War. A tight Britishnet across the narrow North Sea, from the Shetland Islands to the coast ofNorway, maintained by a mine barrage and a patrol of ships, had bottled upthe powerful Imperial Navy, seriously hampered the attempts of U-boats tobreak out into the North Atlantic, and kept German merchant shipping off theseas. The German High Seas Fleet never reached the high seas. The Britishnaval blockade stifled Imperial Germany in the first war. Between the warsthe handful of German naval officers who commanded the country’s modestlysized Navy pondered this experience and this geographical fact and came to theconclusion that in any future war with Britain, Germany must try to gain basesin Norway, which would break the British blockade line across the North Sea,open up the broad ocean to German surface and undersea vessels and indeedoffer an opportunity for the Reich to reverse the tables and mount an effectiveblockade of the British Isles.It was not surprising, then, that at the outbreak of war in 1939 Admiral RolfCarls, the third-ranking officer in the German Navy and a forceful personality,should start peppering Admiral Raeder, as the latter noted in his diary and605