How Norway’s Gold Was Saved
The day was April
10
, 1940, one day after the landing of the Germans
in Norway. The German General Staff had set up its headquarters in
Oslo’s Continental Hotel, only a short distance from the Storting
and
the palace of King Haakon.
Vidkun Quisling, the traitor, had so far found little employment, for in
critical situations the Nazis trusted their own forces much more than
native sympathizers.
But at last the call had come. A German colonel who spoke excellent
Norwegian had excitedly asked to see Quisling. Quisling was only too
happy to receive the summons; for a while it had appeared that his
beloved Germans had forgotten him.
The German—Colonel Ernst Kretschmer—wanted information from
Quisling. Kretschmer was the former secretary of the German Legation
in Norway, a man whose fame had hitherto rested on his murder of
General Kurt von Schleicher, Hitler’s predecessor as Chancellor of
Germany.
Kretschmer gloomily informed Quisling that the battleship
Bluecher
had been sunk by the Norwegian Coastal Defense, and that
consequently the Gestapo men and the military and naval intelligence
agents had not arrived in Oslo with the rest of the occupation troops.
The Norwegian counterespionage later learned that between 1,300 and
1,600 Secret Service officials were on board the
Bluecher
when the
battleship was sunk. Only eighty-six escaped drowning. Some of these
were captured by the Norwegians. The prisoners from Canaris’s
Intelligence Bureau and Best’s Gestapo were carefully questioned.
The Germans revealed small courage. Trembling, they made their
confessions. They revealed that every one of the agents on the
Bluecher
had had an address in his pocket, to which he was to go and inform the Norwegian officials that he was the new head of their office. In this
way, the railroads, postal service, telephone, telegraph, banks, and so
on,
were to be taken over at one stroke. The entire plan had been
worked out years before by Canaris’s espionage bureau.
The new masters knew precisely how each office operated. They knew
something about the personality of the Norwegian head, had lists of the
names of their subordinates, and were prepared to become the
directors of these functions and institutions months before they set foot
in Norway. But this time they were out of luck. Colonel Kretschmer
asked Quisling where the Norwegian gold reserve was concealed.
Quisling was unable to help; he had not thought of the matter at all. He
guessed it might be in the “Riksbank” in Oslo. Kretschmer
laughed
scornfully; the Germans had already searched the National Bank and
found no gold.
This was the beginning of a Norwegian epic. It is the story of the flight
of one man who, with the help of a few Norwegian soldiers, wandered
up and down the country for months, passing through burning villages
and mined fjords, to save a quarter of a billion kroner in gold from the
hands of the Nazis.
