The German Invasion of Norway, April-June 1940: Romanian Echoes

Abstract

We can all agree that World War II, beyond its military, political or economic coordinates, countless tragedies, convulsions propagated around the world, tensions and dramas often felt to our day, was for all of us a lesson of geography. From this perspective, the invasion of Poland in September 1939 by the German and Soviet troops was a first lesson, continued on another level by the Soviet-Finnish Winter War. The invasion of Norway (and Denmark) by the Germans in April 1940, followed by the allied reaction and the transformation of the Scandinavian states into a theatre of military operations, was monitored with distinct interest in Romania, at political, diplomatic and military level, but also at the level of general perception of a society that was both worried and avid, in the context of the European (for the time being) war, of information on the evolution of the conflict and not only. Names such as Oslo, Narvik, Trondheim, Åndalsnes, Namsos, Bergen, Lillehammer, Stavanger or Tromsø become familiar to the Romanian public. We find, especially in the Romanian media of the time, a luxurious abundance of accounts, commentaries, editorials, telegrams or interviews related to the conduct of military operations in northern Europe, beyond the censorship and restrictions imposed by the conditions of the war. From this perspective, we find it difficult to attempt even to pursue the conflict in Norway in April-May 1940 only in the light of articles in the Romanian press. Central newspapers, in the first place, abound with telegrams that alternately feature views, news, and information from both camps. Inevitably there were various denials, rumors, or what we call today “fake news”, often taken over by the sensational rush, even by big press agencies of the time, without mentioning newspapers in European capitals including Bucharest. For this reason, our objective is to identify and analyze some of the Romanian echoes generated by the invasion of Norway, both in the Romanian media, but also at a diplomatic or military level, in a context in which Romania, as a neutral state, lived its own tensions and worries about its future fate as the war spread across the old continent.