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243 Chapter 18 The Reckoning Toward the End Had Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg succeeded in assassinating Hitler on 20 July 1944, the war might have ended earlier and differently, but Hitler survived. Key military conspirators refused to act, and the conspiracy fell apart. Among those implicated were men with connections to the Norwegian church struggle: Helmut von Moltke was tried and hanged on 23 January 1945; Theodor Steltzer was condemned to death but released two weeks before Germany capitulated; in prison since 6 April 1943 on other charges, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was hanged on 9 April 1945.1 Admiral W. W. Canaris suffered the same fate on the same day at the same place. Hitler also paid a price. His paranoia intensified, and he slowly lost touch with his people, his subordinates, and military reality. To the end, he thought that the Allies would invade Germany through Norway. As teenagers defended Berlin in May 1945, Germany had 340,000 soldiers defending Fortress Norway. With Germany in retreat, the global war returned to Norway. In May 1944, the Norwegian government signed agreements with the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union about their respective jurisdictions during the liberation. Per agreement, the Soviet army crossed the Pasvik River in Finnmark on 23 October 1944. Five days later, Hitler ordered the evacuation of Finnmark and North Troms. As the 20th German Army retreated, it burned farms, villages, and towns. On 10 November , the first Norwegian troops entered Kirkenes. 244 · Liberation In May 1943, the former cathedral dean in Trondheim, Arne Fjellbu, had been banished to Andøya, a small village in northern Norway, and at the end of 1944 he escaped to Sweden. The Norwegian government appointed him bishop of the liberated areas, and on 12 January 1945 he arrived at Kirkenes to begin his duties.2 His jurisdiction extended from west of Kirkenes to the Tana valley, where the Soviets stopped their advance in November. The Germans halted around Alta and Repparfjord and stayed until their capitulation. In central and southern Norway, the question was when and how the occupation would end.3 General Franz Böhme, von Falkenhorst’s successor as the Wehrmacht’s Commander-in-Chief, had about 340,000 soldiers positioned for battle, but the British, in charge of Allied operations in Norway, had no intention of diverting a comparable number of troops from the continent.4 Both sides wondered if the end would come as a military conflagration or an orderly transition. Hitler’s suicide changed the dynamics of the capitulation. Before he shot himself on 30 April, Hitler designated Great Admiral Karl Dönitz as his successor. Dönitz hoped to negotiate, but the Allies demanded unconditional surrender. At 2:41 a.m. on 7 May 1945, in Rheims, France, the Allied supreme commander, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, accepted Germany’s surrender, effective at the end of the next day, 8 May— Victory in Europe Day (VE-Day). In the Pacific, the war would not end until 2 September. The human cost of death and suffering during World War II was beyond comprehension. A conservative estimate is that fifty million people died across the globe as a result of war. Soviet losses alone were 27 million, of whom two million died fighting the Germans just between D-Day on 6 June 1944 and V-E Day almost a year later, three times the combined losses of the U.K., Americans, Canadians, and French in the same period. German military losses were also high: 2.4 million soldiers killed on the Eastern Front from Barbarossa to the end of 1944, and 202,000 in the same period on the Western Front, almost equivalent to Norway’s 2.8 million population in 1938.5 Against such losses, Norway ’s loss of life bears no comparison: 10,000 total casualties, of whom 2,000 died in military combat, 1,400 in the armed resistance (Milorg), and 4,200 in the merchant marine. Within the total were over 700 Jews and almost 800 volunteers recruited by NS to fight on the Eastern The Reckoning · 245 Front. Per capita, Norway’s losses were among the lowest in occupied Europe.6 Liberation In the fall and winter, the Norwegian government and the Home Front agreed to unify the civilian and military resistance under the Home Front Leadership. They also reached an agreement on the transition to peace, and Norway’s liberation went better than anyone had a right to hope. On 5...

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