Is it true Germany sent 250k troops to Norway because they thought

>>2506575
they didn't die in Norway did they? Its not like it was impossible to bring them back

>>2506578
I heard they kept them there most of the war

>>2506575

Not quite that many. It was 13 divisions at their height of dedicated deployment (not counting the troops in Finland who got evicted and fled there after the Finns switched sides), which is more like 200k than 250.

>How useful would those troops have been on the eastern front?

Hard to say; they were predominantly garrison/static divisions, which were of limited utility in the wide open comparatively mobile Eastern Front. They probably could have fought well if the fight had erupted where they were, but there's no real assurance that it would.

>>2506578

It was pretty difficult considering the sealift capabilities of the 3rd Reich. Plus, just because you have troops somewhere doesn't mean you have them where you need them when you need them. They only started pulling troops back out in April of 1944, and by then the war was pretty much already lost.

>>2506575

You know they shipped the ore, iron from Sweden to Norway... The other thing is there were navalbases there what did the axis use to gain acess to the Atlantic ocean, dont forget that the anglos were shipping equipment to the russians..

>>2506575

I think the real question of the day was why they garrisoned 200k men in Denmark. Why not just stick 15 thousand men in one centralized location and if the local populace acts up, you march them in and fuck their shit up.

>>2507323

Actually, most of it went through the Baltic, except when winter conditions got bad enough that they couldn't use the ports, many of which iced up.

But the general thrust of this one, (at least, I think, I'm not OP), isn't that they tried to use Norwegian areas, it's that the amount of troops that they garrisoned the place with was truly excessive and that manpower could have been used more effectively elsewhere. Your occupation force was roughly 1/15th of the entire country's size, which is huge.

>>2507338

Was it really that big? I had no idea.

>>2507391

The low countries had 100,000 man garrisons a piece even. I guess when 13 million Germans served in world war 2 it might not seem like a lot, but that adds up.

Churchill did want to liberate it. The people in charge of the military just laughed at him

>>2506575
They would've been casualties on the eastern front