The Unbelievable True Story Behind the WWII Epic

The Big Picture

• Narvik, a small Norwegian town, played a crucial role in WWII due to its strategic iron ore that Adolf Hitler needed for weapons.
• The Battle of Narvik saw a fierce fight between German and Allied forces, resulting in heavy casualties and significant destruction.
• After the battle, the people of Narvik faced tragedy as they were forced to evacuate and German bombers destroyed the city in 1940.

Netflix’s movie, Narvik, explores an intriguing World War II story that you may not have heard of involving a small Norwegian town at the center of an iron ore struggle between Germany and Great Britain. Norway is the world’s top producer of iron ore and Narvik, founded in 1902, is the tiny coastal port city in Norway on the coast of the Norwegian Sea that held the key to its distribution during the war.

Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich were dependent upon the ore they secured from the strategic, ice-free harbor of Narvik and Norway to build a large portion of its arsenal after the Nazis started the war in 1939. Meanwhile, it was in the best interest of the British, and the Allied Forces, to cut off that supply to Hitler making it much more difficult for the power-hungry regime to manufacture weapons. A dangerous and deadly situation had developed where this small 1,680 acre town of less than 10,000 people with its refineries and port outlet emerged as a pivotal stronghold between the two powers, and forced Norway to give up its neutrality. Narvik is the tale of the people and events that surrounded the 1940 Battle of Narvik, which is still the largest battle ever fought on Norwegian soil and is regarded as Hitler’s first loss of World War II.

Were the Characters in ‘Narvik’ Real People?

In the film, Kristen Hartgen plays Ingrid Tofte, a young Norwegian woman who works at the town’s largest inn, and is married to Gunnar Tofte (Carl Martin Eggesbø) who is a corporal in the army. Together, they have a young son named Ole (Christoph Gelfert Mathiesen). The WWII drama does a remarkable job of portraying the very simple and normal day-to-day lives of the people of Narvik before the German occupation and subsequent English response forced them into taking sides in the interest of protecting their own people. When the Germans forces decide to take up residence in the entire hotel where Ingrid works, she becomes extremely useful to them as she knows German and can serve as a translator between the town’s mayor and the German officers who are in the process of commandeering the city.

Meanwhile, she unwittingly harbors a British operative, Konsul George L.D. Gibbs (Billy Campbell) who is forced from the inn after the German occupation and sent to hole up in a tiny mountain cabin provided generously by Ingrid, free of charge. She is later blackmailed by Gibbs forcing her to provide information on the German installations in Narvik that resulted in an Allied airstrike that killed many of the townspeople. The Toftes are not real people, but are an accurate representation of the turmoil that these regular people faced during the period.

The True Story Behind the Battle of Narvik

In the spring of 1940, after the Germans had easily overtaken the small Norwegian forces and the town of Narvik, the Norwegian Army was called upon by the English to join them in waging war with them against the growing Nazi occupation. The Germans were trying to establish positions in the mountains near Narvik, and the British, French, Polish and Norwegian forces took to the mountains to thin out the German numbers that were building by the day. It was a brutal and bloody battle fought in frigid temperatures on the icy terrain of Norway not too far from the Arctic Circle.

In the film’s epilogue, it states that there were 85,000 casualties, 65 boats sunk, and 86 planes were shot down over the span of the battle that lasted 62 days. Many of us think of WWII as a battle fought primarily between Germany and the Allied Forces of the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union, but even neutral countries like Norway couldn’t avoid the catastrophic collateral damage caused by Hitler’s warmongering campaign of death. The forces did retake control of the mountain, dealing Hitler his first loss, but it came at a heavy price, and the Nazis reclaimed Narvik just a few short months afterward, as also stated in the film’s final scene.

Tragedy After the Battle of Narvik

After the people of Narvik are forced to evacuate their homes and flee on every available fishing boats, British and French troops pulled out of Norway (something they had planned on doing even before the Battle of Narvik) and the German bombers laid waste to what remained of the port city in June 1940. It is still a grim and stark story that illustrates the toll one madman’s delusions extended far beyond the area in Europe that Germany was attempting to conquer. No one was safe from the Nazi campaign, especially if you lived in a strategic city that was important to Hitler and his regime.

Narvik currently streams on Netflix in the U.S.

WATCH ON NETFLIX