Ciao all,
@ Maxim,
I do not have very precise and official evidences either, but with those Kriegsmarine warships it is always like this on most cases, the KTB does not contain the camouflage used colours neither the dates when it was applied, just like the "fliegersichtzeichen" top turret colour infos for Luftwaffe air recognition identification, they were GEHEIM ( Secret-Confidential ) infos.
I have to admit this is the biggest part of the interesting activity on working on the historical researches on them since 38 years from my side.
So you have to study ships. operations and places to try to discover it, running the risk to fail in order to get close to reality, if you are lucky one day something will show up and confirm your theory, but with time you get used to understand the logic driving them and with the real places knowledge everything becomes more easy to be realized.
You are right, between Trondheim and Elvegårdsmoen ( which is into OfotFjord north of Narvik ) there are more than 1.000 km, but the warships were supposed to sail very close to the coast and not very fast, in most cases between the islands and the fjord entrance.
I did that travel either with car on the main road and by ship with the Hurtigruten ferry boat doing exactly the same trip north out of Trondheim.
If you have a coastal type camouflage it is just perfect and you will not take it out of your ship, most of the KM tankers doing fuel support for the main warships on that area were camouflaged that way and we have colour photos of them.
I can confirm you that while coming back from that Nora operation, Nurnberg was having the full coastal type camo on her, a bit different than Adm Hipper as she had also some lighter areas ( and Gneisenau was a bit different too ), so the Koop/Schmolke book photo was taken before the operation Nora from Levante as said and the camo was under paint.
But if Nurnberg did an operation with that camo on her, we have not yet any evidence of Gneisenau and Admiral Hipper sailing out of the Trondheim Fjord with that camo on them.
In reality I have something about Gneisenau I am currently working on ....... but this is still... GEHEIM ....
Between 10 of june and 25 of july 1940, which are 45 calendar days, Adm Hipper only try to sail out of Trondheim fjord was on June 20 with Gneisenau escorted by Z20 Karl Galster, but Gneisenau was torpedoed just out of the fjord and all warships went back immediately into Trondheim fjord.
If you want to play investigation you can look at Z20 Karl Galster photos in Trondheim during june 1940 on Tore Eggan website, look for Adm Hipper on the photos taken from the ground
http://krigsbilder.net/coppermine/thumb ... hp?album=8Adm Hipper :
http://krigsbilder.net/coppermine/displ ... m=8&pos=48http://krigsbilder.net/coppermine/displ ... m=8&pos=38and a tanker with Trondheim on the background :
http://krigsbilder.net/coppermine/displ ... m=8&pos=37So they kept that camo for a long period into Trondheim fjord changing many anchorages, and I can only see one reason they kept it on the warship, because it helped hiding the ship with the surrounding area colours.
Which colours would you choose to try to hide a cruiser into a Norwegian fjord on june july period ?
We have many answers to that either from Tirpitz on 1942 as well as from tankers, not to forget Z5 and Z6, Nurnberg and Gneisenau.
Closing, been a modeler myself I would like to tell you that the camo was completely painted on the ship covering all the base paint making the warship a lot darker overall, so no base RAL 7000 or RAL 7001 grey's were left neither on the hull nor on the upperwork. So before continuing applying painture on your model, you better realize how you want to proceed on this.
Bye Antonio