by Lynne Olson
The plan, however, took no account of the fact that airborne troops could now leapfrog flooded areas and land right in the heart of the fortress—precisely the scenario that Germany now followed. On May 10, German paratroopers seized key bridges at Rotterdam and over the Maas River at Moerdijk and Dordrecht, as Wehrmacht troops, spearheaded by tanks and motorized infantry, poured over the border between the two countries. A second airborne force was to land at The Hague, the center of government, and capture the queen, her ministers, and the top military command.
Known for its leafy parks and wide boulevards, The Hague was a quiet, elegant, cultured city a few miles from the Dutch coast and the North Sea. Its swift occupation was a key objective for Hitler, who was particularly determined to seize Wilhelmina within hours of the initial German assault. He had instructed the commander of his airborne force in Holland to treat the queen with the utmost deference and honor. He even ordered that she be presented with a bouquet of flowers after she was taken prisoner. No harm must come to Wilhelmina, “who is so popular with her people and the whole world,” he declared.
Having failed so miserably in his attempts to win over the king of Norway to the Nazi cause, the Führer was now set on wooing the Dutch queen, whose mother, husband, and son-in-law had all been German. His doomed efforts showed how little he understood this feisty fifty-nine-year-old monarch, who, despite her German connections, considered the Third Reich “an immoral system” and denigrated Hitler and his followers as “those bandits.” In November 1939, Time magazine noted that “no one has given Wilhelmina more trouble in recent years than Hitler, and from no ruler has the Führer taken at times such straight talk.” Wilhelmina had long made clear, to Hitler and everyone else, that “anyone who threatened the interests of my people and country was my personal enemy.” Less than four hours after the German attack began, she declared via Dutch radio, “I raise a fierce protest against this flagrant violation of good faith, this outrage against all that is decent between civilized states.”
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AS A LITTLE GIRL, Princess Wilhelmina had taken to heart the declared aim of her English governess—to “make a bold and noble woman out of you.” Her dream from childhood had been to perform “great deeds,” like those of her famed ancestors: William the Silent, who had led Holland’s fight for independence against Spain in the sixteenth century, and William of Orange, who had defended both Holland and England against the French a century later.
But to her great dismay, she saw no possibility of realizing that dream. The youngest and only surviving child of her elderly father, King William III, she had grown up in what she despairingly called “the cage”—the oppressively formal, strict atmosphere of the Dutch royal court that precluded, she later said, “any kind of initiative” and provided “no opportunity to show vigor and courage.” The shy, serious little royal, who became queen at the age of ten after her father died, was raised with few friends or companions her own age. No one was allowed to address her familiarly, and when she went ice skating in the winter, the designated pond or canal was cleared of people and she was forced to skate alone. She was once overheard scolding one of her dolls, “If you are naughty, I shall make you into a queen, and then you won’t have any other little children to play with.” Years later, she made sure that Juliana—the only progeny of her unhappy marriage to a playboy German princeling, Heinrich of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, who died in 1934—had as normal an upbringing as she could give her.
From the beginning of her reign (she assumed her queenly duties at eighteen), the strong-willed Wilhelmina was determined to break out of the “cage” and make her mark on the world. At nineteen, she offered one of her palaces in The Hague as a place where countries could come to arbitrate their differences rather than resort to war—an offer that led to the foundation of the International Court of Justice. In 1900, in the middle of the Boer War, the twenty-year-old queen ordered a Dutch warship to defy a British blockade of South Africa and rescue Paul Kruger, the embattled Boer president. Eighteen years later, after the end of World War I, she granted asylum to Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany and later refused Allied demands to extradite the kaiser as a war criminal.
Queen Wilhelmina early in her reign.
The Allies were incensed by her effrontery. Wilhelmina and her country, in their view, were acting as if the Netherlands were still one of the most powerful nations in Europe instead of the second-tier country it had become. There was much truth to that opinion. Although Holland’s Golden Age—during which it had dominated world trade, produced great artists such as Rembrandt and Vermeer, and controlled an empire as vast as any other on Earth—had ended more than two centuries before, the queen and her people strongly believed that their country still had an important international role to play. While it was true that Holland’s overseas possessions had been greatly reduced, it retained control of its great colonial treasure chest: the Dutch East Indies, a chain of islands stretching from Burma to Australia, whose cornucopia of riches included rubber, oil, coffee, tobacco, tin, and gold. And despite its small size in both land and population, Holland remained one of the world’s leading banking and trade centers, home to such blue-chip conglomerates as Philips, Royal Dutch Shell, and Unilever.
For her part, Wilhelmina was determined to uphold the greatness of the House of Orange, Holland’s ruling dynasty since the sixteenth century. But as her ministers repeatedly made clear, she no longer possessed the power of William of Orange and her other famed predecessors. Since the mid–nineteenth century, Holland had been a constitutional monarchy, much like Britain and Norway, which meant that Wilhelmina, to her great frustration, had only the same types of rights held by George VI and Haakon: to encourage, to warn, and to be consulted and informed. But, as was true in Norway, the leaders of the coalition governments presiding over the country during her rule did not consult her, and when she gave them unsolicited advice, they usually paid little or no heed.
Much more imperious and outspoken than Haakon, Wilhelmina had no qualms about venting her anger over being ignored. “In certain respects, she resembled Queen Victoria, who, in her moments of displeasure, could make such aristocrats as Lord Salisbury quake and Prince Bismarck sweat,” noted the British historian John Wheeler-Bennett. (During the later years of World War II, Winston Churchill would remark, “I fear no man in the world but Queen Wilhelmina.”)
As the threat of war increased in the mid- to late 1930s, the queen was given a multitude of opportunities to display her formidable temper at the blindness of her ministers and people in respect to Nazi Germany. “By the spring of 1938, when Hitler invaded Austria, [it] was plain to me that German policy would result in a European catastrophe,” she later noted. But the Dutch were “quietly asleep on a pillow called neutrality….Shortly before the war it was necessary for me to point out that Hitler had written a book, and that it might be of some use to examine its contents.”
Most of the Dutch were strongly anti-Nazi; the country’s small fascist party, the National Socialist Movement, had won only four seats in each of the two houses of parliament in the 1937 general election. At the same time, many Dutchmen, complacent in their peace and prosperity, considered Hitler’s rise to be a purely German affair, with little potential impact on or danger for Holland. Germany was also Holland’s most important trading partner, and Dutch business interests believed it essential not to rile their powerful next-door neighbor, so vitally important to their country’s economy. As one young Dutchman wrote, “Our little speck of land…conducted its business as usual, as if war were a foreign product unsuited to the Dutch marketplace.”
It wasn’t until Germany occupied the Sudetenland in October 1938 that the Dutch government began, albeit reluctantly, to prepare for war. It strengthened the country’s water defenses and tried to modernize its armed forces, but the attempt came much too late. Dutch factories were incapable of producing all the aircraft, arms, and equipment that the country needed, and Britain and other countries had none t
o spare. As a result, the Dutch army, which numbered 300,000 men when fully mobilized, was armed with little but nineteenth-century carbines and equally antique artillery. Of the air force’s 118 planes, just a handful were of recent vintage. Only the navy, whose main task was to protect the Dutch East Indies, had more than a modicum of up-to-date vessels and equipment when the war began.
Urged on by the queen, the Dutch government mobilized the country’s armed forces in August 1939, just days before Britain and France declared war on Germany. At the same time, Wilhelmina, who had been an ardent advocate of world peace since her teens, joined the leaders of five other neutral nations in Europe—Belgium, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Denmark—in offering their “good offices” to find a nonviolent solution to the crisis over Poland. The leader of the appeal, King Leopold III of Belgium, declared that he and the others wanted to establish “a great new power—a moral and spiritual power capable of arousing world opinion through the union of the small states….Let the conscience of the world awake!”
This desperate attempt by the neutrals to ward off what they saw as looming disaster served only to annoy Britain and France. When war was declared, the Allies’ irritation increased when the neutrals, particularly Holland and Belgium, refused to enter into official military talks. Behind the scenes, however, the British and Dutch military, particularly the two admiralties, quietly exchanged information and formulated contingency plans in the event of a German assault on Holland.
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WHEN GERMANY LAUNCHED ITS blitzkrieg, the queen, her daughter and son-in-law, and her two small granddaughters (the younger only nine months old) were staying at her country palace not far from The Hague. Her security forces told her that German paratroopers were landing only a few miles away. Indeed, one of the palace guards had just shot down a German plane, which crashed in a nearby park.
Wilhelmina’s bodyguards bundled the royal family into cars and, threading their way through massive traffic jams and enormous crowds jamming the streets, escorted the royals to the relative safety of Noordeinde Palace, the queen’s main residence in the center of town.
For the next three days, while war raged throughout the country, the queen and her family took refuge in a little air-raid shelter in the palace’s garden. Furious at being sequestered, Wilhelmina insisted that she be allowed to go outside and see for herself what was going on. Her palace guards refused, explaining that they were under orders not to let her leave the palace. She was further incensed when she was unable to contact her ministers, who showed little sign of wanting to contact her. Once again, she found herself trapped in the hated “cage.”
Within hours of the invasion, the Dutch government appealed to Britain for arms and air support. The foreign and colonial ministers, “bewildered and dazed as if they simply did not know what had hit them,” flew by naval plane to London to make the plea in person. General Pug Ismay, representing the British chiefs of staff, told them that their request was impossible to fulfill. Britain, whose small expeditionary force was now fighting in Belgium, had no spare planes or men to send to Holland. “Even if the troops had been available, we had no means of getting them there in time,” Ismay recalled. “I remember observing that, alas, we had no magic carpet.” Winston Churchill, who would become prime minister later that day following Neville Chamberlain’s resignation, gave the Dutch officials, whom he described as “haggard and worn, with horror in their eyes,” the same bad news.
By May 13, the Luftwaffe had destroyed most of the Dutch air force, and German troops, despite a determined defense by the ill-equipped Dutch army, had gained control of much of the country. Early in the invasion, Dutch soldiers had succeeded in routing German airborne troops from three airfields outside The Hague, thus saving the queen and government from imminent capture. But The Hague’s defenders couldn’t halt the swelling German tide for long: the city was now partially surrounded, and there was hand-to-hand fighting in many of its streets.
At five o’clock that morning, Wilhelmina made a desperate personal plea for aid to her fellow sovereign George VI. A police sergeant on duty at Buckingham Palace woke the British king with the news that the queen of the Netherlands was on the phone. The startled monarch, who had never met Wilhelmina, thought it was a joke, but he took the call and found, as he wrote in his diary, that it indeed “was her. She begged me to send aircraft for the defence of Holland. I passed this message on to everyone concerned & went back to bed.” While George slept, Wilhelmina prepared to flee. Shortly after her appeal to the king, she was told by General H. G. Winkelman, commander in chief of the Dutch forces, that German units were now on their way to the palace to capture her. She must leave at once.
The night before, the queen had dispatched the thirty-one-year-old Juliana and her family to England aboard a British destroyer—the fruit of prewar talks between the Dutch and British admiralties that had resulted in the drawing up of evacuation plans for the royal family and government in case of invasion. Reluctant to leave the country herself, Wilhelmina decided to travel to Zeeland province in southwest Holland, where the Dutch were continuing to hold out against the enemy with the help of French troops. After hurriedly filling a briefcase with official papers, she was driven in an armored car to Hook of Holland, a port near Rotterdam, where thousands of people, many of them Jews, were milling about on the docks, dodging German bombs while desperately seeking a passage out.
Once aboard the British destroyer HMS Hereford, the queen, “calm and unruffled” in a life jacket and steel helmet, asked the captain to set his course for Zeeland. He informed her that, according to his instructions from the Admiralty, he was not allowed to make contact with the shore and must go directly to England. Wilhelmina was devastated. She had hoped to join her troops on the battlefield, as her illustrious ancestors had done so many years before and as King Albert I of Belgium, Leopold’s father, had done in the Great War. If the worst happened, she was prepared, in the words of William of Orange, to “be the last man to fall in the last ditch.” She found it impossible to accept that these “great deeds” were to be denied her. She would follow the Admiralty’s instructions and go to England, she decided, but as soon as she landed, she would demand an immediate return to Holland, as well as more aid for her beleaguered country.
When Wilhelmina phoned George VI a few hours later from the British port of Harwich, his answer to her requests was a polite no. The king explained that the military situation in Holland had worsened considerably since she had left that morning and that it was unthinkable for her to go back. He added that a train was waiting to bring her to London. For a second time that day, the tough, imperious queen was close to tears. How could she abandon her country and people during the worst moment in their history? She knew that the Dutch would not understand the circumstances of her departure, that it would make a “shattering impression” on everyone back home. Still, what alternative did she have but to follow the king’s instructions and board the train for London? She was well aware that she was following in the footsteps of William of Orange, who had taken up residence in the English capital more than two centuries before. But he had come in triumph as the new king of England, while she was going into exile.
When Wilhelmina’s heavily guarded train arrived at London’s smoke-blackened Liverpool Street station late that afternoon, George VI and an honor guard of khaki-clad British soldiers were on hand to meet her. The somber queen stepped from the carriage, a gas mask over her shoulder and clutching the steel helmet she’d been given aboard the destroyer. After kissing her on both cheeks, King George escorted her to Buckingham Palace. “She was naturally very upset & had brought no clothes with her,” he later wrote in his diary.
Wilhelmina still held out hope that she might return, but the firebombing of Rotterdam the following day put an end to her plans. On the afternoon of May 14, a wave of Heinkel bombers, flying wingtip to wingtip, dropped hundreds of bombs on Rotterdam’s downtown, incinerating much of the area and killing nearly
a thousand residents. Told by German officials that other Dutch cities would suffer the same fate unless Holland surrendered, General Winkelman signed a letter of capitulation that afternoon.
Once again, however, not everything had gone according to the Germans’ carefully worked-out plans. Most of Holland’s gold bullion had vanished, already on its way to Britain and the United States. Also missing were more than $1 billion worth of international securities, as well as diamonds worth tens of millions of dollars. But the most significant disappearance was that of the rebellious Dutch queen and her government—another German misstep, like Haakon VII’s escape, that Hitler would soon come to regret.
Unlike the sovereigns of Norway and the Netherlands, King Leopold III of Belgium was not whisked away to safety during Germany’s invasion of his country. Instead, as commander in chief of the Belgian army, the thirty-eight-year-old king took charge of Belgium’s defense as soon as the Wehrmacht crossed the border.
Under the Belgian constitution, Leopold possessed more power and governmental responsibility than any other western European monarch: in addition to his role as commander in chief, he also acted as president of the Cabinet. When Hitler dispatched a note to him and his ministers warning that resistance to German occupation might well mean the destruction of Belgium, Leopold responded, “When it is a question of sacrifice or dishonor, the Belgian in 1940 will hesitate no more than his father did in 1914.”
Like Norway and Holland, Belgium had been neutral before the 1940 German attack, as it had been before World War I. Indeed, when the Belgians won their independence from Holland in 1831, they had been promised permanent neutrality and “inviolability of Belgian territory” by Europe’s great powers. That promise had not been kept; virtually from the day the treaty was signed, several of the powers had sought at one time or another to breach Belgian neutrality in order to promote and protect their own interests.