For the remaining neutral states Hitler’s latest conquest was also a terrifying lesson. Obviously neutrality no longer offered protection to the little democratic nations trying to survive in a totalitarian-dominated world. Finland had just found that out, and now Norway and Denmark. They had themselves to blame for being so blind, for declining to accept in good time—before the actual aggression—the help of friendly world powers.
I trust this fact [Churchill told Commons on April 11] will be meditated upon by other countries who may tomorrow, or a week hence, or a month hence, find themselves the victims of an equally elaborately worked-out staff plan for their destruction and enslavement.45
He was obviously thinking of Holland and Belgium, but even in their case, though there would be a month of grace, no such meditation began.*
There were military lessons, too, to be learned from Hitler’s lightning conquest of the two Scandinavian countries. The most significant was the importance of air power and its superiority over naval power when land bases for bombers and fighters were near. Hardly less important was an old lesson, that victory often goes to the daring and the imaginative. The German Navy and Air Force had been both, and Dietl at Narvik had shown a resourcefulness of the German Army which the Allies had lacked.
There was one military result of the Scandinavian adventure which could not be evaluated at once, if only because it was not possible to look very far into the future. The losses in men in Norway on both sides were light. The Germans suffered 1,317 killed, 2,375 missing and 1,604 wounded, a total of 5,296 casualties; those of the Norwegians, French and British were slightly less than 5,000. The British lost one aircraft carrier, one cruiser and seven destroyers and the Poles and the French one destroyer each. German naval losses were comparably much heavier: ten out of twenty destroyers, three of eight cruisers, while the battle cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau and the pocket battleship Luetzow were damaged so severely that they were out of action for several months. Hitler had no fleet worthy of mention for the coming events of the summer. When the time to invade Britain came, as it did so shortly, this proved to be an insurmountable handicap.
The possible consequences of the severe crippling of the German Navy, however, did not enter the Fuehrer’s thoughts as, at the beginning of May, with Denmark and Norway now added to his long list of conquests, he worked with his eager generals—for they had now shed their misgivings of the previous autumn—on the last-minute preparations for what they were confident would be the greatest conquest of all.
* It was on October 10 that Hitler had called in his military chiefs, read them a long memorandum on the necessity of an immediate attack in the West and handed them Directive No. 6 ordering preparations for an offensive through Belgium and Holland. (See above, pp. 644–46.)
* It was a correct assumption. It is now known that the Allied Supreme War Council, meeting in Paris on February 5; 1940, decided that in sending an expeditionary force to Finland the Swedish iron fields should be occupied by troops landed at Narvik, which was but a short distance from the mines. (See the author’s The Challenge of Scandinavia, pp. 115–16n.) Churchill remarks that at the meeting it was decided “incidentally to get control of the Gullivare ore-field.” (The Gathering Storm, p. 560.)
* He had not impressed the German minister in Oslo, Dr. Curt Bräuer, who twice in December warned Berlin that Quisling “need not be taken seriously … his influence and prospects are … very slight.”9 For his frankness and reluctance to play Hitler’s game, the minister was quickly to pay.
* On March 7 General Ironside, Chief of the British General Staff, informed Marshal Mannerheim that an Allied expeditionary force of 57,000 men was ready to come to the aid of the Finns and that the first division, of 15,000 troops, could reach Finland by the end of March if Norway and Sweden would allow them transit. Actually five days before, on March 2, as Mannerheim knew, both Norway and Sweden had again turned down the Franco–British request for transit privileges. This did not prevent Premier Daladier on March 8 from scolding the Finns for not officially asking for Allied troops and from intimating that the Allied forces would be sent regardless of Norwegian and Swedish protests. But Mannerheim was not to be fooled, and, having advised his government to sue for peace while the Finnish Army was still intact and undefeated, he approved the immediate dispatch of a peace delegation to Moscow on March 8. The Finnish Commander in Chief seems to have been skeptical of the French zeal for fighting on the Finnish front rather than on their own front in France. (See The Memoirs of Marshal Mannerheim.)
One can only speculate on the utter confusion which would have resulted among the belligerents had the Franco–British expeditionary corps ever arrived in Finland and fought the Russians. In little more than a year Germany would be at war with Russia, in which case the enemies in the West would have been allies in the East!
* Examples of Hitler’s weird views on America have been given in earlier chapters, but in the captured Foreign Office documents there is a revealing paper on the Fuehrer’s state of mind at this very moment. On March 12 Hitler had a long talk with Colin Ross, a German “expert” on the United States, who had recently returned from a lecture trip in America, where he had contributed his mite to Nazi propaganda. When Ross remarked that an “imperialist tendency” prevailed in the United States, Hitler asked (according to the shorthand notes of Dr. Schmidt) “whether this imperialist tendency did not strengthen the desire for the Anschluss of Canada to the United States, and thus produce an anti-English attitude.”
It must be admitted that Hitler’s advisers on the U.S.A. were not very helpful in shedding light on their subject. At this same interview, Ross, in trying to answer Hitler’s questions as to why America was so anti-German, gave the following answers, among others:
… An additional factor in hatred against Germany … is the monstrous power of Jewry, directing with a really fantastic cleverness and organizational skill the struggle against everything German and National Socialist …
Colin Ross then talked about Roosevelt, whom he believes to be an enemy of the Fuehrer for reasons of pure personal jealousy and also on account of his personal lust for power … He had come to power the same year as the Fuehrer and he had to watch the latter carrying out his great plans, while he, Roosevelt … had not reached his goal. He too had ideas of dictatorship which in some respects were very similar to National Socialist ideas. Yet precisely this realization that the Fuehrer had attained his goal, while he had not, gave to his pathological ambition the desire to act upon the stage of world history as the Fuehrer’s rival …
After Herr Colin Ross had taken his leave, the Fuehrer remarked that Ross was a very intelligent man who certainly had many good ideas.17
* Weizsaecker replied that Canaris himself had assured him that neither of the men mentioned by Thomsen was an agent of the Abwehr. But no good secret service admits these things. Other Foreign Office papers reveal that on January 24 an Abwehr agent left Buenos Aires with instructions to report to Fritz von Hausberger at Weehawken, N.J., “for instructions in our speciality.” Another agent had been sent from the same place to New York in December to gather information on American aircraft factories and arms shipments to the Allies. Thomsen himself reported on February 20 the arrival of Baron Konstantin von Maydell, a Baltic German of Estonian citizenship, who had told the German Embassy in Washington that he was on a sabotage mission for the Abwehr.
* “Before God and the world,” Goering exclaimed to Welles, “he, the Field Marshal, could state that Germany had not desired the war. It had been forced upon her … But what was Germany to do when the others wanted to destroy her?”
† A quite unofficial American peacemaker was also in Berlin at this time: James D. Mooney, a vice-president of General Motors. He had been in Berlin, as I recall, shortly before or after the outbreak of the war, trying like that other amateur in diplomacy, Dahlerus, though without the latter’s connections to save the peace. The day after Welles left Berlin, on March 4,
1940, Hitler received Mooney, who told him, according to a captured German record of the meeting, that President Roosevelt was “more friendly and sympathetic” to Germany “than was generally believed in Berlin” and that the President was prepared to act as “moderator” in bringing the belligerents together. Hitler merely repeated what he had told Welles two days before.
On March 11 Thomsen sent to Berlin a confidential memorandum prepared for him by an unnamed American informant declaring that Mooney “was more or less pro-German.” The General Motors executive was certainly taken in by the Germans. Thomsen’s memorandum states that Mooney had informed Roosevelt on the basis of an earlier talk with Hitler that the Fuehrer “was desirous of peace and wished to prevent the bloodshed of a spring campaign.” Hans Dieckhoff, the recalled German ambassador to the United States, who was whiling away his time in Berlin, saw Mooney immediately after the latter’s interview with Hitler and reported to the Foreign Office that the American businessman was “rather verbose” and that “I cannot believe that the Mooney initiative has any great importance.”22
* See above, p. 648.
* The first three German supply ships had sailed for Narvik at 2 A.M. on April 3. Germany’s largest tanker left Murmansk for Narvik on April 6, with the connivance of the Russians, who obligingly furnished the cargo of oil.
* On the stand at Nuremberg, Grand Admiral Raeder justified such tactics on the ground that they were a legitimate “ruse of war against which, from the legal point of view, no objection can be made.”36
* This writer had rarely seen the Nazi Foreign Minister more insufferable than he was that morning. He strutted into a specially convoked press conference at the Foreign Office, garbed in a flashy field-gray uniform and looking, I noted in my diary, “as if he owned the earth.” He snapped, “The Fuehrer has given his answer … Germany has occupied Danish and Norwegian soil in order to protect those countries from the Allies, and will defend their true neutrality until the end of the war. Thus an honored part of Europe has been saved from certain downfall.”
The Berlin press was also something to see that day. The Boersen Zeitung: “England goes cold-bloodedly over the dead bodies of small peoples. Germany protects the weak states from the English highway robbers … Norway ought to see the righteousness of Germany’s action, which was taken to ensure the freedom of the Norwegian people.” Hitler’s own paper, the Voelkischer Beobachter, carried this banner line: GERMANY SAVES SCANDINAVIA!
* Total Danish casualties throughout the realm were thirteen killed and twenty-three wounded. The Germans suffered some twenty casualties.
* See above, p. 676.
* Norway had been a part of Denmark for four centuries and of Sweden for a further century, regaining its complete independence only in 1905, when it broke away from its union with Sweden and the people elected Prince Carl of Denmark as King of Norway. He assumed the name of Haakon VII. Haakon VI had died in 1380. Haakon VII was a brother of Christian X of Denmark, who surrendered so promptly to the Germans on the morning of April 9, 1940.
* There is an ominous hint of further treachery in Ribbentrop’s secret instructions. Bräuer was told to try to arrange the meeting “at a point between Oslo and the King’s present place of residence. For obvious reasons he, Bräuer, would have to discuss this move fully with General von Falkenhorst and would then also have to inform the latter of the meeting place agreed upon.” Gaus, who telephoned Ribbentrop’s instructions, reported that “Herr Bräuer clearly understood the meaning of the instructions.” One cannot help but think that had the King gone to this meeting, Falkenhorst’s troops would have grabbed him.43
* Quisling did not last long in his first attempt to govern Norway. Six days after he had proclaimed himself Prime Minister, on April 15, the Germans kicked him out and appointed an Administrative Council of six leading Norwegian citizens, including Bishop Eivind Berggrav, head of the Lutheran Church of Norway, and Paal Berg, the President of the Supreme Court. It was mostly the doing of Berg, an eminent and scrappy jurist who later became the secret head of the Norwegian resistance movement. On April 24 Hitler appointed Josef Terboven, a tough young Nazi gauleiter, to be Reich Commissar for Norway, and it was he who actually governed the country, with increasing brutality, during the occupation. Bräuer, who had opposed Quisling from the beginning, was recalled on April 17, retired from the diplomatic service, and sent to the Western front as a soldier. The Germans reinstated Quisling as Prime Minister in 1942, but though his unpopularity among the people was immense, his power was nil despite his best efforts to serve his German masters.
At the end of the war Quisling was tried for treason and after an exhaustive trial sentenced to death and executed on October 24, 1945. Terboven committed suicide rather than face capture. Knut Hamsun, the great Norwegian novelist, who had openly collaborated with the Germans, singing their praises, was indicted for treason, but the charges were dropped on the grounds of his old age and senility. He was, however, tried and convicted for “profiting from the Nazi regime,” and fined $65,000. He died on February 19, 1952, at the age of ninety-three. General von Falkenhorst was tried as a war criminal before a mixed British and Norwegian military court on charges of having handed over captured Allied commandos to the S.S. for execution. He was sentenced to death on August 2, 1946, but the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.
† On April 13, General von Falkenhorst, no doubt goaded by Hitler, who was in a fury because of Norwegian resistance, signed an order providing for taking as hostages twenty of the most distinguished citizens of Oslo, including Bishop Berggrav and Paal Berg, who, in the words of Minister Bräuer, “were to be shot in the event of the continued resistance or attempted sabotage.”44
* The Swedes, caught between Russia in Finland and the Baltic countries and Germany in possession of adjoining Denmark and Norway, meditated and decided there was no choice except to cling to their precarious neutrality and go down fighting if they were attacked. They had placated the Soviet Union by refusing to allow Allied troops transit to Finland, and now under great pressure they placated Germany. Though Sweden had sent an impressive stock of arms to Finland, it refused to sell Norway either arms or gasoline when it was attacked. All through April the Germans demanded that Sweden allow the transit of troops to Narvik to relieve Dietl, but this was refused until the end of hostilities, although a train of medical personnel and supplies was allowed through. On June 19, fearing a direct attack by Germany, Sweden gave in to Hitler’s pressure and agreed to permit the transport over Swedish railways of Nazi troops and war material to Norway on condition that the number of troops moving in each direction should balance so that the German garrisons in Norway would not be strengthened by the arrangement.
This was of immense help to Germany. By transporting fresh troops and war material by land through Sweden Hitler avoided the risk of having them sunk at sea by the British. In the first six months of the accord, some 140,000 German troops in Norway were exchanged and the German forces there greatly strengthened by supplies. Later, just before the German onslaught on Russia, Sweden permitted the Nazi High Command to transport an entire army division, fully armed, from Norway across Sweden to Finland to be used to attack the Soviet Union. What it had refused the Allies the year before it accorded to Nazi Germany. For details of German pressure on Sweden and for the text of the exchange of letters between King Gustav V and Hitler, see Documents on German Foreign Policy, IX. The author has covered the subject more thoroughly in The Challenge of Scandinavia.
21
VICTORY IN THE WEST
SHORTLY AFTER DAWN on the fine spring day of May 10, 1940, the ambassador of Belgium and the minister of the Netherlands in Berlin were summoned to the Wilhelmstrasse and informed by Ribbentrop that German troops were entering their countries to safeguard their neutrality against an imminent attack by the Anglo–French armies—the same shabby excuse that had been made just a month before with Denmark and Norway. A formal German ultimatum called upon the two gov
ernments to see to it that no resistance was offered. If it were, it would be crushed by all means and the responsibility for the bloodshed would “be borne exclusively by the Royal Belgian and the Royal Netherlands Government.”
In Brussels and The Hague, as previously in Copenhagen and Oslo, the German envoys made their way to the respective foreign offices with similar messages. Ironically enough, the bearer of the ultimatum in The Hague was Count Julius von Zech-Burkersroda, the German minister, who was a son-in-law of Bethmann-Hollweg, the Kaiser’s Chancellor, who in 1914 had publicly called Germany’s guarantee of Belgian neutrality, which the Hohenzollern Reich had just violated, “a scrap of paper.”
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany Page 113