Chapter Twenty-three

The Fall of Democracies in World War Two

Once the Second World War cranked up to full strength, it began wiping nations off the earth like a runaway bulldozer. Between 1937 and 1942, 21 nations were overrun by outsiders: twelve nations (Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Danzig, Denmark, Norway, Netherlands, Luxemburg, Belgium, France, Yugoslavia, and Greece) by the Germans, two (Albania, Monaco) by the Italians, and 3 (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) by the Soviets. Four theoretically neutral countries (Iceland, Iraq, Egypt, and Iran) were occupied by the Allies in order to prevent them from falling into the wrong hands. All in all, 32% of the world's nations lost their independence for the duration of the war.

There were 18 democracies on the eve of World War Two. Eight of them got conquered. (Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, France, Luxemburg, Netherlands, and Norway by the Germans. Iceland by the Allies.)  Three lay low and stayed out. (Ireland, Sweden, Switzerland) Six took a major part in the war and stayed unconquered. Five of those were central to the Allied war effort. (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, United Kingdom and United States). Finland, on the other hand, fought for the Axis.

For the most part, Latin America stayed out until the last couple of years when the United States pushed them into declaring war on Germany so they would no longer be safe havens for Axis shipping. Latin America’s only definitely-no-doubt-about-it democracy, Costa Rica, was leftist and gladly clamped down on Axis activity when the United States got involved. Among the mostly-sort-of democratic nations, Panama was a satellite of the United States and joined the war shortly after Pearl Harbor. Chile stayed out as long as possible before breaking down and declaring war on Japan in April 1945. Among the almost democratic countries, Colombia joined the Allies in July 1943, and Peru in February 1944, mostly at American urging.

Scandinavia

With war sweeping over Europe, Stalin demanded that Finland move its border back to give him greater strategic access to the Baltic Sea and remove Leningrad (St. Petersburg) from artillery range.  Stuck between Stalin and Hitler, the Finns were in a bad position, but they refused to budge, so the Soviets invaded in November 1939.

Seeing another democracy fighting totalitarianism, the West wanted to help. France put together an expeditionary force to send to Finland, including a special tank battalion of the Foreign Legion; however, in March 1940 while the Allies were trying unsuccessfully to negotiate passage across Norway and Sweden, Finland admitted defeat and signed a peace treaty with the Soviet Union. As the price of defeat, the Finns were forced to cede the demanded territory, but they completely evacuated all the residents of these areas before Stalin could get his hands on them.

Called the Winter War, this conflict brought Scandinavia to the attention of the warring nations. War planners glanced up toward the top of their maps, rubbed their chins and pondered.  Most of Germany’s iron ore came from northern Sweden, shipped from the Norwegian port of Narvik. When Hitler discovered the Allies trying to negotiate a stop to this trade and offering the protection of the troops they had assembled to help Finland, he swooped in and conquered Norway ahead of them in April 1940, securing Denmark on the way as well.

Denmark knew it had no chance of stopping or even delaying the Germans, so the government surrendered as soon as it realized what was happening. German troops just moved in and set up garrisons around all the critical transport, communication and government facilities.  At the same time, the German invasion force swept over Norway, which fought back long enough for Allied forces to arrive and join the defense. Fighting continued at Narvik longer than most places, but in the end, the battered Norwegian troops and government abandoned the country to the German conquerors in June.

King Haakon VII of Norway, the royal family and the Labor Party cabinet escaped Norway and set up in England for the duration of the war. Meanwhile, the Germans shut down parliament and handed out cabinet posts to Norwegian fascists of the National Union Party. They promoted Vidkung Quisling, fascist party boss and former Norwegian defense minister, to prime minister, although the Reich Commissariat, the German civilian representative, had ultimate authority. By the end of the war, the name Quisling would become synonymous with treason, and the Norwegians happily reinstated the death penalty (abolished in 1904) just so they could legally shoot him and his colleagues.

The basic political structure of Denmark was kept in place under a German protectorate. King Christian X and a parliamentary coalition government remained nominally in charge, but they had to clear everything through their German representative. All Communists were expelled from parliament.  Danish crops, livestock and manufactured goods were exported to Germany at artificially low prices. The most enthusiastically blond Danes and Norwegians were recruited into volunteer combat units to help Hitler conquer the world.

Much to the annoyance of Hitler, Denmark stubbornly pretended to be a free country.  During the parliamentary elections of March 1943, Danes turned out in record numbers to vote for the traditional democratic parties of Denmark, snubbing the Danish Nazi party with a pitiful 2% of the vote, so the Germans disbanded parliament entirely and started running the country more directly in August. The Germans almost immediately turned their attention to Denmark’s Jews, who had mostly been left alone until then.

Denmark became the only conquered nation to successfully resist the Holocaust. During September and October of 1943, when the Danes learned that their Jewish population was scheduled to be rounded up and exterminated, they got a head start and smuggled most of their Jews over to Sweden for safekeeping. Among them was the half-Jewish physicist Niels Bohr, who had been using his influence to help Jewish scientists escape Germany ever since Hitler came to power. Despite this, he was respected enough on both sides of the war for the German physicist Heisenberg to visit him during the occupation and try to persuade him to work on the German nuclear program. He turned down the offer. When Danish agents learned that Bohr was about to be arrested, they smuggled him to Sweden, then to Britain, and eventually into the American nuclear program.

In May 1941, Germany invaded Russia, which gave Finland the opportunity to settle scores with Stalin. While German armies thrust deep into the Soviet Union, killing, wounding or capturing millions of Soviet soldiers along hundreds of miles of front lines, Finnish armies pushed their border outward into the territory taken by the Soviet Union the previous year. They also closed in behind Leningrad, sealing it off from outside help when the Germans brought the city under siege.

The Finns call this the Continuation War and consider it merely round two in their ongoing quarrel with Stalin. They really do not like being called allies of the Nazis. They prefer the term “co-belligerent” instead, and explain that they were fighting an entirely different war that merely occurred at the same time in the same place against the same people as World War II. The western Allies never seemed comfortable about having a fellow democracy fighting on the other side. As a formality to satisfy their Russian ally, the British declared war on Finland, but the Americans never did.  Because German warships and aircraft operating from the northern Finnish port of Petsamo sometimes attacked the Allied supply convoys on the way to the Russian port of Murmansk, the British sent carrier-based aircraft to bomb the port in July 1941; however, the British lost too many aircraft and inflicted too little damage in the raid for them to ever try that again.

Sweden stayed neutral throughout the war and provided a safe haven for fugitive Jews, spies, stranded sailors and pilots, and escaped prisoners. Many Swedish diplomats stationed in German-occupied Europe used their influence to save potential victims of the Nazis. Folke Bernadotte, Count of Wisborg and vice chairman of the Swedish Red Cross, organized the exchange of 11,000 disabled British prisoners of war for crippled German POWs, and arranged the release and transport of 15,000 concentration camps inmates to Sweden. Raoul Wallenberg, Sweden's special envoy in Budapest, issued tens of thousands of Swedish passports to Hungarian Jews so they could escape the Nazi roundups.①

In other ways, however, Sweden was forced to cooperate with Nazis. German-controlled Europe was the only market for Swedish exports, and Swedish iron ore kept the German war machine well supplied.  Sweden allowed German troops from occupied Norway to pass through into Finland where they were redeployed for combat on the Russian Front.

Iceland was a sovereign dominion under the Danish crown, but rather than let the Germans claim this strategic island simply as a byproduct of conquering the Danish homeland, British troops occupied the island in 1940 a month after Denmark surrendered. In July 1941, before the United States even entered the war, American troops took over occupation duties which freed the British troops to go back to fighting Hitler. Although officially neutral, Iceland became a vital way station for transatlantic flights and a base from which Allied aircraft could hunt for German submarines. In 1944, Iceland formally cut its ties with the Nazi-dominated king of Denmark and voted itself an independent republic.

West Europe

Military technology of the time favored the offensive, and Germany had twice the population of France anyway, so it only took a month and a half for Germany to conquer France and the three smaller democracies that were in the way. Attacking in May 1940, German tanks, trucks, aircraft and paratroops easily destroyed the Allied armies, rolling over their defenses and inflicting massive casualties.  The three Low Countries (Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands) were quickly overrun by the German army and administered as conquered nations. Their parliaments were disbanded. Their resources were looted. Partisans and hostages were shot. Jews were shipped off to death camps, and random citizens were rounded up to work in Germany. Tens of thousands of native fascist volunteers were also recruited from the Low Countries to fight the Soviets.

Like Christian X of Denmark, King Leopold III of Belgium surrendered with his country. Leopold refused to cooperate with the Germans, so they confined him to one royal palace after another while the German army ran Belgium without him. The parliamentary leaders of Belgium who had escaped to London ignored the king too. After the war, the Belgians argued fiercely over whether Leopold’s comfortable survival counted as collaboration with the enemy. They refused to let him return from the Austrian palace where the Germans had been keeping him, so his brother reigned in Brussels as regent while everyone tried to find a solution. Although a commission of inquiry exonerated the king of treason, popular opinion split angrily and closely on the topic. Finally, to move past the issue, Leopold was forced to abdicate in favor of his son, Baudouin, in 1950.

In contrast, Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands and her family fled to Britain, and her broadcasts over British radio stirred Dutch patriotism. The grand duchess of Luxembourg and her prime minister also fled their country and settled in Canada for the duration of the war, becoming a beacon of freedom for their small country, which was annexed directly into Germany.

As the German invaders swept over France, defeat proved inescapable. To spare Paris destruction by modern weapons, the French government abandoned the city without a fight and continually relocated southward ahead of the advancing Germans, all the while arguing over the best course of action.  Prime Minister Paul Reynaud wanted to move the government overseas and continue to fight from the French colonies, but General Maxime Weygand and Vice-Premier Philippe Petain felt that the government should make the best deal it could with Germany and stay in France to share the fate of the people.

The consensus leaned toward surrender, so Prime Minister Reynaud was voted out and Petain took over while Raynaud tried to escape the country. He grabbed his suitcases and his mistress and headed for the Spanish border, but tragically, his car crashed on the way.  His mistress was killed outright, and Reynaud was hospitalized, so he fell into German hands and spent the rest of the war in a German prison, along with other former prime ministers Léon Blum and Édouard Daladier. The residual government finally arranged a cease-fire with Hitler on June 22 and settled into the south central resort town of Vichy on July 1 to argue over what to do next.

The Fall of France confused the remaining participants, and for a few days no one knew who to fight anymore. The British continued fighting Germany, but they also turned around and launched Operation Catapult against the French Navy to keep French warships from being incorporated into the German fleet. The British ordered all French crews to either bring their warships over to the British side or render them useless before the Germans got them. The British seized any French ships already docked in their ports, and threatened to destroy any others that refused to cooperate. Most French ships on the high seas ignored the ultimatum and went home. At the French Algerian port of Mers-el-Kebir, however, a British task force cornered a French squadron that stubbornly refused to give up. On July 3, under orders from British Prime Minister Churchill to solve the impasse as quickly as possible, the British pounded the squadron, sinking a French battleship, damaging several more and killing 1,300 of their recent allies.

As it turned out, the Germans left the French navy alone. German troops spread out across the north of France to set up bases for aircraft and submarines, and to prevent any amphibious British counteroffensive or local uprising, but Hitler was willing to recognize the independence and neutrality of the Vichy government in the unoccupied south because it removed the French colonial garrisons and navy from the fight without tying up more German troops than necessary. Most French troops overseas continued to take orders from the home country and did not join the renegade Free French forces that General Charles De Gaulle was gathering in Britain. On the other hand, Hitler kept most of the 2 million French prisoners of war locked up as hostages or working as slave labor in factories and farms – no sense in letting the French recover too easily.

Back in Vichy, the French parliament voted on July 10 to turn dictatorial power over to Marshal Philippe Petain. The vote was, all things considered, a surprisingly fair vote, and 80 socialist deputies actually stood their ground and voted no. The elderly war hero of the Battle of Verdun in World War One, Marshal Petain had originally been brought into Reynaud’s government in May after the first few defeats called for a shake-up and a respected military man in the war cabinet.

Being too old to be much more than a figurehead, the 80-year-old Petain left the everyday activities of the Vichy government, such as delivering the mail and rounding up Jews, in the hands of Premier Pierre Laval. Laval had first been elected just before World War One as socialist deputy; then he briefly volunteered to fight in the First World War before he got a medical discharge. After the war, the socialists did poorly in French elections,② but Laval set out on his own and was reelected as an anti-Communist independent. He soon became a wheeler-dealer on the right wing. The switch was not surprising, people said, because Laval’s politics was like his name; it reads the same from the left or the right. After two short terms as prime minister during the 1930s, Laval landed as foreign minister in another cabinet. His rightward drift became an embarrassment even to his own side. When Italy invaded Ethiopia for no reason other than naked aggression, Laval took Italy’s side. Forced to resign from government, he then built up a media business and opposed the oncoming war with Germany, feeling it could be solved diplomatically instead. When Petain drew up his Vichy government, Laval was a natural candidate. He began as justice minister but soon climbed up to the top.

For a couple of years, the Vichy government went through the motions of being the official government of France. Most foreign countries, including the United States, recognized it as such and exchanged ambassadors. Washington continued to cultivate a relationship with Vichy, hoping to woo them back into the war against Germany, but finally in November 1942, the Americans just gave up and invaded France’s North African colonies. The local French forces half-heartedly fought back and then switched sides after Free French forces seized their military headquarters in Algiers. Sensing a massive French double-cross on the horizon, Hitler took over Vichy, and German troops spread throughout southern France. The French scuttled their fleet, 77 vessels at Toulon, rather than let it fall into German hands.

Switzerland escaped German conquest mostly because it would have been too much trouble and there was no need anyway. It was safely tucked off the main road deep in the mountains, and it didn’t interfere with transalpine contact between Italy and Germany. The legendary secrecy of Swiss banking became a vital part of the Nazis’ international money laundering schemes, and Swiss manufacturing often found its way into German weapons. Toward the end of the war, pessimistic Nazis shifted much of the wealth they had looted from Jews and other conquered Europeans into Swiss banks to serve as post-war retirement funds. The Swiss have since apologized for helping the Nazis this way.

Warplanes from both side often strayed into Swiss airspace where they were either shot down or escorted out, depending on how cranky the Swiss were feeling at the moment. American fliers sometimes mistook Switzerland for its neighbors and bombed Swiss factories and railyards.  Being the only safe haven in the heart of Europe, Switzerland eventually took in some 300,000 fugitives from Nazi occupied Europe, including about 100,000 escaped allied prisoners and 25,000 Jews. As this was only about half the number of Jews who tried to get in, the post-war era saw a bitter debate over whether the Swiss could have done more to help.

-- Matthew White

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① Both these men met tragic ends shortly after the war. Bernadotte was assassinated by Zionist radicals while negotiating an end to the first Arab-Israeli War. Wallenberg fell into Soviet hands when Budapest was captured and was never seen or heard from again.

② The pre-WW1 pacifism of the French socialists retroactively alienated many voters after the Germans attacked. Then the Communists split off after the Russian Revolution in 1917 to go it alone, leaving the socialists a fraction of their former selves.