A World at Arms (100 page)

Turkey was unable to extend its territory at the expense of its neighbors during the war, but it held on to its pre-war gain at Syria’s expense. The country’s backward economy was somewhat aided by the demand for its products, especially chrome. Both sides had been fooled by the
Turkish government into providing some modern weapons to supplement the army’s antiquated and inadequate equipment. The country’s small circle of leaders faced the post-war world, and especially the pressure for concessions from the Soviet Union, with a confidence born of what they considered a successful policy of neutrality until they had joined the victors when it no longer mattered.

Iran had been inclined toward Germany before the war and during its initial years. Trade ties and worry about British and Russian imperial expansion had contributed to this orientation. From the summer of 1941 on, the country was occupied by British and Russian forces, but there was an increasing American presence with the building up of the supply route across Iran to the Soviet Union by American transportation corps units. This development had two short–term advantages for the Iranians. In the first place, the country inherited the improved harbor, railway, and highway facilities constructed by the Americans. Secondly, it enabled them to playoff the Americans against the Russian and British occupying powers. This would be especially important when, at the end of the war, the Russians were inclined to keep their troops in the country rather than withdraw them as promised.

On the other hand, in Iran as elsewhere in the Middle East, American influence was also resented, especially as it focused increasingly on obtaining a foothold in the exploitation of the region’s petroleum resources.
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Here was a source both of wealth and of foreign interest which enhanced the region’s income during the war and thereafter but also brought further threats to the independence of its people.

This was as true of Iraq as of Iran. Once the revolt of 1941 had been suppressed by British troops, the country was ruled by a regime which collaborated with the Allies. The urge to throw off all outside influence, and especially that of the British, remained, however, and would reassert itself not long after the war.

On the Arabian peninsula, the war’s most significant impact was in the further strengthening it provided for the role of Ibn Saud and his family in the consolidation of their hold on what was increasingly referred to as the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. For now, the area deferred to British interest in the war, but the post-war years would be different.

During, as before and after, World War II, most governments in the Middle East had, or pretended to have, a great interest in the developing situation in Palestine. The British had partitioned their mandate along the Jordan river in 1922, calling the east bank “Trans-Jordan” for the obvious, if characteristically colonialist, reason that it was on the other side of the Jordan river from the perspective of London. The client state under King Abdullah was loyal to Great Britain during the war and
provided important facilities and transit routes for its military forces. There was, however, no occasion for the massive construction of facilities which took place in Iran and Egypt. Between the Mediterranean and the Jordan river, however, was the other portion of the mandate, now called Palestine, and though a small fraction of the original, it became the focus of the majority of the attention.

Originally held by Britain as a protector for the northern flank of her position astride the Suez Canal, the Palestine mandate performed this function in World War II but only because the British were able to keep the Axis away from the canal by action elsewhere. The German and Italian advance from the western approach via Libya was halted, if with great difficulty, by the British 8th Army in 1941 and 1942 when the threat to the canal was most acute. From the north, the reluctance of Turkey to join Germany and the success of the British, Australians, and the Free French in wresting Syria from Vichy France in the summer of 1941 eliminated German influence there and barred the way. For these developments, the British base in Palestine was an essential prerequisite, but otherwise the area was and after 1942 remained a military backwater. In the political sense, however, it was a center of attention because of the efforts of ever larger numbers of Jews seeking refuge from persecution elsewhere by joining those who had been living in the area for millennia.

From the late nineteenth century on, Jews from Eastern Europe had arrived in Palestine in several waves, adding slowly to the prior Jewish presence. The British had promised to allow further settlement but soon had second thoughts as some local Arabs objected to the influx. The economic development of the area in this period quickly led to an even larger immigration of Arabs from other portions of the Middle East. When Nazi persecution of Jews and the somewhat lesser plundering of German Jews who fled to Palestine as compared with those who went elsewhere increased the immigration of Jews in the 1930s, disturbances in the country led the British first to advocate and then to reject a second partition, this time into Arab and Jewish states. Instead, the British government, fearful of Arab enmity in a looming war with Germany, decided to halt most Jewish immigration in 1939. Ironically this decision came just before the outbreak of World War II provided the German government with a cover to initiate first a program for killing Germans thought unfit to live because of their mental or physical state and then the program to kill all Jews they could get their hands on.

This new development made the Jews more eager than ever to open the gates to those fleeing certain death, some Arabs more determined than ever to keep them out, and others, like the Grand Mufti, interested in collaborating with the Germans so that they could get to Palestine
and kill the Jews already there. The British did what they could to restrict both legal and illegal Jewish immigration, but the issue would resurface at the end of the war.
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The major long-term impact of the war on Palestine was two-fold. The alignment of the Grand Mufti with Hitler, after the former’s earlier elimination of rivals for leadership among Palestinian Arabs, meant that with Germany’s defeat the Arabs of Palestine were left without any leadership which could obtain respect and attention elsewhere. For the Jews, the enormous slaughter of the Holocaust meant that the major reservoir of potential immigrants from Europe had been decimated and the community of Jews in what came to be Israel would, at least until 1989, therefore, become increasingly one of North African and Middle Eastern origin. As these attained political influence in the country, their prior experience of Arab oppression (as opposed to the European Jews’ memory of German, Russian and Polish anti-Semitism), made the community increasingly dubious about concessions to Arab interests.

GERMAN-OCCUPIED EUROPE: NORTH AND WEST

In German-occupied Europe, the occupier began the establishment of a new system of which the outlines only could be developed during the war and which collapsed as the German forces were driven back.
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In Northern Europe, Denmark and Norway remained under German control from April 1940 until the surrender of May I945.
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In the case of Denmark, the German invasion came so quickly that there was no resistance and no opportunity for the government, and especially the King, to flee. Given the acquiescence of the administrative apparatus, it was obviously easiest for the Germans to run the undamaged country by supervising it rather than controlling it directly. There was, in effect, a temporary accommodation between occupier and occupied. As part of this tacit but effective arrangement the Germans did not raise the question of revising the border which had resulted from the World War I peace settlement, much to the dismay of many among the German minority in the area. On the other hand, the Danes not only provided important military bases for the German conduct of the war but furnished vast quantities of food supplies, about one–twelfth of the total annual rations for Germany (including all annexed areas).
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As the war-and the occupation-continued, a few Danes became restive, but major changes were forced by the Germans. In October
1942 Hitler shifted to a harsher course, instructing his new military representative that Denmark would be annexed to Germany and could not keep her monarchy and her democratic institutions.
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For a while these intentions were masked, but the antics of Danish Nazis pointed to the future. In August 1943 the Germans proclaimed a military emergency and the Danish government was effectively removed. Ironically this stimulated rather than inhibited resistance, first clearly manifested soon after when the German effort to round up Denmark’s Jews foundered as the Danes helped them flee to Sweden. Repression and resistance faced each other for the rest of the war; any hopes the Germans might have had of turning the “Nordic” people of Denmark into loyal Germans had long vanished, while the Danes had abandoned whatever illusions they might once have held about the aims of their powerful neighbor.

The situation in occupied Norway was more confused because there was considerable fighting and a period of negotiations about the possibility of an accommodation between parts of the government and Germany. As these broke down, the picture was further clouded by the appointment of a German Reichs Commissioner, Josef Terboven, who had been–and remained - Gauleiter of the Essen area of the German Rhineland. A long-time member of the Nazi Party, Terboven was going to run Norway the way he saw fit, subject only to Hitler’s repeatedly announced intention that Norway would always remain a part of the German empire. In carrying out his policies, Terboven was generally supported by the German army commander in the area, General Nikolaus von Falkenhorst, occasionally obstructed by the representative of the German navy, Admiral Hermann Boehm,
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and frequently in trouble with Vidkun Quisling, the leader of the Norwegian Nazi Party.

Though willing to help the Germans first conquer Norway and then to recruit Norwegians for the SS,
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Quisling wanted to run the country as a client state of Germany. The German repressive measures taken in the country were under the cloak of wartime needs–which automatically made him and his followers into traitors in the eyes of Norwegians.
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Whether inside or outside the government structure established by the Germans in occupied Norway, therefore, he called for a peace treaty, something the Germans always refused as Hitler had no intention of ever letting the country regain a measure of independence. By April 1943 even Quisling had come to recognize that he was merely being used to facilitate annexation by Germany and was embittered over the trend in that direction.
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If this was the attitude of the man who had once encouraged the Germans to occupy the country, one can easily imagine what the ordinary patriotic Norwegian thought.

Resistance to the Germans grew slowly but steadily and was encouraged rather than halted by the ruthless measures taken to suppress it. A very poor country, Norway could not contribute ,much to the German war economy; most of its greatest economic’ asset, its merchant fleet, having escaped to continue in the war. The Germans took what they could, and made the Norwegians suffer great hardships, not the best way of persuading them that as fellow Nordics they shared a community of fate with the Germans.

While Hitler evidently thought of absorbing both Denmark and Norway the way he had incorporated Austria, any such plans depended entirely on a German victory in the war. The people in both countries would have none of it, and everything they saw of the Germans and their minions only reinforced this reluctance. They awaited liberation and return to the type of independent, democratic, political life they had led before the war.

Like Denmark and Norway, Luxembourg was to be incorporated into Germany.
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Occupied on May 10, 1940, the Grand Duchy was considered a Germanic area. Those held to be non-Germanic, like the Italian workers who had come there for jobs and those considered of Walloon or French background, were deported. Many classified as Germans but not sufficiently enthusiastic about this designation were resettled among German settlers sent to Eastern Europe. The rest, except of course for the tiny number of Jews, were to be governed and treated as Germans.

The Grand Duchess and the ministers had escaped before the Germans could seize them, and formed a government-in-exile. Until the winter of 1944-45, when the Grand Duchy was first liberated and then the scene of bitter fighting during the German Ardennes offensive, the Battle of the Bulge, the people looked forward to a German defeat which could only be brought about by others. There were instances of resistance and of German repression, but Allied victory brought a return to independence. Their wartime experience helped Luxembourgers see the need for a closer association with their northern neighbors in the post-war world. They would remember those who had fought to restore their freedom, and there is a certain propriety in the fact that an American military cemetery in the country includes the grave of General George S. Patton.

If Luxembourgers visit an American cemetery at Hamm, the Dutch go to a British one near Arnhem. The German invasion of 1940 quickly overran the Netherlands, and in spite of the terrible bombing of Rotterdam, most of the country was not devastated in the rapidly moving
fighting. For a while it almost looked as if, in spite of the flight of the Queen and the leaders of the government, the people might settle down to a quiet acquiescence, almost glad that the war had passed over them so fast and with such little apparent impact. They were soon awakened by the realities of German policy.
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The Germans saw the Dutch as fellow Germanic people, temporarily led astray, and expected to reassimilate them into Germany proper—but at the same time to exploit their economy and possibly also their colonial empire.
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Hitler wanted to replace the military administration as quickly as possible and did so on May 17, installing as the Reich’s commissioner Arthur Seyss-Inquart, who had played a key role in the absorption of Austria into Germany two years earlier and had most recently been assigned to helping Hans Frank exploit and terrorize Poles.
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He tried to utilize the Dutch administrative apparatus, integrate the country into the German economy, and prepare its people for their future as Germans.