A World at Arms (37 page)

Hitler had considered the removal and possible killing of Jews as a part of the war as much as the killing of the mentally ill, the elderly, and others he and many other Germans considered unworthy of life. He had tried to include the murder of vast numbers of Jews in the initial stages of the war in Poland but had run into difficulties with the military. He had then removed the military from control of occupied Poland but had postponed further action.
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As it became obvious in the summer of 1940 that there was no immediate prospect of acquiring Madagascar as a sort of super-concentration camp for the Jews, the same project that Hitler turned to in those same weeks of the summer, the invasion of the Soviet Union, would provide a new opportunity for ending the existence of Jews in Europe as he had publicly threatened to do before he began the War.
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If the Jews were to disappear physically as human beings, numerous European countries were to vanish from the map as independent entities. Norway, Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg were to be absorbed by Germany,
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Denmark could be expected to follow once Germany had won the war, and France would survive as a tiny and impotent dependency.
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But that was not all. The German victory in the West looked like the opportunity for Germany to end the independence of some other countries as well. Since revision of the World War I peace settlement had always been a pretence, not an aim, for National Socialist policy, this looked like the right time to end the existence of another country which had been neutral in that conflict: Switzerland.

There had been periodic instances of friction in the relations between the Third Reich and the small neutral, but the basic issue was always the existence of the latter, a small democratic state on a continent Germany intended to transform. At 1:35 a.m. on June 25, 1940, the armistice between Germany and France went into effect; a few hours later orders went out of the high command of the German army to prepare an invasion of Switzerland. In the following weeks, these plans were worked out in considerable detail, and the prospective Commander-in-Chief of the invading forces, Ritter von Leeb, who would be one of the horde promoted to the rank of Field Marshal by Hitler on July 19, personally reconnoitered the terrain.
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The plan was to crush Swiss resistance quickly and then partition the country with Italy, Germany taking the northern four-fifths and Italy the remaining area south of a line running from Lake Geneva east.
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Originally code-named operation “Green,” the project was renamed “Christmas Tree” when the former name was applied to the planned invasion of Ireland; it was never launched as more important projects came to the fore in German planning.
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The end of Switzerland, that pimple on the face of Europe as Hitler described it in August 1942,
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would have to wait until Germany had defeated her European enemies.
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The other neutral immediately affected by the German victories of the spring of 1940 was Sweden. The German invasion of Norway, combined with the quick occupation of Denmark, dramatically altered the situation of Sweden. Now it not only controlled iron ore resources important to the German war effort but was itself practically surrounded by German forces. In the early stages of the operations in Norway, the Germans still exercised some caution in their treatment of the Swedes. They wanted no Swedish aid for the beleaguered Norwegians but, instead, to utilize the Swedish railway system themselves in order to send reinforcements to the isolated German garrison in Narvik and to evacuate the naval crews stranded there by the sinking of their ships.
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Swedish suggestions that they themselves might occupy Narvik were turned aside; the last thing the Germans wanted was for Sweden to have its own free outlet to the Arctic Ocean.
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Once the Germans were in control of all of Norway, they could press upon the Swedish government that view of neutrality which best suited Berlin.

German troops and supplies would cross Swedish territory practically at will; the Swedish economy would be reoriented toward Germany; and Swedish ship yards would build merchant ships and warships for the Third Reich.
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The kind of cooperation Sweden had refused to Finland as well as to the Western Powers in the winter of 1939–40 was now accorded to the Third Reich. The key difference was the assumption in
Stockholm that refusing the democracies might bring unkind words but refusing the Germans meant more substantial dangers. In the face of German pressure, Stockholm capitulated on practically all matters; and the Germans could draw on the resources and transportation system of the country for their own war effort as long as they seemed to be winning. If they won, Sweden’s nominal independence would go the way of Norway’s; if they appeared to be losing, the Swedes might begin to reassert their rights.
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German public pronouncements of their intentions to dominate the European economy and exploit all of it–including Sweden’s-for their own purposes, like Minister of Economics Walter Funk’s declaration of July 25, 1940, might evoke criticism in the Swedish press, but there was no substantial resistance from Stockholm until the tide of war had been turned by the exertions of others.
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German plans for a newly ordered Europe were being discussed in Berlin in the summer of 1940, and were accompanied by the squabbling of government and party agencies on the one hand and the grasping cupidity of German business and industrial concerns on the other; both characteristics of the internal situation of the Third Reich. Every agency had plans and every firm had hopes. Whatever the details, Germany would control everything. There would certainly be no general peace conference - Germany would impose her will in bilateral negotiations.
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What international organizations remained were to be replaced by new ones of German devising; the International Labor Organization, for example, by an International Central Labor Office with headquarters in Berlin.
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Italy was still seen as entitled to a special role, especially in North Africa and the Near East
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but the German capital would certainly be the center around which all would revolve. And such smaller satellites like the puppet state of Slovakia would have to march in lockstep with Berlin now that it was no longer necessary to treat them leniently as models of how nicely Germany could behave.
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The great problem for the future was the fact that the Germans had been obliged by the outbreak of war in 1939 to postpone construction of the navy needed for the war which Hitler expected to wage against the United States. The first of the battleships designed with the British navy in mind, the
Bismarck
and the
Tirpitz,
were being completed; but work on the super-battleships which were expected to outclass anything the United States might build had been halted in September 1939. Knowing that the completion of these enormous ships took years, Hitler was eager to have work on them resumed as soon as possible. On July 11, 1940, the orders to do so were agreed upon between him and the Commander-in-Chief of the navy. At a time when Hitler still had some hope that Britain might pull out of the war, he was looking forward to
the contest ahead when a great blue-water navy would enable him to defeat the United States with England either conquered or allied with
either
of the two major contestants. Nothing more clearly illuminates the world–wide ambitions of the Third Reich than the decision to press forward with a vast program for constructing battleships, aircraft carriers, and other warships at a time when the war that began in September 1939 was believed to be over. Unlike some post-war German apologists and many non-German historians, Hitler recognized, and acted on the recognition, that a pre-condition for any successful war with the United States was not the selection of American beaches on which to land but the building of a navy that could project German power across the Atlantic.
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For the immediate conduct of submarine warfare against British shipping, the ability to use bases on the French Atlantic coast, especially Lorient, was an immediate and enormous advantage; and the Italian offer to supplement the German effort in this regard by stationing a substantial fleet of Italian submarines at Bordeaux was happily accepted.
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But the anticipated German naval bases for future transatlantic operations involved more grandiose plans. A huge base was to be built at Trondheim in German-annexed Norway. Not merely repair and naval construction facilities would be provided there but a whole German city with at least a quarter of a million inhabitants, joined by a four-lane highway and colossal bridges directly to Germany. This enormous project–on which German workers were hard at work until March 1943–was however to be only one, if perhaps the biggest, of the bases for Germany’s world–classfleet.
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Not only would the Germans expand the bases on the French coast at St. Nazaire and Lorient but they would hold on to the British Channel Islands which were occupied in the summer of 1940.
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In internal affairs, this portion of the United Kingdom could eventually serve as a model for the sort of Britain Germany expected to see in the world: its Jews evacuated and murdered, the islands themselves furnished with an example of that marvellous institution of the National Socialist state, the great concentration camp fully equipped with reusable coffins and all the rest. And there was to be a major naval base. Furthermore, there would be a series of bases outside Europe to enable the German fleet to protect the routes to the country’s revived and enlarged colonial empire as well as assist in the projection of its naval power across the Atlantic.

The navy proposed and Hitler very much made his own a series of projects for bases on and off the coast of Northwest Africa.
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Included in these plans were bases to be constructed and owned by Germany
not only in formerly French colonial possessions, especially the French protectorate of Morocco, but also on Portuguese and Spanish territory, in particular the Spanish Canary Islands.
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This project, to which the German government clung rigidly in the summer and fall of 1940, is especially illuminating for our understanding of the priorities of Berlin, since the Germans sacrificed the possibility of Spanish participation in the war to it.
^g

Unlike Mussolini, who had jumped into the war at what he believed was the last minute but without prior assurances from Berlin about the realization of Italian aspirations in the forthcoming peace settlement, Spanish leader Francisco Franco had cautiously reversed the sequence. He was ready to enter the war on Germany’s side, but he first wanted assurances about both the conduct of hostilities and the satisfaction of Spanish war aims. As already explained, he had told the Germans of his desire to join them in the war but had specified both the supplies he needed and the colonial expansion he wanted.
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The German response to Franco’s offer to join in was far more tentative than later efforts from Berlin to entice Spain into the war might lead one to expect. The initial Spanish list of demands was sent to Berlin on June 19; but the response sent a week later was clearly a stalling one.
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As some have recognized, the Germans, not the Spaniards, were holding back.
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One contributing factor may have been the belief in Berlin at that time that the war with England was about over and Spain’s help was not needed. Moreover, the extravagance of Franco’s expansionist aims may well have astonished the Germans; certainly his idea of expanding Spanish Equatorial Africa (Rio Muni, now known as Equatorial Guinea) at the expense of the former and soon to be reclaimed German colony of Cameroon did not win him any friends in Berlin. When the Germans subsequently dangled colonial bait in front of the Spanish dictator to obtain his participation in the war, they always took care to evade this last request. But there was a third element which may well have contributed to the initial German reticence and which would constitute a critical element in all subsequent approaches to Franco.

When at the invitation of the Germans at the end of August formal negotiations for Spain’s entrance into the war began, the Germans insisted that while Spain would certainly get Gibraltar and an expansion of Spanish Sahara (Rio de Oro) southward, French Morocco would go to Spain subject to the siting of German naval bases there, and, in
addition, the Germans would obtain a base in the Spanish Canaries. These latter demands were fiercely opposed by Franco as well as by his negotiator, Serrano Suñer, when the latter visited Berlin in September. Whatever else Franco hoped for and wanted, he saw himself as a Spanish nationalist; he would not accept territory in Morocco subject to German interference and he was under no circumstances about to yield a base on Spanish territory in the Canary Islands to Germany or any other country. The fact that the Germans were willing to forgo Spain’s participation in the war rather than abandon their plans for naval bases on and off the coast of Northwest Africa surely demonstrates the centrality of this latter issue to Hitler as he looked forward to naval war with the United States.
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For years Hitler had been calling for an airplane capable of bombing the United States, and work on such a plane had been under way since 1937.
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The realization of this project, however, was still not imminent in 1940, and the Germans could only push forward with it in the hope that by the time the planes were ready, refueling in the Portuguese Azores would be possible and would increase the possible bomb load. The prerequisites for war with the United States were being worked on, but it was obvious that they would take time to complete. While the preparations went forward, a project which was thought to be much simpler and capable of completion long before the huge blue-water navy and swarms of four-engined bombers had been built was to be carried out by Germany’s victorious army: the invasion of the Soviet Union and the defeat of that country so that huge portions of it could be annexed and settled by German farmers, and the area’s metal and oil resources harnessed to the subsequent campaign against the United States.