The German–Danish non-aggression pact

On 31 May 1939 in Berlin, the Reich Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and Herluf Zahle, the envoy of the Kingdom of Denmark to Germany, signed a non-aggression treaty. It was very short. In the first article both parties undertook that “in no case” would they resort to war or to any other use of force against each other, and that should a third state take such action against one of them, the other would give that state no support of any kind. The second article provided that the treaty would enter into force on the exchange of ratifications in Berlin and remain valid for ten years, and that it would be extended automatically unless one of the parties denounced it a year before it expired. Attached to the treaty was a protocol the Danes had pressed for: ordinary trade and the transit of goods between Denmark and a third state, even one at war with Germany, were not to be regarded as prohibited support.

The pact was broken when Germany invaded Denmark the following year: on 9 April 1940, less than eleven months later, the Wehrmacht crossed the Danish border.

The only one to agree

The treaty grew out of a German diplomatic offensive launched after Roosevelt’s appeal to Hitler and Mussolini. When the American President asked for an assurance that Germany and Italy would not attack thirty-one states, Adolf Hitler mocked the request in his Reichstag speech of 28 April and announced that he could give each of those countries guarantees on a basis of reciprocity. German diplomats then offered non-aggression pacts to Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Estonia and Latvia. In mid-May the Scandinavian countries rejected the proposal, citing their neutrality. Denmark alone among the Nordic states replied that it was ready to negotiate.

The Danish Foreign Minister, Peter Munch, a historian and a politician of the left-liberal Radikale Venstre party, saw no alternative. At a Nordic meeting in Stockholm he urged the Swedes, Norwegians and Finns to accept the offer together with Denmark, so that the impression of small states bowing to Hitler would be spread across four capitals. He failed to persuade them. Refusing risked worsening relations with a powerful neighbour, while accepting showed the world how dependent on it Denmark was. The government judged the first risk to be the greater.

A country without defences

Denmark’s position was unique. It was the only Nordic state with a land border with the Reich. That border, drawn in 1920 after the plebiscite in Schleswig (PL) held under the Treaty of Versailles, was less than 70 kilometres long and followed no natural obstacle. To the south, in Schleswig-Holstein, the NSDAP had some of its best election results in Germany, while to the north lived a German minority in which Nazis demanding a revision of the border had gained the upper hand. The Danes would have liked the pact to confirm the 1920 border. It contained no such confirmation, however, and according to some studies the German side made it clear during the negotiations that it should not be read that way.

The Social Democratic–Radical government of Thorvald Stauning, in power since 1929, did not believe that Denmark could defend itself by force of arms. The armed forces had been cut back to a modest size in the 1930s, and their task was to guard neutrality rather than to wage war. Munch, who had been Minister of Defence during the First World War, had helped shape this policy and still believed that the country’s security depended on good relations with Germany and on giving it no pretext. Advocates of stronger defences pressed Stauning, but the Prime Minister rejected their arguments. Most Danes hoped that the war, as in 1914, would pass their country by.

The signing in Berlin

The negotiations moved quickly. The Danes were above all concerned with the trade protocol. The country’s economy lived on food exports, chiefly to Britain, and Copenhagen wanted to be sure that it would not be forced to stop them in the event of an Anglo-German war. The Germans agreed, because they themselves needed Danish butter, bacon and eggs. The Western powers received the treaty with understanding: they knew Denmark had no other choice.

It was signed in Berlin on 31 May, only nine days after Ribbentrop and Galeazzo Ciano had signed the Pact of Steel, a military alliance with Italy, in the same city. The juxtaposition suited German propaganda: with one state the Reich concluded an alliance, with others agreements guaranteeing peace. A week later Estonia and Latvia signed similar pacts with Germany.

Significance

The pact did not give Denmark the security it sought. When war broke out on 1 September 1939, the country declared its neutrality and for some months was indeed kept out of the fighting. In the autumn, however, the German navy began stopping Danish ships bound for the ports of the Reich’s enemies, and in the winter Berlin began planning a Scandinavian operation. The Germans wanted to seize Norway to secure the route for Swedish iron ore and to forestall the British, and for this they needed Danish airfields, especially at Aalborg in northern Jutland. According to an account repeated in the literature, Hitler personally struck out the words in the draft plan about occupying only the northern tip of Jutland and wrote in all of Denmark instead.

On 9 April 1940, before dawn, the Wehrmacht crossed the border, an infantry battalion was landed from a ship in Copenhagen harbour, and Luftwaffe aircraft appeared over Jutland and the islands. The German envoy handed the Danish government a memorandum assuring it that the Reich wished only to protect Denmark from the British and would respect its territorial integrity and political independence. After a few skirmishes in which a dozen or so Danish soldiers were killed, King Christian X and Stauning’s government decided to end resistance. Of the non-aggression pact that was to last ten years, nothing remained after less than one.

For three years Denmark was a “model protectorate”: it kept its king, government, parliament and police, and in 1943 even held elections. This policy of cooperation ended on 29 August 1943 when, faced with strikes and sabotage, the government refused to meet new demands and the Germans imposed a state of emergency. The Reich plenipotentiary Werner Best soon prepared the deportation of the Danish Jews, but in October 1943 almost all of them, warned in time, managed to escape across the Øresund to Sweden. The occupation lasted until 5 May 1945. The fate of Denmark, the only Scandinavian state to accept the German offer in 1939, showed what Hitler’s guarantees to small nations were worth.