Italy and the neutral states

At 3 p.m. on 1 September 1939, when German troops had been fighting in Poland for several hours, the Italian Council of Ministers met in Rome. After the meeting a communiqué was issued in which the Fascist government informed the nation that “Italy will not take the initiative in any military operations”. Hitler’s closest ally, bound to him since May by the Pact of Steel, was for the moment staying out of the war. To describe this position Rome soon coined the term “non belligeranza”, non-belligerence, deliberately distinct from neutrality. On the same day and over the following two days the Nordic states – Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland – declared their neutrality, as did Estonia and Latvia. Portugal stated that its alliance with Great Britain remained in force but did not oblige it to take part in the war.

The ally that does not fight

The Pact of Steel, signed in Berlin on 22 May 1939 by Galeazzo Ciano and Joachim von Ribbentrop, committed Italy to join any war waged by the Reich, including a war of aggression. Benito Mussolini, however, signed it in the belief that no war would break out for another three years, and he repeated as much to Hitler at the end of May in a memorandum delivered by General Ugo Cavallero. Exhausted by the war in Ethiopia and the intervention in Spain, Italy had neither raw materials, nor modern weapons, nor fuel reserves. When in August Ciano heard at Salzburg and on the Obersalzberg that Germany would strike at Poland any day, and had not consulted its ally about it, he returned to Rome convinced that Hitler had deceived him.

On 25 August Mussolini wrote to Hitler that if Great Britain and France entered the war, Italy would not take up arms unless Germany immediately supplied it with the equipment and raw materials it needed. This message, together with the signing of the Anglo-Polish alliance, led Hitler to call off the attack on Poland set for 26 August. The next day Rome sent a list of requirements so enormous that it could not possibly be met. It amounted in total to almost 17 million tonnes of supplies, including 600 tonnes of molybdenum, after which it later became known as the “molybdenum list”, and Ciano noted that it would be enough “to kill a bull”. Hitler understood the intention, released his ally from the obligation to join the war and asked only that the Italians keep up the appearance to the last that they might enter it. The pretence suited Mussolini, who in the final days of August tried to cast himself as a mediator, as he had at Munich a year earlier, and on 31 August proposed to London and Paris a conference for 5 September.

1 September in Rome

On the morning of 1 September, as news of the fighting came in from Poland, Mussolini telephoned his ambassador in Berlin, Bernardo Attolico, and asked that Hitler send him a telegram publicly releasing Italy from its obligations as an ally. He did not want the Italians or the world to regard him as a betrayer of the pact. Hitler replied promptly and courteously, even before the cabinet met in Rome. He thanked Mussolini for his political and diplomatic support and wrote that he was confident Germany could accomplish its task with its own forces, and so did not expect Italian military assistance. Yet no German newspaper or radio station published the telegram. The Germans never learned that the Führer himself had released his ally, and they soon began to speak of Italian treachery. On 10 September Ambassador Attolico reported that in the Reich “the words treachery and perjury are heard ever more often”, and as late as March 1940 Mussolini reproached Ribbentrop that the telegram ought to have been published in Germany too.

The Council of Ministers’ communiqué was carefully worded. The government stated that the roots of the German–Polish conflict lay in the Treaty of Versailles, praised the Duce’s efforts for peace and approved the military measures taken so far, and only then announced that Italy would not take up arms. The word “neutrality” did not appear. Mussolini loathed it. It recalled August 1914, when Italy, bound to Germany and Austria-Hungary by the Triple Alliance, declared its neutrality and then, nine months later, entered the war on the other side. Fascist propaganda argued moreover that Germany had broken the duty of mutual consultation laid down in the pact by warning its ally neither of the pact with Moscow nor of the date of the attack on Poland, so that Italy was not breaking the alliance by standing aside. “Non-belligerence” was meant to signify that Italy remained Germany’s ally and did not rule out entering the war when it saw fit.

At 5 p.m. the same day the Italian Foreign Ministry replied to Roosevelt’s appeal that, since Italy would not be taking up arms, the question of bombing did not concern it. In the evening Hitler received the British and French notes demanding the withdrawal of his troops from Poland. On 2 September Mussolini made one more attempt to convene a conference, but it collapsed when London insisted that the Wehrmacht first withdraw from Poland. Ciano noted in his diary that day that the Duce was convinced of the need to stay out of the war, “but he is not at all happy about it”, and returned at every opportunity to the possibility of Italian participation.

The Nordic and Baltic states

The Nordic states had a long tradition of neutrality behind them. Sweden, Norway and Denmark had come through the First World War without taking part in it, and in the 1930s, after the failure of the sanctions imposed on Italy over Ethiopia, they ceased to regard themselves as bound to join League of Nations action. In May 1938 Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland and Iceland adopted identical rules of neutrality in the event of war. In the spring of 1939 Sweden, Norway and Finland rejected Germany’s offer of non-aggression pacts, judging that they needed no separate guarantees to protect their impartiality. Only Denmark, the most exposed of them, accepted, and on 31 May it signed a pact with the Reich.

On 1 September the governments in Stockholm, Oslo, Copenhagen and Helsinki announced that they would maintain strict neutrality in the German–Polish war. When Great Britain and France entered the war on 3 September, they issued further declarations, this time concerning the war between the great powers. For Sweden, governed by the cabinet of Per Albin Hansson, and for Norway under Prime Minister Johan Nygaardsvold, the overriding concern was to keep trading with both sides. Through the Swedish mines in Lapland and the Norwegian port of Narvik flowed the iron ore on which the German arms industry depended, and from the very first weeks of the war the British would be considering how to cut that route. Norway was at the same time mindful that the British fleet ruled the North Sea, and its merchant fleet, one of the largest in the world, sailed chiefly for the British. Finland, under President Kyösti Kallio, was more worried by its eastern neighbour than by Germany. On 18–19 September the prime ministers and foreign ministers of the Nordic states met in Copenhagen and reaffirmed their common policy of neutrality.

Estonia and Latvia followed a similar path. In November 1938, at a conference in Riga, the three Baltic states announced strict neutrality, and at the end of the year they passed neutrality laws modelled on the Swedish rules. On hearing of the war Tallinn and Riga declared that they intended to abide by them. Ruled in authoritarian fashion by Konstantin Päts and Kārlis Ulmanis, the two states had been bound since June 1939 by non-aggression pacts with Germany, and since 1932 by similar pacts with the Soviet Union. What they did not know was that their fate had already been sealed. In the secret protocol to the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of 23 August Germany had recognised Estonia and Latvia as part of the Soviet sphere of influence.

Portugal and the oldest alliance

Portugal’s position was different. It was linked to England by an alliance concluded in the fourteenth century, the oldest alliance still in force in the world, and in the First World War the Portuguese had fought in France alongside the British. António de Oliveira Salazar, prime minister since 1932 and also in charge of foreign policy, had no wish to repeat that experience. The country was poor, its army weak and its vast colonies in Africa and Asia defenceless. Across its land border lay the Spain of Francisco Franco, with whom Salazar had signed a treaty of friendship and non-aggression, the so-called Iberian Pact, on 17 March 1939.

On 1 September the government in Lisbon issued a statement declaring that its obligations as England’s ally, which Portugal had no intention of disowning at so grave a moment, fortunately did not compel it to abandon neutrality. Since Great Britain had not called on its ally for help, Portugal could remain neutral. On 5 September a British memorandum confirmed this understanding. The arrangement suited London: a neutral Portugal needed no defending, gave Spain no pretext to draw closer to Germany and kept its Atlantic ports open to trade.

Place in the war

Italian non-belligerence lasted nine months. Mussolini wavered between mediation, which no one wanted any longer, and entering the war once a German victory was in sight. In May 1940, as the Wehrmacht was crushing France, he decided that the moment had come, and on 10 June 1940 Italy declared war on Great Britain and France. The term coined in Rome was later taken up by Spain: in June 1940 Franco exchanged neutrality for non-belligerence, openly favourable to the Axis.

The neutrality of the Nordic and Baltic states proved for the most part illusory. A few weeks after the outbreak of war the Soviet Union forced Estonia and Latvia to conclude mutual assistance pacts and accept Soviet garrisons, and in the summer of 1940 it occupied them and incorporated them into the USSR. On 30 November 1939 the Red Army invaded Finland. On 9 April 1940 the Wehrmacht occupied Denmark, despite the pact concluded with it, and struck at Norway, which held out for two months. Of the six states that declared neutrality on 1 September, only Sweden maintained it to the end of the war, paying for it with ore shipments to the Reich and by allowing German troops to pass in transit.

Portugal came through the war as a neutral state, though its neutrality increasingly favoured the Allies as time went on. Lisbon became one of the last gateways through which refugees fled occupied Europe for America. In 1943 Salazar, invoking the old alliance, granted the British bases in the Azores, which helped the Allies close the gap in air cover for convoys in the mid-Atlantic, and in 1944, under Allied pressure, he halted the sale of tungsten to Germany.