The Scandinavian countries reject pacts with Germany

In mid-May 1939 the governments of Sweden, Norway and Finland gave Berlin a polite but firm answer: they thanked it for the offer of bilateral non-aggression pacts but declined it. They did not feel threatened by Germany, they pursued a policy of strict neutrality towards all the powers, and they needed no separate undertakings or guarantees for that purpose. The replies had been agreed beforehand at an extraordinary meeting of the Nordic foreign ministers in Stockholm. The fourth Nordic state, Denmark, acted differently: it declared that it would gladly discuss the terms of such an agreement with the Reich government, and two weeks later it signed one.

Some chronologies place the three states’ refusal on 17 May, and the American press of the time wrote of replies delivered on 17 and 18 May. The difference concerns only when the individual notes reached Berlin. The decision itself had been taken a few days earlier in Stockholm.

Where the German offer came from

The offer of pacts was a by-product of Roosevelt’s appeal to Hitler and Mussolini of 14 April 1939. A month after Germany occupied Bohemia and Moravia, and a week after the Italian invasion of Albania, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt asked Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini for an assurance that for at least ten years they would not attack thirty-one named states. The list included all the Nordic countries, as well as Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.

Berlin responded in a way calculated for propaganda effect. In the second half of April German missions asked the governments of the states on the list whether they felt threatened by the Reich and whether they had inspired the President’s appeal. The answers, predictably, were negative. On 28 April in the Reichstag Hitler ridiculed Roosevelt by reading out the names of the countries one by one, and announced that he was prepared to give each of them, on a reciprocal basis, assurances of their inviolability. In the same speech he renounced the naval agreement with Britain and the non-aggression declaration with Poland. Soon afterwards German diplomacy offered bilateral non-aggression pacts to Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Estonia and Latvia. Lithuania already had a similar undertaking in the agreement of 22 March under which it had been forced to hand Klaipėda (Memel) over to the Reich.

The aim was twofold. Hitler wanted to show the world that it was not Germany that threatened the small nations, and that the “encirclement” being built by London and Paris was directed against a peaceable Reich. In the spring of 1939 Britain and France had given guarantees to Poland, and then to Romania and Greece, and had opened negotiations with Moscow in which, since the Soviet proposal of an alliance of 17 April, the question of guarantees for the Baltic states kept recurring. Pacts with Germany’s neighbours to the north and north-east were meant to break up that front before it took shape, and to shut out both Western and Soviet influence from the Baltic at a time when the Wehrmacht was preparing for war with Poland.

Nordic neutrality

The Scandinavian states had long pursued a policy of common neutrality. Sweden, Norway and Denmark had come through the First World War without taking part in it, and in the 1930s, together with Finland, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg, they cooperated within the so-called Oslo Group, which brought together small states with similar interests. After the League of Nations’ failure over Ethiopia they ceased to regard themselves as bound to take part in sanctions, and in May 1938 they adopted identical neutrality rules for the event of war. The foreign ministers of the four states met regularly and tried to act in concert.

On news of the German offer an extraordinary meeting of the ministers was called in Stockholm in the first half of May. Present were the Swede Rickard Sandler, the Norwegian Halvdan Koht, the Finn Eljas Erkko and the Dane Peter Munch. Munch argued energetically that the others should accept the offer together with Denmark. He hoped that a joint reply would spare his country the odium of being the only state to have bowed to Hitler. The others showed understanding for Denmark’s position but did not agree.

The arguments of Stockholm and Oslo were simple. None of these states had any dispute with Germany, and signing a pact with one power might be read as a departure from impartiality towards the other. Nor did a pact offered by a Reich that had just broken the Munich Agreement seem particularly valuable. Norway, moreover, counted on British dominance of the North Sea to protect it in practice from a German attack. In Sweden an important part was played by the deliveries of iron ore to Germany: Stockholm wanted to keep them as ordinary trade rather than as an element of a political understanding.

Finland was in the most difficult position. Since 1932 it had been bound by a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union, and Moscow watched suspiciously for any sign of rapprochement between Helsinki and Berlin. In the spring of 1939 a dispute was under way over the Finnish–Swedish plan to fortify the demilitarised Åland Islands, which the USSR regarded as a threat, and Soviet diplomats were demanding that the Finns lease them several islands in the Gulf of Finland. A pact with Germany would have given Moscow a pretext for further demands. The government of Aimo Cajander therefore chose the Nordic line. Not everyone in Finland was pleased: the chairman of the Defence Council, Marshal Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim, favoured accepting the offer, and after the war wrote in his memoirs that on the eve of the war Finland had needlessly weakened its relations with Germany.

The Danish exception

Denmark could not afford what Sweden and Norway could. It shared a land border with the Reich several dozen kilometres long, and its small army had no chance of defending Jutland. In the border region of North Schleswig (PL), which had returned to Denmark after the 1920 plebiscite held under the Treaty of Versailles, lived a German minority among whom Nazi influence and demands for a change of border were growing. A refusal might have been taken in Berlin as a hostile gesture. The Danish government of Prime Minister Thorvald Stauning concluded that it had no choice and replied that it was ready to talk. The Western powers received this with understanding, since everyone knew that Denmark was the most exposed country in Scandinavia.

Significance

The three states’ refusal was a minor propaganda setback for Hitler, but it changed nothing in his plans. In the spring of 1939 Scandinavia was not within his field of interest, and the pacts with Denmark, Estonia and Latvia, signed on 31 May and 7 June, were enough to allow talk in Berlin and abroad of the Reich’s peaceful intentions towards its small neighbours. For the Nordic states, the whole affair confirmed their belief that neutrality would be enough to protect them from the coming war.

The following months put that belief to the test. On 23 August the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact assigned Finland to the Soviet sphere of influence in its secret protocol, and on 30 November 1939 the Red Army attacked it, beginning the Winter War. Germany, bound by its agreement with Stalin, refused the Finns help. On 9 April 1940 the Wehrmacht attacked Denmark – despite the pact concluded with it – and Norway simultaneously; Norwegian resistance lasted two months. Sweden alone of the four remained neutral to the end of the war, paying for it with ore deliveries to the Reich and with consent to the transit of German troops. Finland, isolated in 1939, entered the war against the USSR alongside Germany in June 1941. The policy the ministers adopted in Stockholm in May 1939 thus proved effective only for the one state that neither of the warring sides needed to conquer.