GERMANY AND SCANDINAVIA
By HERBERT ROS1NSKI
THE attack launched by Germany against Denmark and Norway under cover of the plea of their inability to maintain their neutrality effectively comes as no surprise to those who during the last few years have been watching her strategic plans for that region. In fact, so frank have been her pronouncements in this respect that the only surprise is that such a move has not been undertaken even earlier, at the outbreak of the war.
By far the most important, as well as the most interesting, of these pronouncements—both for their substance and for the personality of their author—are to be found in a lecture on the "Strategic Geography of the Baltic and the North Sea," given in March, 1937, at the Berlin Institut fiir Meereskunde by Colonel Prof. Dr. Oscar Ritter von Nieder- mayer. For Colonel von Niedermayer, from 1924 to 1931 the organiser of German military training activities in the Red Army, and since that time lecturer and head of the Institute of Military Sciences and Military Geography at Berlin University, is at the same time one of the leading figures in German intellectual preparation for war, one of the foremost representatives of the Nazi regime within the army, and a chief link between the Reichswehr and the Soviet Union.
In this lecture Dr. von Niedermayer plainly intimated that Germany could not remain indifferent to develop- ments in these neutral countries. Germany had a vital interest in the maintenance of their full and equal neutrality, in the free use of their territorial waters for her merchant shipping and the non-extension of her defensive fronts in this direction. In their possession were a series of strate- gically important positions which in war might be vital to a Power that wished to defend itself against an impending attack: the south-west coast of Norway, the Danish-- Swedish Sounds, Gotland and the Aaland islands. If these States wished to protect their neutrality effectively they would have to take care that an infringement of it should appear as a real risk to an aggressor, and should, govern- ments and peoples alike, adapt their spirit to a truly neutral attitude, the lack of which was seriously disturbing National Socialist Germany.
This fear that through the Scandinavian countries Great Britain or Russia might threaten Germany on her extremely vulnerable Northern flank—rarely expressed with such candour, but to be sensed between the lines of all German publications touching upon these issues—was further forced by strategic considerations emphasising the vital importance which Denmark and still more Norway would possess for any effective conduct of operations in the North Sea. In the opinion of German naval experts one of Germany's most fatal mistakes in the World War had been the hasty demand of her naval authorities at the outbreak of hostilities that Denmark should proclaim the neutrality of the Danish Sounds and close them with minefields. The result had been that they had voluntarily deprived themselves thereby of a second outlet besides that from Heligoland Bight, which would have enabled them to control at least the trade route running through the Skagerrak and given them a flanking position towards all irruptions of the British Fleet into the southern part of the North Sea.
This most fatal move hase nowhere been more bitterly criticised than in Admiral Wegener's famous study of The Naval Strategy of the World War that was to play such a decisive role in the forming of the present German naval doctrine. According to him, the German Navy should not only have attempted to use the Sound, but should have gone further to establish a base at Skagen, on the northern tip of the Jutland peninsula, and thence have advanced still further to the south-west coast of Norway, where the German Fleet would have been able to roll up the British blockade and find that decisive battle which it had been seeking in vain around Heligoland and in furtive dashes to the British East Coast. These ideas of Admiral Wegener were seized with avidity by the new Germany Navy, burning to profit this time from the opportunities spurned during the World War. German naval commanders and men-of-war systematically familiarised themselves with all the intricacies and possibilities of Norwegian coastal waters right up to the Murmansk coast. As long as France appeared to be the only opponent to be reckoned with 'in the West, German naval strategists believed it possible to hold their own against her in the North Sea, and to use Norwegian territorial waters as a neutral channel for the uninterrupted maintenance of transatlantic communications When, however, it became more and more clear that Germany would have to reckon with both Great Britain and France in the West, those defensive hopes shrunk to a minimum. On the other hand the importance of the S.W. coast of Norway as a base for offensive operations against Britain increased correspond- ingly. Although Germany's inferiority in capital ships would not allow her to engage the main Allied forces in the open, submarines and aeroplanes would from the Norwegian coast find thenselves at much closer range to the British bases than from the Heligoland Bight. Above all from here they would be able to attack the British line of blockade, and by forcing it back to the West loosen it and give blockade- breakers a greatly increased chance of getting through.
During the last few months the stabilisation of the struggle on land in an almost hopeless deadlock and the shifting of the decision to the sea and to economic warfare brought the Danish-Norwegian problem more and more into the fore- front of German strategic plans until it became merely a question of time when the blow would fall. That the stopping of the Narvik iron-ore trade provided merely the opportunity for an action long decided and prepared for other reasons, is shown not only by the sinking of a German troopship on its way to action before news of the minelaying could have reached the German authorities, but also by the fact that Sweden, the possessor of the ore, but strategically without value, has contrary to expectations so far been left out of the picture.
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