War Diaries, 1939-1945, Page 4

  The worst thing is, soon we won’t even be able to wish for a German defeat any more, because the Russians are on the move again. In the last few days they’ve occupied Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, on sundry pretexts. And a weakened Germany can only mean one thing for us Nordic nations – that we’ll be overrun with Russians. And I think I’d rather say ‘Heil Hitler’ for the rest of my life than have that happen. I can’t think of anything more appalling. I met a Finnish woman out at Elsa Gullander’s on Sunday and she told us some dreadful things about the Finnish war and the way the Russians treat their prisoners. Her own brother, just released from captivity, had been beaten until his ears, nose and mouth bled. Another prisoner was shut up in a small room with a 100-watt bulb until he went blind. She seemed absolutely reliable, so it must be true. The most terrible thing of all was when the Russians drove Polish women and children ahead of them towards the Finns. Some of the Finns couldn’t bear to shoot them, so they surrendered voluntarily – and now they face court martial in Finland. So do those who couldn’t withstand being tortured in the Russian jails and revealed what they knew about the Finnish armed forces. But when red-hot splints are being forced under your nails (which she swore was true), it can’t be at all easy to stand firm. The Russians were said to have crucified three Finnish ladies’ defence volunteers. She’d heard this but couldn’t guarantee it really happened. It was true, however, that the Russians abducted 10 junior volunteers (Finnish girls aged 8–12). Nothing more’s been heard of them.

  No, o Lord, keep the Russians away from here.

  Tomorrow I’m taking the children to Vimmerby. All the schoolchildren have been issued with so-called evacuation tickets, which have cost the state 8 million. But the evacuation train departs at 5 in the morning, so we’re travelling on a family ticket at 8 o’clock instead.

  21 JUNE

  At 15.30 today, Hitler received the French delegation in the railway carriage at the forest of Compiègne where the Armistice was signed in November 1918. We don’t yet know the terms of the truce.

  24 JUNE, 11.30

  In approximately two hours’ time – at 1.35 in the early morning of 25 June 1940 – hostilities between Germany and France will cease, and between Italy and France. Italy and France signed the piece of paper confirming their agreement at about 7 this evening in a villa outside Rome, and then Ciano informed Hitler. Six hours later, the ceasefire will come into force and the war in the West will be over. The terms still haven’t been made public but it’s expected that they will be – in all three countries simultaneously – within 48 hours. In Germany there’ll be flags waving and bells clanging for ages, as usual. In France, 25 June will be a national day of mourning.

  And what’s to come now? Los gegen England [Let England have it!] – that’s probably going to be the next instalment. In Britain, they’re evacuating the children – some of them all the way to Australia, Canada and New Zealand.

  Gunnar came home from Finland this evening. A lot of people there expect the Russians will soon be back – and now Finland probably won’t be able to defend itself. Then we’ll very likely find the Germans wading in to ‘protect’ us. Will the day really come when the Nordic countries are no longer free? Norway and Denmark have already lost their freedom, of course.

  Maybe there are lots of soldiers dying on the western front right now – two hours before the ceasefire. Human stupidity is simply colossal.

  27 JUNE

  The Soviet Union has delivered an ultimatum to Romania, which runs out at midnight tonight. Romania is to give up Bessarabia and two districts in northern Bucovina and allow the use of Constanza [Constanța] and other Black Sea ports as Russian naval bases. Romania has submitted to its demands.

  There’s an awful lot going on! On Wednesday, British naval forces attacked French marine units in the French naval port of Oran in Algeria. The British wanted to stop the French fleet falling into German hands and issued an ultimatum to the French commanders to surrender their ships. In some cases they did this good-naturedly but the commander in Oran refused and there was a violent sea battle. According to Churchill, ‘the loss of human life among the French and at the port must have been great’.

  Today, as a result of what happened, diplomatic relations between France and Great Britain have been severed.

  It takes very little to break friendly treaties these days. And once again, Hitler has got what he wants – splits among the Allies.

  21 JULY

  In a long speech to the German parliament on Friday, Hitler issued a peace ultimatum. He won’t get any official response from Britain. The fighting will go on. And in its atrocity it will exceed anything the world has seen before. Germany is better prepared for action than ever and Britain, too, claims to be ready to mobilize on a grand scale. Roosevelt also gave a speech (before Hitler’s) encouraging the British to hold out in this battle over ‘the continuance of civilization as we know it versus the ultimate destruction of all that we have held dear’.

  Today, three free countries ceased to exist – Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania! They were declared independent on 18 November 1918 – 22 years of building up their nations, now declared dead by the Soviet Union, which has incorporated them as republics. One is simply incapable of feeling sorry any more – but it certainly is a tragedy.

  In spite of everything, Finland does at least still have its freedom, for now. Perhaps their struggle was not in vain. The Olympic Games were supposed to start in Helsinki yesterday, had the world been the home of reason and not a madhouse. Instead they are now holding national championships at Helsinki Stadium to honour the memory of fallen Finnish sportsmen.

  Lars and I got back from our cycling trip yesterday. We had a wonderful ride through Roslagen and stayed over at Norra Latin’s summer hostel on Björkö [island]. We saw so many lovely sights: the roadsides edged with the yellow of lady’s bedstraw, the open horizon across the sea at Simpnäs, the full moon over the water and the hostel roof. And the sun blazed down – intense and relentless. We’ve had no rain in this fateful summer of 1940, everything’s looking so parched and burnt and the crops are pretty much failing. That dreadful winter seemed to me to be God’s punishment on the human race – is it the same with this drought?

  The lord of the world – the wild beast of the Book of Revelations – once an unknown little German artisan, the rehabilitator of his people and (as I and many others see it) annihilator, agent of cultural decline – what is his end to be? Will we at some point have reason to say: Sic transit gloria mundi?

  1 SEPTEMBER

  Today it’s been a year since the beginning of war. We’re starting to get used to it. At least those of us who live in a place where it isn’t exactly raining bombs all the time.

  A year! Has so much ever happened in a single year before? I haven’t written any entries in this war history of mine for a long time now, because nothing particularly sensational has happened recently. Things were so tense between Japan and Britain for a while that we expected war would be declared any time, but the threat seems to have passed for now. Things haven’t been going smoothly between Romania and Hungary either, or between Romania and Bulgaria. Romania’s had to give up various bits, I think. But the Axis Powers run their affairs the way they want. Greece and Italy have been at each other’s throats as well.

  The huge German attack on Britain that Hitler announced in his speech in July hasn’t exactly turned out as intended. The skies over England are teeming with planes that are dropping bombs as fast as they can, to be sure, but the British are giving more or less as good as they get, and there’s been no sign of any invasion of England. At first the Germans were attacking both day and night, but now it’s only at night; they dare not risk too many casualties. In both Berlin and London, people are spending hours in shelters overnight. Hamburg is said to have been comprehensively bombed by the British; I doubt there’s very much of the port left.

  How the food situation is in Britain I don’t know, but in Germany they sa
y it’s very, very bad. The shortage of fats is hitting particularly hard. I heard of some Germans who were over here and were invited to a smörgåsbord. All they ate was bread and butter, and when their host asked them why they weren’t eating anything else they replied that if we in Sweden had experienced what they had, we’d be overjoyed by a meal of bread and butter. I know that in Norway they’re getting very scant fare, too. Norwegian feeling towards Sweden is currently hostile, reportedly as hostile as in 1905. This is because we’re letting German troop trains pass through – it’s an open secret. We’re doing that – presumably because we have to – and we’ve also engaged in some horse-trading with Germany over coal. I expect the Norwegians are also angry because their interned countrymen have allegedly been badly treated.

  Finland is in a pretty precarious situation in its foreign policy. Finland’s been obliged to let Russian troop trains through to Hangö [Hanko]. And Tanner has left the government, not of his own free will but on the orders of Moscow. So Finland’s right of determination has now been considerably curtailed.

  In our own little land we aren’t that badly affected by all this, in spite of everything. But prices just keep rising. Our coffee ration has to last us six weeks now, rather than five. Last spring I said that if the war wasn’t over by the autumn, we just wouldn’t be able to bear it any longer. And yet we are! After an unspeakably rainy August – as ridiculously wet as it was dry before that (because there’s no moderation in anything this year) – we returned to town last Saturday, and I’ve rarely been so glad to get back to our place. Despite everything, one still takes an interest in making one’s home look nice. It’s really smart in the children’s room. Karin’s got a new chest of drawers and Lars has a reading lamp above the sofa, which is where he sleeps now, while Karin has inherited his splendid bed with the canopy curtains. Pelle Dieden came round, passing on her cold to the kids and grieving for Emil.

  A year has gone by! Will we have peace by next 1 September? Adolf claims the war will be over before the end of the month – as the farmer said when the doctor told him the old woman wouldn’t last the month: ‘It’ll be interesting to see how that goes.’

  To finish with, a story that tickled me:

  A Swede boasts to a Dane about our Swedish neutrality-guarding forces, how reliable and smart, etc. they are, and when he’s gone on like that for a while, the Dane says coolly and calmly: ‘You should see our Germans.’

  11 SEPTEMBER

  The punch-up continues. It’s total aerial war between Britain and Germany. On 7 September, the Germans launched a terrible mass bombardment of London and since then they’ve been coming back night after night, dropping bombs on the capital by the ton. There are huge fires burning, which help the Germans find their way. But the British are doing their best to answer them in kind, and tonight they bombed Berlin, setting a lot of buildings on fire including the Reichstag and the academy of art. We don’t hear as much about the damage in Germany, but we can be sure the British are far from inactive. The fact is that the populations of both London and Berlin have to spend most of the night in shelters. Ugh! Not an evening passes without me lying in bed and thanking my Heavenly Father that in this country we can still sleep undisturbed. But it’s hard thinking about all those who can’t.

  Oh yes, and King Carol of Romania has abdicated in favour of his son Michael. Madame Lupescu has gone with him into exile and Princess Helena, or the ‘queen mother’ to use her new title, has returned to Bucharest. It must be exciting to be royal these days.

  And we’ve been issued with ration cards for bread.

  21 SEPTEMBER

  The air war continues and is horrendous! Ten thousand civilians killed by air bombardments in London alone, Churchill said in a speech the other day. And the Germans have promised even more destructive methods. They expect the war to end by this autumn and Ribbentrop has just been in Rome. The partition of Africa was apparently under discussion. Under the ‘new order’, only Germany, Italy and Spain will have any say in that area. The expectation is, incidentally, that Spain will enter the war on the side of the Axis Powers any day now. Although one would think that poor country had already had enough after its civil war in 1936–37.

  In Norway, the Germans are rebuilding the roads for all they are worth and concentrating their troops up in the north as a salutary memento mori to the Russians.

  On the 15th of the month I started my secret ‘defence work’, which is so secret that I daren’t even write about it here. I’ve been in the job for a week. And it’s become completely clear to me that, as things stand, there’s no country in Europe left so untouched by the impact of the war as here, in spite of a considerable rise in prices, rationing and increased unemployment. We live sumptuously here, as foreigners see it. To my mind, our rations are so generous that anyone who bought all that we are entitled to would end up in dire financial straits.

  And yesterday we had hot water – and will be getting it two days a week. Kar de Mumma’s column in Svenska Dagbladet today gave us his picture of events:

  [Swedish press cutting pasted here: extract from a comic column.]

  From Monday, bread will be rationed too, so now we’ll have to take our coupons with us to the restaurant, as well. Things could turn out like in this Danish cartoon.

  [Cutting from Dagens Nyheter, 1940: the Danish Post Office is to administer bread coupons, giving customers their change in small-denomination stamps. A Danish cartoonist imagines the scene.]

  It’s extraordinary, the way one can grow accustomed to simply anything! I was wondering the other day whether a time will ever come when it strikes us as unnatural to see a ‘Shelter’ sign down in our peaceful entrance halls. At the moment it actually feels perfectly in order that there are rooms everywhere whose sole function is to protect human beings if other human beings happen to start chucking bombs at them. So when I see the sign in the hall with its blue letters saying ‘Shelter’ every time I go out, or see the notice in the lift that it is not to be used during an air-raid alert, I don’t react in the slightest. If only we could hope to hear our grandchildren ask one day: ‘Shelter – what does that mean?’

  26 SEPTEMBER

  Yesterday Terboven, the German War Commissioner for Norway, addressed the Norwegian people on the radio, and anybody still holding out hope that Norway would be able to control its own affairs was soon disappointed. The royal family have been deposed and are not allowed to return to Norway, nor is the Nygaardsvold government. All political parties are forbidden in Norway except for National Unity, i.e. Quisling’s party. So the traitor Quisling has won, and is shortly expected to take his place in the new Council of State, where the other appointments that have been announced are all fellows of the same stamp as Quisling. Poor King Haakon and Olav and Märtha! Märtha and her three children went over to America a while back, at the invitation of President Roosevelt; Haakon and Olav must be in England. And today in Denmark there was a huge turnout to celebrate King Christian’s 70th birthday. Denmark seems to have got off more lightly after its invasion than Norway, though they both have equally restricted rights of self-determination.

  Other news is that the Japanese have marched into Indochina and the French have apparently bombarded Gibraltar – this misery is extending everywhere. We’ll have to see whether, once the presidential election is over, America joins in the game as well.

  29 SEPTEMBER

  Now Japan’s made a pact with Italy and Germany which amounts to Japan joining the Axis Powers if any other major power (i.e. America) sides with Britain.

  Sture just said he thinks the war will be over by Christmas. He who lives will see [in English].

  [Cutting from Dagens Nyheter on 4 October with picture of the Norwegian flag and news that it, and the parliament, are to be abolished.]

  13 OCTOBER

  No, it was a lie! The intention is clearly for the Norwegians to keep their flag.

  Last Saturday they introduced coupons for bacon and ham, and then (yesterd
ay) we were all braced for butter coupons, so I – for the children’s sake – stocked up on 3 or 4 kg. But there was no word of butter coupons. So I’m left with a refrigerator full of the stuff.

  In occupied France they get 200 grams of butter a month, according to information in our letters. The letters also refer to starvation in Belgium. Everything, clothes and food, gets sent to Germany, if the letter-writers are to be believed. It makes one feel quite hopeless, sitting at work and reading them. All these occupied countries, whether it’s the Baltic states under Russia or the countries Germany has suppressed, are suffering badly under the foreign yoke. In Estonia (and presumably Latvia, Lithuania and Poland, too; though I haven’t read any letters from there) nobody is allowed to own more than 30 hectares of ground. If you have even half a hectare more, it has to be nationalized. On 1 October, all goods went up by 40–50%; the previous day there was complete panic in the shops, according to the letter-writers. People aren’t allowed to have big apartments any more; each individual is only allocated a certain amount of space; the rest is occupied by ‘guests’, as they’re called, who pay no rent. People daren’t write too much in their letters, but promise ‘I’ll tell you all about it when I see you.’ Russian has replaced English in schools; the kids are expected to learn 1,000 Russian words in a year. The last confirmations have taken place – and one girl was worried that they wouldn’t be allowed to celebrate Christmas this year.