The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [4]
In the Nazis’ eyes, France and En gland were the biggest prizes in Europe, and Holland more a means to an end than a goal in itself. (In World War I, Germany had swept into France by way of Belgium, sparing Holland.) In the end, the decision to take Holland fell largely to Goering, who was commander in chief of the Luftwaffe, the German air force. Goering wanted to use Holland’s airfields as launching sites for attacks on Britain.
But even while plotting battle tactics, Goering scarcely wavered from his focus on plunder. For the Reich Marshal, Holland meant airstrips, but it meant old masters, too, and it was by no means clear which struck him as the higher priority.
EVEN IF MAJOR Sas’s warning had gone through immediately, Holland stood no chance against the Nazis. With the exception of a brief battle with the Belgians in 1830, the Dutch army had not gone to war since Napoleon’s day. Now, in 1940, it stood in the path of its belligerent next-door neighbor unprepared, outnumbered, and out-equipped.
Like the Belgians, Norwegians, and Danes, the Dutch had opted for neutrality in the forlorn hope that if they kept their heads down, trouble might pass them by. It was less a strategy than a prayer. “They hoped,” in the words of the Dutch historian Walter Maass, “to avoid provoking the monster that had already clawed at their doors.”
In Rotterdam, the monster stepped into the open. On the afternoon of May 14, 1940, while the Dutch tried to negotiate surrender terms, one hundred Luftwaffe bombers took to the sky over the city. “The planes are searching systematically for their targets,” a German observer noted approvingly. “Soon the center of Rotterdam is burning at many places. Within a few minutes the center is enveloped in dense black and sulfur-yellow clouds. The bombers are flying quite low over the city. A splendid picture of invincible strength.”
Nine hundred Dutch citizens died, and seventy-eight thousand were left homeless. The next day, the Germans announced, it would be Utrecht’s turn. The Dutch had fought bravely against unthinkable odds, but the loss of a second city would be a futile sacrifice. On May 15, five days after the Nazi invasion, Holland surrendered.
For the rest of his life, Hermann Goering would exult in recounting the triumphs of his Luftwaffe in the war’s early days. As the fighting moved on to France over the next few weeks, he grew ever more boisterous. He sent his planes aloft to bomb the airfields around Paris with the command, “Let my air force darken the skies!”
In the midst of battle, Goering dreamed of pilfered art. Almost as soon as Holland fell into German hands, he dispatched Walter Hofer, his primary art scout, to start “shopping” on his behalf. An art dealer of no great reputation before the war, Hofer now carried a business card that declared him “Curator of the Reich Marshal’s Art Collection.”
FOR THE NAZIS, the spring of 1940 brought triumph after triumph. Winston Churchill had taken over as British prime minister on May 10, the same day the Nazis invaded Holland and France. “Behind us,” Churchill told his countrymen, “…gather a group of shattered states and bludgeoned races: the Czechs, the Poles, the Danes, the Norwegians, the Dutch, upon all of whom a long night of barbarism will descend, unbroken even by a star of hope, unless we conquer, as conquer we must, as conquer we shall.”
Delighted with Germany’s run of good fortune, Goering flew to Holland on May 24 to survey the wreckage of Rotterdam. In high spirits, he continued on to Amsterdam to see what art and jewelry he might find. One of Goering’s scouts purchased 368,000 guilders’ worth of diamonds on his behalf, about $2.7 million in today’s dollars.
Two days after Goering’s visit to Holland, the Allies achieved their lone “victory” in this early fighting. The victory was in fact a retreat, at Dunkirk, where a makeshift fleet of fishing boats and ferries and lifeboats and yachts managed to rescue hundreds of thousands of soldiers trapped in northern France.