In Europe

1938 the country was ruled by strict anti-Semitic legislation. At the same time, King Carol II was trying to make himself Rumania's dictator, as Miklós Horthy had done in Hungary in 1920 and Ioannis Metaxas in Greece in 1936. Since spring 1940, Bucharest had been run by a coalition of fascists and generals led by Marshal Ion Antonescu. In September, Germany more or less took over the country, which was crucially important for the Reich's energy supplies. Rumania ceded large parts of its territory to Hungary, King Carol abdicated, real power was transferred to Antonescu and the Iron Guard was given free rein and organised one bloody pogrom after another. In June 1941, Rumania committed itself completely by joining Germany's foray into the Soviet Union.
    In 1940, however, the country was still neutral, and in June all of Europe was sitting side by side in the lobby of the Athene Palace, as though nothing untoward was going on: the old Rumanian dignitaries, the leaders of the new radical right-wing government, the American journalists and diplomats, the despondent French ambassador. The ‘elegantly bored’ British – diplomats, oil men, journalists and intelligence officers – had their own table, the young Rumanian nobility sat at the bar, there was always a table with a delegation of whispering
Wehrmacht
officers, industrialists, bank directors and military attachés, another German table was reserved for Nazis, Gestapo agents and boisterous women. Later a table was added for the German generals, all of them equally courteous.
    Rosie Waldeck: ‘Seeing them sit there you would never believe that they were here to plan a war. There was nothing tense or excited about them, nothing that would indicate they sat up all night poring over their maps.’
    Even today, Waldeck's observations are of great interest; despite herAmerican diffidence, she was deeply involved with everything and everyone in the hotel. Night after night she sat talking to Germans in the flush of victory, to generals, diplomats and young officers, without in any way concealing her own Jewish background. What struck her most of all during those months was the enormous élan of almost all the Germans she met, ‘the dynamism of the National Socialist revolution, the dynamism which went through the entire military and bureaucratic machine of Hitler's Germany.’ It was like an intoxication, she wrote. ‘All said that they never felt as free in their work as they did now.’
    At the same time, their diplomacy was less than brilliant. ‘The Nazis were good at conquering, but deplorable at exploiting their conquests, even for their own good, not to speak of the good of the conquered.’ She also knew full well that this young, intellectual generation of Germans would, sooner or later, end up in conflict with the limitations of party and state.
    But for the time being, in summer 1940, she saw a continent that was genuinely impressed by this unprecedented German vitality:‘Hitler, Europe felt, was a smart guy – disagreeable, but smart. He had gone far in making his country strong. Why not try his way?’
    That was how many Europeans felt, and they all expressed it in their own way. In France they spoke of the ‘Pax Hitlérica’. In the upper circles of society, it quickly became fashionable to invite young SS and
Wehrmacht
officers to dinner. They represented a dynamism that had never been seen before, that could perhaps breathe new life into stuffy old France.
    The leader of the Dutch Anti-Revolutionary Party (ARP), the former prime minister Hendrik Colijn, wrote in June 1940:‘Unless a true miracle takes place, the European continent will be led by Germany. It is healthy, and therefore allowable realpolitik to accept the facts as they present themselves to us.’ He hoped, when things quietened down, for a new European trade system under German leadership, a sort of early predecessor of the EU. In Belgium, the socialist leader Hendrik de Man published a like-minded manifesto in which he depicted the collapse of the decaying democracies as ‘a relief’. A ‘realistic’ alternative – the word ‘realistic’ was bandied about a great deal that summer – was, in his view, an authoritarian government under King Leopold III.
    Similar feelings were expressed in Great Britain. On 13 May Churchillhad given his legendary ‘blood, sweat and tears’ speech in the House of Commons: ‘You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: victory,