What happened to the Dutch, M-G?
The Dutch army mobilized in September 1939 as they hoped to remain neutral again, but somehow knew they would be invaded sooner or later. This fear was to be confirmed with the "Venlo-incident", in which English secret agents were lured to Venlo, a town on the German border by ppl who posed themselves as either British agents or German agents who had fallen off with Hitler. As soon as the English agents arrived, they were kidnapped by those German agents and dragged into Germany. Venlo lies half in Germany.
As from January 1940 ongoing msgs were received from a German officer Hans Oster (who later participated in the assasination attempt of 20 July 1944) by Dutch Major Sas (the commander in chief) that the invasion was imminent, but those warnings were withdrawn every time at the last moment. I think the first word of an invasion was somewhere half January 1940. When the final warning came on the evening of the 9th of May ("Tomorrow at dawn") the Dutch troops were put on alert, but since they had so many warnings, the attitude was a bit laissez faires. But when the Germans came that morning, they were ready.
The Dutch army was in a sorry state: basically built during WW1 (and at that time it was indeed strong enough to withstand any invading enemy), and way too weak to withstand the superior power of the German army. Nevertheless, they fought where they could and fighting was especially vicious at the Grebbelinie, the Peel-Raamstelling, Zeeland, Rotterdam (more or less) and the entrance to the Afsluitdijk in the North. Germans, expecting the invasion of NL to take no longer than a day or two, grew angry with the Dutch resistance after 3 days and sent word that if the Dutch army would not capitulate, they would bomb Rotterdam and after that Utrecht and Amsterdam. The Dutch army already made contact with the German forces to negociate the truce and capitulation, when the German planes had already taken off to bombard Rotterdam. German efforts from the ground to stop the imminent bombardment (as the Dutch had already surrendered) were ignored as the pilots had instructions to ignore all signs from the ground. Rotterdam got bombarded, the entire old city was in flames and app 8000 ppl died. Rotterdam was one of the most beautiful cities of the Netherlands before it got bombarded. It's also one of the few big cities that the Germans bombarded severely outside of a battlefield during the war. The others are London, Warsaw, Belgrade.
Hitler let alll greek prisoners of war free as a recognition of the braveness of the greek soldiers
A couple of months after the Dutch surrender the Dutch soldiers were allowed to go back home - except the Jewish soldiers of course. He did this with all the pow's of the small countries he conquered. Actually, it's unknown why he did this. To create goodwill? Or perhaps because he was afraid he wouldn't have enough space and resources to maintain these huge numbers of pow's? It's unknown.
Edit: a few months before the invasion Hitler had said in a speech on the radio "The Dutch are my friends! We would never want to hurt or attack them! If they want to remain neutral, I will respect their wish and I will personally see to it that nobody ever harms the Dutch."
>^..^<
M-G (Neen!)