governments-in-exile

governments-in-exile were formed in the UK and elsewhere by representatives of Allied countries overrun by the Axis. They were recognized in the normal way by the Allied powers, who exchanged diplomatic missions with them (most of them came to be headed by ambassadors), and they sent envoys to such meetings as the San Francisco conference which founded the United Nations. Many of these governments controlled part of their own armed forces, formed in the UK, and had some control over resistance forces in their home countries.

When Poland was overrun by Germany and the USSR in September 1939, the government of the Polish republic—which had foreseen such a catastrophe—escaped, through Romania to Paris, where it established itself until the fall of France the following summer forced it on the move again, this time to the UK. Even before the Poles had settled in London, King Haakon VII of Norway (1872–1957) and Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands (1880–1962) had arrived there, each accompanied by a cabinet. The Grand Duchess of Luxemburg moved on from London to Canada, leaving her prime minister and officials in London.

These first exiles were joined in the autumn of 1940 by the Belgian cabinet, whose King Léopold III had stayed behind in Brussels. They too became a government-in-exile, sustained by the economic resources of the Belgian Congo. The Dutch and the Norwegians, similarly, had not only their gold reserves but also the resources of their merchant marine, as financial support; to which the Dutch added much of the network of an already large international airline, KLM.

Two more kings went into exile in the spring of 1941, when the Wehrmacht overran Yugoslavia and Greece during the Balkan campaign. The young King Peter II of Yugoslavia (1923–70) moved to London, with his cabinet; he had protracted difficulties in exerting any real influence in his kingdom. King George II of the Hellenes (1890–1947), a close relation to the British King George VI, moved first to Cairo, also with his cabinet; then, leaving them in the Near East—they went to Jerusalem—to London, to be near his cousins. His cabinet moved for a time to Johannesburg in South Africa, but then returned to Cairo where he sometimes rejoined them.

The Czechoslavak president, Edvard Beneš, much distressed by the Munich agreement, resigned soon after it, and went to teach sociology in Chicago. He returned to London in 1939, and was recognized in 1941 as the head of a Czechoslovak government-in-exile, which managed with British help to assassinate Heydrich.

MI6, usually operating through Colonel Dansey, found it useful to co-operate as closely as SOE did with these exiled bodies; several of them produced useful volunteer intelligence organizations in their homelands, as well as more or less well organized secret armies, standing by to help an Allied invasion. Moreover, though he was not recognized as the head of a government-in-exile by the British or the Americans until October 1944, General de Gaulle had been active in London from 17 June 1940 as head of the Free French movement; the Soviets had recognized him as early as September 1941. His followers too provided Dansey as well as SOE with many volunteers; and Eden said to him, only half in jest, when he came to leave London, that he had been more trouble to the British than all the other regimes in exile put together. He moved his headquarters from Carlton Gardens, London, to Algiers in May 1943, and by the end of that year had established himself, rather than Giraud, as the undoubted leader of anti-Vichy Frenchmen.

Pétain, who had proclaimed himself head of the French state (state, not republic) in July 1940, himself became head of a government-in-exile in August 1944, when Vichy became untenable by the Germans; they moved him to Sigmaringen in south Germany, the seat of the Catholic branch of the Hohenzollern family whose Protestant cousins had ruled the Second Reich. This was a nominal arrangement—Pétain made no further attempt to exercise any authority in France.

There were also two governments-in-exile from Asia: President Quezon escaped from the Philippines to form one in Washington, and the governor of Burma got away to Simla, where he headed the ghost of a regime which had no impact on events. See also government sections of occupied European countries mentioned in this entry.

M. R. D. Foot