Alex Walter – “… den tyske embedsmand, der overhovedet har gjort Danmark de største tjenester under krigen”

Resumé

Mogens Rostgård Nissen: Alex Walter, — “… the German official who rendered the largest services of all to Denmark during the war.”

Alex Walter was head of the German government committee, which during the occupation of Denmark negotiated trade agreements with the corresponding Danish government committee. That is why he had great influence on the economic side of occupation policy, which the German occupying power carried out in Denmark during the war.
Walter had a broad knowledge of Danish economy and Danish conditions in general, because since 1932 he had negotiated trade agreements with top Danish officials. At the same time, he was well-known and respected in Denmark, and that was important for the agreements he assisted in concluding during the occupation. Under his leadership, the German occupying power followed a traditional trade policy, which was focused on practical issues and concrete results. It was a policy, which objectively was for the common good of Denmark and Germany.
Walter was a very high-level official in the thoroughly Nazified Ministry of Nutrition and Agriculture. His immediate superior, Herbert Backe, was responsible for German food planning, and he had a decisive influence on the Nazi occupation policy for all of Europe, including the exploitation policy, which took place in Eastern and Southeastern Europe. But Denmark followed an entirely different economic track, which was characterized by negotiations and cooperation, and it was very much Walter, who became responsible for planning and implementing this economic policy.
Among his negotiation partners in Denmark, Walter was perceived as a reasonable and sensible man, with whom one could negotiate and rely on. There was a clear understanding that Walter had intervened several times during political crises — among other things when the Danish government stood down in August 1943; during the general strike in the summer of 1944 and in connection with the deportation of the police in the autumn of 1944. But he also had a dark Nazi side to him, precisely because he was linked to Backe and the Ministry of Nutrition and Agriculture. After the war, he was interned due to the fact that as a senior official, he had been a member of the Nazi party and held the rank of SS Sturmbannführer. That is why he was only finally acquitted and stripped of his Nazi status in October 1948, a few months before he died.