Hvorfor overlevede de fleste i Danmark Holocaust

Abstract

The short answer is that they survived thanks to the policy pursued by the Danish government, the main political parties, and the administration in the lead-up to World War II and during the German occupation of Denmark from April 9th, 1940. The Danish survival strategy during the 1930s was simple and in no way heroic. By establishing a deep linkage between being Danish and supporting democracy, a similar identification was created between Denmark as a nation and a democracy. This effectively deprived Danish Nazis and Communists of any national legitimacy and turned attacks on the principles of democracy and the rule of law into treason, cultivating a strong sense of national unity around the foundations of “folkestyret”, the rule by the people. When Germans attacked on April 9th, 1940, the Danish government accepted the terms set by Germany, and the ensuing “peaceful occupation” provided the Danish government of national unity with some leverage to resist German demands. However, it also incentivized it into a more or less voluntary cooperation with The Reich, especially in the economic sphere. Two key red lines became the principle of not accepting Nazi participation in the Danish government – and firm rejection of any move in regard to Danish Jews who according to the government were an inseparable part of the Danish people. Unwilling to bear the cost of ending the “peaceful occupation” much treasured by Hitler, Germany time and again postponed the first “small” steps of singling out Jews that elsewhere marked the beginning of the end. When Germans finally decided to move against the Danish Jews the outlook for the war had changed together with the perspective in many parts of the Nazi apparatus. Even Hitler and his inner circle realized that moving against the Jews in Denmark would come at a significant political and economic cost at a critical moment and wanted the action to go soft. This opened the space necessary for local Nazi officials to tip off the Jews ahead of the planned round-up, allowing the vast majority to flee from their homes before October 1st, 1943, when the action was executed against intense protests from broad segments of Danish civil society objecting in the strongest terms to this unjustified atrocity against fellow citizens. Thanks to a spontaneous and wide-ranging popular mobilization, countless routes were invented for Jewish countrymen to escape to Sweden. Over the following weeks more than 7,000 Danish Jews and stateless Jews in Denmark fled to Sweden. 481 were captured and deported to Theresienstadt, from where a coordinated Scandinavian relief effort in the last weeks of the war managed to rescue all but 52 who vanished in the camp. The Danish exception to the Holocaust was a direct result of the firm and consistent rejection by the Danish society of the very idea that Holocaust represented and the strong linkage created between being Danish and standing up for the values underpinning democracy. Thus, most that helped their fellow countrymen escape acted not only in an humanitarian gesture but also as a national manifestation at a point when resentment against the occupying forces ran deep.