The Myth Behind the Rescue of Denmark's Jews From the Holocaust

[wm]

One of the well-known stories, for example, is that the king wore the telltale yellow Star of David patch Jews were forced to wear in many occupied countries while riding his horse in the streets of Copenhagen, as a mark of identification with the community. That account turns out to be false.

“Denmark survived the Nazi occupation better than any other European country,” says historian Orna Keren-Carmel of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
...
“When Hitler invaded Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium and France,” Dr. Keren-Carmel explains in an interview, “he made them all the same offer: surrender in advance, and in return you will be given the possibility of going on managing your domestic affairs in a sovereign manner, while Germany will be in charge of foreign policy.”
Denmark was the only country that acceded to this offer, signing terms of surrender within hours, on April 9, 1940. ...
“The Germans, from their point of view, chose to rule Denmark with a ‘velvet hand’ in order to maintain political stability and avail themselves of Danish exports,” she says.

The Danes thus remained in control of their three branches of government – legislature, executive and judiciary.
Moreover, daily life proceeded as before, and in March 1943 a free election was held in which the parties that were in favor of cooperation with Germany won 94 percent of the vote.

For many years, August 29 was seen to be the watershed date on which the Danes ceased to cooperate with Nazi Germany and declaratively joined the Allies. The rescue of the Jews, which took place about a month later, bolstered this conception. However, in recent years quite a few researchers, especially Danish scholars, have come up with a different view.
They maintain that a few weeks after the members of government stepped down, relations between the Danes and the Germans returned to the former routine and the proportion of Denmark’s industrial production earmarked for Nazi Germany remained intact.

After August 29, a state of emergency was declared and the Reich’s plenipotentiary in Denmark, Werner Best, decided to expel the Jews to the Theresienstadt camp/ghetto in Czechoslovakia. According to Keren-Carmel, shortly before the start of the planned deportation, which was due to take place on the night between October 1 and 2.
Best himself decided to leak its exact date to his naval attaché, who passed on the information to senior Danish and Swedish officials.

“The German police were ordered not to break into Jewish homes by force. Some survivors also testified that the Germans turned a blind eye to the Jews’ attempts to hide and escape. Around this time, the commander of the German fleet, who was in charge of the passage in the Oresund Strait, instructed all German patrol boats there to return to port for maintenance.
It’s also known that the Germans received intelligence information in real time that thousands of Jews were reaching Sweden, but they had a greater interest in preserving fruitful relations with the Danes than in annihilating the country’s small Jewish community.”

“When we delve into the details, we discover that the vast majority of Denmark’s Jews took pains to find themselves a place to hide. They left their homes within hours, found a way to reach the coast, and the majority financed their own boat trips to Sweden."

[Waleed Y. Majeed]

Nothing new. Not a myth. Known fact for years if you’re a dane. Not all true though as there were many danes who did help and some jews were also caught by the germans.

The positive election in early 1943 was to be substituted by increasing acts of sabotage, general strikes and the newly elected government resigned less than half a year later due to new german demands and public unrest (mentioned as “a state of emergency“). Denmark was basically run by the germans and civil servants after august 43.

The warning of the action against the danish jews went out on september 28, several days before the october 1-2 action. So braking doors in by force would make no sense as the majority of families had already left. And those who came back, came back to their own homes which in many cases had been maintained by neighbors.

So in my opinion her views are not all together fair as much is missing in her judgement of Denmark and the danish jews.

Waleed

[wm]

The article explains that the myth is perpetuated by Israeli schools.

[gebhk]

I am a little confused. What 'myth' exactly is Keren-Carmel suppused to be 'busting' aside from the King-and-Star-of-David thing? I would suggest that in surrendering quickly, the Danish Government did the right thing for the country and incidentally for its Jews. It is a fact that, for whatever reasons, those countries that bowed down to the Germans and 'kissed the ring' as it were, came out of it better and the per-capita Jewish losses of those countries were significantly lower. There is a line that can be drawn in the table of percent losses of the Jewish populations of all the countries touched by this horror. Above that line are all the Countries that fought Germany to the bitter end. Below that line, lie the countries that cooperated or surrendered after a brief struggle. Ironically, the latter set includes Germany and Austria.

[wm]

The myth is simple and frequently heard from Jews: only the Danes heroically rescued their Jews when at the same time, the others, especially the Poles, collaborated and helped the Nazis.
There is an example in the comments to the article (the mistakes result from the broken, for years, and unusable comment system):

The attitude of the local population made a difference In the Scandinavian countries it was positive and the Jews survivedIn Poland snd Ukrain etc it was negative and they cooperated with the Nazis and the Jews were decimated and their property stollen

[Waleed Y. Majeed]

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/ ... of-denmark
https://www.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/Micr ... 206266.pdf

Waleed

[gebhk]

OK, yes, that clears it up. I would agree with you on that one. I doubt very much that the German and Austrian population was particularly positive to the Jews, yet the Jewish populations there fared a lot better than in Poland of Greece. If one were to follow this argument to one conclusion, clearly the attitude of the Austrians towards Jews must have been more positive than that of Norwegians......

[wm]

Although the German/Austrian Jews mostly survived because they were married to Germans - so one might say the Nazis saved them.
That was not possible in occupied Poland at all; married to an Aryan or not they all went straight to ovens.

[LineDoggie]

The myth is simple and frequently heard from Jews: only the Danes heroically rescued their Jews when at the same time, the others, especially the Poles, collaborated and helped the Nazis.

Wow! this reeks of Anti Semitism- Jews this, Jews that poor poor Poles, Danes not angels.

[gebhk]

Wow! this reeks of Anti Semitism- Jews this, Jews that poor poor Poles, Danes not angels.

Seriously mate? Have you actually read this thread and what it is about? Or is Dr Keren-Carmel an anti-Semite in your opinion? If so you should perhaps acquaint yourself with her CV and better-still her professional output?

On a more serious point - I think Dr Keren-Carmel hits upon one important factor which goes beyond her area of interest in WW2, Scandinavia. This is that the fate of the Jewish part of the population was very much a reflection - not an exact one by any means but nonetheless - of the fate of the entire population. Those countries hit the hardest by Nazi repression - such as Poland, Greece, Yugoslavia and present day Belarus and Ukraina, suffered the highest percentage losses of both overall and Jewish populations. Those countries that cooperated with the Nazis to a greater or lesser extent suffered less overall and in their Jewish populations. There is also a certain pattern that reinforces this point - when relations between countries and Nazi Germany moved from a more cooperative to a more coercive model, the prospects of the Jewish part of the population nose-dived. Denmark and Hungary can both serve as good examples (albeit, of course, the extent of the nose-dive still depended on the attitude of the Germans).

She also highlights the very relevant truism which is that what fuels mainstream narrative is, in the main, the political and/or economic needs of the day rather than what actually happened in WW2. In the case of Denmark she identifies the close co-operation of Israel with the Scandinavian countries since the 1950s - of benefit to both - as the main driver behind the operating narrative - much of it a myth in the light of the available evidence and research (Scandinavia and Israel after the Holocaust (2020). Nordisk Judaistik/Scandinavian Jewish Studies 31(2):41-59). This is not to negate the point made by Waleed, that many Danes did help the Jews just that, for example, the testimony of Jewish survivors who experienced Danish kindness is heard while that of those who had not occassioned that kindness or indeed met with indifference or hostility, are left to collect dust on the shelves (Like lambs to the rescue: the survivors and the rescue of Danish Jewry in the Holocaust (2016). Holocaust Studies 22(4):1-18).

One take-home for me is that there is little hard evidence that anti-semitism in the local population was a decisive factor in the level of Jewish persecution - a commonly held belief, exemplified by the post from another site that WM quotes. It was almost entirely dependent on how viciously the Nazis were willing to treat any given country. The reasons for this are likely two-fold: firstly the direct measures taken against the Jews would be harsher the harsher the treatment of the country as a whole and, secondly, because helping Jews would be more dangerous and therefore less likely to be undertaken.

[wm]

Denmark is a case of limousine heroism and stolen valor.
The Danes who helped the Jews didn't risk anything; they weren't even inconvenient.

“The German police were ordered not to break into Jewish homes by force. Some survivors also testified that the Germans turned a blind eye to the Jews’ attempts to hide and escape.
Around this time, the commander of the German fleet, who was in charge of the passage in the Oresund Strait, instructed all German patrol boats there to return to port for maintenance.
It’s also known that the Germans received intelligence information in real time that thousands of Jews were reaching Sweden, but they had a greater interest in preserving fruitful relations with the Danes than in annihilating the country’s small Jewish community.

And when the Danes were inconvenient, the Jews had to pay for their services.

the vast majority of Denmark’s Jews took pains to find themselves a place to hide. They left their homes within hours, found a way to reach the coast, and the majority financed their own boat trips to Sweden.

It could be argued that the whole affair was orchestrated by the Germans to get rid of the Danish Jews in an easy way. After all, the same man - Werner Best, decided to expel the Jews to the Theresienstadt camp and informed about it Danish and Swedish officials.

[michael mills]

The most likely explanation for best's decision to leak to Danish officials the information that a deportation of Jews living in Denmark was to take place on a certain date is that he was acting on the basis of secret orders from Himmler that were related to the latter's attempts to initiate negotiations with the Western Allies in an end to hostilities between them and Germany, leaving Germany free to concentrate on its battle against the Soviet Union.

It is a well-known historical fact that since 1942 Himmler had been endeavouring to contact the Western allies, including through Allen Dulles in Switzerland, and it is also well known that he used Jews as bargaining chips for that purpose, hinting that he would be willing to release them if the Western Allies responded favourably to his initiatives. The best-known case if of course his "Jews-for-trucks" offer made in Hungary in 1944, which is generally regarded by historians as an attempt to initiate peace negotiations rather than a genuine attempt to obtain trucks and other supplies, that being just a cover story for Hitler's benefit. That was only the latest in a series of such approaches, and it is most likely that the "escape" of the Danish Jews was another hint of his willingness to trade Jews for a start to negotiations.

After the war both Best and Duckwitz claimed that they had been acting on their own initiative, contrary to Himmler's orders, and that they had assumed a great risk to themselves in doing so. However, neither of them of them suffered any negative consequences for their claimed "resistance", which suggests that they were not disobeying Himmler. Best was a close confidante of Himmler and a man who had been entrusted with many high-level tasks, which makes it unlikely that he would have blatantly disobeyed his commander at a point in the war when it was not yet certain that Germany would lose, and moreover would make him just the sort of person to whom Himmler could entrust a secret mission of the sort that would enrage Hitler if he found out about it.

[wm]

Since 1942?

[michael mills]

The first recorded attempt by Himmler to use Jews as a means to make contact with Allied agents for the purpose of negotiating an end to hostilities between Germany and the Western Allies occurred in 1942.

That was the so-called Europa Plan, a scheme to ransom Jews that was actually proposed by a group of ultra-Orthodox Jews in Slovakia. They approached Wisliceny, Eichmann's agent in Slovakia, and proposed that the Jewish community in the US would be willing and able to raise a large amount of money in US currency, which could be given to the German Government in exchange for the release of a substantial number of Jews. Wisliceny referred the matter through Eichmann to Himmler, who authorised Wisliceny to run with it, after selling the idea to Hitler on the basis that this would gain much needed foreign currency fro Germany.

Some secret negotiations were held with Allen Dulles in Switzerland, but the whole plan fell through because the US Government refused to allow the transfer of any assets to Germany, so no Jews were actually released. However, historians believe that Himmler's motive was not so much to gain foreign currency as to establish links to agents of the Western allied Governments, which could be steered to the subject of negotiations on an end to hostilities.

[wm]

Although in 1942 and in 1944, Himmler acted for the greater good of Nazi Germany. In 1945 for the greater good of himself.