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The Escape of Danish Jews from Nazi- Occupied Denmark

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The Escape of Danish Jews from Nazi- Occupied Denmark FAIR WARNING: THE ESCAPE OF DANISH JEWS FROM NAZI- OCCUPIED DENMARK BRADEN WYLIE The origins of European anti-Jewish policy did not begin and end within the term of the Second World War. The final solution sought by Nazi Germany only occurred when all other options in the minds of the Nazis had been exhausted. In hindsight, the Jews of Denmark were a small population, but they had the potential to swing a country’s cooperation in an instant, if unregulated aggressive actions by the Nazis proceeded. Their rescue in early October of 1943 has been popularly heralded as a success story, with various resourceful and compassionate Danes who helped orchestrate the secret rescue of the Jews under the noses of the German forces. The escape was heroic, until historians decided to dig deeper. They uncovered actions by individuals that could not be ignored and conditions that Werner Best and Heinrich Himmler may have found favorable for allowing the Jews to freely escape, never to see the confines of death camps plotted around Europe. The story began as one of savior by the fellow Danes, but has since been deconstructed to the point of being considered another element of the Nazi’s final solution in Judenrein. The popular story of heroism in Danish society has since been challenged by facts and claims that the escape of the Jews was just what the German Nazis wanted to occur. The Holocaust that occurred in Europe resulted in the death of millions of Jewish residents and those unfavorable to the Nazi regime. As Germany continued its tirade in Europe, it violently captured and deported millions of innocent people to death camps where populations were decimated. However, Denmark was an exception to this, as it was the only Nazi-occupied country to rescue almost all of its Jewish population. 7,742 of roughly 8,000 Jews living in 143 Denmark in 1943 had escaped to their neutral neighbor Sweden.1 It was unusual that so many people were able to escape, but also unusual were the conditions that were established once the Germans invaded in April of 1940.2 When the Germans arrived, there was little resistance and neither the Danish crown nor the government fled. German ground and sea forces invaded Denmark, and the government was forced to capitulate almost immediately.3 Adolf Hitler envisioned Denmark as his Muenster Protekorat or model protectorate, a part of Germany that would operate under its own internal power but was under the protection of Germany.4 The Danish crown, government and federal institutions remained operative as Germany sought many industrial and agricultural outputs that Denmark could supply for the war effort. The model protectorate ensured that King Christian X would remain in power and his army would follow orders under recommendations of the German officers on the ground. Upon occupation, King Christian announced, The Danish Government has, under protest, decided to adapt its policies in accordance with the occupation which has taken place and, consequently to proclaim the following: The German forces now present in the country will establish relations to the Danish military forces and is the duty of the population to refrain from any resistance to these forces. The Danish government will attempt to safeguard the Danish people… and therefore encourage the population to remain calm and restrained towards these conditions… peace and order must prevail in the country, and loyal conduct must be exercised towards authority.5 1 Sofie Lene Bak, “Repatriation and Restitution of Holocaust Victims in Post-War Denmark,” Scripta Instituti Donneriani Aboensis 27 (2016): 136. 2 Andreas Marklund, “Under the Danish Cross: Flagging Danishness in the Years around World War II,” Scandinavian Journal of History 38, no. 1 (2013): 91. 3 Kerry Greaves, “Hell-Horse: Radical Art and Resistance in Nazi-Occupied Denmark,” Oxford Art Journal 37, no. 1 (March 2018): 51. 4 Buckser, Andrew. “Group Identities and the Construction of the 1943 Rescue of the Danish Jews.” Ethnology 37, No. 3 (Summer 1998): 209-226. 5 Greaves, 50. 144 The Danes’ autonomy would remain, but only if collaboration with German authority continued. The Danish Nazi party that had almost 30,000 members was a mediating member who made sure the “model occupied nation” would remain one.6 Thus, German forces were under orders to treat Danes not like conquered peoples, but as fellow Aryans and members of Germany. The Jews in a similar fashion were not forced to endure what many other European Jews were facing. They continued daily life in their own homes and places of employment, with 3 ½ years of being relatively undisturbed.7 The policy of negotiation that occurred kept anti-Jewish action and resistance efforts from drumming up, as trusted Danish individuals were still central to the society they controlled before. While the cooperative nations remained relatively aligned in the years of occupation leading up to October of 1943, the war had changed and plans as to what to do with the Danish Jews had also been altered. When the Germans finally took action to deport the Jews, the Danes had already made heroic plans to promptly escape. The popular story that persists in Danish society speaks of the resilient community that kept the occupying Germans from harming or deporting thousands of Jews that lived in the nation. To ignore its narrative would be problematic, as it was the story maintained in the decades following WWII and until further details about the Germans came to light. The valiant plan that emerged was to sneak the Jews across the River Øresund to Sweden, where Jews had recently become welcomed instead of turned away. All levels of Danish society refused to allow Jews to be treated as the other and instead took up acts of solidarity to keep them safe.8 High German orders had come that the Jews were to be deported on the 1st of October of 1943, but the 6 Daniel Gross, “Spared from the Holocaust by his countrymen, a Jewish refugee hopes that Denmark can regain its humanity,” Smithsonian (16 March 2016). 7 Roul Tunley, “The Danish Jews,” Saturday Evening Post 236, no. 7 (23 February 1963): 74. 8 Fiona Macdonald, “The Danish Network that Defied Hitler,” British Broadcasting Corporation (1 October 2018). 145 Danes and Jews already knew this. On September 29th, a Danish Rabbi had interrupted the morning service at the Krystalgade Synagogue in Copenhagen saying, “We have no time to continue prayers. We have news that this coming Friday night… the Gestapo will come and arrest all Danish Jews.”9 As word spread and almost all Jews had been warned, the German police and Gestapo organized, raiding local government offices and finding little numbers of addresses where the Jews lived.10 Their unsuccessful raid was partly due to how well ingrained Jews had become in Danish society, to the point that their religious affiliation was not noted. The Germans planned to confront Jews at their front doors on October 1st, the day of Jewish Rosh Hashanah, a celebration of New Year’s that would bring them together in their homes.11 The German pursuit of the Jews was assigned to the IV-B-4, a small group of men in the German security police department.12 They were dependent on local documents and some Danish informers as to where they could find Jews at the first of the month. When the time came, the German forces cut telephone lines in Copenhagen, and groups of the police force strolled toward homes they had determined were Jewish. They knocked, but often found no answer. Leo Goldberger was only thirteen when the Germans knocked on his door and called for his Jewish family to come out. He told the Smithsonian, “the Germans came and tried to take my dad.”13 His family did not answer the door, and the Germans moved next door, where his neighbours told them the Goldbergers were on vacation. Other Jews had been warned to stay away from their homes that Friday night and to find alternate residences for the meantime. Goldberger remembers his family quickly boarded a boat bound for Sweden. He mentioned how 9 Macdonald. 10 Buckser, “Group Identities.” 11 Tunley, 76. 12 Bak, 136. 13 Gross. 146 the small fishing boat, packed with at least a dozen Jewish escapees, was intercepted by a German patrol. “We were packed down there in the hold covered with canvases.”14 They boarded the vessel for inspection, but without looking around too much, determined it was only fishing and moved along. Meanwhile Danish doctor K. H. Koster and his colleagues at Bispebjerg hospital in Copenhagen dressed Jews in hospital staff gowns and shuttled them to the docks where boats were taking the Jews to Sweden.15 While the Gestapo surrounded the hospital, they oddly did not come inside. Jews who had been warned of the coming deportation had been brought into the hospital as fake patients or as parts of funeral processions. One resistance leader, Jens Moller spoke about how he and his friends also hid Jews when deportation orders were known. He stated, We went to Pârup Station to fetch a whole trainload of people and distribute them amongst the big farms. For three days, they stayed and I stood by and ran back and forth from the harbor to see when there would be more room for them to get across.16 Moller and Koster then moved Jews on to the final stage of the escape. From their hiding places, they then travelled to meet fishing boats in hospital vans, much like the one in which Leo Goldberger and Inge Jensen escaped.
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