Countrymen
Page 3
The situation in Denmark thus rested on the unique understanding that Denmark was the subject of a “peaceful occupation.” Germany had indeed occupied its neutral neighbor, but with a minimum of violence, without a state of war being declared and thus without Germany assuming responsibility for Denmark’s internal affairs. There were many problems associated with this unusual design, but also benefits for both countries. From a Danish point of view, one of them was that a peaceful occupation preserved all fundamental institutions of democratic society and protected the country against the nazification enforced in other occupied countries. This also barred persecution of Danish Jews, who were fully integrated into Danish society. The Danish government consistently rejected special laws or provisions in relation to Danish Jews. On this and other key points the elected politicians were uncompromising, and their stance was reinforced by King Christian, whose support was decisive both because only he could endow a Danish government with constitutional legitimacy and because he soon became a popular symbol of hope for Denmark to regain its lost freedom.
As long as the war went Germany’s way, Danish cooperation with the occupying forces became more and more proactive, actively seeking to ensure Denmark’s production and exports within the zones controlled by Germany. In the summer of 1940 the national unity government was reshuffled with a view to becoming less “political” and more active in economic and trade cooperation. A veteran diplomat from the successful Danish policy of neutrality during World War I, Erik Scavenius, was recalled from retirement and once again appointed foreign minister, now in the critical junction between the German representatives and the Danish authorities. He was persuaded to take responsibility for the more active cooperation with Nazi Germany that the elected politicians felt necessary but knew would be highly unpopular with the electorate. Scavenius was reluctant to take on the role of a scapegoat, and he harbored no illusions as to the strength of elected politicians’ spines. An anecdote relates that upon Scavenius’s nomination a colleague asked Prime Minister Stauning whether the new foreign minister might not be too friendly with the Germans. Stauning is said to have replied: “Scavenius? He is not friendly with anyone!”
On September 18, 1940, as the successful German campaign in the west came to a conclusion and the Battle of Britain intensified, the king discussed the Jewish issue with Prime Minister Stauning. Christian refers in his personal diary to the conversation, which was based on the fear of a German demand for deportation of Danish Jews: “I interjected that after the Germans’ past performance one might expect they would demand the expulsion of Jews who were present, and that such a requirement would definitely be repellent to me. The prime minister was of the same opinion and added that the question was once raised by the leaders in Berlin, but the president of the National Bank [former leading Social Democratic politician Carl Valdemar Bramsnæs] had rejected it saying that ‘in Denmark, there was no issue in relation to Jews.’ I pointed out that I had noticed that when we were determined, the Germans backed off.”5
A few months later the king and the prime minister reverted to the issue in a private conversation, and according to his diary, Christian stated “that I considered our own Jews to be Danish citizens, and the Germans could not touch them. The prime minister shared my view and added that there could be no question about that.”6
The Germans were aware that an action against the Danish Jews would mean the collapse of cooperation. Whenever the German authorities raised the issue, the politicians would in one form or another come back to the argument that their legitimacy, and thus their capacity to keep the machinery of society running, originated solely in their mandate from the electorate. If this confidence was betrayed, people would no longer respect them and follow their rules and instructions: The resistance would be pervasive, and the carefully structured design of peaceful cooperation would collapse.
The Germans largely bought this argument, not because of sentimentality or excessive respect for the Danish politicians’ objections in relation to their voters. They bought it because they believed that fundamentally Danes would react exactly the way the politicians claimed. If the Germans pushed this point, the occupying power would have to take full responsibility for the community and run Denmark as they ran other occupied countries: with violence and force. That possibility always existed, of course, but there were important advantages for Germany in the construct of cooperation. Until 1943 the Wehrmacht needed hardly more than twenty thousand men in Denmark to maintain the occupation. This number, however, increased substantially with growing German fear of an impending Allied invasion on the west coast of Jutland, and it is estimated that the number of German troops in Denmark reached some 150,000 by the end of 1943, predominantly worn-out units or new ones undergoing combat training.7 In comparison Germany kept 300,000–450,000 troops in strategically more important and geographically more challenging Norway.
In addition Danish industry and especially Danish agriculture were providing increasingly essential supplies to the occupying power. Both factors played into the discussions in Berlin. Perhaps a third consideration was ultimately the most important: The peaceful occupation of Denmark was in Hitler’s lens the very model for how Germany could control Europe when the Third Reich had prevailed. While the areas and populations to the east were colonized and exploited—in fact mostly obliterated—in order to expand German Lebensraum, the northern and western European countries and populations held a more fortunate position. Denmark was a special case, both racially and because the government had chosen from the outset to base its policy on cooperation.
Thus the Danish design was not just practical and useful. It was also a confirmation of the new European order—the Neuropa—Hitler meant to create. Even more cynically, it made Denmark a living political laboratory for practical arrangements in a future Europe dominated by the Third Reich. But the sum of German interests in keeping cooperation alive at the same time gave Denmark astonishingly firm ground in its ongoing tug-of-war with the occupying power, which from the outset began to cut bits and pieces from what soon became known as “the promises of April 9.”
The Policy of Cooperation
While King Christian could note the protection of the Danish Jews as one of the few accomplishments of recent years, the adoption by mid-1941 of the “Communist Laws” troubled him. Indeed, one of the most critical concessions made to German demands was the internment of Danish Communists after Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union, on June 22, 1941. The democratic parties harbored a deeply rooted distrust of the Communists, whose leader had declared from the podium of the Folketing, the first and dominant chamber of the Danish parliament, his party’s willingness to take power by violence. This distrust was further fueled by the conclusion of the nonaggression pact between the Soviet Union and Germany in 1939, the Soviet Union’s attack on neutral Finland later that same autumn, and Communist legitimizing of the German occupation of Denmark as a preemptive move to counter English and French imperialism. From this point on, the Communists were regarded as pariahs, feared and hated by many and together with the small Danish Nazi Party excluded from the common “us” of society. In this way those who chose to join the two nonparliamentary parties on the political extremes were ostracized by the strong national community that the four democratic parties celebrated.
Immediately after Hitler’s surprise attack on the Soviet Union, the Germans demanded that “all leading Danish Communists” be interned. The Danish government responded by launching a police roundup after a Ministry of Justice order—based on lists of Communists the Danish police had already prepared.
By the end of July 1941 nearly three hundred Communists were interned, including several members of parliament. The Danish authorities chose a broad definition of “leading” and demonstrated a shameful zeal in carrying out the German requirements. Further arrests directed against virtually all known Communists were conducted in five waves over the following sixteen months.
Little doubt remains that the internments in general, and the arrests of members of parliament in particular, amounted to outright viola- tions of the Danish constitution and thus encroached on the very foundations of democracy the policy of cooperation aimed to protect.
Another vulnerable group was also those from Nazi Germany who had sought refuge in Denmark, including both political refugees, mostly Social Democrats and Communists, and stateless Jews. The Germans gradually increased pressure on this group, and Danish authorities went further and further in accommodating these requests. This proved fatal for between 50 and 100 refugees, including 21 stateless Jews, who were individually exiled from Denmark to Germany, where the vast majority vanished in the camps.9
A direct consequence of the German attack on the Soviet Union was a request for Denmark to allow volunteers to join a special army group, Frikorps Danmark, established for the same purpose under the Waffen SS, and designed to engage in the “fight against Communism” on the eastern front. The arrangement was an example of the kind of compromises by which Foreign Minister Erik Scavenius kept the cooperation above the fray. In order to avoid Danish conscripts being forced to take part in Hitler’s crusade against Communism, the unpleasant and ambiguous—but still much less harmful—opening for volunteers could satisfy the Germans. The government walked a thin line by allowing Danish army officers to enroll without directly encouraging them to do so. The politicians also saw—but did not say—that those most likely to volunteer would be Danish Nazis, the majority of whom came from the German-speaking minority just north of the border. From a cynical perspective it was not unwelcome if individuals from this militant group went off to an unknown fate on the eastern front.
Though King Christian clearly also saw this dimension, he did not like one bit the idea of Danish officers fighting in German uniforms, and he did little to hide his contempt when a high-ranking German representative in August 1941 went to see him to give official thanks for the Danish contribution. According to his diary notes, he responded by declaring that “anyone could volunteer and I would recommend using those doing so in the front lines. They had chosen themselves to fight there, and it would save your own troops.”10
To the stunned German officer the king further explained that to him the arrangement “would be equivalent to Germans fighting in British uniforms in the ranks of British regiments,” and the German assurances that the volunteers would carry Danish demarcations on their uniforms did nothing to calm him. Over the following years six to seven thousand volunteers joined Frikorps Danmark; some two thousand died in combat.
In many other cases Denmark extended itself to accommodate Germany or improve its position in German-occupied Europe. With the discontinuation of exports to its main market in Great Britain, Denmark became economically dependent on its exports to Germany. Of particular importance in this regard was the country’s substantial agricultural production, which, together with goods and foodstuffs from other occupied areas, contributed to keep the Reich running.
Step by step the unparalleled “peaceful occupation” of Denmark developed into a very special case within the Europe controlled by the Third Reich. On the one hand Denmark firmly rejected Nazism and the German war efforts, firmly upholding democratic institutions and the rule of law. On the other the constitutional government did cooperate with the occupying power, not least in economics and through exports, and it played its part in keeping the situation in Denmark calm, including arresting the Danish Communists. While Danish cooperation with Nazi Germany was pragmatic, unheroic, and sometimes humiliating, it was not without clear lines of demarcation. In the midst of its apparent powerlessness Denmark managed to force significant concessions from the Third Reich—even on points that were central to Nazi ideology. A central source of this surprising strength was the very unity hailed by the king. Despite all internal strife and rivalry, the elected politicians remained united, not allowing any elected representative who commanded the slightest popular credibility to join forces with the Germans or to drive a wedge through the Danish administration. With a mixture of delays, compromises, partial concessions, and references to democratic rules, applicable law, and public attitudes, the government in many cases managed to meet the Third Reich’s representatives on a negotiating ground that was defined not just by Nazi logic but also by the Danish perception of what was right and wrong. Nowhere is this precarious balance more apparent than in respect to the question of the Danish Jews.
The German historian Peter Longerich points out in his compelling analysis of the Nazi persecution and murder of the Jews that the Judenpolitik was closely linked to the strategic alliances of the Third Reich with neighboring countries, and that together with economic policy and military security and cooperation it constituted one of the main axes of German occupation and alliance policy. Thus cooperation on this specific issue was considered key to the loyalty of the alliances Germany sought to forge with other countries.11
In this area cooperation was refused in Denmark, and the conversation already quoted between the king and the acting prime minister on September 10, 1941, only confirmed the complete agreement within Denmark to draw a line right there. While mass deportations were organized from Vichy France, Danish Jews were able to continue their daily lives protected by law and a complete refusal of Danish authorities to embark on even the first steps of the persecution—the naming and identifying of Jewish citizens.
Defiant Diplomacy
While there was ongoing friction within the cooperation, the basic construct came to its first tough test in the dramatic process that in November 1941 led to Denmark’s signing of the reinvigorated Anti-Comintern Pact between the German Reich and Japan directed against that international arm of Soviet Communism. Germany insisted that Denmark join the pact, which was first and foremost a piece of propaganda designed to demonstrate support for the fight against Communism at a time when the German campaign in the East was getting bogged down. Since victories were not immediately apparent on the military fronts, they were now to be harvested with all the more fanfare on the diplomatic one. This posed a problem for the government in Copenhagen, because the pact came uncomfortably close to a linkage of Denmark to German war aims. Any hint in that direction would break the notion of Denmark’s continued neutrality and, even worse, be a first step toward active participation in the war on the German side. The government, therefore, was inclined to refuse flatly German demands for Denmark’s signature, even if doing so meant the collapse of the policy of cooperation.
Eventually Foreign Minister Scavenius persuaded the government that Denmark was best served by joining the pact. Scavenius, who was burdened with the unenviable task of bridging German demands and Danish reluctance, held out the possibility of compromise while raising in the politicians’ minds the specter of total Nazi control as an inducement to make the concessions he found necessary. Scavenius believed that Denmark had a vital interest in continuing the cooperation, and that his country should go as far as was necessary to accommodate Germany—even when this appeared unfair and came close to compromising the promises of April 9. There would always be, Scavenius argued, a moment when Denmark needed the accumulated goodwill for more important purposes. Scavenius b
elieved in realpolitik, which for him was based on the premise that Germany would always remain Denmark’s big neighbor and that therefore Denmark could not afford being seen to side with Germany’s enemies, not even in the event of war. He based his policy on two fundamental principles that were not easy to reconcile: On the one hand, Denmark had every interest in holding on to the three promises from April 9. On the other hand, it was crucial that the elected politicians explicitly back each concession given to satisfy the ever-more-arrogant backed. This attitude implied that the Jewish question was a line Scavenius felt Denmark could not and should not cross, because it would involve a flagrant breach of Denmark’s political integrity.
It was not surprising, therefore, that Scavenius turned strongly against breaking with the Germans on the question of Denmark joining the Anti-Comintern Pact. If Berlin was anxious to reap a hollow propaganda gain, Denmark had to bend and secure compensatory measures where it really mattered. The compromise between Foreign Minister Scavenius and the elected politicians was that Denmark could join the pact while insisting on a set of reservations that would expressly state that the pact did not oblige Denmark to participate actively in the war against Communism—let alone against the Soviet Union. According to his diary notes, the king concurred: “I nourished my own reservations in regard to signing the pact, but faced with an ultimatum with unforeseeable consequences we had no choice.” The wording of these reservations was negotiated and agreed with the German minister in Copenhagen, in order that every detail be settled before the hesitant politicians gave their final go-ahead.