Countrymen
Page 4
At the last moment Scavenius traveled to Berlin to sign, only to learn upon his arrival that the Nazi leadership had no intention of accepting the agreed Danish reservations. Everything came to a head when the German foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, bluntly ordered Scavenius to appear with Hitler the following day at 12:05 for the signing ceremony at the Court of Honor in the new chancellery of the Reich and Scavenius refused outright on the grounds that he had no mandate to sign without the reservations. In that night’s war of nerves between the Third Reich’s foreign minister and his stubborn Danish counterpart, everything was at stake. But in the end a solution was found, and Scavenius got the Danish clarifications adopted, albeit secretly and in attenuated form. The drama suggested that the Danish negotiating position was stronger than one might have expected, even in direct confrontation with the Nazi leadership in Berlin: The appearance of Denmark’s “voluntary” support for the pact was more important than a political concession, which in practice would be irrelevant when Germany had won the war.
Denmark had made countless concessions to the Germans before Scavenius’s signing of the Anti-Comintern Pact. For an increasing number of Danes this appeasement was disgraceful, and Scavenius’s signature in Berlin triggered the first demonstrations with public demands for “Norwegian conditions” rather than an unwilling drift into the German embrace, all the more so as the hard-won Danish “reservations” could not be made public. Were clarity and suppression not preferable to “voluntary” submission to injustice? Now the question was being posed directly, and the students in the streets adopted a resolution addressed to King Christian proclaiming that they “would rather share conditions with the Norwegian people than have Denmark submit without resistance to aims that deeply conflict with our determination to live in a free and democratic Denmark.”
Foreign Minister Erik Scavenius in conversation with Adolf Hitler in Berlin on November 28, 1941, after Scavenius signed the Anti-Comintern Pact on behalf of Denmark. Both men had reason to smile: Hitler because he got the press photo he needed to keep alive the idea that a large group of civilized Western countries supported Germany’s crusade against world Communism and the Soviet Union; Scavenius because he had managed to extract Germany’s explicit assurance that Denmark would remain outside the war and would not contribute in any concrete way to the fight against Communism, either at home or by forced conscription of soldiers to the German campaign.
But these concessions remained secret, and the image of Denmark’s foreign minister smiling with Hitler shamed the Danish public. When Scavenius came home he was met with demonstrations crying for “Norwegian conditions,” implying that some would prefer an outright Nazi takeover to continued concessions to Berlin. By continuing to maneuver within the narrow margins of Hitler’s “model protectorate,” Scavenius became a symbol of subjugation greater than what the Danish resistance wanted, but not greater than what elected politicians of all democratic parties could support.
Scavenius’s policy of cooperation did not reflect a lack of spine, position, or will, but rather a deep conviction that Danish democracy could be defended only in this way, and that a confrontation with Germany would place the most vulnerable in peril. Among them, no one group was more exposed than the Jews.
Polfoto
Even if most citizens apparently continued to accept the government’s answer that the lesser evil was preferable to the greater one, a small but growing minority disagreed. To them confrontation was necessary, no matter the cost. Still, it took another year to build up the first significant armed Danish resistance.
The demand for “Norwegian conditions” has continued to echo through later critiques of the policy of cooperation. But even if the Norwegian government and king, like the Dutch, were forced into exile after putting up a fight against the German invasion, neither the Dutch nor the Norwegians were spared the ugly dilemmas entailed in practical cooperation with the occupying power. King Christian—a brother of King Haakon—described those dilemmas in a secret letter he addressed that same day to the Swedish king, Gustav V, who was the father-in-law of his son Crown Prince Frederick. The close connections among the Scandinavian royal families, together with the intimate ties among the ruling Social Democratic parties in the three countries, served to enhance a sense of communality despite their very different fates during the war.12
A few weeks later Germany’s major ally, Japan, launched a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, the main base of the U.S. Pacific Fleet. The following day President Roosevelt declared war against Japan, causing Hitler to honor Germany’s alliance and declare war against the United States. World War II was a reality, and at the turn of 1941–42, Prime Minister Winston Churchill and President Franklin D. Roosevelt met in Washington with their delegations and with those of the other countries at war with the Axis to forge the great alliance against the Axis powers and their adherents. The United Nations Declaration was agreed upon and formally signed as a formidable demonstration of the forces now uniting against Germany and Japan. Surely the war was far from won, but it was suddenly hard to see how it could end with anything but the ultimate defeat of the Axis powers.
At the Allied meeting Denmark was represented by its former minister in Washington, Henrik Kauffmann. At the occupation of Denmark, Kauffmann had been the only prominent Danish official to denounce cooperation and the very idea of the “peaceful occupation.” A year later, he secretly negotiated and signed in Washington, on April 9, 1941, an agreement granting the United States the right to build military bases in Greenland, still a Danish colony and thus formally neutral. The Danish government regarded Kauffmann’s action as high treason and issued an arrest warrant for the rebellious diplomat, who in turn was recognized by President Roosevelt as an independent envoy with power over the frozen Danish funds in the United States. It was in the latter capacity that Kauffmann at the beginning of January 1942 associated himself with the UN Declaration, stating that the Danish people shared the hopes and aspirations it expressed.
Kauffmann stopped short of signing this declaration of war against Germany, but he did bring Denmark into the curious position that official representatives of this small, neutral, but occupied country had within a few weeks participated both in Hitler’s magnificent ceremony in Berlin against world Communism and in the Allies’ conference to seal the war aims of the United Nations, including the Soviet Union. This contrast reflected Denmark’s ambiguous position in the second half of the war, in which Germany did not relax but quite to the contrary stepped up its racial policies and its systematic effort to rid Nazi-controlled Europe of all Jews.
The “Jewish Question” in Denmark
Long before the rainy morning at Sorgenfri Castle on his birthday, King Christian had made clear his position in relation to the Danish Jews. Moreover, on this specific point his position coincided with that of the foreign minister. While Scavenius was in Berlin for the signing ceremonies of the Anti-Comintern Pact, Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring told him to his face that sooner or later the Danes would have to deal with the Jewish question. Scavenius had replied that there was no Jewish problem in Denmark, a view he repeated a few weeks later when he reported the conversation to the Swedish minister in Copenhagen. The Danish people would regard an attack on the Jews as a clear German abuse of power, and it would bring cooperation to a halt. In her classic book about the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the German American political theorist Hannah Arendt described this refusal to go along with the first initial distinction between Jews and other Danish citizens as critical. It had become clear to both the German and the Danish sides that this was a crucial test. The Israeli historian Leni Yahil, who in 1969 released her groundbreaking work about Jews in Denmark during the occupation, cast the implication in simple terms: “As long as the Germans, for their own reasons, were interested in honoring the agreement they had forced on the Danes, they could not touch the Danish Jews.”13
Meanwhile, Die Endlösung—“the final solution”—was beginn
ing to shape up under the supervision of the SS. It was not a plan or a program but a set of loosely defined aspirations, ideas, and actions aimed at exterminating the Jews from all areas controlled by the Third Reich. The deployment of special Einsatzgruppen (“operational units”) on the eastern front in June 1941 marked the first operations to this effect. At the Wannsee conference near Berlin in January 1942, where German authorities organized the mass deportations and murder of the European Jews, the execution of the final solution in Norway and Denmark was initially postponed. The discussion is known through one single copy of the minutes, and it is not to be taken at face value as a reflection of what actually transpired at the conference. Adolf Eichmann transcribed the minutes from a stenograph that had been worked through several times by other participants in order to use them as secret operational guidelines to the units and institutions within the Nazi machinery commissioned to deal with the final solution of the Jewish question. In the Scandinavian states it was foreseen that “difficulties will arise if this problem is dealt with thoroughly and that it will therefore be advisable to defer actions in these countries. Besides, in view of the small numbers of Jews affected, the deferral will not cause any substantial limitation.”14 The postponement gave the Norwegian Jews a delay of ten months and the Danish Jews a year and a half.
This decision obviously was not known at the time, and the threat of an action against the Danish Jews hung in the air; it was also conveniently used whenever the occupation authorities needed additional leverage. It was tangible in September 1942 when the Danish-German relationship ran into a crisis caused by nascent acts of sabotage, and triggered by Hitler’s rage over what he saw as King Christian’s insultingly brief acknowledgment of the Führer’s congratulations on the occasion of the king’s birthday. Christian had simply responded, “I thank you,” provoking the hard-liners in Berlin to convince Hitler that Denmark had grown intolerably defiant.
Resistance in Denmark was beginning to grow, however slowly, and the terms of the occupation became tighter. By virtue of its formal sovereignty Denmark was the only one of the occupied countries that was controlled by the German Foreign Office, and Foreign Minister Ribbentrop had no lack of enemies within the Nazi leadership waiting only to rid him of his authority over Denmark. In the wings Adolf Eichmann, together with the Gestapo, pushed for the imposition of direct Nazi rule on the occupied country, bringing it into line with Norway and the Netherlands.
As Hitler seemed to relinquish all notions of Denmark as the ideal protectorate, Ribbentrop was forced to take a harder stance and demand the deportation of the Danish Jews. But Hitler’s first inclination that Denmark should henceforth be ruled with an iron fist as a hostile country was replaced with the decision to send two new representatives to oversee the German operations there and to impose a reshuffle to obtain a more acquiescent Danish government. Hitler instructed the newly appointed supreme commander of the Wehrmacht in Denmark, General Hermann von Hanneken, to take a tough line. Essentially, however, the general was to focus on preparing the Danish front to fend off the feared Allied invasion on the west coast of Jutland. This war aim was at odds with the soft occupation policy pursued by the German Foreign Office, jealously protecting its sway over Denmark. But the general had his priorities right—and they were military and strategic, not political.
On the civilian side, Hitler decided to make a more decisive political move by appointing the thirty-nine-year-old SS Gruppenführer Werner Best to become the new Reich plenipotentiary in Denmark.
Werner Best
Werner Best was to play a key role in the fate of the Danish Jews, but exactly what that role was is still debated today. It was as ambiguous as Werner Best’s personal motives. It is not easy to figure out what was fundamentally going on in the mind of a committed Nazi and anti-Semite, and Werner Best is a case in point with plenty of confusing contradictions. Educated as a lawyer, he had been a member of the party since 1930 and had, as a close collaborator of then SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler and the head of the security police, Reinhard Heydrich, worked his way up to the number three position in the SS hierarchy as head of the Gestapo personnel and administration department, surpassed only by Himmler and Heydrich. After the invasion of Poland, in September 1939, Best participated in the organization of the deportation of Jews into the new “Generalgouvernement” as well as in the “völkische Flurbereinigung,” which was the Nazi term for “ethnic reallocation and consolidation,” a shorthand for the initial steps in the organized mass murder. At this point, a deep conflict with Heydrich created turbulence in his career.
Best was sent to Paris in the summer of 1940 as part of the German occupation administration. Here, he issued the Judenverordnung setting in motion the deportation of non-French Jews, first to detention camps in France, then from there on to Auschwitz. In France he also tested and further developed his theories on how best to elicit cooperation in an occupied country with the minimal use of force, and his work helped to develop the Nazi leadership’s thinking about how territories should be administered and organized in a German-dominated Europe. Best focused on how each nation could be impelled to voluntarily concede its sovereignty and submit to the German administration. In August and September 1941 he traveled to Brussels, The Hague, Oslo, Copenhagen, and Prague to study in detail occupation practices in those countries, including their official and legal framework and overall working methods. In this comparative study, Best reached the clear conclusion that Denmark was the country where the occupation costs to Germany were by far the smallest, partly because the civil administration was more effective than the military, even when it came to surveillance and security. A mere 89 German officials in the Danish governing authority were able to manage 3.8 million Danes, while the corresponding figures were much higher for the other occupied countries: 260 in Norway, 1,596 in the Netherlands, and some 22,000 in France.
The advantages for the Reich were obvious, and Heydrich’s death in June 1942 paved the way for Best to return to Berlin, where he served for a while in Ribbentrop’s Foreign Ministry before he was sent to Denmark as Hitler’s special envoy to set things straight in the Danish protectorate. On October 27 he received his instructions from Hitler personally, accompanied at the audience by his predecessor, the career diplomat Cecil von Renthe-Fink, who ironically was sent to Vichy France to represent Germany there. This seems to confirm that Hitler had not denounced the negotiating line pursued by Renthe-Fink in Denmark. Rather, developments had convinced the Führer of the necessity to send in someone stronger to continue it, as the Danish side seemed increasingly reluctant to give the concessions demanded. That someone was Werner Best, who left Berlin not only as Hitler’s personal choice but also with unique backing from both his old comrade SS chief Heinrich Himmler and Ribbentrop, who all seem to have endorsed the idea of allowing Best to practice in Denmark the ideal form of “administration by supervision” that he had been advocating.15
Best’s bloody past was not known in Denmark at the time, although the underground Communist press retrieved and passed on Best’s nickname, the Bloodhound of Paris. But the gentlemanly lawyer did not appear to be a brutal man. He was an anti-Semite of the “civilized” kind, who aimed to purge the Aryan people’s body of the Jews but not necessarily the hard way. For him the Jews constituted a biological threat to the purity of the Aryan race. Therefore it was more about the separation and removal of the Jewish population than its eradication. With an intelligent and cultivated appearance, Best was able to instill confidence and foster personal respect, all the more so as he was a pragmatic and creative bureaucrat for whom the ends trumped the means. And Best’s goal in Denmark was to maintain the peaceful occupation and its basic features, allowing Hitler to indulge in this unique vision of Neuropa, Ribbentrop to maintain his authority over this piece of the bigger European puzzle—and Himmler to avoid having to expend too many resources on that particular corner of his SS universe while securing most welcome provisions from Danish agricultur
e. In this way maintaining the status quo served not only Berlin but Werner Best’s own standing as the central figure in the German administration of the occupied country.16
This position provided Best with a strong footing, also enabling him to resist pressure from the Danish Nazis aiming to take advantage of the arrival in Denmark of this leading SS officer to roll back the cooperative policy and gain direct access to power like their comrades in occupied Norway. It was a source of deep frustration to the small but radical Danish Nazi Party that the old elected politicians had successfully kept them out of any position of power—indeed of any position at all—as a key condition of “the cooperation.” But Best had no interest in the Danish Nazi amateurs and deftly outmaneuvered their leader, Frits Clausen, who ended up having to heed his own call and join the few thousand Danes volunteering to join the Waffen SS on the eastern front.
For all these reasons Best was generally perceived in Denmark as a man of moderation and cooperation. Few realized fully that hidden behind the cultivated and pragmatic exterior, Best remained a devoted Nazi. Most Danes who got close to Dr. Best felt they could trust him. And they were right in the sense that Best did not let his Nazi beliefs overshadow the moderation or the maneuvers that were necessary to preserve and consolidate Best’s own position at the epicenter of the German occupation of Denmark. Best was also more open than most in terms of the problems Germany was encountering, and at regular intervals he published an information newsletter to all German service units in Denmark, in which he outlined not only how the situation should be viewed from the German perspective, but also in surprisingly direct terms how Germany’s opponents assessed developments of German policy in the occupied country.