by Bo Lidegaard
A common feature of the entries of these first days was that the family sought help and advice from anyone who might be able to provide it. The thought that among the large circle of friends, acquaintances, and colleagues who were involved, there might be someone who would turn the family in, or try to lure it into a trap, seems not even to have occurred to Poul Hannover. On the contrary, his fellow citizens were his natural allies. This is also reflected as he returned home: “Svend Aage Holm was waiting—the other man from Titan had investigated conditions in Skovshoved and Klampenborg—both hopeless—he was about to proceed to his house in order to see whether there were any possibilities from there—he had already promised to put the house at my disposal if need be. In addition, one of Ludvig’s staff was there—they knew of nothing yet—but worked on it and it was agreed that I would look for one of them at 3:30 at Østbanen [East Station] … ”
Small and large concerns are getting mixed up—all under the general theme of utter confusion: “At home everything was breaking up. Inger had begun packing—a small bag for each, but as we had no idea of how long we were going to stay … it was rather random—we didn’t dare not to bring a few towels—though they were bulky, but we might end up needing precisely just them. Gunnar was there—we had decided to go together. I hardly managed to eat two bites—then went on to see Herbert [Jerichow, the vice president of Titan]. He was in despair—promised to see whether he could do anything—we agreed on a telephone code—then home again to begin packing. Thank God, Mom had given me a tennis bag ideally suited for the purpose—I took that one and Inger her equivalent.”
The apparent confusion is also due to the fact that Poul Hannover, in typing up his diary notes, is trying to reconstruct the details a few dramatic days after the events: “The more I write the more I realize that I’m not getting it all down. I had agreed with my brothers the preceding evening to try and get Mother with us. I called her from Bredgade in the morning to tell her that I would send someone to collect her passport—but she said she was already on her way to the countryside. I didn’t even think to thank her for my birthday present—and she did not congratulate me.”
Still considering himself a good citizen, Poul Hannover is not in the least uncomfortable with seeking assistance from the police: “Just as I was standing there, Carl Holbøll, the policeman whom I had met on Sunday, came by—like an angel from on high. He had found a way we could get away—to an address in Gentofte [north of Copenhagen]. He, Gunnar, and I immediately went out there. No one was home. Gunnar was told that he should call there every quarter hour—I went to Østbanen—at nearly half past three as I came in I ran into my old friend who had moved from the country to Vedbæk. He was immediately willing to entrust his house to me, but regretted that there was no bedding or space—so I had to abandon the idea. Just before he came, Louis’s man arrived—he now had an address, but did not know if it could help—it was very busy, but when they heard my name, they had expressed their willingness to talk to me.”
On the same day Kis Marcus writes of her doubts and confusion: “We went home again the next morning when everything seemed to be normal. I spoke with Inger on the phone and since we could not speak freely, I asked Gunnar to drive by Lyngbyvej and hear the news, on the way to the office.—Meanwhile Joanna [a friend] called and we agreed that she should come out right away to pick up some things, including my jewelry, which she had offered to keep for us. Gunnar came home again. We were now aware that something was cooking. Inger was going to town to meet Poul, and Gunnar was to go there again at 1 o’clock to hear what they would do.—I took care of lunch for us (none of us had any appetite), and so I took care of some things in the house and packed our bags, but afterward I realized that I was not thinking enough and therefore we didn’t have with us what we could have had.”
Kis is struggling to deal with the prospect that they are about to leave their home, possibly for good, with no more than they can carry by hand. The sense of the whole thing being unreal is also supported by the fact that nothing has actually happened. It was all in the air, all based on hearsay: “Gunnar telephoned to say we had to go immediately, and we cycled back to Erik and Elsa Nyegaard. The children played there all afternoon, and I walked around nervously and began to worry about Gunnar, who had said that he would come within the hour. Then Johanna Kruse came again. She thought we were gone, but now promised to go look for Dad. It was his birthday, and when I called there in the morning, Line [his maid, Miss Oline Henriksen, also known as Line] had said that they were waiting for us in there with hot chocolate. Johanna fetched a wastebasket that Dorte had made for Father, and then went to see him. Later in the day she came back with greetings from Father, who thought it was sensible for us to go to Sweden, and with the message that he would hide in Denmark. Once he was assured later that all his children and grandchildren were saved, he would go over himself.”
The Final Doubt
Dr. Meyer had the day’s third birthday. The aging physician’s report confirms his daughter’s, but also sheds light on the considerations and intelligence brought to the Jewish community’s leadership, still finding it hard to believe what was about to happen, and that they had made a fundamental error about Werner Best’s credibility and the Germans’ plans: “I got up on September 29 at 7 a.m. and went home, where there were flowers from the girls. It was my 72nd birthday. And what a day it became. I telephoned to congratulate Poul, where I was to go for dinner. ‘We’ll see each other at dinner,’ I said, but he responded with a maybe. I heard nothing from Else and Knud, nor from Kis and Gunnar. Through the girls I heard that Poul and Inger, Kis and Gunnar, and the children had left.… I cycled to the clinic as usual, received congratulations. At 9:45 a.m. Mrs. Hermansen presented cake and champagne (Mumm), I gave my little thank you speech.… When Allan and I left, Leif Henriques [a nephew of C. B. Henriques] was waiting for us below and said that ‘now it is going awry.’ Pihl [a friend] had been at Henriques’s office and told of the planned raid.… At 11 a.m. I was already at C.B. [Henriques]’s office, he and Lachmann came down the stairs to a waiting car to drive to the Foreign Ministry, and I drove with them. C.B. had a confirmed message (from a German source) about a raid on the Jews.”
It is Hedtoft’s dissemination of Duckwitz’s warning that materializes here, and that has lit a fire under the community’s leadership. But it’s hard to look the worst straight in the eye, especially when you are afraid that by doing so you will exacerbate it. Dr. Meyer reports on the visit to the Foreign Ministry: “We saw Director Svenningsen instantly; he was ashen at the message, which was a surprise to him. He promised to summon the permanent secretaries to meet at 2 p.m. He admitted that the outgoing government would have resigned over the Jewish question. As we drove away at approximately 11:30 Lachmann said, ‘I still don’t believe it,’ and I too found it unthinkable.”
With hindsight and with our knowledge of the horrors of the Holocaust it can be difficult to understand the reluctance of the Jewish community’s foremost representatives to believe what was now written in letters flaming as mene tekel on the wall. After the war Karl Lachmann tried to explain the refusal of the leaders to engage in planning for an escape, “since it was agreed that one should refrain from it as 6,000 to 7,000 people could not go into hiding. Any action would require help from non-Jewish countrymen, a request one could not make, or expect to be honored.” This does not explain what is perhaps difficult to understand today: Accepting that the threat was real was arduous for those directly concerned. Even so cynical an observer as Vilhelm Bergstrøm still doubted the whole thing was more than much ado about nothing: “I had a bunch of people who wanted to know what was going on with the persecution of the Jews. They would not believe that I knew as little as they. They thought that the police must know something. Alfred Olsen came and told me that today several large Jewish firms had paid staff three months’ salary in advance.
“Several had fled to Sweden, and many just abandoned their homes. There was a
general fear in Jewish homes. All sorts of stories are told and believed. There are supposed to be ships ready in the ‘Free Port’ of Copenhagen to take them away. In short, panic. There may now be something else behind this. The Germans would like to have a Danish government, and they are pushing. Pressure on the Jews could be a way.”
Bergstrøm was right that the Germans had deliberately played on the fear of an attack on the Jews, using the threat as leverage in the wrestling with the Danes, currently for a new pro-German government. The cry of “Wolf!” had been heard many times before.3
A report written by a young woman, Lise Epstein, in 1944, reflects the shock and confusion that prevailed in many families: “We met in the hallway—Mother wailed, fully dressed to leave the house, with a face that was red and swollen from crying and despair, and in a half-choked voice stammered that Mrs. Storm … had been informed by a reliable source that raids on Jews in Denmark would start this night. We should dress and leave house and home as soon as possible as we were no longer safe in our own home. Mother told me that she had called Father, and we expected him momentarily.… When Father came home, he said, surprised: ‘You almost frightened the life out of me on the phone. What happened? What happened?’—‘Poor man, poor man! Don’t you understand? Now the Nazis are coming. Get your clothes and run away.’ Dad stood confused and stammered: ‘What should I do? What should I do?’ ”4
The daughter notes her parents’ shock, fear, and confusion. That the mother broke into Yiddish reflects that the family belongs to the so-called Russian Jews who had emigrated from Eastern Europe, and for whom pogroms were more recent memories than for the “old” Jewish families in the country. For her it was not the Germans who were coming, let alone the Danes; it was the Nazis.
There was great difficulty in reading the Germans’ real intentions in Denmark. From the end of 1941 one of the country’s first and leading resistance men of a Conservative persuasion, the industrialist Erling Foss, prepared short intelligence reports, “The Week,” on conditions in the occupied country for use in the free world. These reports were sent by courier via Stockholm to London, where the information was included partly in the BBC’s news programs, including those broadcast in Danish, and they were also used by the British authorities to assess developments in Denmark. Foss had good contact with other resistance fighters and a broad knowledge of the illegal press, in addition to his personal contacts with leading Conservative politicians. Even with this solid start, Erling Foss also had trouble figuring out what was at stake, and in his weekly intelligence report on September 29 he writes: “Copenhagen is extremely alarmed today by a persistent rumor that all Jews will be arrested and be carried south by ship. There is also talk that room has been made for two thousand in the prisons. Some famous half-Jews are said to be on the list. The announcement comes from undoubtedly well-intentioned and well-informed sources, so there are only two possibilities. Either it is true, and if so the arrests will happen overnight on Friday or Saturday. Or maybe it’s the Germans who have deliberately put the message into circulation, either because something less bad is coming, or because they want the Rigsdag* to bow before them and establish a new government.”5
Foss is aware that the leading Social Democratic politicians believe the warning. But have they allowed themselves to be led by the nose? Have they let themselves be used in a cunning German intrigue? The doubts gnawed. And Foss was far from alone in seeing the rumors now being spread by the Germans from this perspective. One of Denmark’s leading industrialists, Gunnar Larsen, had been serving as a cabinet minister since the summer of 1940. He was co-owner and CEO of Denmark’s single largest company, the major construction firm F. L. Smidth & Co., pursuing enterprises throughout the world, and as a strong ally of Erik Scavenius he shared the desire to find a way for cooperation with the Germans to be resumed after the August events. Larsen kept a diary, and his notes from September 29 reflect a long conversation he had that day with a former transport minister who was a leading member of the Farmers’ Party and agreed with the need to resume the cooperation in some way involving the elected politicians. To Larsen the fate of the Jews was among the prime arguments: “I did not consider it advisable to leave things alone, as this would entail taking on a very serious responsibil- ity to answer for the future in several regards, including also the fate of the Jews.”6
Erling Foss was by no means a typical Danish resistance fighter. He was one of the very few who went into active resistance early, and he was Conservative, but outside the National-Conservative wing that was hostile toward parliamentary democracy. In 1941 Foss initiated contact with Danish military intelligence. As a businessman he could legally travel to Sweden, bringing documents and microfilm to the leader of the Free Danes in Stockholm, Ebbe Munck, who served as an intermediary for the British secret service. It was this military intelligence that Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, at the liberation of Denmark, complimented as “second to none.”
Foss participated in the negotiations between the leading resistance fighters, resulting in the formation of Denmark’s Freedom Council in September 1943. The council functioned as a kind of internal government in exile with representatives of the Communists and other leading opposition groups—but no prominent politicians.
Erling Foss was arrested in December 1943, but he managed to keep the scope of his illegal activities undisclosed and was subsequently released. In February 1944 he escaped to Sweden after an attempt on his life.
Frihedsmuseet
These leading political figures had not realized that this logic cut both ways, and that the imminent raid was closing the door to any further cooperation on the political level.
For those directly concerned, the practical questions were pressing. The aforementioned librarian of the Jewish community, Josef Fischer, who was born in Hungary and thus was one of the more recently arrived “Russian Jews,” had three adult daughters. One of them, thirty-three-year-old Ella Fischer, who worked as an assistant in a bookstore, was admitted to the municipal hospital for treatment. In her diary she recounted how the warnings that came via her sister were presented exactly the way Duckwitz and Best wanted: “With the politicians Alsing Andersen and Hans Hedtoft as the sources, it was announced that there were personal orders from the Reich chancellor that the Jewish issue in Denmark should be resolved before week’s end. The German Reich agents in Denmark, Dr. Best and the commander of the German Wehrmacht in Denmark, von Hanneken, were against it, but you dared not assume that they could exercise their influence.… Father, Mother and Harriet would go up to Hornbæk, and Edith would go to Miss Raastöff. It was about everyone getting away from their residences, of course, if they were raided.”7
Dr. Meyer also realized after meetings with the leaders of the Jewish community and at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that staying at home was no longer an option:
From C.B.’s office I bicycled home, it was teeming with flowers, letters, telegrams, gifts. It was terrible, I did not have time to open the letters. As I recall, ate lunch with Ada who said that she and the children would go away, wanted me to, but I did not want to because I did not know anything about the others.… During consultation time called Medical Association, and was read a message from the Danish Medical Association that there would be a raid against the Jews, and that any Jewish doctor had to hide privately, in hospitals or in the country, would probably only need 4–5 days. Now there was no more doubt. At 2:15 I rode my bicycle with my attaché case to the Farmers’ Bank and emptied my box. 2:45 I was sitting with C.B. (called from there to Dr. Keller to come to me regarding admission to the hospital, he promised to come at 4 p.m.).…
Present at the meeting with C.B. were also Lachmann, Mogens, and I …, Arthur Henriques (with wife) and the Supreme Court attorney H. H. Bruun, to whom the representatives gave power of attorney to act on their behalf. At 3:30 p.m. we said good-bye to one another, and I rode home with my papers. There had been various people with gifts. Mrs. Kruse came with a wastebasket f
rom Dorte and with a message about Kis and Gunnar’s plans.… I wanted to go up to Ada, who had said that she would go on the train at 5 p.m. but she now took the 4:20. We met in the hall and embraced each other and the kids, sobbing.… I asked [a colleague] by phone to cover my practice during my absence, of which I also put notice on a poster outside the front door.
It is characteristic of all reports that the fugitives are doing whatever they can in haste to ensure and prepare their return. This is achieved, among other ways, by making provisions for their business’s continuation in their absence, which they obviously see as quite temporary. The warnings now come with a force that convinces almost everyone that escape is necessary. But not emigration. It is loaded with symbolism that the pediatrician puts up a poster about the clinic’s continuation in his “absence.” Dr. Meyer’s poster is not only a practical measure. It is also a manifesto with the message that the occupation will not last, and that the Danish Jews will return home as soon as possible. Like many others Dr. Meyer sought hospitalization as a cover while he saw how things developed:
Dr. Keller came at 4 p.m., in the meantime having secured a room on the maternity ward, he was overwhelmed, wrote a hospitalization note for prostatic hypertrophy [difficulty urinating]. I actually had the thought last week to seek him out again because of certain urinary inconveniences (perhaps part of the nervous nature). Then I spoke to Honoré, as far as I can recall, I had asked him to come to my home, I asked him to write to Dr. Hart in Ruds Vedby to ask him if he could possibly house me, he should ring me up the following day (the 30th), but only say yes or no. Line and Miss Rigmor Eriksen, my faithful domestic workers, were distraught and upset; they packed my red suitcase, and after dinner I left. Hjalmar came earlier and announced that he thought he could get away in a couple of days.… It was probably about 7 p.m. when I drove to St. Joseph Hospital, the girls would be sleeping out (they did at least a few nights). I did not answer the phone for fear of wiretapping, Mary [Goldschmidt, Adolph Meyer’s sister-in-law] insisted that she must speak with me, but I said I could not because of wiretaps (probably not justified).—At the hospital I was admitted to a private room on the maternity ward under an alias. An intern took my medical history, and I went to rest, using bromisoval [a common sedative] to sleep.