by Bo Lidegaard
It remains one of the most fascinating dimensions of the events unfolding in Denmark that this force, described by Bertelsen, proved to be stronger than anyone previously expected it could be—let alone would be. Although helpers came from all walks of life and professions, two groups played a special role: doctors and students of all kinds. Most Copenhagen hospitals served as collection centers, and many practitioners were involved in the rescue work. Students took action and contributed at all levels of assistance, ranging from efforts to track down the hidden and transport them to safe shelter to the critical phase of shipping them out. The crossing was, from first to last, the crucial point where the capacity was lacking.25
Escape Routes
In the days after October 1 several transports left the Grønsund ferry dock. The collection center was Næsgaard, midway between the woods on Hesnæs, where the Marcus and Hannover families had spent a restless night, and the ferry dock, which for several days became the center of a lively traffic of everything but beets. Most refugees got away directly from the Copenhagen area, but many were looking to North Sjælland, where they gathered in the small fishing villages along the coast waiting for a boat. Unfortunately a number of them ran into the arms of Criminal Adjutant Hans Juhl, known as Gestapo-Juhl, who was the German security police representative in Helsingør (Elsinore) with an office in the ferry port. On Saturday, Juhl learned that a steamer had picked up some Jews who were found floating in a rowboat west of the Swedish island of Hven. The steamer was now outside Helsingør, and the captain had asked the Danish pilots to ensure that the shipwrecked Oppenheim family was handed over to the Danish police. It was not that simple. Juhl demanded that the pilot sail him out to the steamer, where he boarded with his people and arrested a total of eight Jews, including two children. The whole family was deported to Theresienstadt.
Gestapo-Juhl, who had previously been a chauffeur for German foreign minister Ribbentrop, was the exception to the general sense that the German authorities did not actively try to stop the mass exodus. Several accounts place him in a class by himself, and he is the only ranking German police officer who is reported to have been zealous in pursuit of the fleeing Jews. It was Gestapo-Juhl who was behind the most dramatic—and tragic—events in the North Sjælland fishing villages where he roamed.26
It was extremely difficult for the refugees to get an overview of the situation and the relative dangers of the various escape routes. Information on the Germans’ movements was highly contradictory and difficult to interpret. An impression of the rumors that were circulating, and that many latched on to, could be acquired through broadcasts from the Danish Press Service in Stockholm, which was formed immediately after August 29 to gather news from Denmark and communicate it to the world press. From there it also filtered back to Denmark via Swedish radio and via the BBC from London, which included daily news-service bulletins to occupied countries.
On the evening of October 2 the Danish Press Service from Stockholm denied rumors that Danish SS volunteers were stationed along the coast of the Øresund. It was reported, however, that German guards stood at one-hundred-meter intervals guarding the North Sjælland coast from Copenhagen to Hundested—and particularly the ports. This was all wrong, of course. But the Danish Press Service was one of the few sources for the facts in Denmark not controlled by German press censorship.27
On Saturday afternoon one of the best-informed underground newspapers, the independent Information, ran a fairly accurate description of the events of the previous day: “With the raids last night, hundreds of Danish Jews along with individual immigrants and about 150 communists were dragged away from their homes and led to ships to bring them south, probably to Poland.… From the Danish side it is still far from clear how successful the Germans were in their manhunt. From the best-informed source in Copenhagen it is estimated that about 1,500 Jews have been taken.”
Information was also able to give the vital details that Best “has announced through the Danish Foreign Ministry that there would not be more raids taking place beyond tonight,” and that “the German authorities in this country have been eager to spread … rumors, whether this has been to threaten (to form a government) or to warn of the consequences of the Berlin sadists’ impending excesses. Still, of course, it was mainly the more affluent who had slipped away from their homes—some very few of them, even to Sweden.”
Information gives a detailed account of the action’s culmination the previous night, including harrowing scenes from the inner city: “At Vesterbro, a predominantly poor neighborhood in Copenhagen, the captured Jews were gathered in groups. These Danish Jews were bound together like members of slave transports, many of whom suffered incredibly brutal treatment during the arrest, having been first gathered around Frihedsstøtten and elsewhere. Here they had to endure a wait of up to several hours. Children cried, and many women screamed continually from fear.”
The underground newspaper is also aware that this image is contradicted by other information “later in the day,” such as “Raids in some places have been a decided failure. Thus a German soldier of South Jutland ancestry reported that he was at twenty-five different locations, and that they did not get a single Jew. They had all made themselves invisible.”28
That same evening, as Denmark was taking in the events of the night, the steamer Wartheland arrived in Swinemünde with its cargo of deported Communists and Jews, who were kept separate during the transfer. On the quay the prisoners were organized into two distinct columns. As the guards hurried the prisoners down the steep ladders, hitting and pushing the elderly who hesitated, the deported, according to several later accounts, stood silently awaiting their fate. At this point one of the Communists stepped out from his column and loudly addressed the Jews: “Countrymen, stand tall!”29
Cooking the History, Round One
While Jewish refugees lived through an awful night of uncertainty and anxiety, and the underground newspapers tried to deliver reasonably accurate information about what had happened in Copenhagen, Werner Best worked intensively to interpret the action as a success. He was obviously aware of the disparity between the three hundred Jews who were deported and the six thousand on the Germans’ lists. The question was whether it should be seen as a problem or not. Best didn’t think so: “So far, the first day after the action against the Jews manifested that the announcement of the impending release of the detained Danish soldiers has resoundingly made up for all the adverse reactions to the Jewish action within the Danish population. There is complete calm in the country.”
Fear that the action would lead to unrest, perhaps even insurrection and rebellion, in the Danish population contributed to the moderation of Best and Mildner, and Best’s report was a sigh of relief. He himself had proposed the notorious linkage of the Judenaktion with the release of the Danish soldiers, embraced and endorsed by Hitler. Now he made every effort to highlight this as a decisive and clever idea, instrumental for maintaining peace and quiet in the occupied country.30
But Best was also a man who was at home in the unique dual reality in which the Third Reich’s most powerful men found themselves. On one side the extermination of the Jews stood above all other goals. The Holocaust was carried out with a zeal that, beyond all its human horrors and crimes, in many cases was given surprising priority over more pressing strategic objectives of direct military relevance. On the other hand, both Hitler and his closest associates—at least occasionally—had a good idea of what it took to conduct the war, including stability in Denmark and a steady supply of foodstuffs from the occupied country. Though Hitler hardly bothered to refer to this dependence, but rather to the “model protectorate” that Denmark was in his eyes, the upshot was the same. In relation to Hitler, it was therefore essential to show that the action against the Danish Jews had been successfully implemented, while at the same time ensuring that it did not mean the end of the peaceful occupation or adversely affect the steady flow of Danish supplies.
It was hardl
y a coincidence, therefore, that the action against the Danish Jews was carried out on the eve of the conclusion of the annual bilateral supply agreement between Germany and Denmark. Negotiations were under way through the same days that the last pieces of the action fell into place. While the permanent secretaries discussed the Danish internment plan, and German security authorities the plans for the Jewish action, parallel negotiations continued in regard to Danish supplies to the Third Reich. The two sets of talks were not formally interrelated, and yet Best was not ashamed to link the two issues directly. On Saturday afternoon, in the very same telegram in which he proclaimed the subdued Danish response to the action, he boasted of the successful trade negotiations. Himmler and Hitler had to be spoken to in clear language: They had gotten what they wanted. No Jews in Denmark—but continued supplies to Germany. The German trade delegation even managed to wring more out of the occupied country than in the previous year—which had already been favorable. From this perspective what actually became of the Danish Jews would perhaps be less critical to Berlin. If the Nazi leaders insisted on conducting a manhunt in Denmark, they could create major problems for the continuation of vital supplies. Best was a cautious man who had done what he could to take out a life insurance policy.31
Similarly, in the days following the action the new head of the Gestapo, Dr. Mildner, was deeply involved in negotiations on further cooperation between the German security apparatus and the Danish police. The goal was a continuation of the cooperation that had existed during the first years of the occupation. In this context the action against the Jews was an obstacle to be overcome as quickly and painlessly as possible. Otherwise many more men might be necessary to control Denmark.
Cooperation and Complicity
Part of the Danish public has had a hard time coping with the image of a country that continued to supply Germany, particularly with foodstuffs, and whose police continued interacting with the occupation forces for almost another year after the action against the Jews. Critics of the continued policy of cooperation undertaken by the permanent secretaries point out that Denmark thereby helped to prolong the war and thus indirectly made the ongoing Nazi atrocities possible. From this perspective the unique assistance provided to Danish Jews is seen in the context of continued agricultural exports that helped the Nazi regime to survive and continue the war. In the same vein it is argued that by maintaining security in the occupied country Danish police relieved German forces to fight elsewhere. By not picking an open fight, or at least discontinuing all cooperation with the Germans, was Denmark then not responsible for the deaths of countless victims throughout Europe? The question keeps being raised, and there is no simple answer.
Although it is estimated that Danish agriculture covered more than a month per annum of use of foodstuffs such as butter, bacon, and meat for about ninety million Germans, the supplies are not considered to be crucial because even without these supplies Germany would still have been at the upper end of European per capita calorie consumption. Also, there is no evidence that getting hold of provisions from Denmark was part of the rationale for occupying the country in the first place. Those reasons were purely strategic and closely related to the German push toward Norway. The possibilities inherent in Danish agricultural exports became apparent only gradually, and it is probably true—as several researchers suggest—that, while substantial, these exports primarily played a political role in German-Danish relations—a role whose significance grew in the occupation’s later years.32
Part of the terrible reality is that all occupied countries and regions helped to keep the German war machine running, either through forced labor, looting, cooperation, or collaboration—or an ugly mixture of them all. It was not an option for any occupied country to avoid providing for the Germans. But the terms of the occupation and of providing supplies were very different, and no place obtained more favorable terms than Denmark—except if they were more or less directly allied with Germany. Until the action against the Jews, the situation in Denmark was more similar to that of its unoccupied, neutral neighbor, Sweden, than to that of occupied Norway or the Netherlands, where Germany had inserted a Nazi regime.
It is also part of the picture that it was the very cooperation that provided Denmark with the means to balance the German pressure against it with a countervailing pressure that proved surprisingly strong in key situations. With its firm control of the country and the rejection of any move to let the Nazis get a foothold—and thus a semblance of legitimacy—in a Danish government, Denmark succeeded in bringing about a situation where the occupier had something to lose: namely the cooperation and the advantages it provided. This position gave Denmark room to maneuver and the ability to shield the Danish population, among them Jews, from the worst of Nazi atrocities.
The ongoing trade negotiations gave Nils Svenningsen an opportunity to test Best’s standing directly with other high-ranking German representatives. The action against the Jews had shaken Svenningsen’s trust in Best, all the more so as Best claimed that he had tried to stop it. If that was true, the obvious conclusion had to be that Best and his people at Dagmarhus did not have the influence with the Nazi leadership that had been previously assumed by the Danish side. Svenningsen used the presence in Copenhagen of a senior German diplomat, Hilger van Scherpenberg, as a back door to explore Best’s standing in the German Foreign Office. At the same time Svenningsen was sending a clear warning to Berlin that a continuation of the action against the Jews would have direct consequences for the Danish supplies. Scherpenberg first completely refused to deal with the action, let alone to discuss it, but as a dutiful officer he then noted carefully everything Svenningsen said in their confidential conversation, and sent the report to his superiors in Berlin—exactly as Svenningsen had expected.
According to Scherpenberg, Svenningsen pulled no punches. From now on Germany must expect to meet rejection and resistance, even from circles that had previously been willing to cooperate. Scherpenberg asked if that meant strikes or work stoppages. Svenningsen could not say; the situation had not yet stabilized. But even if he did not consider strikes to be likely, one could expect increased sabotage in the future. Deportation of the Communists posed a particular problem. While the Germans were solely responsible for what had happened to the Jews, the Danish government felt directly accountable for the arrest and deportation of the Communists.
Svenningsen made it clear that this situation undermined the efforts of the permanent secretaries to establish an administration. To avoid further problems, quiet now had to prevail: No further intervention in Danish conditions! According to Scherpenberg, Svenningsen repeatedly came back to this last point “in the most forceful way.”
At the end of the conversation Svenningsen launched a trial balloon, though it is hard to say whether it was sincere or rather intended as an indirect warning to both the German Foreign Office and Dr. Best: Would it be possible, Svenningsen ventured, that there might be an opportunity in the near future to get the status of Denmark further clarified by a direct discussion with the competent German authorities—be it at the Foreign Ministry in Berlin or at the headquarters?33
Svenningsen was playing with fire. All of the special arrangements for Denmark stood or fell on Ribbentrop’s success in keeping Denmark in the foreign policy domain—with Best as his local representative. Svenningsen’s implicit message was that a continuation of the action against the Jews could tear apart the whole fragile construct of cooperation. It would be hard for Denmark—but likely even tougher for the leading Nazis, whose positions depended on the continuation of a peaceful occupation. Probably part of Svenningsen’s bet was that the top Nazi echelon in Berlin would consider the meager results of the night’s action as a failure. Now he wanted to send a warning not to let this failure provoke a manhunt in Denmark.
Even if contemporary sources do not document the reaction in Berlin, a postwar account confirms that Adolf Eichmann and his deputy Rolf Günther were indeed furious—but impotent
in their rage. In the “Sassen conversations” with Eichmann, recorded in 1957 while he was still in hiding in Buenos Aires, and excerpted in Life magazine in 1960, he volunteered, “Denmark created greater difficulties for us than any other nation. The king intervened for the Jews there and most of them escaped.” On the Sassen tapes Eichmann is more explicit in regard to what he calls his failure in Denmark. It was bad enough in Belgium, but worse in Denmark where Eichmann was unable to execute the deportation program as planned. “The result was meager.… I also had to recall my transports—it was for me a mighty disgrace.” There are reservations as to the nature of these talks that were held with one of his admirers, a Dutch fascist and former Waffen-SS man, but they seem to confirm the general impression that the Nazi leadership considered the action in Denmark a failure. They also suggest that King Christian’s protest was duly noted in Berlin, although it could not stop the roundup.