by Bo Lidegaard
In Sweden shortly afterward, Erik Seidenfaden considered the reasons for the strong Danish reaction and provided a first, well-considered explanation that still largely holds true. It was, he wrote before the end of the year, “the first time you saw a whole people rise up as one against the disgrace of racial persecution. The special Danish triad showed its strength in this crucial situation. The underground organizations had their apparatus in order, the Danish administration’s well-preserved machinery functioned optimally and with the right attitude, and the population’s widespread passive resistance demonstrated that the ambiguity of the policy of cooperation had not undermined its attitude toward the concrete requirements of humanity and love thy neighbor. The unarmed people rebelled against power with all kinds of tricks, with adventurous artifice and disguise, with ingenuity and courage—but first and foremost with solidarity fueled by deep indignation.”24
By completely rejecting the ideas that excluded the Jews from the national “us,” Denmark deprived the Nazis of the fig leaf they needed to justify discrimination and legitimize the deed.
This rejection explains not only the people’s spontaneous support of their Jewish countrymen, but also the Nazi hesitation that made the rescue possible. And this is where the troubling perspective arises: Would something similar have been possible elsewhere? Could the rejection of the logic of the Jewish extermination have stopped the project in other occupied countries—even in Germany itself? The answer is yes—of course. But the point is not to moralize that people in other occupied countries could “just” have rejected persecution of the Jews, or that the responsibility rests on each individual who didn’t do so. The history of the Holocaust tells a different story, and the terms of occupation, local conditions, and much else differed radically from place to place and over time, making the situation unique in each case. The special Danish example cannot be used to reproach others who experienced the German occupation under far worse conditions than Denmark.
However, there is another—and in the current perspective, important—lesson to be learned: Politics makes a difference. It was not the Danes’ reaction that made the Nazi leadership bend. It was the expectation of that reaction and the certainty that it—or something worse—would surely be forthcoming.
Statistics and Fatalities
The question of what the Danish helpers knew or thought about the real risk has been thoroughly discussed over the past seventy years. Opinions are divided, and there is no reason to believe that the helpers had any kind of a common view. The most thorough historical study finds that “there is evidence to suggest that there were many who were aware that they were not performing an extremely dangerous form of resistance work, and that this forms part of a nuanced understanding of why thousands of people dared to launch themselves into illegal aid work in those October days.”25
Historians base this assessment mainly on the case law, already beginning to accumulate in October 1943, which showed that even fishermen who were caught in the act escaped relatively unscathed. Some who helped organize the transports also subsequently concluded that “for the Jewish transports the boat was confiscated, but no more.” It was totally different if there were saboteurs or other resistance fighters among the refugees, and there is evidence that they may have impersonated Jews in order to get across. The experienced helpers distinguished between the transports of resistance fighters, for which there were severe penalties, and aiding the Jews, an activity that was punished much more lightly.
But there are also examples proving these generalities wrong. When a police officer fled on the night of October 9, his wife subsequently explained to a colleague that the reason was that he had helped Jewish refugees across and feared being shot by the Germans. His nervousness turned into panic after he heard that the German police had arrested twelve fishermen from Snekkersten, including the parish constable, for helping Jews to Sweden. The police officer who wrote up the report on his colleague’s fear of being shot coolly noted, “whether or not these fears were unfounded.” Still, the point actually lies in the very fear and uncertainty. In the rumors and half-truths. In the terror and the sleepless nights. In the effects of imagination and bad nerves. In the concern for family and future. Many had probably been clear-eyed enough eventually to arrive at a fairly realistic picture of the risk, and cold-blooded enough to wager that things would probably not go so wrong. But others did not have that overview or that fearlessness: They acted in spite of their uncertainty, and they overcame their own fears.
However, even if the risk was small, it did exist. The very same night that Adolph Meyer was finally able to rest safely in a real bed in his colleague’s house in Höganäs, shots were heard from the coastal police office in Tårbæk Harbor, north of Copenhagen. Two sergeants went down to see what had happened. They found a German security police officer there who explained that he and a colleague had gone to Tårbæk after receiving a message that there was a boat in the port with Jews ready to depart. The German police soon realized that Jews had been led aboard the fishing boat Matador. They fired some shots in the air and shouted: “It is the German police!” A firefight ensued with the Danish helpers, during which a young student, Claus Christian Heilesen, was fatally struck by a bullet.26
It is true that statistics were with the fugitives and their helpers. Only a few were caught and even fewer were killed. Even the Jews who were caught and deported from Denmark got exceptional treatment, and the vast majority survived. But statistics were of no help to Claus Heilesen at that moment in the port of Tårbæk. And no matter how rare the instances of death being the price of their activities, both the fugitives and their helpers had every reason to believe that they were risking their lives.
The Danish Exception
In 1996, Daniel Goldhagen published an extensive study of the general public’s knowledge of and involvement in the implementation of the Holocaust. Hitler’s Willing Excecutioners is a disturbing account because Goldhagen shows how many Germans were implicated in the nefarious project. But it is especially disturbing because it reveals chauvinism’s roots in Germany, and how appallingly widespread the thinking was that led to the mass extermination of fellow citizens. It shows how deeply the problem was rooted in the general population, who allowed themselves to put so much credence in the systematic description of the Jews as a threatening foreign body that they lost their basic compassion and empathy—the starting points for all peaceful coexistence. Goldhagen makes little mention of the few exceptions where the Holocaust failed—such as Bulgaria and Denmark. His focus is on the general picture and the underlying driving forces, and he concludes: “The destruction of the Jews, once it had become achievable, took priority even over safeguarding Nazism’s very existence.” Goldhagen points out that this priority was so high that the extermination continued to the bitter end—long after it was clear that the Third Reich would be defeated.27
The German historian Peter Longerich has a somewhat different interpretation. He agrees with many of Goldhagen’s observations, but gives different answers when it comes to what the German population knew—or avoided knowing. Davon haben wir Nichts gewusst! (“Of this we had no knowledge!”) is the apt title of Longerich’s 2006 study of the Nazi propaganda against the Jews and the public knowledge in Germany of the mass murder. In Longerich’s interpretation the Jewish extermination was an open secret. All the elements were commonly known, and anyone had the opportunity to recognize mass murder as the objective, and to know about the scope of the genocide. But that still does not mean that most Germans knew what was going on. Longerich believes that most closed their eyes and ears and shied away from seeing the scale of the criminality, and many protected themselves against the sense that insight entailed responsibility. The closer the Nazis came to defeat, the more their propaganda sought to promote a sense of collective guilt and responsibility. “Of this we had no knowledge” is an assertion that reveals more than it denies: It was clear that something was going on, and that everyone
suspected the worst. But Longerich’s point is that the majority wanted anything but the transformation of their fears into certain knowledge: “Between knowledge and ignorance, there was a broad gray area marked by rumors and half-truths, fantasy, forced and self-imposed limitations in communication. It lies between not wanting to know and not being able to understand.”28
The history of the Danish Jews in many ways differs from that of the Jews in Germany, and the account of their escape can shed only limited light on developments within the Third Reich. Still, one persistent question remains: Did special historical circumstances make it possible for Hitler and other leading Nazis to mislead an entire people so that eventually, with regard to the Jews and other minorities, they went astray and allowed the heinous oppression of their universal humanity? Or did these special historical circumstances rather in their own right create a brief rupture in civilization’s control of the individual, lifting the lid and allowing people to live out their inherent brutality, xenophobia, and selfishness? In other words, are human beings fundamentally good but weak? Or are we brutal by nature, checked and controlled only by civilization?
On two important points the story of the Danish Jews supports the first interpretation.
First there is the uplifting experience that the Danish population, whose political leaders soon realized the terrible consequences of the totalitarian mind-set, and who consistently refused to let it gain a foothold in national politics, spontaneously turned against the injustice exercised against their countrymen. The vast majority were completely alienated by the idea of separating Jews from the rest of society, seeing them as an explicit part of the “us,” as part of the nation. Leni Yahil put it that although the Danish people, its leaders and authorities, had placed solidarity with the Jews up front from the beginning of the occupation, “the rescue operation nevertheless came as a surprise—no one could have foreseen that in the hour of need the mass of the nation would give this identification the full force of action. No other example had ever been known”29
It is certainly true that among the Danes, more or less innocent prejudices against the Jews flourished, as some of Bergstrøm’s comments also reveal. But anti-Semitism had not been allowed to take root, and most of the countless Danes who in the crucial days in September and October 1943 helped fellow citizens, did not see these fugitives as Jews. They saw them as distressed countrymen, as families harmed by injustice and misery, as elderly people, women, and children who were experiencing what no one ought to experience; as neighbors, colleagues, and relatives, as countrymen who through no fault of their own were suddenly hit by a crime instigated by the occupying power. Therefore they perceived it as both a human and a national duty to take personal responsibility, to assist in the exodus—without regard to personal consequences. And when the number who helped was so massive, and those who pulled the other way were so few, it was a reification of this strong connection between compassionate instincts and national duty. Among the rescue’s greatest heroes were the political leaders who through a decade in which it would have been easy and popular to talk about “them” and “us” had the courage to stick with the fundamentals of democracy: that all citizens are subject to the same laws and entitled to claim the same justice.
The story also sheds light on the question of whether the executioners were seduced or freed from the shackles of civilization. On the occupying power’s side a number of prominent Nazis contributed to making the flight possible. Each of them had their own opportunistic reasons, and it is not difficult to show how any of them could see the advantage of appearing as one who had tried to mitigate the blow. Yet it is remarkable that both the leading German Nazis in Copenhagen and their superiors in Berlin shied away from a consistent implementation of the persecution of the Danish Jews.
We are not talking about a group of especially “soft” Nazis but of men who all bore their personal share of responsibility for monstrosities elsewhere in occupied Europe. The logic that softened the blow against the Danish Jews found its way up to the very top of the Nazi leadership, which even on issuing the order mentioned reservations to avoid a perceived public reaction. Why? What made the Danish Jews something special, and how was it possible for Best to persuade even Adolf Eichmann to spare them? What made Denmark an exception?
The answer is undeniable: The Danish Jews were protected by their compatriots’ consistent engagement. Hannah Arendt, in her 1964 book on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, wrote: “Politically and psychologically, the most interesting aspect of this incident is perhaps the role played by the German authorities in Denmark, their obvious sabotage of orders from Berlin. It is the only case we know of in which the Nazis met with open native resistance, and the result seems to have been that those exposed to it changed their minds. They themselves apparently no longer looked upon the extermination of a whole people as a matter of course. They had met resistance based on principle, and their ‘toughness’ had melted like butter in the sun, they had even been able to show a few timid beginnings of genuine courage.”30
Today, Hannah Arendt’s observations can be taken even further, as it is clear that the orders from Berlin were also softened in relation to the Jews in Denmark. It turns out that even leading Nazis in Berlin and Copenhagen needed the local understanding and support that would give the crime an aura of necessity and justice. Without this even the most hardened Nazis shrank back. Public participation was therefore not only a practical condition for implementation of the project; its support was also a prerequisite for the leading Nazis’ daring to set the atrocities in motion. Even these experienced Nazis with blood on their hands could not or would not go all the way alone. Even they depended on the understanding and support of the project, which was absolutely missing in Denmark.
Without it they faltered, and extermination of the Jews came to appear as a goal that had to be weighed against other, more practical considerations, particularly the further cooperation with Denmark and the maintenance of essential supplies from the country.
The leading Nazis’ complicity in making the flight possible suggests that they were led by practical and opportunistic considerations. In the Danish context, continued interest in cooperation with the “model protectorate” weighed more heavily than the desire to annihilate the Jews. The senior Nazis’ involvement was not driven by personal necessity. Hatred of the different was not some primordial force that was unleashed. Rather, it was a political convenience that could be used as needed, and in most occupied territories the Nazis followed their interest in pursuing this with disastrous consequences. But without a sounding board the strategy did not work. It could be countered by simple means—even by a country that was defenseless and occupied—by the persistent national rejection of the assumption that there was a “Jewish problem.”
Paul Hennig was the most centrally placed Dane in the preparation and implementation of the action against the Danish Jews. As a manager from 1941 in the Danish Nazi Party’s “Central Office for Race Policy,” he was an avid anti-Semite and was given the responsibility of separating Aryans from Jews—which he acknowledged was a difficult task in Denmark. In September 1943 Hennig was permanently employed by the Gestapo at Dagmarhus. In this position he took part in the raid on the Jewish community office to obtain its membership lists.
On the night of the action Hennig was responsible for the cross-examination of the detainees in order to single out half Jews who were not supposed to be deported. During the following days he was engaged in the efforts to track down and arrest those fleeing, both with the help of informers and through direct actions. Thus he and his colleague Fritz Renner were responsible for the October 9 shooting of the student Claus Christian Heilesen while he was in the process of helping a group of refugees board a boat in the port of Tårbæk.
After the liberation Paul Hennig succeeded in staying hidden until December 1945, when he was arrested in South Jutland. In 1947 he was sentenced to death for his part in the action against the Jews. After an appe
al to the Supreme Court, Hennig was sentenced to life imprisonment. He served until October 1956, when he was released.
Private collection
The idea is both edifying and terrifying. When it is so easy to arouse national chauvinism, it is not because we all ultimately fear and despise those who are different. It is because from time to time we allow political leaders to use suspicion of “the other” as their political tool.
EPILOGUE
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Allan Hannover ends his diary with a few notes on the everyday life of the family in Västerås. He tells how they move to the more practical hotel, and then in January 1944 on to their own apartment. On Octo- ber 15, less than two weeks after the crossing, his little sister, Mette, entered the local public school, and Allan started school four days later. The family liked to go to the movies and watch the American films that had been banned in occupied Copenhagen.
Allan’s grandfather, Adolph Meyer, traveled with his sister-in-law, Mary, to Jonsered, just outside Göteborg, where they were accommodated in Skogshem, a large summer home that belonged to his wealthy cousin. In the following months several of Meyer’s children and their families gathered there and stayed for the rest of the war. Adolph Meyer was licensed and worked as a physician for the many refugees in Göteborg.