by Bo Lidegaard
Poul Hannover continued his involvement in the businesses of ASEA and went all around Sweden. He was also active as a volunteer in the Danish Brigade, a military corps with volunteers from the Danish refugee community, established in Sweden to provide the Danish politicians with a nascent army. Hannover spent the last period up to the liberation with the brigade in Tingsrud. Poul returned to Denmark with the Danish Brigade; Inger and Mette soon followed, while Allan stayed until June 1945 and finished his middle-school exams in Sweden. On their return to Søholm Park the family found their house unharmed. Friends and neighbors had emptied it of valuables but maintained what was necessary, and according to Allan’s report, “the only visible sign that the Germans had been after us were marks on father’s old desk, where a bayonet had tried to open a drawer that did not exist.”
The Marcus family stayed with their friends for three months in Ljungsbro, where the children went to a Swedish school. In January 1944 they moved to Jonsered, where they could live with Adolph Meyer and other family members. Dorte and Palle entered the Danish school in Göteborg, while Gunnar Marcus found employment with the Oceanographic Institute. Like his brother-in-law he joined the Danish Brigade, and on May 5, 1945, he returned with the brigade to Denmark as a truck driver.
Kis and the children followed a month later, and the family moved back into their house, which had been rented out. Gunnar also reclaimed his rented business premises. The landlord had sold the stock and sent the proceeds to Sweden, but had kept the office space, from which Gunnar was able to resume his business.
Many years later both Palle and Dorte Marcus told me that for the rest of their lives their parents didn’t want to talk about the escape or about their time in Sweden. It was like a parenthesis, a sequence of events both they and their children lived with but rarely touched on. The diaries, completed during the first days in exile, were stored away and kept in a safe place—but the entire experience was not a subject of conversation within the family. The family’s close friendship with Erik and Else Nyegaard dwindled away in the years after the war, and the Marcus family never returned to the places and people they encountered in Sweden. Palle Marcus and his older sister remember little from the flight, but they—like Allan Hannover—have kept the records, which run like a red thread through this book.
The librarian of the Jewish community, Josef Fischer, was arrested on October 6 on the road between Helsingør and Gilleleje with his wife and daughters Edith and Harriet. The whole family was deported to Theresienstadt but returned home at war’s end. The third daughter, Ella Fischer, saved herself, reaching Sweden on October 8. She had no connections in Sweden but found a job in January 1944 when Bonnier’s publishing house employed her in their book club.1
The cashier of the Jewish community, Axel Hertz, who had asked the Gestapo by what right they requisitioned the membership list, arrived in Limhamn on a fishing boat from Copenhagen early in the morning of October 10.
After his arrival on the Swedish mainland Herbert Willie Levysohn was reunited with his mother and other close relatives, who all went on to Stockholm. He wrote his account there in the last days of October 1943. According to the Swedish immigration authorities Levysohn carried eight thousand Danish kroner in cash, which he supplemented in Stockholm with his monthly salary of two hundred kroner from employment at a warehouse. After the war he took over the family business, succeeding his father, who died in March 1944 in Theresienstadt.
Permanent Secretary Einar Cohn arrived in Sweden on October 13 and immediately proceeded to Stockholm, following his wife. He gave two Swedish references on his entry form: Permanent Secretary Dag Hammarskjöld and the governor of the National Bank of Sweden, Ivar Rooth. Hammarskjöld was later to become the second secretary-general of the United Nations.2
C. L. David reached Sweden safely and returned to Copenhagen after the war, where he resumed his business. In 1945 he donated his unique art collection—which among other things included one of the world’s finest assemblages of Islamic art—to the C. L. David Foundation and Collection. At his death in 1960 David bequeathed his summerhouse, Marienborg, to the Danish government. Marienborg has since served successive Danish prime ministers as their official residence.
Henrik Kauffmann remained in Washington until the end of the war as an independent envoy for “free Denmark.” His contact with James Wise of the World Jewish Congress in Washington later led to an agreement with Jewish organizations in the United States on a shared fund-raising drive that before the end of 1943 had reached fifty thousand dollars. At the same time the campaign helped to put Denmark, the Danish Jews—and Kauffmann himself—powerfully on the map with the American public. Thus the activities of the envoy for “free Denmark” succeeded in achieving his most important goal: making the American public aware that Denmark stood firmly on the side of the free world. By their successful escape the Danish Jews helped their country immensely in this regard. Nothing contributed more to the general impression in the United States that Denmark rejected Nazism than the fact that it rejected the persecution of its Jewish citizens. And nothing cemented this reputation more strongly than the fact that the escape was made possible not by the Danish government but by the Danish people.
Kauffmann was appointed a minister without portfolio in the liberation government, and he represented his country at the San Francisco conference in 1945 where the United Nations was created. Subsequently he returned to Washington, where he remained Denmark’s ambassador until his retirement in 1958.
Paul Kanstein left Denmark as he desired at the end of October 1943 to take up a position in northern Italy. He felt that what he had stood for—and taught his boss, Werner Best—had been undone by the state of emergency on August 29 and the action against the Jews. Rudolf Mildner had to leave the post of chief of the security police in Denmark in January 1944 after just three months of service. But it was not, as often interpreted, to punish him because of the failure of the action against the Jews. The reason was rather Mildner’s dislike of Himmler and Hitler’s requirement at the time to launch “counterterror” in Denmark. Mildner was not sensitive, but he was a good policeman, who thought that such counterterror would strengthen rather than weaken the Danish resistance. At the end of the war he was the deputy chief of the security police in Vienna. During the Nuremberg trials Mildner was a witness for the prosecution in the case against one of the organizers of the extermination of the Jews, Ernst Kaltenbrunner. Mildner was released from custody in 1949 and disappeared soon after escaping prosecution—probably to Argentina.3
Werner Best was sentenced to death in 1948 by the district court in Copenhagen. It did not help that Scavenius testified in his favor; in fact, it probably had the opposite effect. Police psychiatrists found Best highly intelligent and a psychopath to a minor or moderate degree. In prison Best wrote almost maniacally in his own defense. He felt very unfairly treated and portrayed himself as the rescuer of Denmark and the Danish Jews. Best claimed to have waged a war on two fronts: against armed resistance in Denmark and against other German authorities to fend off much tougher repression. Indeed, this self-image, which was the one Best fought hard to uphold, is widely reflected in the common perception of his role, not least in regard to the persecution of the Danish Jews. It seems as if this allowed Best to displace the real purpose of his presence in Denmark as part of the criminal Nazi executive. An almost whimpering appeal runs through his self-defense to take his moderate policy in Denmark for real and credit it to his personal effort—though at no time in the postwar period did he distance himself from the Nazism he was part of. Werner Best aspired to be respected as a “good Nazi”—and never seems to have realized the fundamental contradiction inherent in his claim.
In 1949 the Supreme Court acquitted him, on appeal, of having launched the action against the Jews, but sentenced him to twelve years’ imprisonment for his part in the murders of prominent Danes. In 1951 Best was pardoned and expelled from Denmark. In 1952 he settled in Essen as a legal cou
nsel and began to advise the old SS-Kameraden and the Hugo Stinnes Industrie und Handel GmbH. In 1969 he was charged as the principal and co-perpetrator of the murder of ten thousand men in Poland; however, he was then conditionally discharged on grounds of fragile health. Neither the main proceedings nor a later retrial was initiated, while his capacity to act in court was only established in April 1989. But Best died in June 1989, before his criminal past managed to catch up with him.4
G. F. Duckwitz remained after the war for a while as a trade counselor in Denmark, where he was hailed as the savior of the Danish Jews and as a much-needed “good German.” He got credit for warning of the impending action and for a marked lack of zeal in the ensuing manhunt—an image he actively sought to consolidate in his own accounts. But as a conservative German patriot and member of the Nazi Party, Duckwitz never distanced himself from Werner Best, and he kept defending his former boss. He was also known to share the contemporary Nazi stereotypes about Jews, at least up until the beginning of the war. Nevertheless, historical research generally accepts that Duckwitz did indeed play a key role, claiming he was driven by a personal conviction that the action was a crime and that he had the civil courage to stand against it.
Duckwitz had established contact with the organized German opposition, but this was never disclosed. In the 1950s he entered the Foreign Office of the Federal Republic and from 1955 to 1958 he was the first German ambassador to Denmark. From 1967 to 1970 he was state secretary under Foreign Minister Willy Brandt and in this capacity was deeply involved in the development of his Ostpolitik, which culminated with the signing of the Polish-German treaty in 1970. When Duckwitz died in 1973, Chancellor Brandt said to Annemarie Duckwitz that her late husband “had secured for himself a lasting place in our memory by his humanity, his integrity and his friendly determination.”5
General Hanneken was discharged in January 1945 from his command of the Wehrmacht in Denmark, accused of corruption. It is unclear, though possible, that the accusations were planted by the SS as part of a power struggle. After the war he went to trial for war crimes in Denmark and in 1948 was sentenced to eight years in prison in district court. The following year, however, he was acquitted by the Supreme Court and deported to the Federal Republic, where he remained until his retirement, serving as an economic adviser to German industrial companies. He died in 1981 at the age of ninety-one.
Immanuel Talleruphuus, who was the Marcus and Hannover families’ first contact in Falster, was an underwriter from Copenhagen. He survived the war and died in 1968, at the age of sixty-five.
Sven Otto Nielsen, the young resistance fighter who helped the Hannover and Marcus families in Grønsund, but who would not go to Sweden because he thought there was still work to be done, involved himself a few weeks later in the resistance group Holger Danske, where he became a leading member, known as “John.” It is conceivable that it was meeting with Erik Nyegaard in Grønsund that drew him into the organized resistance. In civilian life he was a teacher at the Skovshoved elementary school north of Copenhagen. He participated in a series of daring sabotage actions. On December 9, 1943, he and a friend were stabbed by a female traitor. During the escape from the Gestapo he was badly wounded, captured, and subjected to brutal interrogation at Dagmarhus, but he revealed nothing. He was later transferred to the Vestre Prison, where he was incarcerated for several months without medical treatment for his injuries. In April 1944 he was sentenced to death by a German court-martial, and on April 27 he was executed in Ryvangen.
Erik Nyegaard was in Denmark throughout the rest of the occupation and maintained his relationship with Holger Danske, though it is unclear what role he played. His villa on the Strandvej, where the Marcus family spent their first nights as refugees, was blown up in October 1944 by the Germans after the renowned freedom fighter Bent Faurschou-Hviid, known as “the Flame,” was surrounded there and committed suicide with a vial of cyanide.
Erik Scavenius exercised no influence on Danish politics after August 29, 1943. His last action in government service was on May 5, 1945, immediately after the German capitulation, and while there still was shooting in the streets, when he set off on foot toward Amalienborg Palace to receive his formal dismissal from King Christian. He knew that responsibility for the cooperation that the politicians had wanted, which was now deeply resented, would be placed on his shoulders, and that many of the armed resistance fighters who were in the process of consolidating their positions in Copenhagen considered him a traitor. That is not how he perceived his role, and shortly after the war he published a book in which without equivocation he accounted for “the policy of negotiating during the occupation.” It was, in Scavenius’s own words, a policy that was “determined by the difficulties of the moment. The goal was to avoid disaster, and the policy would be the same regardless of who you thought would win.… My policy was justified until the day Germany was finished.”
Throughout his long retirement Scavenius maintained personal contact with Werner Best, who never tried to hide his personal admiration for the Danish statesman, whom he regarded almost as a father.
Scavenius pursued realpolitik to its extremes, and in his vision Denmark’s perpetual closeness to Germany dominated. Here, no room was left for more lofty considerations—not even those most urgently warranted. At the same time, he drew a clear line in regard to concessions that could and should not be made, and it is impossible not to give him part of the credit for the survival of the Danish Jews. Scavenius died in 1962 at the age of eighty-five without having been forgiven by his people and without overcoming his bitterness at not being recognized for having saved his country twice at critical junctures during the two world wars.6
Nils Svenningsen retained his position as head of the permanent secretaries right through to the liberation of Denmark, and he remained in office under the liberation government in 1945, although he was a red flag to the resistance movement. Later that year he was sent on a kind of retreat as minister to Stockholm, where he had been born. Few expected to see more of him in the forefront of Danish diplomacy. However, they underestimated the assertive official, who in 1951 made a spectacular comeback as director of the Danish Foreign Service, a post he retained for an additional ten years.
Svenningsen enjoyed a long retirement, during which he vigorously defended the policy of negotiating—in tandem with his master and colleague, Erik Scavenius. He remained an inveterate critic of the armed resistance and those who had chosen what he until his death in 1985 considered “the easy solutions.”
Both Erik Scavenius and Nils Svenningsen were caught in what the American diplomat George Kennan during his posting in 1940 to occupied Prague described as “one of the oldest and most sticky humanistic dilemmas” consisting of the choice between “a limited cooperation with evil in order to alleviate ultimately its consequences” as opposed to “an uncompromising, heroic, but suicidal fight against it.” Kennan saw that everyone who “participated one way or another would end up being impaled on the horns of this dilemma.” Kennan, of course, was referring to Czechoslovakia after Munich—but his observation is equally true for Denmark during the German occupation.7
King Christian X lived to regain full constitutional powers at the liberation on May 5, 1945, and to install a liberation government supported by both the armed resistance and the old politicians. The king was physically weak but more popular than ever. He died two years later in April 1947, at the age of seventy-six.
The king had managed at one and the same time to fully back the policy of cooperation with the Germans while standing as a popular symbol of Denmark’s dream of freedom and the will to resist. The king did not distance himself from Scavenius or his policies even though the two men vehemently disagreed at many places along the way. King Christian did not leave notes from their last conversation when Scavenius, as acting prime minister, arrived at Amalienborg on liberation day to be dismissed. According to Scavenius the king remarked: “Our achievement after all was that Copenhagen was n
ot bombed, and that the country was not destroyed.” That short phrase says it all. The “after all” refers to the lack of struggle and therefore to lost honor. But it also serves to highlight the crucial point that democracy had passed its toughest test.
The escape of the Danish Jews happened because they acted on their own initiative when warned of the impending threat against them. But how did they even get the opportunity? The hesitation of the Nazi leadership in Berlin and of their officials in Denmark was caused primarily by the expectation of the Danish reaction and its negative ramifications for both the “model protectorate” and the continued shipment of Danish provisions to Germany. What made the escape possible, therefore, before anything else, was the fact that Danish society as a whole had so quickly, so consistently, and with such determination turned against the very idea underpinning the persecution of their fellow countrymen. This attitude was anchored in the preceding ten years of antitotalitarian Danish politics. The miraculous escape of the Danish Jews cannot be understood outside that political context.
The way in which the civilian population assisted both the Danish and stateless Jews in October 1943 remains without precedent or parallel. Indeed, two years before, in the summer of 1941, only a few had risen up to defend the many arrested Communists. Societal inclusiveness did not extend to those who were perceived to be hostile to democracy. Conversely, the escape of the Danish Jews was due to the penetration deep into the population of the idea that everyone who declared themselves part of democracy belonged to the national community. Because of this a great majority of Danes knew that the intimidation of one individual is a threat to the entire society. In October 1943 they acted upon that insight.