Almost the entire Jewish community of Denmark survived the war. Of around 7,800 Danish Jews in 1943, around 7,200 were ferried to safety in neutral Sweden over the course of three weeks in October 1943, in fishing boats, in defiance of the German occupation forces. The Danish rescue is the cleanest example in the Holocaust of an entire national community organising the protection of its Jewish citizens, with the active cooperation of the police, the church, the king, and ordinary Danes who passed the word along the network. Around 470 Danish Jews who did not get out were deported to Theresienstadt. Most of those survived too, partly because the Danish government and Red Cross continued to monitor them throughout their imprisonment. The total Danish Jewish death toll was around 100 people. The figure is, by the standards of every other occupied country, astonishingly low.
The community before the war
Danish Jewry was small, old and integrated. The community traced itself to Sephardic merchants who had settled in Copenhagen in the seventeenth century. By 1939 it numbered around 6,500 native Danish Jews, plus around 1,500 refugees who had arrived from Germany and Czechoslovakia in the late 1930s. The community was overwhelmingly urban, concentrated in Copenhagen, and largely secular. It supplied senior figures to Danish public life: the physicist Niels Bohr (whose mother was Jewish), several senior politicians, businessmen and academics. Danish antisemitism existed but was politically marginal.
The German occupation
Germany invaded Denmark on 9 April 1940 in an operation completed in a few hours. The Danish government surrendered to spare the country a destructive war. The Germans permitted the Danish king Christian X, the Danish parliament, and the Danish government to continue functioning under a kind of permitted autonomy that lasted until August 1943. During this period the Danish authorities consistently refused to apply anti-Jewish measures. The Germans did not push the issue. Denmark was treated as a model occupied state, and the Reich preferred to keep it cooperative.
This relatively benign arrangement broke down in August 1943. Strikes and sabotage actions across Denmark led the Germans to declare martial law, dissolve the Danish government and parliament, and take direct control. Within weeks the German plenipotentiary, Werner Best, signalled to Berlin that the time had come to deport the Danish Jews. The deportation was scheduled for the night of 1 to 2 October 1943, the eve of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, when most Danish Jews would be gathered at home or at synagogue.
The warning
Werner Best himself, or someone close to him, leaked the date to the German shipping attache Georg Duckwitz on around 28 September. Duckwitz, who had Danish friends and Jewish friends, passed the warning to the Danish Social Democratic leadership. The Danish leadership passed it to the Danish Jewish community through the chief rabbi, Marcus Melchior, on 29 September. Melchior announced the warning at the Copenhagen Great Synagogue on the morning of the 29th: the deportation was coming, the Jews of Copenhagen should leave their homes immediately, and the synagogue should not be used during the holy days.
The crossing
What followed was an unplanned, decentralised operation by ordinary Danes. Jewish families were sheltered in private homes, in hospitals, in the homes of professional acquaintances, in churches. The hospitals registered Jewish patients under fictitious diagnoses. Boarding schools, summer hostels and rural farmhouses were used as transit points. The Jewish refugees were then moved over the course of two weeks to coastal towns on the Oresund, particularly Gilleleje, Helsingor, Snekkersten, and Dragor, where Danish fishermen ferried them across the strait to neutral Sweden. The crossings ran day and night for three weeks. The fee charged by the fishermen varied: some refused payment; some charged commercial rates that the Danish resistance helped Jewish families afford.
The Swedish government had announced on 2 October that it would accept any Jewish refugees who reached Swedish soil. Around 7,200 Jews crossed safely. Some were caught at the embarkation points by the German police; about 470 of these were deported to Theresienstadt, where they were held in conditions slightly less lethal than the rest of the camp population because of continued Danish diplomatic interest. Around 50 of those died there. The remainder, around 420, returned to Denmark in April and May 1945 in the white buses operation organised by the Swedish Count Folke Bernadotte.
The return
The Danish Jews who came back from Sweden in May 1945 found their homes mostly intact. Their non-Jewish neighbours had, in many cases, watered the plants, fed the cats, paid the rent, and kept the premises ready for the family’s return. The synagogue had been protected by the Danish government and the Lutheran church. The pattern of post-war material recovery was unique in occupied Europe.
Why Denmark
The Danish rescue was the result of several factors lining up. A small Jewish community well integrated into Danish life. A geography that placed neutral Sweden a few miles across a sea strait. A coastal fishing infrastructure that could be quickly improvised into transport. A national resistance leadership willing to act decisively. A leak from inside the German administration that gave the warning in time. A Lutheran church that read protest letters from every pulpit on 3 October. A king who reportedly told a German official, on being asked when the Danes would deal with their Jewish problem, that there was no Jewish problem in Denmark.
Each of these elements existed in some form in other occupied countries. None of them existed all together in any other. The Danish case is sometimes invoked as proof that more could have been done elsewhere; it is also, to be fair to other countries, the case where the most things went right at once. The Danish rescue stands. It is one of the few episodes of the Holocaust that is genuinely uplifting to read about.
See also
Sources
- Leni Yahil, The Rescue of Danish Jewry: Test of a Democracy, Jewish Publication Society, 1969
- Bo Lidegaard, Countrymen: The Untold Story of How Denmark’s Jews Escaped the Nazis, Knopf, 2013
- Emmy Werner, A Conspiracy of Decency: The Rescue of the Danish Jews During World War II, Westview, 2002
- USHMM: Denmark