Why Did Denmark Jews Survive While Dutch Jews Died in the Holocaust?

Simon Kuper, in the London Financial Times Weekend Magazine (1-22-05):

[Two responses to the Nazis.]

... Tens of thousands of Danes - politicians, pastors, fishermen, ambulance drivers - helped smuggle 7,300 of the country's 7,800 Jews into Sweden. Many more helped by not betraying the operation. Only 116 Danish Jews, or 1.5 per cent of the total, died in the Holocaust.

The other extreme in western Europe was the Netherlands. More than 100,000 Dutch Jews - three-quarters of the total - were massacred. This was nearly twice the proportion killed in Belgium, where Jews had far more chance of finding hiding places, and three times as high as in France. Only in Poland were proportionately more Jews murdered. The Dutch had a reputation for wartime heroism, even - until recently - among themselves. But they owe it chiefly to the hiding of Anne Frank....

In the spring of 1940, Denmark and the Netherlands looked alike: two small democracies, with negligible armies, both overrun almost instantly by the German army. Neither had much history of anti- Semitism. Both were quiet places: it had been decades since people in either country had shot at humans. Both nations initially sought to keep the peace under the Nazis. Hitler praised Denmark as a "model protectorate". In both countries, most gentiles experienced a relatively placid war. Yet, on the Jewish question, the Danes and Dutch took opposing positions from the start of their occupations.

The Danish historian Therkel Straede writes that the German occupation of Denmark "passed off more mildly than in any other country". Germany had recognised it as a "sovereign state". Until 1943 the Danes ran their own domestic affairs, even holding elections. Every day, King Christian X rode his horse through Copenhagen, greeting his subjects as he went, living proof that the Danish establishment continued. Furthermore, the Danes were more homogeneous than the Dutch. You could see it in their paucity of surnames: Hansen, Petersen, Jensen and a few others covered most of the population. The German immigrants who had arrived the previous century, and the few Jews, had integrated to the point of invisibility. Nor did Denmark have great regional divides.

The crucial shared heritage, though, was that almost everyone belonged to the Danish Lutheran church. Not only were there just 7,800 Jews in Denmark, there were hardly any Catholics either, nor many non-Lutheran Protestants. In 1940, although the percentage of churchgoers was perhaps the lowest in Europe, most Danes still used the church for baptisms, weddings and funerals. Pastors remained moral authorities, each year inspecting their local schools....

In the autumn of 1940, the pipe-smoking theologian Hal Koch gave a series of lectures on Grundtvig to packed halls around Denmark. Koch's audiences understood that he was not simply talking about theology. He emphasised "the need for the entire nation to combine politicisation, individual and collective responsibility, knowledge of all facts, and negotiations with the Nazi, as long as that was possible". Danes must act as a group, Koch said. A year later, he moderated a public debate on the "Jewish question", itself an astonishing fact, in which he called on Danes to reject any suggestion of discrimination. Other churchmen took a similar line.

Though the Danes collaborated with Hitler on most matters, they always refused to take any measures against Jews. The myth that King Christian X wore a Jewish star to show his solidarity is false, because the star was never imposed in Denmark....

In August 1943, after a wave of Danish strikes and acts of sabotage, the Germans declared martial law. In September, Germany's Reich plenipotentiary, Werner Best, decided to deport the Danish Jews. His plans were leaked to Danish politicians. It is now believed that Best himself instigated the leak, probably because he thought that deportation would make his rule in Denmark untenable. On the morning of September 29, the day before the Jewish New Year, Denmark's chief rabbi, Marcus Melchior, alerted his congregation: "You must leave immediately, warn all your friends and relatives and go into hiding."

On the night of October 1, when German special police units (the Danish police refused to help) knocked on Jewish doors, they found almost nobody home....

The Danes protected the Jews because they considered them part of the homogeneous Danish collective. Bent Melchior, son of the wartime chief rabbi, told me: "This was the result of a development of over 200 years. We had become part of forming this society." Or as Uffe Ostergard, director of Denmark's Holocaust and Genocide Studies Centre, says: "The Jews were rescued not because they were Jews but because they were not seen as Jews."

Denmark had a haven just across the sea, and the Netherlands didn't. However, the Dutch as a group - as opposed to a few thousand isolated individuals and cells - never even tried to protect the Jews. In the Netherlands, some companies sacked their Jews without waiting for the Germans to tell them to. AVRO, a leading radio broadcaster, did so on May 21 1940, six days after the capitulation. Anti-Semitism lacks explanatory force here: before 1940, there had been no discernible Dutch impetus for measures against Jews....

The Dutch for decades propagated a false myth of having saved the Jews. The Danes, who really did save their Jews, rarely talk about it. In part, this is precisely because the Holocaust didn't hit Denmark. Here there was no rupture. This struck me in Bent Melchior's comfortable bourgeois living room. On his walls were photographs of children and grandchildren, Jewish art, and a copy of a letter of support from Christian X to his father. There is no trauma to relive as in the Netherlands.

In the 1990s, when Danish historians finally turned to the rescue of the Jews, they debunked the heroism. For instance, they emphasise the large sums charged by fishermen to ferry Jews, even though most of the rescuers demanded nothing, and others contributed their own money. The historians note that Danes who helped Jews weren't sentenced to death, as happened in the Netherlands, but the rescuers didn't know that in advance. Every Dane I spoke to about the rescue added some caveat apparently intended to diminish it.

I asked Straede, the historian, why this was. He said: "There is a consensus to feel unease about it, because whenever you are confronted with it, it is always because some American Jews bring it forward to you with ridiculous ideas of heroism, a simplified view of history that the good guys are fighting the bad guys, and so on. We know that our motives are more tainted."