How Denmark’s Jews escaped the Nazis

Of all the statistics generated by the Holocaust, perhaps some of the most disturbing in the questions they give rise to are the following. Of the Jews in Hungary, the Netherlands, Greece, Latvia and Poland, between 70 and 90 per cent died, while the corresponding figures for Estonia, Belgium Norway and Romania were between 40 and 50. In France and Italy somewhere around 20 per cent perished. In both Bulgaria and Denmark, however, just one.

Bo Lidegaard’s Countrymen is the story of how Denmark to a great extent saved its  Jewish population from the labour and extermination camps, but it inevitably raises issues of equal relevance to the rest of Europe. The author is careful to underline the cultural and racial differences that made each country’s experience of Nazi occupation different, and yet at the end of his lucid, compelling and scrupulously fair book nothing rings more true than his assertion that there was nothing ‘inevitable’ in occupied Europe’s collaboration in the Holocaust and that Denmark was the stirring proof of that.

There had been nothing heroic about Denmark’s response to German aggression in the early years of the war; but when the crunch came late in 1943 and plans were activated for the deportation of its Jewish population, a whole country woke to its humanitarian, civic and democratic collective duty. For three years of virtually peaceful  ‘co-operation’ the Danish authorities had followed an uneasy path between pragmatic self-interest and principle; but there had always been one line that they were never prepared to cross. King Christian X noted in his diary after a conversation with his prime minister in September 1940:

I interjected that after the Germans’ past performance one might expect that they would demand the expulsion of Jews who were present, and that such a  requirement would be repugnant to me … I considered our own Jews to be Danish citizens, and the Germans could not touch them.