How Denmark Saved Its Jews From the Nazis [View all]

[Beacool]

By Gerhard Spörl, SPIEGEL
November 3, 2013



Denmark was the only European country to save almost all of its Jewish residents from the Holocaust. After being tipped off about imminent roundups by prominent Nazis, resisters evacuated the country's 7,000 Jews to Sweden by boat. A new book examines this historical anomaly.

They left at night, thousands of Jewish families, setting out by car, bicycle, streetcar or train. They left the Danish cities they had long called home and fled to the countryside, which was unfamiliar to many of them. Along the way, they found shelter in the homes of friends or business partners, squatted in abandoned summer homes or spent the night with hospitable farmers. "We came across kind and good people, but they had no idea about what was happening at the time," writes Poul Hannover, one of the refugees, about those dark days in which humanity triumphed.

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Denmark in October 1943 was a small country with a big heart. It had been under Nazi occupation for three-and-a-half years. And although Denmark was too small to have defended itself militarily, it also refused to be subjugated by the Nazis. The Danes negotiated a privileged status that even enabled them to retain their own government. They assessed their options realistically, but they also set limits on how far they were willing to go to cooperate with the Germans.

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The Danes provided no assistance to the Nazis in their "Jewish campaign" in Denmark. They viewed the Jews as Danes and placed them under their protection, a story documented in "Countrymen," a new book by Danish author Bo Lidegaard. "The history of the rescue of the Danish Jews," writes Lidegaard, "is only a tiny part of the massive history of the Shoah. But it teaches us a lesson, because it is a story about the survival instinct, civil disobedience and the assistance provided by an entire people when, outraged and angry, it rebelled against the deportation of its fellow Danes."

http://abcnews.go.com/International/denmark-saved-jews-nazis/story?id=20750027

I had heard this story before, but it still moves me. It reminds me that in the depth of despair, when the darkness enfolding the world seemed to be at its worst, there was a ray of hope. The Danish did not bow to Nazi oppression and defended every single one of their Jewish citizens and refugees.

I have visited quite a few museums in various countries, but the Holocaust Museum in Washington affected me in a way that none of the others did. I am not Jewish, but the suffering of one people and the enormous cruelty and evil of another is something that the world should never forget, because to forget history is to repeat it.

This is a lesson that is as applicable today as it was in 1943. Never forget, and to quote Churchill, "Never, never, never give up."