Auschwitz (36 page)

“We didn't have any discrimination whatsoever,” says Knud Dyby,
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a Danish policeman at the time. “The Jews were absolutely assimilated. They had their businesses and their houses like everyone else. I'm sure in Denmark there was a lot of intermarriage. One of my family members married a Jewish showgirl.” Even those Jews who chose actively to practice their religion under the Nazi occupation faced little problem. Bent Melchior,
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then a schoolboy, was initially concerned when the Germans arrived since his father, a rabbi, had been outspoken against the Nazis. But nothing untoward happened: “We went to school, the synagogue, cultural activities—it all continued to function.”

One exceptional story, recalled by Bent Melchior, illustrates the extent to which tolerance was embedded in Danish society. His father wrote a short book of commentaries to the five books of Moses and, because the King of Denmark was the focus of patriotism for all Danes, he decided to have one copy of the book specially bound as a gift for his monarch. On New Year's Eve 1941, Bent's elder sister was given the task of delivering the book to the palace in Copenhagen. As she approached the gates, by coincidence the Queen walked out, saw her and asked, “Is this for my husband?” His sister said, “Yes, Your Grace,” and the Queen took the book. That night King Christian X of Denmark sat up and wrote a personal thank-you note to Bent's father, sending greetings to him and to the Jewish community. “It [the letter] arrived on 1 January 1942,” says Bent Melchior, “and it made a very great impression on the whole community—how he answered a little rabbi who sends him a book.”

It seems incredible, in the context of the measures of anti-Semitic persecution the Nazis inflicted on the rest of Europe, that the Germans permitted such tolerance to exist. But they faced a delicate situation in
Denmark. In the first place, the Nazis wanted to ensure that food supplies from that country to Germany were unaffected. They also recognized the propaganda value in this “ideal” occupation of a fellow “Aryan” state, and knew the added benefit that came from a peaceful Denmark that required few Germans soldiers to be stationed on Danish soil.

This attitude was to change, however, over the summer and autumn of 1943. In the wake of the defeat at Stalingrad and the retreat of the German army, there were a number of acts of resistance in Denmark culminating in a series of strikes. The Germans insisted that repressive measures must be introduced to counter such actions, but the Danish authorities refused to do so. On August 29, therefore, the Germans assumed power in Denmark.

The German plenipotentiary in Denmark, Dr. Werner Best, now faced a dilemma—what should be done with the Danish Jews? Little in Best's background suggested he was likely to take a sympathetic line. Trained as a lawyer, he had joined the Nazi party in 1930 and the SS the following year. He had been legal adviser to the Gestapo and worked directly for Reinhard Heydrich. While at the Reich Security main office, Best was complicit in the murder of Polish intellectuals and he had then worked in France, directly involved in the oppression of French Jews. Yet, now this committed Nazi was prepared to do something completely out of character—through intermediaries, he was about to warn the Danish Jews of their impending arrest.

The roundup was planned for the night and early morning of October 1–2, 1943. But, just days before, Best had a meeting with the German naval attaché, Georg Duckwitz, and informed him about the forthcoming raids. Best did this knowing that it was almost certain that Duckwitz, who had known sympathy with the Danes, would leak the information to Danish politicians, who would in turn warn leading members of the Jewish community. This chain of causation duly occurred.

“It was on a Tuesday night [September 28],” says Bent Melchior, “that a woman came to our apartment, asked to speak to my father and said that this coming Friday night the action would take place.” Next morning, because it was a Jewish holiday, there were more people in the synagogue than usual when Bent's father rose to speak.

The exodus began later that day, September 29, and Rudy Bier
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and his family were part of it. They traveled about fifteen kilometers out of Copenhagen to stay with some business friends of Rudy's father. “They were a very nice family with three daughters, a bit older than us. They lived in a villa and there was a garden, which we didn't have because we lived in a flat. They took extremely good care of us.”

As the Bier family settled into their new home outside Copenhagen, the Danish police learned of the impending deportations. “I was at the police station when I heard the news,” says Knud Dyby, “and a police comrade of mine said he had been contacted by a Jewish neighbor of his, a merchant by the name of Jacobson. He and his family were very, very nervous and needed help.” It is remarkable, of course, given the previous actions of police in other Nazi-occupied countries such as France and Slovakia, that the immediate reaction of Dyby and his colleagues was to offer assistance to the Danish Jews. In this case Dyby offered to help the Jacobsons himself and organized their escape across the narrow strait between Denmark and neutral Sweden.

Once the Jewish families were concealed, Knud Dyby went out in search of fishermen prepared to take the risk and carry them through the night across the strait, “I would tell the fishermen how many I had, and we would have to beg and borrow enough money to pay them—as much as we could
to get everyone on board.” It was a journey fraught with difficulties. Dyby says,

It was not just the Danish police who helped the Jews escape; many members of other institutions made their contribution, from the Danish coastguard who looked the other way when countless small boats left the harbors at night to the Danish clergy who helped support the fleeing Jews. A statement from the bishop of Copenhagen registering their forthright position was read in Danish churches on October 3.

Meanwhile, Rudy Bier's family felt that it was no longer safe to continue living with friends in the country, and it too began the journey to Sweden:

The Biers were driven on past Copenhagen, forty kilometers south to the point at which Sweden is farthest from Denmark. This was thought by their protectors to be the safest place to make the crossing. Here two ships, each capable of taking 200 passengers, waited just off the coast. The Biers were rowed out to one of the ships and began their voyage at about eleven o'clock
at night: “We were on deck,” recalls Rudy, “and my smallest brothers and sisters were given some light medication [so as] not to cry and they slept their way over the crossing.” After several uneventful hours they reached Sweden.

The Swedes could scarcely have been more helpful. They sent out lighted boats to ensure that the refugees made it safely to shore, having previously announced on the radio on October 2, that they would welcome all incoming Danish Jews.

Rudy Bier's experience was not unusual, and the vast majority of Danish Jews successfully fled to Sweden. During the roundup on the night of October 1, the Germans caught just 284
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Jews, and in the following weeks they managed to catch fewer than 200 of those escaping to Sweden. Out of a Danish Jewish population of 8,000, fewer than 500 were eventually arrested and deported. Significantly, those caught by the Germans were sent not to Auschwitz but to the ghetto of Theresienstadt in Czechoslovakia where, although they endured a life of privation, they did not face selection and systematic murder. More than four out of five of the deported Danish Jews returned home at the end of the war.

The story of the rescue of the Danish Jews is, of course, an immensely cheering one amidst the catalogue of betrayal and vindictiveness that pervades many of the other stories of deportation. But the ambiguous attitude of the Germans to the arrest and deportation of the Danish Jews shows that, while this is certainly an admirable story, it is not a simplistic one. At the heart of its complexity lies the curious attitude of Werner Best, for not only did he warn the Danish Jews through an intermediary, he presided over a distinctly lackluster attempt to catch them.

There were pockets of vigorous work done by the German security forces—most infamously the efforts by Hans Juhl (“Gestapo Juhl”) to arrest
the Jews in Elsinore—but for the most part the Germans do not seem to have been particularly diligent. Says Rudy Bier,

Yet not one of the escaping boats was stopped by German naval patrols.

A clue as to why Werner Best acted as he did is given by a report he sent to Berlin on October 5: “As the objective goal of the Judenaktion in Denmark was the de-judaization of the country, and not a successful headhunt, it must be concluded that the Judenaktion has reached its goal.”
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Thus, Best claims credit for making Denmark “Jew-free” by methods that minimized disruption to the overall Nazi occupation. That the Jews had fled to safety rather than been captured also offered one practical benefit to him—it made it more likely that the Danish authorities would subsequently be cooperative.

There is another area in which recent scholarship challenges the conventional history of the Danish Jews—the question of the “altruism” of those involved in the rescue. It is clear, for example, that many of the first Jews who fled had to pay considerable sums to the fishermen. “Unfortunately some of the refugees would flash some money to get on the first boat they could,” says Knud Dyby, “and the fishermen were actually a rather poor bunch of people—they had made very little money. So I'm sure somebody welcomed an extra income.” But was the position of the Danish fishermen so very unreasonable? They were being asked to risk their livelihood—for all they knew, their lives—in helping the Jews escape. Was it therefore wrong for them to charge what they could? Especially since, during the first nights of the operation, there was no guarantee that German patrol boats were not waiting offshore to intercept them. Indeed, seen from that perspective, the most reprehensible way for the Danish fishermen to behave would have been to refuse to take the risk of crossing at whatever price. Significantly, there is not one case of Danish Jews being left behind because they could not pay.

The Danes, of course, were helped in their rescue action by a number of factors outside their control. Geography clearly played a part—unlike the Netherlands or Belgium, there was a neutral country nearby. The relatively lax occupation of Denmark up to the summer of 1943 also had meant that key institutions like the police and coast guard were relatively free from Nazi control. Then there was the timing of the Nazi attack on the Danish Jews. As noted, it was obvious by the autumn of 1943 that the Germans were losing the war and the Danes knew that to help the Jews would be to help the aims of the winning side. Another important factor is that the Nazi occupation of Denmark was never as violent as that of, for example, Poland, and we cannot know how the Danish population would have acted had the persecution of the Danish Jews—and reprisals for helping them—been similarly as brutal.

Nor can we take from this story the notion that the Danes are somehow uniquely caring as a people, not least because Denmark was reticent to accept large numbers of Jewish refugees from Germany during the 1930s. But what those who seek to relativize the Danish experience sometimes forget is that, even when it looked as if the Germans were going to win the war, during 1940 and 1941, the Danes still held steadfast to their moral principles and did not persecute the Jews—an action that would surely have pleased their Nazi masters.