Germany, Denmark and the Holocaust: Different Histories, Different Lessons

In recent years, interest in the Holocaust has dramatically increased in the American society, among men and women of all religious faiths and backgrounds.

In his recent book, The Holocaust In American Life, Professor Peter Novick, a University of Chicago historian, notes that for two full decades after World War II, the Holocaust was ignored in America by Jews and non-Jews alike. Today, however, it has become a pervasive presence, filling book shelves and movie and t.v. screens, even mandated by law as a subject for study in public schools.

Dr. Novick argues that in recent decades the Holocaust "has moved from the margins to the center of how American Jews understand themselves and how they represent themselves to others."

There are many individuals and groups who seek to learn "lessons" from the Holocaust. Dr. Novick is critical of those who abuse the Holocaust for their own narrow purposes. He laments the fact that many American Jews have learned to embrace and perhaps even to exploit their historical persecution.

Importance of Holocaust

Among the findings in the American Jewish Committee’s 1999 survey of American Jewish opinion, it was discovered that 98 percent of respondents said "remembering the Holocaust" was "important" to their identity, while only 15 percent said the same of religious observance.

Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, humanities professor at New York University, said that he "deplored" the survey results. Pamela Nadell, director of the Jewish Studies Program at American University, said of the stress on the Holocaust that, "I don’t think it’s healthy. Jews can’t hang their identity on that forever."

One "lesson" which seems to have been learned from the Holocaust is that anti-Semitism is endemic to the Western world and that, as a result, Jews need a country of their own. This, of course, is the essential insight of Zionism and goes back to a period even before the Holocaust.

In 1894, Theodor Herzl, the founder of political Zionism, was a journalist based in Paris representing a liberal Vienna newspaper. He had little interest in religion and associated himself with the literary and cultural groups of his time. He was far more concerned with general than Jewish matters.

Dreyfus Case

Captain Alfred Dreyfus, an Alsatian Jew attached to the French general staff, was arrested when it was discovered that military secrets were being sold to the German government. Accused of the crime, Dreyfus was condemned by a court martial for high treason and sentenced to life imprisonment. The proceedings were obviously prejudiced and anti-Semitism was a key element. Herzl felt the matter keenly and came to the conclusion that if France, one of the most advanced nations of the modern world, could do this to a Jew, the Jew was not at home anywhere but in his own land. He felt that there was no hope for Jews in the modern world, that anti-Semitism was inevitable and growing and that the only salvation was a Jewish homeland. He dedicated the rest of his life to this Zionist ideal.

Yet the Dreyfus case was far more complex than Herzl’s emotional response could encompass. In his book, Not By Power, Rabbi Allan Tarshish draws a far different conclusion: "An impartial investigation revealed that the culprit was really a Major Esterhazy, part of the clique of the French officer group which wanted to keep the stigma away from their group. This clique was also opposed to the French Republic, favoring a monarchy, and was anxious to fasten guilt on someone identified with the Republic, a Jew who had been granted equal rights by the French Revolution. And so it was Capt. Dreyfus who was singled out...Clemenceau, Anatole France, Emile Zola and other great leaders of France attacked the conviction of Dreyfus and sought a new trial. The whole matter became a ‘cause celebre’ of France and the entire modern world of the time."

In the end, Dreyfus was pardoned by the President of France and a year later the Court of Cassation quashed the verdict and pronounced him innocent. Dreyfus remained a fervent French patriot to his death. Rabbi Tarshish notes that, "Herzl could have come to an opposite conclusion from the same facts as others did, including Captain Dreyfus himself. It was of course true that Dreyfus was wrongly condemned, but it was also true that he was released and acquitted by the united forces of progress and decency....So the Dreyfus case was in reality a victory for the forces of democracy and enlightenment for Dreyfus was finally vindicated."

Just as Herzl saw in the Dreyfus case a reason to lose hope in liberal democracy and for the integration of Jews into European society, so many found in the Holocaust exactly the same lesson, concluding that a separate Jewish state was the only appropriate response.

Posthumous Victory For Hitler

In his book A Partisan History of Judaism, Rabbi Elmer Berger expresses the view that many Jews tended to give Hitler a posthumous victory by accepting the anti-Semitic idea that it was foolish to believe in Emancipation and in all of the liberal ideas for Jews which the 19th century Jewish reformers believed in so deeply. He writes: "Germany, they argued, ‘was one of the most enlightened nations in the world and look what happened to Jews there.’ And the shattering impact of the tragedy mounted as Hitler paralyzed and stultified other Jews. They did not stop to think that Germany was not really such a liberal state; that it had been unable to sustain a democratic form of government for anyone—not only Jews—at a time of crisis. They did not stop to realize that the terror which Hitler had unleashed has engulfed practically the entire world. They did not ask into the antecedents of those ‘Jewish’ segregationalists who used the world tragedy to advance a political national idea that had existed long before the world ever heard of Hitler...Rather they accepted Hitler’s decree of separatism and tried to make of it a virtue and to use it as political capital to win a ‘Jewish’ state."

The Holocaust is, in fact, a far more complex event in history. How a totalitarian Nazi regime acted is one part of the story. How others acted and reacted is another. Thus, students of the Holocaust have for decades asked themselves why some nations turned their Jews over to the Nazis while others risked their lives to save them.

This is a difficult question which may best be answered only after probing what might be called the national psyche of the nations in question. To arrive at any conclusions regarding national psyche, one must probe not only how Jews were treated under pressure from the Third Reich but also in the centuries that preceded the Nazi takeover of Germany.

Denmark And Germany

Perhaps the most interesting contrast for the study of national psyche is that provided by tiny Denmark and powerful Germany regarding the treatment accorded by these nations to the Jews living within their borders. The Danes have been heralded for their bravery in transporting 8,000 Jews to neutral Sweden in October 1943 under the nose of a Nazi occupation force. The Germans have been castigated for presenting virtually no resistance to the Nazi persecution of the Jews.

The explanation for the difference may lie in the distinctly different concepts of nationhood that characterize the neighboring countries. The answer may be rooted in the questions: What does it mean to be a Dane? A German?

The cumulative effect of centuries of living with and responding to a Jewish population can also not be discounted in an investigation of national psyche. How a nation responds to its Jewish population is one of the means of determining the psychological make-up of a nation.

There are similarities between the Jews of Denmark and Germany that make a comparison valid. In both countries the Jewish population at the beginning of the Second World War comprised about or slightly less than one percent of the total population. While Jews were somewhat prominent in the professions and in business in both countries, many Danes and Germans had never met a Jew. Danish Jews considered themselves Danish by nationality and Jews by religion. Oddly enough, German Jews viewed themselves in exactly the same way, as fully German. But there the similarity ends. The history of the Jewish community in Denmark has been characterized by minimal anti-Semitism while the Jews of Germany have been subjected to persecution since Roman times.

Medieval History

In fact, a clue to the difference between Germany and Denmark’s attitude toward the Jews may be found in medieval history. Jews lived in German lands since Roman times, but they did not enter Denmark or the rest of Scandinavia until the 17th century. In Germany the Jews suffered under Church-instigated anti-Semitism beginning with the Crusades. Germans were actively taught to despise Jews. Christians were increasingly exposed to a "conception of the Jew as a deliberate unbeliever, as a creature of a different (not human) nature, inspired and instigated by Satan’s own majesty, to a concretely apprehended image in the medieval mind." (Guido Kisch, The Jews in Medieval Germany, A Study In Their Legal and Social Status.) The Crusades marked a negative turning point in the history of the Jews in Germany. It was undoubtedly a crucial time in the shaping of the German national psyche, for it marked the beginning of the German habit of turning against the Jews at times of social or economic downturn. ‘The restrictions of that era also froze the Jews into the occupations frowned upon by the church—money lending and pawnbroking.

According to the Encyclopedia Judaica, "Henceforth the mob came to regard physical attacks on Jews as permissible, especially in periods of social or religious ferment. The city guilds forced the Jews out of the trades and the regular channels of commerce; this coincided with the stricter appliance of the church ban on usury in the 12th to 13th centuries. The combination of circumstances made money lending and pawnbroking the main occupation in Germany."

In the post-Crusade period severe restrictions were imposed on the Jews, demonstrating their lower status within society. Merchant guilds expelled their Jewish members. In 1237 the Holy Roman Empire adopted the doctrine of servitus Judeorum, according to which Jews were serfs as punishment for their allegedly anti-Christian acts and beliefs. In 1342, a poll tax was levied on Jews.

Luther’s Views

In 1542 Martin Luther imprinted upon the Germans his anti-Jewish views in a widely circulated pamphlet: "In truth, the Jews being foreigners, should possess nothing, and what they do possess should be ours...They...have become our masters in our own country...No one wants them...They are a heavy burden on us, a scourge, a pestilence and misfortune for our country...They steal and pillage every day."

The denunciations of the Jews of Germany, delivered with full moral authority of the Catholic Church and later the budding Protestant Church had a lasting impact upon the German temperament. Evidence of this is the recurrence of Church-instigated invective against the Jews in centuries to come, during the 18th and 19th century battles for Jewish emancipation and ultimately in the Nazi era.

Because Denmark was outside the mainstream of events, the Danes did not undergo the rabid teachings of anti-Semitism that characterized the middle ages. The first Jews who arrived in Denmark in 1622, at the invitation of King Christian IV, did not enter a society permeated with six hundred years of carefully taught prejudice. In 1620 the king had founded the city-fortress of Gluckstadt in Holstein. He invited the Portuguese Jews of Amsterdam and Hamburg to settle in the newly founded city, to give it a financial boost so that it might challenge Hamburg in commerce and industry. He had invited the Sephardic Jews at the suggestion of his Jewish mintmaster, Albertus Denis. It was the beginning of cordial relations between the Jews and the Danes. It was also the beginning of a long history of Danish officials welcoming Jewish capital into Denmark. This tendency never soured into the anti-Semitic association between big capitalists and Jews that flourished later in Germany.

In a decree of August 1, 1641, Christian IV permitted the Jews a synagogue and the right to various religious rituals. "Throughout the reign of Christian IV a spirit of liberalism and understanding towards the Jews began to prevail," notes Ib Nathan Bamberger in The Viking Jews: A History Of the Jews in Denmark.

Jews In Copenhagen

Under the reign of Frederick III, Sephardic Jews were permitted to settle throughout the land, while the poorer Ashkenazic Jews were kept out. Gradually Jews began to settle in Copenhagen and by 1694 there were 12 Jewish families living there. While the Jews in Germany had been forced into the occupations of money lending and pawnbroking, the Jews in Denmark engaged in the desirable occupation of trading.

The 19th century was a period of economic and social progress for Jews in both Germany and Denmark. But only Germany was plagued by periodic setbacks for the Jews. Germany was characterized by a suspicion of emancipation, not only for Jews, but in general terms. Denmark, on the other hand, moved steadily toward liberalization.

In Germany, the great enlightened thinker Wilhelm von Humboldt urged the government in vain to end discriminatory attitudes toward Jews: "It is not that the State ought to teach respect for the Jews. What it ought to do is to eradicate the inhumane and prejudiced mentality that judges a human being not by his specific qualities but by his descent and religion, and treats him not as an individual but as a member of a race with which he is considered to share certain characteristics of necessity. This the state can only do by saying loud and clear that it no longer recognizes any difference between Jews and Christians."

The German rulers, however, seemed impervious to declarations of universal principles of freedom and pluralism. But when Napoleon crushed the Prussians at Jena on October 14, 1806 the Holy Roman Empire came to an end and emancipation of certain groups was forced upon the German occupied territories. This short-lived emancipation came at enormous cost, for the Napoleonic defeat of Germany engendered a pathological hatred of all movements toward civil rights. The Jews were emancipated in the German occupied territories, but these rights were rescinded after the defeat of Napoleon.

Germans Define Themselves

Out of this emerged a very negative concept of what it meant to be German. What was a German? Someone who was not French or English, the despised proponents of parliamentary democracy. The Germans defined themselves in contrast to the French. The liberal ideas of liberty, equality and fraternity were French ideas. They were ideas associated with Jews, who had so long pushed for emancipation. Therefore, these ideas, along with the Jews, had to be rejected as unGerman. It was an easy step to the next conclusion. To be German was to be not Jewish. The Jews were no longer ostracized solely because of their religion. They were now considered a nation, a nation within the German nation. As a foreign element, they had to be uprooted.

After the German states had rescinded the Jewish rights given in 1813, there were violent pogroms against the Jews. The most violent of these was the hep hep movement that occurred in Wurzburg in 1819 where the people vented their fury on Jewish businesses. The special brand of German nationalism came into its own here, as the Jews for the first time were branded as the foreigner, the internal enemy, Historian Lucy Dawidowicz writes: "German nationalism arose out of the ashes of defeat in the Napoleonic wars, fragmented, without nationhood, without political definition, lacking military power and economic vitality, the Germans searched for a shared identity that would restore their self esteem...They turned inward for self-definition, in search of psychic and metaphysical values, qualities of feeling and spirit. And they turned backward—to a remote past of glory and mastery, to a past deep in the womb of historic time, where they had once been secure....From 1789 to 1815 the quarter century between the French Revolution and the Congress of Vienna, the ethos of modern Germany took shape. The doctrines of the revolution were anathema to the princely, priestly and knightly rulers of the German states and principalities."

Out of all of this emerged the German concept of nationhood, the answer to the question, What does it mean to be a German."

Jewish Persecution

The failure of the German states to accord their citizens civil rights had further negative ramifications for the Jews. As in the middle ages they were persecuted as a balm for the oppressed in a perpetually disappointed society. The failed revolution of 1848 created a great deal of frustration within the feebly striving German middle class. In December 1848, the German parliament at Frankfurt adopted a declaration of "fundamental rights of the German people." According to Article V, "The enjoyment of civil and political rights is neither dependent nor restricted by religious creed." Thus the Jews were beneficiaries of rights granted to all.

Anti-Semitism was a morass out of which German society did not seem able to escape. Every step toward emancipation of the Jews seemed to engender an anti-Semitic reaction creating an environment more anti-Jewish than had prevailed before the suggested reform.

When the revolution was defeated in 1849 the German states, in rapid succession, rescinded the granted rights. Not only the Jews were oppressed by the state governments’ oppressive rule. But now the medieval tendency, which became characteristic for the German national psyche, came to the fore again. Instead of banding together and demanding civil rights, other elements of the middle class vented their frustration on the Jews.

Friedrich Hecker, a revolutionary leader in south Germany, attempted in 1846 to explain this psychological phenomenon: "In states where no true liberty reigns, where we feel crushed every day by the burden of the police state, it makes a man feel good to see someone he may despise and bully and mistreat, thereby gaining some slight relief from the daily oppression and stifling atmosphere of the police state. It is because of the lack of freedom in our states, because of the pressure and bitterness that we did not want to emancipate the Jews. By bullying the Jews, we fancied ourselves more free and higher up.

Withdrawal Of Rights

In Germany every step forward that the Jews took was characterized by anti-Semitic reaction borne of anger over any social or economic rise by the Jews. The fall of Napoleon and the victory of the Holy Alliance led everywhere, to the withdrawal of equal rights that the Jews had been accorded.

But there was an even more reactionary reason for this backtracking. The fall of Napoleon gave rise to a new conservatism in Germany which rejected the ideals of equality of the French Revolution and looked backwards toward the past in search of a Christian-Teutonic spiritual and cultural renewal.

Poets and philosophers provided ideas for what it meant to be truly German. Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814), the father of German nationalism, has also been called the father of modern German anti-Semitism. He praised "Germanness" and criticized the Jews. In 1793 he fought Jewish emancipation, characterizing the Jews as a state within a state that would undermine the German nation.

Friedrich Lugwig Jahn (1778-1852) developed the particular concept of German nationalism associated with the word Volk. This signifies not simply a people united by common traditions but the union of a group of people with a transcendental essence, never specified, sometimes called nature, cosmos, mythos.

Volk Concept

In the Volk concept of German nationality, the Germans drew up a definition of themselves that was per se negative. It was based on who they were not. To be a German was to be not a Jew. Because this form of nationalism originated from the inferior sense of defeat, it could not be inclusive. It was narrow and xenophobic.

The Germans upheld throughout the 19th century the habit of blaming the Jews for everything that went awry in their society. When, in 1873, the stock market crashed, the deep economic depression that followed stimulated a spate of anti-Semitic writings which blames the crash on a Jewish conspiracy. In 1879 Heinrich Treitschke, a respected professor of history at the University of Berlin, attacked the Jews as "unser Ungluck" (our misfortune), a line that was to recur during the Nazi period. During the Second Reich (1870-1918) anti-Semitism increased and in 1892 the Conservative Party adopted an anti-Semitic plank in its platform, a harbinger of what was to come.

The obsession with the concept of Jews as aliens within the German nation, as internal enemies, continued to beset the German mind. Historian Jonah Goidhagen describes an underlying German cultural model of the Jew which consisted of three notions: "that the Jew was different from the German, that he was a binary opposite of the German, and that he was not just benignly different but malevolent and corrosive. Whether conceived of as a religion, nation, political group, or race, the Jew was always a Fremdkorper, an alien body within Germany. The centrality and power of this conception of Jews was such that anti-Semites came to see everything that was awry in society, from social organization, to political movements, to economic problems as being linked to, if not derived from, the Jews...These, it must be emphasized, were not merely the views of prominent anti-Semitic polemicists, but also the views that were dominant throughout German society."

Evolution In Denmark

What did Denmark look like at the same time?

Denmark was not always a bastion of liberal democracy. After the thirty years war and a war with Sweden which cost Denmark its wealthiest territories, Denmark was in a state of economic, military and political chaos. In 1660 the king seized control over the country and imposed an absolute monarchy which was to last until 1848. Long after most monarchs in Western Europe had their power curbed by parliaments, the Danish king ruled under the Regal Law (Kongeloven) which forbade any amendments. Liberty in Denmark was extremely curtailed at that time as to even suggest a change in the Regal Law was considered treason.

The monarchy looked favorably upon the immigration of wealthy Jews because the king needed capital to shore up his country. The religious ban that existed on forbidden religious denominations, Calvinists, Roman Catholics, and Jews,was dropped and the oldest Jewish settlement was established in the new fortress town of Fredericia. By 1780 Jews were permitted to join guilds in Copenhagen, and in 1798 Jews were given permission to study at the university and other schools of higher learning.

Napoleon’s lunge for power affected Denmark, but in a different manner from Germany. Denmark held to a strict policy of neutrality while Napoleon conquered most of Europe. But when Denmark joined Russia in a coalition of neutrality in 1800, England responded angrily. In 1807 England bombarded Copenhagen and captured Denmark’s fleet. The monarchy was forced into an alliance with the French which ended in national bankruptcy in 1814. The monarchy was aware of the French emancipation of the Jews and, unlike the Germans, considered a wealthy, loyal Jewish community an asset.

Greater Protection For Jews

One of the few outbursts of anti-Semitism in Denmark occurred in 1813. The poet Thomas Thaarup translated and published a pamphlet Moses and Jesus by the German writer Friedrich Buchholz. The pamphlet presented a series of anti-Semitic allegations to which Thaarup called for refutations. Prominent writers, Christians and Jews, joined the dispute on both sides. The Jews were accused of exporting money out of the country and causing a financial crisis. Unlike analogous situations in Germany, where anti-Semitic petitions and articles often led to more restrictions on Jews, this literary attack caused the government to take the position that it needed to provide greater protection and security for its Jewish citizens.

Unlike what occurred repeatedly in Germany, in Denmark there was no concurrence of economic crisis and anti-Jewish government measures. The literary attack does not seem to have any causal relationship to other events. In fact, during this period of deep financial crisis, 1814-1830, the Danish monarchy took a giant step toward giving the rights of citizenship to the Jews. On March 29, 1814 it issued a royal decree which stated: "Those of the Jewish faith who were born in the kingdom of Denmark, or have received permission to settle within its borders, should have equal opportunity with the rest of the citizens to earn a living and support themselves according to the established laws." This decree basically ratified and confirmed the position of Jews as it had evolved for a number of years.

This move must not only be compared with the repeated retractions of such legislation in Germany after the fall of Napoleon but also with the situation in Norway. After the Napoleonic wars Norway declared its independence from Denmark, established a parliament and wrote a constitution that was considered the most democratic in Europe at that time. Yet paragraph two of the constitution banned Jews from living in or entering Norway. It was not voted down until 1851.

Despite the absolutist monarchy, Denmark was liberalizing its society. In 1814 a revolutionary Educational Act brought compulsory schooling for all children between six and fourteen. This act, by educating for the first time the children of the peasantry, which formed the overwhelming majority of the population, was to have great social, economic and political consequences.

End Of Royal Absolutism

Royal absolutism came to an end in May 1849 when the new Danish Constitution was ratified. It was a government based on equal suffrage and thus the Jews achieved full civic equality. Once suffrage was given, there was no backtracking.

The second half of the 19th century was a period of prosperity for all Danes. This was also the Golden Age of Danish literature and the Jews participated in this flowering of the arts. As if to celebrate their new found freedom and prosperity, the Jews erected in 1833 a splendid new synagogue in Copenhagen. Some Jews became very prominent in the cultural world such as Mendel Levin Nathanson (1780-1868) who was editor of Denmark’s oldest newspaper, Berlingske Tidende. Edvard Brandes (1847-1931) founded the other Danish daily, Politiken.

Evidence of how comfortable Jews were in Denmark is the career of journalist and author Meir Aron Goldschmidt. When he was only twenty years old, Goldschmidt became editor of a weekly tabloid Corsaren, which he filled with typically Jewish humor and satire. He engaged in a literary feud with the celebrated philosopher Soren Kierkegaard which made Corsaren a very popular publication.

A later Jewish writer who familiarized Christians with Jewish themes was Henri Nathansen (1868-1944) whose play Indenfor Murerne (Inside the Walls) about a Jewish family, is always part of the theater repertoire in Copenhagen.

A national economic crisis occurred in 1864 when Denmark was defeated in the war with Prussia and Austria. This marked the loss of Schlesvig and Holstein. Unlike the German response to a crisis, the Danes did not blame the Jews for their misfortune. In fact, the Jews were credited with helping to convert the economy from fish to agricultural products. Jews helped develop the country’s financial resources and founded two important banks, Landmandsbanken and Privatbanken.

Danish Nationhood

Much like Napoleon’s destruction of the Holy Roman Empire shaped the German national psyche along the exclusive lines of a Germanic-Christian Volk, so did the military defeat and subsequent economic collapse mold the Danish sense of nationhood. But the outcome was very different.

William L. Shirer describes "an intense feeling of humiliation and utter despair" that gripped the nation. But unlike the Germans, the Danes neither blamed the Jews for their defeat nor did they look back to a mystical pre-democratic past. They were saved from drifting toward this negative brand of nationalism by the creative genius of one individual, Bishop Nikolai Frederick Severin Grundtvig, who at this moment of crisis became the spiritual founder of modern Denmark.

Grundtvig, a remarkable proponent of liberalism, was inspired by a living Christianity. His sermons and hymns lifted the Danes out of their despair. He believed that all the people must be educated so that they might participate intelligently in the new democratic society. To this end he founded the Danish Folk High Schools which, according to Shirer, "helped transform not only Denmark but all the northern countries into one of the most literate and enlightened groups of societies on earth."

Compare Grundtvig to the German history professor von Treitschke who responded to Germany’s economic crisis by producing a series of articles on the "Jewish Question," labeling Jews "our misfortune."

Nazi Occupation

In the next national crisis to overwhelm the Danes, the Nazi occupation of April 9, 1940, it was the rediscovery of Grundtvig’s spirit, his love of freedom and democracy, combined with education and culture, that inspired the Danes to behave as honorably as they did.

When the Germans occupied Denmark they made an agreement with the Danes not to encroach upon the Danish parliamentary form of government. Because the Danish Jews were protected under the Danish constitution, any persecution of the Danish Jews would be an infringement of Danish democracy. Thus, Denmark’s ability to protect its Jews became the barometer for the strength of Danish democracy.

Hal Koch, a young theologian and professor of church history at the University of Copenhagen, warned against allowing an anti-Jewish policy: "Certainly this is a question of right and justice for the Jews, but in addition—and this is something fundamental—justice and freedom in Danish life are at stake...We should not forget that our country’s fate will be decided not by the war in the outside world but by the extent to which we are able to maintain truth, justice, and freedom by being ready to pay the price."

After 300 years of an absolutist monarchy, followed by radical steps toward emancipation of its citizens, the importance of the preservation of parliamentary democracy had become an essential element in the Danish national psyche.

Commitment To Democracy

Israeli author Leni Yahil notes that, "What is significant here is that for the Danes national consciousness and democratic consciousness are one and the same. Only as a free citizen in a lawful and democratic state can the Dane uphold his patriotism."

She contrasts this national-humanist Danish conception with the concept that characterizes German nationalism: "To the same degree as Danish nationalism finds expression in the people’s democratic way of life, of which the equal rights of the Jews form an integral part, extreme German nationalism required the Jew as a counterweight and an enemy in order to arrive at national self-consciousness and realization."

In November 1934 the Jewish Union held a large public meeting with Jewish and Christian speakers from four political parties. Reflecting Grundtvig’s philosophy, the leitmotif that ran through the speeches was the concept that anti-Semitism and culture are irreconcilable. All the speakers emphasized that Jews were an organic part of Denmark. Compare this to the German concept of the Jews as an alien people that destroy the unity of the German Volk.

Different from Germany, the churches of Denmark repeatedly criticized the persecution of the Jews. In 1936 a group of leading Danish theologians issued a public declaration against anti-Semitic literature in general and a recently published Danish edition of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in particular. Lutheran priests organized themselves into an underground even before the German occupation abolished the Danish parliamentary government in August 1943.

Warning Against Hatred

The bishop of Copenhagen, H. Fuglsang-Damgaard, issued a public warning against racial hatred in January 1943. When the Germans took full control of the Danish government in August 1943, the bishop wrote a letter of protest to the German military commissioner in Copenhagen. Copies were sent to all the bishops of Denmark and on Sunday, October 3 the protest was read aloud from all the pulpits in Denmark.

The decision of the Germans in October 1943 to deport the Jews had an enormous catalytic effect on the latent resistance feelings in Denmark. Outrage at the deportation plan catapulted the resistance into existence. Yet one wonders why certain events in Nazi Germany never resulted in a movement of resistance. Why, for example, did the Germans not protest the abolition of the Social Democratic Party?

In order for the liberal principle which pervaded Danish thinking to gain roots a society must imbibe the ideas of equal citizenship rights and the dissolution of the traditional orders of dependence. In its rejection of the ideas of the French Revolution and in its hurried industrial revolution out of which a true bourgeois class failed to emerge, Germany was not prepared for liberal democracy. As a consequence the Germans at the time of the Nazi takeover were a nation eager for security and stability rather than freedom.

For years the Danish government had let the German occupation forces know that the Danish Jews were to remain unmolested. It was simply an element in leaving the Danish democracy intact. Until October 1943, when things started to sour for the Germans in other areas, the occupation force upheld the Danish request. While much is made of the daring rescue by boat to Sweden of 8,000 Jews in October 1943, it can be said that the Danes began to save the Jews at the beginning of the occupation when they made it clear they would not accede to German anti-Jewish measures.

A Larger Ideal

The important point to be made here regarding national psyche is not that it was part of the Danish mentality to love Jews. The Danes did not stand up to the Germans simply for humanitarian reasons. They did so because a larger ideal was part of their national psyche. Their democratic system had already given Jews civil rights in 1814 and 1849, long before other Western countries. Now it was time to protect that constitution.

After the creation of the State of Israel, David Ben-Gurion called upon Jews throughout the world to show "complete solidarity with the State of Israel." Denmark’s Chief Rabbi Marcus Melchior responded: "We Danish Jews do not usually air our patriotism. Why on earth should we shout ‘hurrah’ more loudly than other Danes? But we take an opportunity like this to state that no one, however big he may be or from wherever he may come, has the right or is able to change even one jot of what for 150 years has been the status of Danish Jews under which there has been established a relationship in Denmark of which we are all just as happy on the Christian side as on the Jewish side. If Premier Ben-Gurion really claimed that in order to be a Jew every minute of one’s life, one has to live in Israel, then according to my view, two questions arise. The first is whether to be a Jew every minute is of imperative necessity and whether Jewishness and being a general human being did not equate each other so completely that one at the same time could be Jewish and a human being in other places than in the few square kilometers which form the territory of Israel."

Human Rights And Liberty

The lesson which some have drawn from the Holocaust, that anti-Semitism is endemic to the Western world and that a philosophy of Jewish nationalism is the only appropriate antidote, permits the example of Nazi Germany to reign supreme and ignores the example of liberal Western democracies such as Denmark. When it came time to physically save the Jews of Denmark, the act may appear to some as spontaneous but the fact is that the rescue was the natural outcome for a people accustomed to many years of support for human rights and liberty. It was the Danish thing to do—and there is certainly a "lesson" to be learned from this example as well.