Ignoble Danes

Kyt · Jan 14, 2008

Denmark's wartime record is more complex and less palatable than they would like to believe, as a recent extradition row illustrates

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Over the last two months, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, the Daily Telegraph, and most recently Steve Rosenberg for the BBC 10 o'clock news have all "tracked down" the alleged Nazi war criminal Søren Kam at his home in Bavaria and demanded that he be brought to justice for wartime crimes. Kam was a Danish citizen who served in the SS during the war but after 1945 took up residence in west Germany. The Danish government accuses him of murdering an anti-Nazi journalist, Carl Henrick Clemmensen, in Copenhagen in mid-1943. Kam is also alleged to have seized the records of the Danish Jewish community, making it possible for the Nazis to attempt the roundup and deportation of Danish Jews.

There is little doubt that Kam, now 86 years old, was in his youth a Nazi believer and a nasty piece of work. The available facts about his wartime activities are enough to make many Danes look askance at the decision of Bavarian judicial officials to deny his extradition to face trial in Denmark. The Danish authorities have gone so far as to appeal to the EU justice commissioner to take action if Germany will not budge. But the growing furore over his case obscures bigger questions about Denmark's attitude towards the Jews in the 1930s and the degree to which the country was willingly entangled in the Nazi "new order" for Europe during the early 1940s.

After the second world war, Denmark basked in the reflected glory of the most successful effort to save Jews from the Nazi death camps. Between September 28 and October 9 1943, over 7,000 Jews were ferried from hiding places in German-occupied Denmark, where they were being sheltered by the Resistance, to safety in neutral Sweden. Historians have recently questioned whether the Germans really intended to round up the Danish Jews or were content to hustle them out of the country, but this extraordinary collective endeavour by ordinary men and women who believed they were risking their own lives to save their fellow citizens is rightly celebrated.

Not many people asked why there were so few Jews, all assimilated Danish Jews at that, in a country neighbouring Nazi Germany, an obvious destination for Jewish refugees from Nazi persecution between 1933 and 1939. Well, independent researchers and an official Danish investigation have established that at the height of the refugee crisis in 1938, the Danish authorities closed the border to Jewish fugitives. Prior to that, the country maintained a restrictive immigration policy that meant that few German Jews could enter the country and stay.

The German occupation of Denmark in April 1940 was bloodless thanks to a quick decision by the government not to resist. Partly in response to this rapid accommodation, and thanks to a perceived racial affinity to the Nordic and "Aryan" Danes, the Germans allowed them to keep their own government and stayed in the background. It was a light-touch occupation also because the Germans did not want to disrupt the vital flow of food from Danish farms to German stomachs. For three years, Denmark obligingly provided 15% of the Reich's food supply. The Germans needed only 215 officials to keep this going.

More disturbingly, in April 1940 the Waffen-SS started recruiting in Denmark. With the start of the anti-Bolshevik "crusade" in June 1941, thousands of Danes volunteered to fight against the Soviet Union. Of 13,000 volunteers, the Waffen-SS was able to select 7,000 of the best. These Danes fought in a variety of units, mainly the Waffen-SS Viking, "Death's Head", and Nordland divisions. They took part in anti-partisan operations in Russia and Croatia that inevitably resulted in the killing of civilians. A couple even ended up in the notorious Dirlewanger Brigade that was a byword for atrocity.

Few serving on the eastern front were unaware of the mass murder of the Jews, even if they were innocent of direct involvement. Yet, when the 3,000 survivors returned to Denmark after the war, they were simply tried for "treason" and sentenced to two years in prison. After the war, the Danish state drew a discreet veil over the years of collaboration and stressed the heroic activity of the resistance after 1943.

To its credit, in the 1990s the Danish government began the process of confronting this ambiguous past. The official institute for international studies set up a department for the study of the Holocaust and genocide and commissioned historical reports into the treatment of Jewish refugees. In 2003, the department published several candid studies. Even so, it ill-behoves the Danish to wag the finger at Germany, a gesture calculated to reinforce Denmark's benign image. There has certainly been less effort to publicise the chequered past in which the activity of Søren Kam ought properly to be located.
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Kyt Άρης

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