Rescuing the Danish Jews

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Boat with Jewish refugees on the way from Falster in Denmark to Ystad in Sweden

The rescue of Danish Jews in October 1943 during the Nazi era is a unique example in the history of the territories occupied in Europe during World War II . It was made possible by the German diplomat Georg Ferdinand Duckwitz (1904–1973) and prevented the murder of many Jews in the course of the Holocaust .

Denmark during the Nazi era

During the Nazi era, Denmark pursued a pragmatic, pro-German neutrality policy. a. because the German economy played a major role and the country was militarily helpless. After the occupation of Denmark by Germany on April 9, 1940, the Danish unity government and the German Reich agreed to work together on the basis of domestic independence. This cooperation, viewed by some as unheroic and sometimes shameful, enabled the Danish government, with reference to the rule of law that Denmark had promised, to reject all discrimination (including the registration, labeling and persecution of Jews), while the German side tried to get Denmark through an authorized representative from the Foreign Office to be developed as an Aryan "model protectorate". The important Danish food deliveries to the Reich increased and the German occupation costs were the lowest in Europe.

At the Wannsee Conference January 20, 1942 expressed Undersecretary Martin Luther from the Foreign Office, recommend it, and the Nordic countries because of the small number of Jews anticipated difficulties for the time being in the final solution reset.

The Jewish community heard rumors of mass murders of Jews in the occupied eastern territories; At the beginning of 1943, however, their Executive Council rejected any planning for an organized escape to Sweden because they were not sure of the support of the non-Jewish Danish fellow citizens and they did not want to give cause for German measures with such illegal plans.

Escape or deportation

Børge Laursen and Jacob Andersen made 10 crossings

Duckwitz, a member of the NSDAP since 1932 , had long since turned away from National Socialism in 1943 and had good contacts with leading Danish social democrats. On September 22nd, 1943 he was in Sweden under a pretext and tried to persuade the Swedish Prime Minister Per Albin Hansson to make an official initiative by Sweden in favor of the Danish Jews. When he found out on September 28, 1943 from Werner Best, the German Reich Plenipotentiary for Denmark, the exact date of the planned deportation of Danish Jews via Germany to the concentration camps for the night of October 1 to October 2, 1943 , he immediately informed the Social Democrat Hans Hedtoft . He informed the chief rabbi of Copenhagen, Marcus Melchior , a rabbi who had fled from Beuthen in Upper Silesia, about his Danish acquaintances at the shipowners . Thanks to a Jewish holiday, the news quickly spread among Jews across Denmark. The "half-Jewish" Danish Nobel Prize laureate Niels Bohr and his Swedish friends, after the intervention of the Swedish King ( Gustav V ), succeeded on October 2nd in having an offer to be made by Sweden on the Swedish radio news.

Research speaks of 7,742 Jews - 1,376 of whom were non-Danish citizens - who reached Sweden with 686 non-Jewish family members via the Öresund , the Kattegat and the Danish island of Bornholm in the Baltic Sea in the next few weeks. Danish fishermen played a central role in organizing the escape across the sea to safe Sweden. The Danish police and coast guard deliberately looked the other way. The Wehrmacht leadership in Denmark was against the deportation of the Jews in order not to endanger the largely harmonious cooperation between Danish and German agencies. That is why the Reich Plenipotentiary Best had expressly ordered that the Gestapo was not allowed to break down any doors during their raid if they did not find anyone on their nightly kidnapping trains, to which they apparently adhered. The imprisoned "full Jews" were brought to concentration camps in four deportations:

Deportations of Jews from Denmark
No. Departure on Departure point Mode of Transport arrival at concentration camp number
1 October 2, 1943 Aalborg train October 5, 1943 Theresienstadt 83
2 October 2, 1943 Copenhagen Ship and train October 6, 1943 Theresienstadt 198
3 October 13, 1943 Horserød camp train October 14, 1943 Theresienstadt 175
4th November 23, 1943 Horserød camp train November 24, 1943
?		 Sachsenhausen
Ravensbrück 		Men 6
women and children 10

One of the places through which the escape was organized was the port town of Gilleleje on the island of Zealand. Just as a large number of Jewish refugees were about to board a Danish ship to rescue them, the news of an imminent arrest came. The ship cast off quickly. The refugees who had not got on board feverishly searched for hiding places in the strange small town. A pastor accommodated most of the refugees in the attic of the village church. The villagers knew the hiding place and spontaneously brought blankets, clothes and food. The hiding place was betrayed, however, and in the early morning hours the Germans arrested around 70 refugees. Nevertheless, Gilleleje remained an important refuge in the following nights, because only two Wehrmacht soldiers of the occupying forces were stationed there, and the German chief of the port police had expressly forbidden his subordinates to hunt refugees at night.

The Danish-Jewish survivor from Theresienstadt Salle Fischermann reported in 2003:

“Spontaneously many, many Danes took the initiative - everyone helped where they could to organize hiding places or escape routes: in ambulances, even in garbage trucks, everything that could drive. Hospitals and churches were also important hiding places. The Danes have even raised money to pay the fishermen for the dangerous escape crossing. You had no income during that time. Even those who were then deported did not forget them and collected money for aid packages that they sent to the camps. I would like to say that this is the only way we survived. "

Among other things, this rescue operation explains the relatively low number of victims in comparison with other Western European countries, which lost at least 20% ( France ) to 84% ( Netherlands ) of their Jewish population ( Germany 33%, 165,000 out of 499,000). This relief operation was an important experience in the Danish resistance to the occupation and is still seen today as an indicator of the strength of the democratic civil society in Denmark .

On October 2, 1943, Best reported to the Foreign Office that Denmark had been de- Jewish because no Jews could legally reside or work here. The Gestapo arrested 57 escape helpers and handed them over to the Danish police; they have been sentenced by Danish courts to low sentences averaging three months in prison.

Effect for the Danish resistance

The Danish resistance movement benefited from the humanitarian action in several ways, as the resistance movement, the Danish people and official Denmark had successfully taken the same objective position on the matter. In the external perception, the rescue operation was mainly attributed to the resistance movement, so that it received increased support and influx from partly new circles. Some of the escape routes were developed in tacit cooperation with the Swedish authorities as conspiratorial sea connections for the transport of endangered civilians, agents, resistance fighters, couriers, weapons and shot down Allied pilots to larger networks.

Protection of property left behind

After the escape or deportation of the Jewish population, the Danish police and social services determined the addresses of the abandoned apartments by interviewing janitors and neighbors, as there was no Jewish register. Some of the apartments were broken into, and valuables, savings accounts and cash were secured for the owners to prevent theft. Jewish companies were given Danish trustees, the rental contracts were terminated or an arrangement for further payment was found, the furniture was stored, and the social services ensured that insurance contracts were paid on. As a rule, the Jews who returned after the war found their homes safe and their valuables well secured.

Danish rescue diplomacy

After the deportation of the Jews, the Danish authorities fought hard for their fate. In negotiations with the Reich Security Main Office , Best was only able to partially enforce the Danish demand to exclude mixed-race Jews from further deportations . In lengthy negotiations with Adolf Eichmann , on November 2, 1943, he obtained the life-saving promise that the deported Jews from Denmark should not be transported from Theresienstadt to the extermination camps . The Foreign Office representative Frants Hvass was able to get the Danish government through that parcels with food and clothing could be sent to Theresienstadt and that he and a delegation of the International Red Cross could visit the deportees on June 23, 1944 in Theresienstadt. In order to change the overcrowding of the camp, non-Danish prisoners were transported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp and Danish families were able to move into renovated and larger apartments.

White buses campaign

White bus with Danish Jews in Haderslev , April 1945

In December 1944 Hvass obtained the return of 200 deportees Danish policemen from Buchenwald concentration camp in the Danish camp Frøslev . Thereupon a resistance group around the Danish admiral Carl Hammerich and the Norwegian diplomat Niels Christian Ditleff, with the support of the Swedish Prince Carl and the influential Swedish diplomat Folke Bernadotte , tried to get Himmler to release the Norwegian and Danish concentration camp prisoners. On April 2, 1945, the Danish Jews were included in the negotiations. On April 15, 1945, 425 living Jewish prisoners from Denmark were picked up from the Theresienstadt concentration camp as part of the White Bus rescue operation and brought to Denmark in a convoy through Germany. The buses passed the Danish border near Padborg and drove - because of the cheering of the Danish population - on side streets to Copenhagen harbor. From there, people were brought to safety in Sweden.

Number of victims

About 50 mostly elderly Jews died in Theresienstadt, an estimated 60 more died while fleeing before or during deportation or by suicide. If you add six members of the Hechaluz who were seized during their attempted emigration from Denmark via the Balkans to Palestine and perished in Auschwitz, around 116 Jews from Denmark died from direct or indirect consequences of the Germans between October 1943 and May 5, 1945 anti-Jewish measures.

memory

Memorial plaques in Jerusalem

The surviving writer Ralph Oppenhejm reported in his diary about the detention in Theresienstadt.

Duckwitz was honored as Righteous Among the Nations in Yad Vashem in 1971 . In his honor, a birch was planted in the Avenue of the Righteous Among the Nations in Yad Vashem.

A sculpture based on a ship was erected in memory of the rescue operation in Jerusalem for the Danish people and the Danish resistance movement. Memorial plaques in Danish, Swedish, Hebrew, Arabic and English are attached to this sculpture to explain the rescue operation.

In Copenhagen reminiscent Danish Jewish Museum of the events.

literature

See also

Web links

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Bo Lidegaard: The exception. October 1943: How the Danish Jews escaped extermination with the help of their fellow citizens. P. 59 f.
  2. ↑ Bo Lidegaard: The exception. October 1943: How the Danish Jews escaped extermination with the help of their fellow citizens. P. 72.
  3. ↑ Bo Lidegaard: The exception. October 1943: How the Danish Jews escaped extermination with the help of their fellow citizens. P. 69.
  4. ^ Hermann Weiss: Denmark. P. 177.
  5. ^ Matthias Bath: Danebrog against Hakenkreuz , Wachholz, 2011, ISBN 978-3-529-02817-5 , p. 128.
  6. ^ Hermann Weiss: Denmark. P. 176.
  7. ↑ Bo Lidegaard: The exception. October 1943: How the Danish Jews escaped extermination with the help of their fellow citizens. P. 509f.
  8. ^ Hermann Weiss: Denmark. P. 183.
  9. ^ The persecution of danish jews . Folkedrab.DK, accessed November 27, 2016.
  10. ^ HG Adler: Theresienstadt 1941–1945. The face of a coercive community. Wallstein 2005, ISBN 3-89244-694-6 , p. 778.
  11. ↑ www.friedenskooperative.de
  12. ^ Hermann Weiss: Denmark. P. 179.
  13. ^ Matthias Bath: Danebrog against swastika. P. 134.
  14. ↑ cf. Matthias Bath: Danebrog against swastika. P. 137 f.
  15. ↑ Bo Lidegaard: The exception. October 1943: How the Danish Jews escaped extermination with the help of their fellow citizens. P. 277.
  16. ↑ Leni Yahil: The Rescue of Danish Jewry. P. 288.
  17. ^ Hermann Weiss: Denmark. In: Wolfgang Benz (Ed.): Dimension of the genocide. P. 180.
  18. ^ Hermann Weiss: Denmark. P. 181 f.
  19. ^ Hermann Weiss: Denmark. P. 185.
  20. ↑ Ralph Oppenhejm: At the limit of life. Theresienstadt diary. Rütten & Loening Verlag, Hamburg 1961.