David Crane

How Denmark’s Jews escaped the Nazis

A review of Countrymen, by Bo Lidegaard. Only one per cent of Danish Jews perished in the Holocaust. How they were saved is a story of courage and principle

Danish Jews escaping the Nazi's across the Oresound to neighbouring Sweden Photo: Getty 
issue 08 March 2014

Of all the statistics generated by the Holocaust, perhaps some of the most disturbing in the questions they give rise to are the following. Of the Jews in Hungary, the Netherlands, Greece, Latvia and Poland, between 70 and 90 per cent died, while the corresponding figures for Estonia, Belgium Norway and Romania were between 40 and 50. In France and Italy somewhere around 20 per cent perished. In both Bulgaria and Denmark, however, just one.

Bo Lidegaard’s Countrymen is the story of how Denmark to a great extent saved its  Jewish population from the labour and extermination camps, but it inevitably raises issues of equal relevance to the rest of Europe. The author is careful to underline the cultural and racial differences that made each country’s experience of Nazi occupation different, and yet at the end of his lucid, compelling and scrupulously fair book nothing rings more true than his assertion that there was nothing ‘inevitable’ in occupied Europe’s collaboration in the Holocaust and that Denmark was the stirring proof of that.

There had been nothing heroic about Denmark’s response to German aggression in the early years of the war; but when the crunch came late in 1943 and plans were activated for the deportation of its Jewish population, a whole country woke to its humanitarian, civic and democratic collective duty.

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