If you sit on the pier at Helsingborg harbour, the southern tip of Sweden, and look across the sea, Denmark is so near that you can make out individual Danish trees, church steeples, the sun reflecting off roofs. The Sound is only a couple of miles wide here. Some of the fishing boats carrying Danish Jews to safety in October 1943 crossed it in just an hour. A Swedish journalist who stood on this beach watching one of the boats arrive recounted: “Someone on board starts singing “Du Gamla, du Fria” (”Thou ancient, thou free”), the Swedish national anthem. And everybody joins in, as best they know. They remember a word here or there of the text, but nevertheless, bright, happy voices join in a mighty chorus. It is almost more than you can bear.”
Tens of thousands of Danes - politicians, pastors, fishermen, ambulance drivers - helped smuggle 7,300 of the country’s 7,800 Jews into Sweden. Many more helped by not betraying the operation. Only 116 Danish Jews, or 1.5 per cent of the total, died in the Holocaust.
The other extreme in western Europe was the Netherlands. More than 100,000 Dutch Jews - three-quarters of the total - were massacred. This was nearly twice the proportion killed in Belgium, where Jews had far more chance of finding hiding places, and three times as high as in France. Only in Poland were proportionately more Jews murdered. The Dutch had a reputation for wartime heroism, even - until recently - among themselves. But they owe it chiefly to the hiding of Anne Frank.
Next Thursday it will be 60 years since Soviet soldiers liberated Auschwitz. This is the last round-number anniversary in which many survivors will participate. Already the camps are fading from remembered experience into history. Eventually they will cease to be the dominating presence in European thought. Perhaps they already have. It is time to ask how the memory of the Holocaust in Denmark and the Netherlands has changed over the last 60 years, how this memory has shaped the Dutch and Danish self-image, and how it has affected policies in both countries.
In the spring of 1940, Denmark and the Netherlands looked alike: two small democracies, with negligible armies, both overrun almost instantly by the German army. Neither had much history of anti-Semitism. Both were quiet places: it had been decades since people in either country had shot at humans. Both nations initially sought to keep the peace under the Nazis. Hitler praised Denmark as a “model protectorate”. In both countries, most gentiles experienced a relatively placid war. Yet, on the Jewish question, the Danes and Dutch took opposing positions from the start of their occupations.
The Danish historian Therkel Straede writes that the German occupation of Denmark “passed off more mildly than in any other country”. Germany had recognised it as a “sovereign state”. Until 1943 the Danes ran their own domestic affairs, even holding elections. Every day, King Christian X rode his horse through Copenhagen, greeting his subjects as he went, living proof that the Danish establishment continued. Furthermore, the Danes were more homogeneous than the Dutch. You could see it in their paucity of surnames: Hansen, Petersen, Jensen and a few others covered most of the population. The German immigrants who had arrived the previous century, and the few Jews, had integrated to the point of invisibility. Nor did Denmark have great regional divides.
The crucial shared heritage, though, was that almost everyone belonged to the Danish Lutheran church. Not only were there just 7,800 Jews in Denmark, there were hardly any Catholics either, nor many non-Lutheran Protestants. In 1940, although the percentage of churchgoers was perhaps the lowest in Europe, most Danes still used the church for baptisms, weddings and funerals. Pastors remained moral authorities, each year inspecting their local schools.
Danish Lutheranism was a peculiar variant of the German creed. Its founding father, Nikolai Grundtvig, born the son of a country pastor in 1783, took as his key text the Book of Genesis. Grundtvig read the Creation story to mean that human life had value in itself, even before Christianity arrived. His slogan was: “Man first, then a Christian.” This implied that religious differences were secondary, contradicting Luther’s own anti-Semitism, and the usual Protestant obsession with schisms.
Grundtvig drew from the Creation a second conclusion: that the richness of man’s life unfolds on earth, not just in heaven. Man is more than just spirit: he is also dust. Doing the right thing on this earth therefore mattered. Danes (Grundtvig was a patriotic theologian) had to act in this life, but as a group rather than as individuals. They must sacrifice for Danish democracy.
In the autumn of 1940, the pipe-smoking theologian Hal Koch gave a series of lectures on Grundtvig to packed halls around Denmark. Koch’s audiences understood that he was not simply talking about theology. He emphasised “the need for the entire nation to combine politicisation, individual and collective responsibility, knowledge of all facts, and negotiations with the Nazi, as long as that was possible”. Danes must act as a group, Koch said. A year later, he moderated a public debate on the “Jewish question”, itself an astonishing fact, in which he called on Danes to reject any suggestion of discrimination. Other churchmen took a similar line.
Though the Danes collaborated with Hitler on most matters, they always refused to take any measures against Jews. The myth that King Christian X wore a Jewish star to show his solidarity is false, because the star was never imposed in Denmark.
In August 1943, after a wave of Danish strikes and acts of sabotage, the Germans declared martial law. In September, Germany’s Reich plenipotentiary, Werner Best, decided to deport the Danish Jews. His plans were leaked to Danish politicians. It is now believed that Best himself instigated the leak, probably because he thought that deportation would make his rule in Denmark untenable. On the morning of September 29, the day before the Jewish New Year, Denmark’s chief rabbi, Marcus Melchior, alerted his congregation: “You must leave immediately, warn all your friends and relatives and go into hiding.”
On the night of October 1, when German special police units (the Danish police refused to help) knocked on Jewish doors, they found almost nobody home. Only a few hundred Jews opened the front door. The rest had been tipped off. The Jews had no trouble finding hiding places. People pressed their house keys even on Jews they had never met before.
Half of Copenhagen must have known what was going on, yet there were barely any betrayals. Thousands of Jews were installed in hospital beds under gentile names, or disguised as visitors, staff, even funeral mourners. At Copenhagen’s Kommunehospitalet, all 1,000 staff were involved in the rescue. The following Sunday, October 3, Denmark’s pastors read a letter from their pulpits: “Whenever Jews are persecuted... it is the duty of the Christian church to protest against such persecution, because it is in conflict with the sense of justice inherent in the Danish people and inseparable from our Danish Christian culture through the centuries.”
They did not leave their sense of duty at words. By one estimate, 90 per cent of Lutheran ministers joined Denmark’s rescue and resistance efforts. Copenhagen’s cantor was lent DKr25,000 (more than his annual salary) by a Lutheran priest named Rasmussen to finance his family’s escape to Sweden. After the war, Rasmussen refused repayment. Five Danish Lutheran priests were killed in the Resistance, others went to prison and concentration camps, and about 100 had to go underground until the liberation. Their influence was enormous. Since the Lutheran clergy were virtually state functionaries, and King Christian was head of the church, the church was in effect the moral arm of government. Perhaps as important, though, was that Denmark’s social democrats had a very similar belief in equality and acting for the collective.
Later, Denmark ensured that the few Jews who had been caught would not be sent to death camps. Instead they were held in the Theresienstadt ghetto in Czechoslovakia, where they received food parcels, and a visit from a Danish delegation (which passed on the king’s regards in a whisper). On April 13 1945, before the war was over, they were released.
The Danes protected the Jews because they considered them part of the homogeneous Danish collective. Bent Melchior, son of the wartime chief rabbi, told me: “This was the result of a development of over 200 years. We had become part of forming this society.” Or as Uffe Ostergard, director of Denmark’s Holocaust and Genocide Studies Centre, says: “The Jews were rescued not because they were Jews but because they were not seen as Jews.”
Denmark had a haven just across the sea, and the Netherlands didn’t. However, the Dutch as a group - as opposed to a few thousand isolated individuals and cells - never even tried to protect the Jews. In the Netherlands, some companies sacked their Jews without waiting for the Germans to tell them to. AVRO, a leading radio broadcaster, did so on May 21 1940, six days after the capitulation. Anti-Semitism lacks explanatory force here: before 1940, there had been no discernible Dutch impetus for measures against Jews.
The Dutch royal family and cabinet had fled to London that May, leaving government to the top civil servants, the secretaries-general, whose instructions were to keep things functioning without anarchy. The secretaries-general aimed not to upset the occupiers. When the Germans asked them to sack a Jewish concert master, they considered objecting, before passing the order on to the orchestra anyway. “Perhaps a middle way can still be found,” they noted in their minutes. When the Germans said they would ban kosher slaughter of meat, the secretaries-general talked about “coming to an agreement”, hoping to impose a Dutch ban before the occupiers acted. The goal was to maintain a semblance of sovereignty.
Measure followed measure, and the Dutch never said no. Amsterdam’s city council produced a helpful chart for the Germans showing where the Jews lived. Later, these people were rounded up by Dutch policemen, who were coerced by the Germans with terrible sanctions: they could lose their Whitsun leave. The rigour of the Dutch police, and of the Dutch state generally, was matched in western Europe not even by Vichy France.
The Holocaust in the Netherlands was a fairly bloodless affair, free of the slaughter of Jews by local people seen in eastern Europe. In the Netherlands, it was a mechanical sorting operation: ringing doorbells, escorting people to trains, impounding their belongings. The Dutch habit of obedience to authority proved fatal under Nazism, a phenomenon they could not fathom.
Dutch morality - and most people were then churchgoers - did not extend to taking risks for neighbours. In any case, with the country divided between squabbling denominations, no one church could lead the nation. But the Dutch churches did not even try to use their moral sway. The Dutch Reformed Church spent most of the war debating arcane theological questions.
Until the 1960s, in most countries the Holocaust was rarely discussed in public. It seemed incomprehensible, and most surviving Jews were fearful of drawing attention to themselves. Many Dutchmen grasped what had happened only in 1965, when the historian Jacques Presser published his account of the Holocaust, Ondergang (Descent). It sold 140,000 copies in eight months. Over the next 20 years, the war and the Holocaust became the central themes of Dutch history. From 1969 to 1988, Lou de Jong, the Dutch state’s official historian of the war, published his The Kingdom of the Netherlands in the Second World War in 27 volumes. Millions of copies were sold, making it one of the best-selling academic histories in history.
When I was at school in the Dutch town of Leiden in the 1970s and 1980s, however, the orthodox version of the war was still being taught. I learned from teachers, neighbours and Resistance tales like Soldier of Orange (nominated for a foreign-film Oscar in 1979) that the Dutch had been “good”. I gathered that nobody shopped in the stores of those who had been “wrong” in the war, and that De Telegraaf, a newspaper that had been wrong, was still universally loathed (although, mysteriously, it was the country’s bestselling daily). I learned that the average Dutchman had spent the war delivering his illegal newspapers after feeding his hidden Jews.
Even in the 1980s, the Dutch still needed the myth of resistance. Many of the wartime generation were still alive, and it would have been too painful to admit that only about 1 per cent of Dutch people had actively resisted. Furthermore, former resistants and exiles had a disproportionate role in Dutch life: many underground newspapers had transformed after the war into regular dailies that still exist today, while De Jong, many politicians and the royals had returned untainted from exile to form the new establishment.
Nor was there much need to delve deeply: whereas the world was accusing the Germans, and even the French, few foreigners knew much about the Dutch war. Only Anne Frank’s story had penetrated abroad. She became shorthand for a people that had bravely sheltered the Jews, even though the end of her story could be read as symbolising Dutch betrayal.
In Denmark, too, a Resistance myth arose after the war: that all Danes had passively resisted the Germans, opposing Nazism in their hearts. This myth did, to be sure, skate over Denmark’s years of collaboration. But it also played down heroism - that of the active resistants, the saboteurs.
When I met Toger Seidenfaden, editor of the main Danish newspaper, Politiken, in his wonderful corner office, he told me a Danish story. His father, also a journalist, had been an active resistant, sending information on the Danish resistance to Britain. In 1945 he was named editor of Politiken. “However,” Seidenfaden told me, “the whole editorial staff, with one exception, said that if he was appointed they would resign.” It angered them that the sitting editor - who like them and most Danes had stayed dutifully in his post throughout the war - was being slighted for an outsider. So Seidenfaden’s father never got the job. The sitting editor kept it until 1958. Today his photograph hangs among the other past editors on Seidenfaden’s wall. Seidenfaden pointed to a leather armchair in a corner of his office. It had belonged to his father. When Seidenfaden became editor, he felt his father should at least have his chair here.
More surprisingly, the rescue of the Jews - famous worldwide - was seldom mentioned. “It has not become a legend. We have not tried to capitalise on it,” Uffe Ostergard, the Holocaust centre director, told me. It was an Israeli historian, Leni Yahil, who wrote the first major book about the subject, The Rescue of Danish Jewry: Test of a Democracy, in 1969. Like most subsequent foreign accounts, it is a paean to the “special character and moral stature of the Danish people”. But the Danes themselves remain blase. Behind the Museum of Danish Resistance, where you’d hardly notice it, a stone sculpture stands in the grass: a Medusa-like tangle of women, it is an Israeli gift symbolising the rescue. The arm of one of the figures is broken.
This is curious. The Dutch for decades propagated a false myth of having saved the Jews. The Danes, who really did save their Jews, rarely talk about it. In part, this is precisely because the Holocaust didn’t hit Denmark. Here there was no rupture. This struck me in Bent Melchior’s comfortable bourgeois living room. On his walls were photographs of children and grandchildren, Jewish art, and a copy of a letter of support from Christian X to his father. There is no trauma to relive as in the Netherlands.
In the 1990s, when Danish historians finally turned to the rescue of the Jews, they debunked the heroism. For instance, they emphasise the large sums charged by fishermen to ferry Jews, even though most of the rescuers demanded nothing, and others contributed their own money. The historians note that Danes who helped Jews weren’t sentenced to death, as happened in the Netherlands, but the rescuers didn’t know that in advance. Every Dane I spoke to about the rescue added some caveat apparently intended to diminish it.
I asked Straede, the historian, why this was. He said: “There is a consensus to feel unease about it, because whenever you are confronted with it, it is always because some American Jews bring it forward to you with ridiculous ideas of heroism, a simplified view of history that the good guys are fighting the bad guys, and so on. We know that our motives are more tainted.”
The rescue happened because Denmark thought of itself as such a homogeneous society. The flipside is that in a homogeneous society, being different is discouraged. The war reminded the Danish Jews of their difference. Jorgen Kieler, a Resistance hero, later Denmark’s senior cancer researcher, now a vigorous 85-year-old writing and lecturing on the war, told me: “It has been a trauma to them, perhaps, to realise that they had not been assimilated in Danish society to such an extent that they could not be identified.”
The saved Danish Jews were therefore reluctant to dwell on their difference. Many deregistered from the Jewish community soon after liberation. Few wrote about the rescue. Janne Laursen, director of the Danish Jewish Museum, which opened only last June, says: “You have many Jews in Danish cultural life, but they are not recognised as Jews. They are recognised as Danes.” By contrast, Dutch literature abounds with Jewish war stories. In Dutch society - replete with Catholics, various types of Protestants, and godless socialists - being different was more acceptable, and the heterogeneity enabled the gentile Dutch to jettison the Jews in the war.
Both Dutch and Danish societies have, in recent years, been faced with relatively large-scale immigration from Muslim regions. Both have reacted similarly - and toughly. And curiously, their diverse histories explain their common present stance.
The far-right Danish People’s Party arose earlier and grew stronger than similar political parties elsewhere in Europe. It won 12 per cent of the vote in national elections in 2001. Other Danish parties have borrowed its attitudes. “Denmark has become one of the leading nations of Europe in terms of Islamophobia,” says Seidenfaden.
At first glance the rescue of 1943 seems to contrast with today’s Islamophobia in Denmark, yet both stem from the same Danish fantasy of homogeneity. Melchior, who sits on the Danish Refugee Council, explains today’s hostility to Muslims by saying that the Muslims have not melted into the Danish collective. “It would serve the Muslim community to look into the history of Jewish integration,” he suggests, omitting to mention that there are far more Muslim immigrants than Jews and that most have only just arrived.
The Danes never drew a generally agreed moral from their wartime resistance. In postwar policy debates, it has been invoked by both sides. In 2003, for instance, the prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, suddenly slated Danish “collaboration” with the Germans in the second world war. Some Danes liked his frankness. Others felt his plea for activism was just a way of taking Denmark into the Iraq war. Many disagreed with his critique: Erik Scavenius, prime minister in the wartime collaborationist government, is constantly being “rehabilitated” by Danish historians as having done the right thing.
The Dutch, by contrast, did draw a generally agreed moral from the Holocaust: that even the mildest racism could lead inexorably to the gas chambers. Until the late 1990s, being nasty about immigrants was taboo. The memories of war made it impossible for the Dutch state to issue identity cards, and even population censuses became unacceptable.
Never again would the Dutch let another Auschwitz happen. And then they did. In 1995 the United Nations had designated the Bosnian town of Srebrenica a Muslim enclave, defended by a Dutch peacekeeping battalion, Dutchbat. But when 1,000 Bosnian Serb soldiers arrived, the terrified Dutch did nothing to protect the Muslims, even handing over to the Serbs the several hundred men who had fled into the UN compound. The Dutch also allegedly ushered some Muslims on to an empty bus guarded by Serb soldiers. The Serbs then massacred 7,500 Muslim men, the worst bloodshed in Europe since 1945.
Srebrenica became the last Dutch war trauma. The Netherlands Institute for War Documentation, which had been founded to study the German occupation, was charged with writing a report on the atrocity. This appeared in April 2002, and blamed the government for errors. The cabinet resigned, admittedly only a month before elections were due.
Srebrenica was one of several events that helped break down the Dutch Resistance myth. Already, Hans Blom, head of the Institute for War Documentation, had argued convincingly that most Dutch people in the war had been neither “good” nor “wrong” but had attempted “accommodation” with the occupiers. By the late 1990s, the tone became even more critical.
Official reports revealed how the Dutch had used the deportations to steal Jewish property. Television programmes and books debunked the Resistance myth. So frankly does the Dutch Resistance Museum now deal with this issue that it should be renamed the Dutch Collaboration Museum.
Most Dutch no longer need to believe the Netherlands was “good” in the war. Not only can’t they remember it, but nor can their parents. A telling moment of closure was the death last month, aged 93, of Prince Bernhard, husband of the former queen Juliana. Born a German, he had joined Hitler’s SA as a young man. He met Hitler and sent him sycophantic letters. Yet Bernhard became a symbol of Dutch Resistance. During the war, in London, he climbed the Dutch military hierarchy to become head of the “Dutch and internal forces”. Each year on May 5, when the Dutch remembered the liberation, Bernhard inspected the veterans’ parade. He stood for the unity of nation, royal family and Resistance. His death closed a murky, mythical era.
But for the Dutch, the war is ending. Auschwitz is no longer omnipresent. Consequently, the taboo on racism has weakened. When Pim Fortuyn began pontificating against Muslims in 2001, his opponents raised the usual spectre of Nazism, invoking Anne Frank and likening him to Mussolini. But this time the charges didn’t stick. Nobody believed that Fortuyn wanted the gas chambers back. He just didn’t like Islam. In 2002, a week after his assassination, his party, List Pim Fortuyn, won 18 per cent of the Dutch vote. Other political parties now bash immigrants too without being called neo-Nazis. Another sign of the fading of Auschwitz came on January 1, when it became compulsory for Dutch citizens to carry identification. One 14-year-old girl spent the first night of 2005 in a police cell because she could not identify herself.
Thursday will see the last great living commemorations of Auschwitz. For many younger people, they mark ancient history. Blom told the Dutch magazine Historisch Nieuwsblad that the recent Dutch commemorations “are aimed at groups who know little or nothing about the war. You then have to simplify enormously.” The result is Liberation pop festivals. Even then the message doesn’t always penetrate: after the war dead were remembered in Amsterdam two years ago, Dutch-Moroccan youths played football with the wreaths.
In Denmark, Auschwitz remains a tragedy that happened elsewhere. In the Netherlands, its after-effects are now concentrated among the few thousand families who suffered. Most Dutch Jews still carry the war with them: the half a table of relatives at a wedding, the shop taken by gentiles. The trauma jumped from the first generation to their postwar children, many of whom are being treated in the Dutch psychological clinic Centrum ‘45. Some have nightmares about concentration camps. Sometimes even their own children are affected. The families of Dutch collaborators have their own demons. The Holocaust is ceasing to be a national trauma, but it remains a family trauma.
Simon Kuper is an FT correspondent based in Paris.
