"Ireland had a deliberate policy to keep undesirables, namely the Jews, out of Ireland," wrote Keith Davis of Newtown, Pennsylvania in this newspaper the other day. "The only European country to hold its head up high during the war was Denmark, whose government made open efforts to defy the Nazis and help its Jewish population."
Really? Which Danish government has he in mind? The one which tamely surrendered to inferior attacking forces in 1940 after losing fewer than a score of soldiers? The one which was so compliant with the Third Reich that it was not governed as a conquered state, but retained its own internal authority? The one with which for most of the war the Nazis conducted business not as a Reich-protectorate, but diplomatically, through the Ministry for Foreign Affairs? Or the one which in 1942 permitted the creation of an SS Division of Danish volunteers, Das Viking, which stood eleventh in the SS Order of Battle?
Free elections
Such bald statements do not, to be sure, tell the whole truth. Within Denmark's free institutions, there certainly was resistance to the anti-Semitism of the Third Reich: but uniquely within occupied Europe, the Danes were able lawfully to resist Nazi will, even having free elections in 1943. Though German troops were garrisoned in Denmark, the country was not until late in the war occupied as other countries were, and Nazi Germany possessed no means by which it could impose the Final Solution in Denmark while the latter remained self-governing.
And though there is something admirable about the Danish rejection of German demands in 1942 to appoint Danish Nazis into the government, equally, uncoerced acquiescence to such demands would have been simply contemptible. But what really made Danish resistance to the Final Solution possible was, paradoxically, the co-founder of the Gestapo and Reich Plenipotentiary SSGruppenfuhrer Dr Werner Best.
Best was sent to Denmark in 1942 to install Nazis in government and to supervise anti-Semitic laws. But Best did something no other Nazi minister did: he ignored Hitler. Far from getting Nazis into government, he persuaded Fritz Clausen, the leader of the three-man Nazi party in the Danish parliament, to leave politics, and more importantly, he actively sabotaged The Final Solution. When two battalions of Ordnungspolizei arrived from Germany to round up Danish Jews, he and his shipping expert, Georg Ferdinand, came up with the idea of smuggling the entire population of Jews to Sweden across the Kattegat. It was they who tipped off Danish resistance and Jewish leaders about the forthcoming police operation, and it was they who made the preliminary shipping plans. Best even ordered security police not to break into Jewish houses but to ring the doorbell, and leave if there were no answer.
Punishments
Moreover, the punishments he introduced for helping Jews were derisory - light terms of imprisonment and mere fines. In the Netherlands, the abominable SeyssInquart introduced a reign of such terror that not merely those who helped Jews faced execution, but so too did their families. As a result, almost the entire Jewish population there was exterminated. In Denmark, however, at Best's initiative, most of the 6,500 Jews were smuggled out of the country, and only 477 were arrested. Best then contrived to have them sent to Theresienstadt Concentration Camp, normally a holding camp for extermination camps. He secured special status for his Danish Jews there, and 423 survived the war. In other words, only 50 out of 6,500 Danish Jews were consumed by the holocaust. Actuarially, their death rate was comparable with any group, even in peace.
Furthermore, when British-trained Danish partisans began guerilla operations, Best refused to allow serious reprisals, even preventing reports of Danish resistance reaching Hitler. When the latter finally heard of the state of affairs in Denmark, he ordered a campaign of counter-terror, with five Danes to be killed for every German.
Best moderated this as best he could, reducing reprisals to one Danish resistance fighter for every German soldier. His maintenance of the rule of law prompted the Nazi Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop to ask angrily for him to explain why, "contrary to the Fuhrer's instructions, you have continued to deal with sabotage activity by legal proceedings instead of simply by counter-terror."
Werner Best is the ultimate of contradictions. Having founded the Gestapo, he did his best to undo its ministrations wherever he worked. Though a Nazi official, he was a good and brave man who ensured that his Danish subjects were spared the atrocities of Nazi rule elsewhere. Instead, largely through his heroic endeavours, Denmark was able to create an engaging myth about its resistance to Nazi anti-Semitism - even concocting the baseless fable that when Danish Jews were ordered to wear yellow stars, the Danish royal family promptly donned them too.
Death sentence
At the end of the war, Denmark thanked the man who had saved both its reputation and its Jews by a classic example of a victor's justice: it sentenced him to death. But at least the death sentence was then commuted to life imprisonment. Werner Best was released from jail in 1951, and as far as I know, vanished from public life, aged only 48.
He has largely been written out of history - Martin Gilbert makes no mention of him in The Holocaust. But by his deeds did this righteous Gentile create another history, a largely invented one, which tells of a unique Danish resistance to the anti-Semitism of the Third Reich. This myth flourishes still, in Denmark, in Pennsylvania and in the Letters page of The Irish Times.