Denmark's Resistance

» Inside news from a closed country.

by SIGNE TOKSVIG

1

WHAT really happened in Denmark? Did it — as some people say so lightly — cave in?

To call one of the outspoken Swedish newspapers as a witness: “If the Danish struggle against the Germans is not as obviously dramatic as that of the Norwegians, it is no less intense; only a people of very old culture could stand so inseparably united against the enemy and fight him in so many subtle ways.”

Subtlety, however, is easy to overlook. A distinguished Dane in this country said the other day: “Ours is not a glamorous position. We can’t compete when it comes to being executed; perhaps not even in being looted.”

He was right, of course. Yet Denmark is a test case of the human values involved in this war. From Denmark, Germany must prove that it has not interfered in the internal affairs of a non-resisting nation. From it Gandhi could perhaps infer something about non-violence and non-coöperation. Whether by choice or by compulsion, in Denmark at present brute force is being met and puzzled by moral force. What is to be seen there?

Denmark did resist — although Germany chose to disregard its resistance — and Denmark is still resisting. But for over two years now this most accessible country has been tightly closed because of its geographical position and its small, easily policed extent — it is about half the size of Maine and has only three and three-quarter million inhabitants.

After invading it on April 9, 1940, the Germans at once shut off all means of communication with the outside world and instituted the death penalty for anyone attempting to escape without permission of their High Command.

On April 8, great numbers of German warships were passing through the Danish straits. Dr. Munch, then Danish Minister of Foreign Affairs, went himself to see the German Minister, Renthe-Fink, and was assured that nothing was planned against Denmark. In May, 1939, Denmark, at Germany’s request, had signed an antiaggression pact in which both sides agreed not to use war or any other force against each other. Herr Renthe-Fink referred to this. The next morning, just before dawn, Dr. Munch was awakened by that same German diplomat, who presented him with an ultimatum with which the Danish Government was requested to comply within an hour — or else! Dr. Munch saw the German bombers darkening the sky. He was also informed that large German forces had landed on the islands and were crossing the border of South Jutland. Before he could reach all the members of the Cabinet on his one telephone, to summon them to the King’s palace, and before he could himself arrive there from his rather distant villa, the hour was nearly up. German soldiers had landed under cover of darkness from supposed coalboats in the harbor, fighting was going on around the palace, fighting was going on at the border, and Denmark could muster only six or seven thousand men effectively under arms. Ten times as many were against them, not to speak of matériel, and the hour was nearly up. King and Cabinet agreed to the terms of the ultimatum, but “under protest.”

A neutral diplomat brought this account to friends in the United States; since then, only stray bits of information have come out of Denmark — bits which did make a picture, but there was nothing to check it against until early this summer when a book was published in Sweden by a Danish journalist, writing under the pseudonym of “Niels Ebbesen” — the name of a Danish patriot who slew a German count who tried to play Hitler in Denmark in the fourteenth century.

Putting our information together, the picture becomes clearer. He tells what it is really like for a country whose independence is millennial to be slugged and then have the assailants settle into the job of devouring liberty and goods, under the pretense of being “guests” and “protectors.”

They were asleep at dawn, April 9, but the bombers woke them: —

We leaped from our beds to the windows, pulled curtains aside, saw the skies darkened by the roaring monsters. No one could doubt their nationality. . . . Poor Norway—that was our first thought. Nothing else occurred to us. But they didn’t fly on, they circled over the city, they flew in close formation and the hellish noise grew worse. . . . We remembered how Austria had been attacked, how mutilated Czechoslovakia had been taken with the threat that Prague would be blasted to bits. And the fate of Poland without any declaration of war. But there had been trouble between Poland and Germany, a long hot strife over Danzig. And we had a non-aggression pact with Germany. . . . It wasn’t possible that we could be attacked this way, and in the middle of the night too!

His telephone rang. A friend shouted that the Germans had thrown down leaflets proclaiming Denmark to be under German protection and that resistance was useless. Mix-up on the line; old sad voices saying “Poor, poor Denmark!”; young voices saying “The despicable villains!”; but no one knowing what to do. He ran to his radio; it was silent. He dressed in cursing haste and rushed out to collect wild rumors in a town of wild confusion. Embarrassed police shook their heads and showed little slips which warned the people to be calm and avoid clashes with the occupying forces.

2

“ Protection,” The contempt in that word burned into the Danes. Wounded in their national self-respect, which they had taken so for granted they didn’t know they had to worry about it, they writhed in the bitterest despair they had ever known, deep and unanimous. Clenching their fists, men wept in the streets.

What had happened? Who was to blame?

We were unprepared, we were small and weak, and we yielded under pressure. But under protest — let that never be forgotten. Ought we to have let them raze Copenhagen to the ground? Ought we to have given the Nazis another chance to prove their brutality? Who can judge?

Then, being human, Niels Ebbesen proceeds to judge. Had there been traitors in Denmark?

Anyone who knows how intimate a community Denmark is, and how each goes his own way but yet feels his honor bound up with that of other members of the national family, will hear with what a tremulous voice this question is asked.

No attention is paid to the fractional percentage of a Nazi party, here as in Norway correctly described as riffraff, “soreheads,” and psychopaths; but two other men are specifically mentioned. One is the chief of the navy, Vice-Admiral Rechnitzer, not called a traitor but accused of gross dereliction of duty. He gave all the men of the coast batteries the day off on April 8. And the ships which brought coal from Germany as a top-dressing for German soldiers were owned by a Danish businessman, Albert Jensen, unfavorably known from shady transactions in the last war. He died suddenly, soon after, in Germany.

But there was no traitor in the Government, no secret selling out. This is corroborated by a former member of the Government who recently escaped to England and who was himself against the capitulation. We know there was partial mobilization on the Jutland border, where the Danish soldiers fought like wildcats till they were ordered to stop after a couple of hours. The men who stood by the few Danish fighting aircraft were ready to join issue, and two of them were killed before the Germans destroyed all the planes. No one knows exactly how many were killed at the border.

But Danish capitulation was a foregone military conclusion. At a press conference in 1939, Winston Churchill warned the Danes that their geographical position made it impossible for England to come to their aid. A year earlier in Copenhagen, at a private dinner, Commander Stephen KingHall, M.P., had said the same, but he added, “While nobody expects you to resist physically, we expect you to give the best example of passive resistance the world has seen.”

3

This resistance is the story of Denmark today. It rests on the legal fact that the Danes did not capitulate unconditionally. The technical basis for it, the slender leverage of which King and Cabinet have often made good use, is the result of the negotiations between the Danes and the Germans that morning of April 9. The Nazis demanded that the Danish Government should issue a proclamation to the army and the people, ordering them to cease resistance to German troops. They demanded all military facilities; control of all communications by land or sea — the post, radio, and telegraph; and blackout.

At noon the Government issued this proclamation, the King adding a personal message in which he urged a levelheaded and dignified behavior. For the people, the two saving words in the document were that the step was being taken “under protest.”

Nor can it be too often underscored that the Germans on their side expressly promised not to interfere in the country’s internal affairs, and to respect Danish integrity and independence. And then: —

With hate, with contempt, people turned their backs on the assailants from the very first day, and the coldness has continued. Keep your distance, you have attacked and oppressed us, we will have nothing to do with you — this is the tacit watchword which has been and is being followed.

Many stories attest this. There is, for instance, an idyllic little park in a suburb of Copenhagen where ducks swim among water lilies. A Dane observes a German soldier sitting on a bench close to the ducks, apparently addressing a monologue to them. An hour later the German is still at it. The Dane’s curiosity breaks bounds, he asks the soldier why he talks to the ducks. “Nobody else will listen to me.”

Some German officers gate-crash at a country dance; no one looks at them. They bow to several girls, asking for dances. Each girl says to her escort, “I am tired, please take me home.” She has not acknowledged the presence of the German by even saving “No” to him.

The “cold shoulder” seemed enough directly after the occupation, because the Danes still felt certain of Allied victory. Let the storm blow over — it won’t be long. That was the prevalent feeling. But when Holland, Belgium, France fell, so we learn from another Danish journalist who escaped to England recently, when it looked as if Germany might really win, then resistance, both spontaneous and organized, grew from the deep roots of the Danish nation into a thicket impenetrable to the Nazis. Weak it might be as a military nation, and overrun, but it intended to remain Danish.

It is hardly necessary to say that the Germans violated their promise of April 9. No sooner was the mailed fist laid on the country than thousands of Gestapo agents, German civilian “experts,” Nazi propagandists of every sort, wriggled into every crevice of official and industrial Denmark. They sit heavily in every post office, telephone and telegraph office, radio station, industrial concern, and in every department of the Government, where they dictate whatever telegrams are sent abroad. They dictate what is to be bought and sold and at what price. Not to German disadvantage. One old Danish firm which had always sold most of its output to Finland was suddenly denied export permits to Finland. There was no other place to which it could export its wares? Yes, dear me, yes, to Germany. It could get an export permit to a firm in Hamburg, which of course bought the product cheap and then sold it at a high price, to the Danish firm’s former customer in Finland.

This is Nazi control on a small scale. On the larger scale Germany “borrows” from the Danish National Bank the money with which to pay for its endless requirements of food, consumers’ goods, Danish slave labor, and so on. The amount is now over two thousand million kroner, four times the amount of the normal annual state budget.

4

In a world where there are Poland and Greece, one hesitates to mention Danish hardships. Yet those who have been prosperous, healthy, and free suffer more intensely from poverty, sickness, and captivity than those more habituated to misfortune. Denmark provided food for twelve million besides its own population, and that in abundance. It had done away with poverty, and had practically done away with tuberculosis and venereal disease.

Last winter people were known to have frozen to death in Denmark — a thing unheard of. They were weakened through not having enough food, clothes, and fuel. The Swedish visitor to Copenhagen at once notices the acrid smell of peat smoke. Peat is a pleasant decorative fire in a mild country, but Denmark is northern and had the hardest winter of a hundred years. Families huddled in the one room in each home which they were allowed to heat a little, in the semi-darkness of the blackout, hearing the iron-heeled tramp of German troops in the streets. “That sound will be a nightmare till my death,” one man said. Gas and electricity are weak wraiths of former selves. Fuel had to be supplemented by briquettes made from sawdust and fallen leaves.

The rationing is more severe than in England, and the people can’t get the rations. Forced deliveries to Germany have resulted in high prices. A couple who before the war spent 150 kroner a month now must spend 500 kroner — if they can get them. For lack of hot water, skin diseases are a scourge. Children suffer abnormally from infectious diseases and colds. Tuberculosis has returned. With the troops of the New Order, about sixty thousand of them, venereal diseases also came. Nazi soldiers from the Russian front bring lice with them into the country, threatening typhus. Danish hospitals, like the Norwegian, are used for Nazi wounded.

Counting on a short war, the Germans did not worry about the deterioration of Danish agriculture because of lack of fodder and Nazi requirements. The pigs have been reduced by two-thirds. The hens by fourfifths. The cows by one-seventh, but they yield little milk and can hardly stand upright. In some sections they are seen eating sand and dirt, they are so hungry. Many horses look like skeletons. And in no other country in the world did the farmer so love the plump sleekness of his livestock.

The fishing trawlers used to go far away; now they must keep close to the coasts, and, under German surveillance, the fish they bring in are counted to assure “deliveries.” The cost of oil and tackle has risen by several hundred per cent. But the Danish farmers are slyly managing production strikes, and the fishers find numerous pretexts for strikes or for not going out. Danish industry, so many-sided and progressive, faces a standstill for lack of raw materials. The unemployment gives the Nazis a chance to force starvation on those who won’t take employment in Germany or Norway. About thirtyfive thousand have been sent away. They were cheated into going to Norway by being told they’d only have to work on reconstruction of towns. Instead they were put on fortification building, where they are halfstarved, in rags, bullied by armed guards. Those who attempt to escape are put in concentration camps — German ones. In Germany, Danish workers are put in the danger zones and have to work over eighty hours a week, besides being bombarded with Nazi propaganda. But such tactics do not succeed. And in Denmark Nazi attempts to set the classes against each other have also failed. There are only Danes now.

5

What is self-respect? There are Danes in all the Allied armies, and in the flying corps. There are four or five thousand Danes daily risking their lives sailing for England and America. One of these sailors, Nazi-bombed forty times from the air as well as torpedoed, said he’d rather the country had fought, even if it had been hollowed out like an empty honeycomb.

All Danes have moments of feeling like that sailor, but their Government was not like the Yugoslavian; here the whole people was really represented by its representatives. Sudden dissociation was not possible, and the Government could not escape abroad as others could. There were no traitors in the Cabinet on April 9 — only bewildered men with too heavy a responsibility. It was the King who called off the unequal fight; no one doubted his patriotism.

Yet the Danes wonder. Over and over again, like the wife who keeps telling her neighbors that John really is too nearsighted for the army, they ponder this question of self-respect!

Did they choose the easy way? Is it easy to be shut up unarmed in your house with a well-fanged, well-clawed tiger of highly uncertain temper? Impatient with the Danish Government’s Hamlet tactics, the Gestapo are making arrests on their own now. One woman said, “Whenever I see a Gestapo man coming down our street my heart stands still and I wonder if they’re coming for my husband now.” A boy who picked his nose as some German troops marched by was put in jail for two weeks for “demonstrating,” but another who shouted an impolite word was bayoneted to death on the spot by a sensitive Nazi. We must admit that these occurrences are not the usual thing in Denmark, where the occupying Germans have observed strict discipline so far, but they can and do happen. They do not make for an easy atmosphere.

There are as yet no Quislings in the sinister Norwegian sense, if one excepts the imbecile, inter-warring factions of the minuscule Nazi party, despised even by the Germans. But on July 8, 1940, the Germans foisted two men on the Government, about whom the kindest thing that could be said would be that they believe Denmark must pull with its big neighbor for geographic reasons. Erik Scavenius became Minister of Foreign Affairs. A soured intellectual, a man contemptuous of the “people,” he feels angry and hurt because 98 per cent of the people since that date have returned his contempt with 100 per cent interest. The other German favorite is Gunnar Larsen, a rich cement manufacturer. He is said to be a potential Quisling. “Unappreciated” by their countrymen, these two have often played into German hands by lending themselves to the Nazi tactic of “or else!”

There have been four concessions, each time plotted by Scavenius in Berlin, behind the backs of King and Cabinet. First a statement of his that Denmark ought to coöperate with Germany. Then the formation of the so-called Danish Free Corps to fight the Russians (a ridiculous failure); the handing over of the torpedo boats, and the signing of the Anti-Comintern Pact. Except for the two opportunists, all the Cabinet were united against these proposals; they were not brought to surrender until the choice had been put up to them: Sign — or else accept a Terboven or a Seyss-Inquart for ruler of the country, with the usual consequences.

A Danish proverb warns that those who say “A” also have to say “B.” But if the signing of the Anti-Comintern Pact was the first serious “B” following on the capitulation of April 9, the people now protested that they wanted no more alphabet soup, especially as the Nazis had begun to talk of a “C” of anti-Jewish measures. Communism is as far from the individualistic Danes as is Nazism, but when the news of the pact leaked out, about twenty thousand stormed to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, shouting “Down with the traitor Scavenius!” They pelted Germans who didn’t keep out of their way with whatever was handy, beat up Danish Nazis, cried that they preferred the fate of Norway to further concessions, and over and over again they sang the Norwegian national song. For a week the demonstrations continued.

6

The cast of the Danish drama is now clear: the German army and Gestapo of occupation; the Danish people, 98 per cent of them against any collaboration with the enemy, whom, after all, they have withstood longer than any other nation in Europe; the less than two per cent of Danish Nazis, a fraction of opportunists; a Coalition Cabinet of good Danes, except two, and the King.

In the Cabinet, except for Nazis and Communists, the five Danish political parties are represented, the dominant being the SocialDemocrat, rather like the English Labor party. Its old leader, the Prime Minister Stauning, died recently, a heartbroken man. He is reported to have said when the invasion took place: “But things like that can’t happen,” tearing at his long beard. His successor, Vilhelm Buhl, is a staunch Social-Democrat, appointed in defiance of the Nazis.

But in none of the five parties was there a man who, under the circumstances, could have commanded the allegiance of the whole people; and the piece of luck with which socialistic Denmark found itself endowed turned out to be that it had a King.

King Christian X, on the throne since 1912, had gradually lived down the old suspicion that the Crown shed its beams on Conservatives only. Fishwives could, and did, walk into his palace and explode about their grievances. His influence was great and is now infinitely greater.

But he hasn’t become a Socialist. You couldn’t imagine him as a President. He is a King. He is of a line of Kings; generations have bred in him a dignity, a power of simple royal gesture, an ability to say and do the right thing at the right time.

“There is no doubt about it,” a man remarked who knows him well, “he can say things that make even the Nazis blush for themselves.” “Why?” “Well, he is old, he’s tall and straight, he speaks perfect German, he has a kind of bearing they don’t know, and they’re snobs. He may threaten to abdicate, but he must never do it; then the lock would be off the door.”

An example. The Germans come to the King to demand that something really must be done about the “Jewish problem” in Denmark. (The country has a few thousand Jews, many of them among the best of its citizens.) “Sirs,” the King is reported to have said, “as we have never considered ourselves inferior to the Jews, we have no such problem here.” Even the Germans laugh, shamefacedly, and leave.

The King, because of his symbolic value and because of what he is as a man, has given the people a way to focus its national consciousness. He never leaves the capital now; the flag is day and night over the palace. Old as he is — over seventy — and severe as the weather may be, only serious illness makes him miss the unattended early ride on his horse through the town, followed by the cyclists going to work, “who never ride ahead of him now, but come in long reverential lines after him.”

But it is, after all, they, the people themselves, who have to show whet her they deserve nationhood.

From Sweden, whose friendship has sustained the Danes immeasurably, comes a judgment on that. One of its papers has said: “Denmark is the one country in which the Germans so far have used comparatively ‘soft’ methods; one might think then that the Danes would yield to the ideas whose mighty instruments have scored such triumphs on all of the European continent, but the Danes stand more opposed to Nazi ideology than ever, long as their history of opposition to Prussianism is.”

7

The Swedes are right. Yet there is a positive side. Being occupied by Germany, even “softly” — with only military and material ruin and loss of liberty — is not a passive affair. The whole demonic propaganda machinery of the Nazis is set going full blast; money, power, glory are offered for conversions; other points of view tend to be suppressed; newspapers and radio must conform — “or else!”

Denmark had many fearless, enlightened journalists; they soon found a way of writing between the lines (even radio announcers learned to speak between the lines), but their way has been hard. The German press attaché in Copenhagen was set to rule over them; in fact he was made Landesführer for the whole country by von Ribbentrop. A speech which he made to the corralled journalists is quoted in Niels Ebbesen’s book. A fragment gives the tone: —

After the American assault on Greenland, I had expected that this Danish national feeling, which the press is always stressing, would make you gentlemen express it in your editorials, but I am perfectly aware of the reaction which this event, has caused in the people. It is only too clear how Western influence [English] prevents all sensible and logical thinking. Your comments at that time were, to put it mildly, thin soup. . . . I have carefully studied the whole press ... it is carrying through a quiet but effective sabotage against Dano-German collaboration. If you gentlemen think that I will rest content with this state of affairs, you are mistaken. . . .

Danish editors, politicians, and many others have been forced from their positions by the Nazis, yet the “state of affairs” not only goes on but is intensified. Determined and brilliant leaders have arisen; the omnipresent Danish youth-coöperation movement includes young men and women of all parties, working steadily against Nazi influence. In every school, from the lowest to the highest, nothing but antidotes to Nazism are being created. The folk high schools, for farmers and workers, have once more become fortresses filled with defenders of humane values, and a Nazi-supported paper wails that “in the churches the parsons preach about Nero, and the congregations never misunderstand them!”

All Danes outside Denmark look to Henrik de Kauffmann, still Danish Minister to Washington, as their leader, because of the brave, wholehearted stand he has taken ever since the invasion. And inside Denmark he is said to be the most popular man next to the King.

The Danes are concentrating on spiritual resistance, but they also practice a very effective lot of “V” sabotage. Yet it would not help general strategy if the Nazis were given an excuse to crush the country entirely. It is better that the Danes should keep some strength, some control of their affairs, for a day that may come.

The unshakable stand taken by the Danes is: You may hurt us materially, and even physically: you shall not make us sell our souls. By making concessions, the Government hopes to pilot the country through until the expected change, but the people are aware that from some concessions there can be no recovery. Rather, for instance, than countenance persecution of fellow citizens because of race or religion, they ask openly, through leaders like Professors Vilhelm la Cour and Hal Koch, for the fate of Norway. Enormous pressure is being brought on the Danes to pass the Nuremberg Laws — not that the small number of Jews matters to the Nazis; but if they could only drag the Danes to their level in this, much would have been gained. They can’t. They may decide that the milch cow is dry, so the Danes needn’t be treated “softly” any longer. They may enforce the Nuremberg Laws themselves. But then, as King Christian is made to say in a Swedish cartoon, and as he may well have said, “If they do that we will all wear the yellow star.”

There is a unique drama going on in Denmark. In keeping with their kind of culture, the Danish people are as one man against the Nazis; their strength not in violence, but in the quiet, deep-rooted will to choose death rather than spiritual degradation. It is not easy to strike the Terrible Meek, but the Nazis may at any time do it. Then, though the turn of the Danes may come to be tortured and murdered in large numbers, the Germans will surely lose that battle, and the Danes will win it.