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The book that I am featuring now is rather remarkable.
It is written by a major Danish diplomat and newspaper person.
He is, in fact, the editor-in-chief of the leading Danish newspaper, Politiken, and as well as a major diplomat in the Danish diplomatic corps.
His name is Bo Lidegaard, and that is L-I-D-E-G-A-A-R-D.
And Mr. Lidegaard has written a book of Danish history, and you might say, hmm, Dennis, we find your interest in all these things remarkable, but why would you pick a book on Danish history?
There are over 200 countries.
Well, this is actually a remarkable chapter in Danish and world history.
The book is titled simply, Countrymen.
That is, fellow members of my country.
And here is what it's about.
Here is the subtitle.
The untold story of how Denmark's Jews escaped the Nazis, of the courage of their fellow Danes, and of the extraordinary role of the SS.
The SS, of course, being the security agency and the real terror group of the Nazis.
And it's quite a book.
And Mr. Lidegaard, welcome to the Dennis Prager Show.
Thank you for inviting me.
I know it's really remarkable because I just had ascertained Mr. Lidegaard is pulled over in his car in the middle of Denmark.
This is the world in which we live now.
And I never cease to be amazed by it.
The first and most, I don't know if it's the most obvious question, but it is to me.
There is so much written on the Holocaust.
Why has this one of the only bright chapters in that utter darkness, why was this not written before you did it?
Well, I guess it's for the very reason that this is the exception.
This is the one instance that is standing out as the country and the situation where everything that happens in all other countries occupied and controlled by the Nazis did not happen.
And for a long time, there's been this notion that the Danes just helped their Jewish fellow countrymen because the Danes are good.
And I guess it has taken quite a while to realize that that is not a real good explanation.
And that the really interesting thing about this story is that everyone behaved differently here.
The Nazis, the Danes, and the Danish Jews.
And it's that dynamic.
Why were everything so different in Denmark?
This is the dynamic that I'm trying to explain in the book.
Boy, and am I interested because I have always said and I have told my listeners frequently that I think goodness is a bigger riddle than evil.
So this – go on.
I agree.
And to me, learning from this part of history in a way is, as you said in your introduction, the more important story to learn.
Because one thing is to understand how the Holocaust happened.
I mean, that is important.
It's important to remember.
But if we can also try to understand what made it not happen, that might be a lesson that we are more eager to learn.
And this is the lesson I'm trying to outline in this in this narrative.
Yes, that's why it's so interesting and so important.
I just would like to add for the sake of historical accuracy that there was, I believe, one other nation that did save its Jews, though in a very, very different way than the way in which the Danes did, and that's the Bulgarians.
That is accurate.
That is accurate.
The difference being there that all the measures introduced to separate the Jews from the rest of the society did happen in Bulgaria.
But eventually the deportations did not take place.
And that saved the Bulgarian Jews.
That is absolutely true.
Yeah.
Okay.
So you've now written about this.
And I have my own series of questions here.
And I guess the again, one obvious one is there were only about 8,000 Jews in Denmark.
Is that correct?
Yes.
That was the number.
Is the small.
Okay, go on.
The 8,000 Jews living in Denmark really were three very different groups.
There were a great number of Jewish families who had been living in the Danish society for many generations and who were extremely well integrated into the surrounding society.
Then there was a somewhat smaller group of refugees who had been arriving from Eastern Europe and Russia in the late 18th century and early 19th century through early 20th century and who had been there only for about four decades.
And then there was an even smaller group of German refugees, German Jews who had managed to escape to Denmark following the Nazi persecution, even though Denmark, like other countries neighboring Germany, were conducting a very rigid policy trying to avoid a major influx of refugees.
So these were the three components and they were very differently positioned in Danish society because one was very integrated and the two others much less so.
Right.
So the the question that I was about to pose is is the small number, the very small number of Jews, does that make it difficult to learn any lessons from the Danish saving of the Jews?
I don't think so, because the two other European countries that somewhat compare to Denmark would be our neighboring country, Norway, which was occupied on the same dates as Denmark in April 1940 and the Netherlands close by and occupied one month later.
All of them in Northern Europe, all of them well-established democracies.
All of them at the outset treated equally by the Nazis.
The Jewish populations in these three countries was very uneven.
In Norway, you had some 2,000 Jews.
In Denmark, as you mentioned, 8,000.
And in the Netherlands, way over 100,000.
And the fate of these Jewish populations were very different.
In the Netherlands, more than three-quarters were killed.
In Norway, more than a third of the much smaller number were killed.
And in Denmark, very few were killed.
So it doesn't seem to be a function of the number.
Yeah, the number would be relative to Norway.
100,000 is way more than 8,000, obviously.
And I will ask you about your thoughts on Holland.
And for my listeners who don't remember this, Anne Frank was a Dutch Jew, so the fate of Dutch Jewry is fairly well known at least.
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In terms of one family, which, of course, was informed to the Nazis upon by a Dutchman.
I don't know, to this day, of course, nobody knows.
I think nobody knows who that Dutchman was.
So in Danish society, we know that in Norway, you had pro-Nazis.
In fact, you had the Qvisling regime.
That's where you get the name Qvisling as a traitor.
In Holland, you had a very active Dutch Nazi movement.
In Denmark, were there people who, or was there any movement pro-Nazi?
I'll be back in a moment.
This is what I call a history hour.
Countrymen is the name of the book.
Bo Lidegaard, the editor-in-chief of the leading newspaper in Denmark and a diplomat for his country's foreign service, has written the book, The Untold Story of How Denmark's Jews Escaped the Nazis.
Countrymen is the book.
It is up at dennisprager.com.
We resume momentarily.
Hello, my friends.
Dennis Prager here.
I am speaking with a very prominent Dane who is in his car pulled over on the side of a road in the middle of Denmark, courtesy of telecommunications on planet Earth at our time.
He's the editor-in-chief of his country's leading newspaper, Politiken, and he is also a distinguished member of his country's foreign service, Bo Lidegaard, L-I-D-E-G-A-A-R-D.
He has written this book, Countrymen is the name of the book, the untold story of how Denmark's Jews escaped the Nazis, of the courage of their fellow Danes, and of the extraordinary role of the SS.
And again, I just want to repeat, and Mr. Lidegaard apparently shares my conviction that it is at least as important to study goodness as it is evil.
Since I have a pessimistic view of human nature, I regard good as rarer and more needing of explanation than evil.
We are talking about this remarkable thing about the saving of Danish Jews, and we had just mentioned that Norway, which had even fewer than the 8,000 Jews in Denmark, Norway's, one-third of their Jews had been killed by the Nazis, three-quarters of Holland's, which had 100,000, and all of the, virtually all of the 8,200 Danish Jews had been saved.
So I'd like to talk to you about your neighbors.
What was different?
And not only that, you mentioned that they're northern countries, one might add as well, Protestant countries.
So they even had that in common.
So what was different among the three countries?
The main difference was their situation under German occupation.
As the Germans attacked the three countries, they offered a very particular settlement to all of them, implying that they would control the country, keep it occupied, but leave the local authorities govern the country.
Denmark accepted this ultimatum, whereas Norway and the Netherlands did not.
So while Denmark preserved her democratic governance, legislation, and entire administration, Norway and the Netherlands were fighting.
They were losing within days or weeks.
And the Germans then installed direct Nazi rule in both countries.
And they established Nazi local Nazis or German Nazis in the leaderships of the civil administration and the police.
And this meant that in Norway and the Netherlands, you had a strong government ruled by the Nazis, a strong administration controlled by the Nazis and acting on Nazi instructions.
In Denmark, you never had such a thing.
You had a German occupation, but it was the democratic government negotiating with the occupying forces.
And as it turned out, that created some leverage for Denmark.
And that leverage was used by the government to fend off any measures directed against the Jews living in Denmark.
So one might say that an observer at the time would have said the Dutch and the Norwegians were actually more noble than the Danes.
They fought the Nazis, and the Danes accepted the deal.
Absolutely.
And to this very day, we are having in Denmark a discussion whether you can morally defend to compromise that far.
Whereas in Norway and in the Netherlands, you have the opposite discussion.
Whether or how you can explain that part of the Norwegian police, part of the Dutch police, helped in executing the deportations.
Well, see, it's fascinating because it shows how difficult it is sometimes to make moral judgments because it would seem so much more natural to praise the Norwegians and to praise the Dutch for fighting the Nazis.
But it turns out that you could have done a lot more good.
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Had you accepted the Danish idea?
Well, I guess you cannot make that comparison quite in that way because nobody knows what would have happened if Norway and the Netherlands had accepted the deal.
What we do know is that it worked here.
It worked for the Jews living in Denmark.
But it's also, I mean, part of this very difficult picture that Denmark did nothing to help in the general question of the Jewish issue in Germany.
And we were very strongly fending off our borders not to be a safe haven for German Jews.
So this was a strategy aimed to protect Danish society, including the Jews living in Denmark.
Very, so you don't accept the Danes are better argument.
No, I do not accept it.
But I do accept the argument that realizing that a military defense against Nazi Germany was simply not an option for such a small country on a flat land bordering Germany.
The Danish politicians did not give up, but they designed a civil resistance and they mobilized the Danish people to defend democracy.
And in a way, the argument which they made very explicit already in the 30s, the argument was the enemy is not the Germans.
The enemy is Nazism.
And by the way, communism.
If we in Denmark start or begin to adopt these ideas, if we start to think like they do in terms of us and them, in terms of the Jews being a problem, if we begin walking down that avenue, we have lost the battle because we have become Nazis ourselves.
So whether we can defend our country or not, we need to keep this line strong.
We cannot separate between Danes.
All Danes are part of society.
Everyone supporting democracy should be defended by democracy.
How insightful.
This gives you an idea of the importance of the book.
The book is called Countrymen.
The untold story of how Denmark Jews escaped the Nazis.
Bo Lidegaard is the author.
I'm Dennis Prager.
This is a history hour on my show.
in a moment I'm Dennis Prager and welcome to the Dennis Prager show or welcome back as I often say This history hour that I'm devoting is devoted to, or this hour that I'm devoting to history, is to the book Countrymen.
Periodically, I have this hour to highlight a very important newly published book of history.
Bo Lidegaard, who is the editor-in-chief of the leading newspaper in Denmark, Politiken, and who is a Danish diplomat, is the author.
The book is up at dennisprager.com.
It is about the saving of Danish Jews by their fellow Danes during World War II.
I had to ask you this question about are Danes better or do they have better values?
And I think your answer is very compelling because you point out that they did not allow, they sealed their borders to Jewish refugees from the Nazis.
Is that correct?
Yes, we did.
And there was this strong notion that what Denmark could do would be to protect its own society.
In this concept, the fascinating thing is that protecting society meant protecting everyone whom they themselves said they belonged to society.
Right.
And as the Jewish population in Denmark were part of society and it makes us that's why your book is called Countrymen, not Jews.
Exactly.
Because for the Danes, protecting their countrymen, regardless of whether they were Jews or not.
Right, it's irrelevant.
It was irrelevant.
Exactly.
And to me, that's even a better story.
No, that's fine.
I'm not judging it in any way negatively.
I'm just saying.
Your point is very, very clear and well taken.
It wouldn't matter if the Nazis had said all Danes under five feet tall.
Exactly.
Exactly.
And this is also why early in the war, as Hitler was attacking Stalin in the summer of 1941, the occupation forces in Denmark ordered the Danes to arrest the Danish communists, the communists being a legal but undemocratic party at the time.
And in the case of the Danish communists, Danish police actually did arrest their fellow countrymen.
And they were eventually deported to Germany.
Now, why was that?
That was because they were considered not part of society because they had denounced democracy.
So they, being, I mean, ethnically fully Danes, they were regarded as not under the protective umbrella of society.
So this was not a soft strategy.
Right, right.
It was a pretty tough stance.
If you stand up and defend democracy, democracy will stand up and defend.
Wow.
Do you discuss in your book, the role, if any, of the churches in Denmark?
Yes.
When the action against the Jews actually took place, which was on 1st October 1943, Denmark was in a very precarious situation.
The government had resigned one month previously.
There was no free press.
The resistance had not yet organized at a national level.
So you really had a country without a head.
You had no government.
You had no one who could speak on behalf of the government or the people.
And yet, the people had to face this crisis and to act vis-à-vis their fellow countrymen.
The Danish church, which is Protestant Lutheran, is organized in a very unpolitical way.
And there's no spokesman and no authority in the church.
It's just the ministers at a local level.
But that Sunday following the arrests of the Jews, or the attempted arrests, there was a unique example of ministers in all Lutheran churches stating.
All right, I want to hear that.
I want to hear that, obviously, and so do my listeners.
Dennis Prager here.
If you're just tuning in, well, you've missed quite something, but you can catch up somewhat.
This is an hour devoted to history, a history hour, as I call it, periodically broadcast to bring to your attention the most important works of history being published at this time.
Countrymen is one of them.
It is by a Dane about the Danish saving of the Jews in the Holocaust.
It has not been told in this depth before.
Bo Lidegaard is perfectly placed to write it, as he is the editor-in-chief of the leading newspaper in Denmark, Politiken, and a major diplomat in the country's country's foreign service.
Before the break, I had asked Mr. Lidegaard the question of the role of Danish churches, if any, in this matter.
And you were telling us that with the collapse of the government, there was a period of no leadership.
And at that time, and now I'll let you continue the story.
At that time was exactly the time when the Germans decided to strike against the Danish Jews.
And they did so on a Friday evening, the 1st of October.
Of what year?
1943.
Of 1943, which was very late.
It was three and a half years into the occupation.
And of course, at a time when Jews had been killed in great numbers all over Europe, until this moment, the Jews in Denmark lived completely normal lives, no discrimination, no yellow star, no special measures.
But that night, the Nazis came to take them.
And as they had been warned, actually by the Nazis themselves, as they had been warned, they were not at home.
They were fleeing into their neighbors, their workmates, the classmates of their schools, and virtually all 8,000 simply vanished into society.
And on that Sunday, following the Friday of the action, in the churches of Denmark, throughout the country, the ministers were reading a small text coordinated between them saying that this was one of the few instances where citizens had to follow the word of God before the word of law.
And everyone had to make up his own mind and do what his conscience told him to do.
And that was understood by the Danish population to mean that the church supported their help to their Jewish countrymen.
And that was indeed exactly the way it was to be understood.
So the church in that way did not initiate the action to help, but it certainly confirmed to the churchgoers that this was with the support of the Danish church.
Now, was Danish society religious at that time?
It was.
And many people would go to church.
But the church did not play a political role in Danish society.
It hadn't for a long time.
Right, but it did now, I mean, if one wants to, it played a moral role, if not political.
So did the Nazis at this time also order the Yellow Star to be worn by Jews?
When did that happen?
Well, it actually did not happen because the action came as a surprise.
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Today, up to 90% of our children and families have already been captured, and you will not know until it's too late.
In one case, a boy committed suicide just 27 minutes after he was contacted by this enemy.
Rescue your children, protect your families, and defend our nation by watching and sharing the docuseries, Sexploited in America.
Visit SalemNow.com.
That's SalemNow.com.
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You'll be stunned by what's uncovered in these real stories.
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Once you see it, you'll understand why silence is no longer an option.
Visit SalemNow.com and watch Sexploited in America.
And visit SexploitedFilm.com.
They let the rumor slip out two days in advance, and the action was executed in just one night, that night of October 1st, 1943.
And as all the Jews had fled into their neighbors, into friends, and the Nazis only succeeded in arresting some 200 out of the 8,000.
they could still report back to Berlin that all the Jews had gone.
So actually, the leading Nazi in Denmark, Mr. Werner Best, a very senior SS officer, concluded in the morning that the action had been a great success and Denmark was now in Newton.
It was Judenfrey.
Free of Jews.
Yeah.
Wait, I don't understand.
How could he claim that?
Because there were none to arrest?
They were gone.
So escaped is the same as success?
Apparently.
And the thing is, and this is one of the points of my book, that the Germans never acted to try to find out what happened to them.
Right.
So this leads to the obvious question.
First of all, you mentioned in passing that the SS, the most feared and sadistic part of the Nazi regime, tipped off the Danish government that there would be a roundup of the Jews on that Friday night.
So how does one explain that?
When Hitler sent Werner Best, his first man, to be his representative in Denmark, in occupying Denmark, he had two orders for Werner Best.
One was to maintain Denmark as this model protectorate, as Hitler termed it.
The showcase example of how well a country would be treated if it cooperated.
Right.
And the second order was to resolve the Jewish question, as Hitler put it.
Now, Dana Best was not stupid, and he realized the contradiction between those two aims.
And this is the explanation why he moved so carefully.
All right, hold on.
We'll have to hear that when we come back.
This is just riveting.
Bo Ledegaard is the Danish author, one of the most prominent Danes of our time, and his book is Countryman, up at dennisprager.com.
I'm very sad to say we only have three minutes to go here.
I am speaking on this history hour with Bo Lidegaard, the leading Danish journalist and diplomat.
His book, Countrymen, The Untold Story of How Denmark's Jews Escaped the Nazis, and the amazing role that the Germans who governed at the time, who governed Denmark at the time, played.
And you were mentioning that the leading, is it the leading German or the leading SS man, Werner Best?
The leading German was an SS man, so he was one of his leading SS man.
And he understood that you can either round up Jews or have a model protectorate, but you can't do both.
Exactly.
And he understood that because he realized in arriving in Denmark that there was absolutely no support in Danish society for any measure on any level of any kind to be taken against the Jews.
So you think that he knew that the Jews were warned in advance that they would be arrested on October 1st, 43?
More than that, I document that he himself personally was behind the warning.
Amazing.
Not because he was a bleeding heart or had gone soft.
He was definitely not.
But because it served his interests of peaceful Denmark.
Yes.
Now, forgive me because we have so little time.
Did King Christian actually put on a yellow star or is that a myth?
That is a myth.
That's what I thought.
He did actually say if they try to force the Danish Jews to do so, we all have to wear the yellow star.
I see.
He actually announced that?
Not in public, but in private.
But the point of this German dilemma is the Danish politics forced the Nazis into making a choice.
Either to take the Jews or to keep Denmark as a protectorate.
Right.
And faced with that choice, they actually hesitated going after the Jews.
Sir, I can honestly say that I regret that this hour is over.
Well, folks, you can always read the book, which is pretty much the point here.
Countryman is up at dennisprager.com.
Mr. Lidegaard, it has been a real joy for me, and thank you for writing the book.