Malbeth

Late August 1943. In occupied Denmark, a long, strange, relatively gentle occupation finally breaks down into open confrontation. The Danish government refuses a German ultimatum and resigns rather than betray its own people, the Danish navy scuttles its own fleet rather than hand it over, and the stage is set for one of the most heroic rescues of the entire war. Denmark's occupation had been unlike any other. When Germany overran it in 1940, the Danes, tiny and indefensible, had chosen not to fight to the death, and in return the Germans had allowed Denmark a remarkable degree of self-rule, keeping its own government, its own king, its own parliament, even its own small military, as a supposed model protectorate. For a while an uneasy accommodation held. But by 1943, with Germany losing the war, Danish resistance was growing, strikes and sabotage spreading, and the population increasingly defiant. The Germans decided to crack down. On August 28 they issued an ultimatum to the Danish government, demanding it impose harsh new measures, ban strikes and public gatherings, and introduce the death penalty for sabotage, essentially demanding that the Danes help the Germans crush their own resistance. The Danish government refused. It judged the demands unconstitutional and a betrayal of its own people, and rather than comply, the whole government resigned. With no cooperative Danish government left, the Germans threw off the pretense, declared martial law, and moved to seize full control, disarming the Danish military in an operation called Safari. And here the Danes made their defiance physical. Rather than let their navy fall into German hands, Danish sailors scuttled the fleet, deliberately sinking their own warships in the harbors, and some ships made a dash for neutral Sweden. They would not hand their navy to the occupier. But the most important consequence was still to come, and it is one of the shining moments of the war. With the takeover, the Germans finally moved to deport Denmark's Jews to the death camps, as they had done everywhere else. Word leaked out, and the Danish people responded in a way almost no other occupied nation did. Ordinary Danes, warned in time, hid their Jewish neighbors and then, in a spontaneous, nationwide effort in October, spirited almost the entire Jewish population, around 7,000 people, across the water to safety in neutral Sweden in fishing boats, night after night. Because of that, the overwhelming majority of Danish Jews survived the war, one of the very few places in occupied Europe where that was true. All of it flowed from the breakdown that began with the refusal and resignation on these August days. The Danes had finally said no, and in saying no, they set in motion the rescue of their Jewish countrymen.