By Donald H. Harrison 

COPENHAGEN, Denmark—Few people have had better vantage points to think about the relationships between Jews and Danes than Arne Melchior, Denmark's minister of tourism and communications.

Melchior is a leader both in the Danish government and in the Danish Jewish community. When he eats at royal functions with Queen Margrethe II, arrangements are routinely made to have kosher food served at the palace.

Melchior's brother, Bent, is the current chief rabbi in Copenhagen. Their father was the rabbi who told worshipers in September of 1943, just before Rosh Hashanah, not to come to services but to go into hiding instead.

A few weeks before that announcement, the Germans had dissolved the Danish government. Next, they planned to round up Jews as they had in other countries, the senior Rabbi Melchior told the congregants.

Melchior met with Heritage in an office in the ministry from which he oversees such diverse activities as the postal service and his nation's efforts to attract more visitors.

He recalled that his father had said that the lasting proof of the Danes' friendship for Jews came not in October, 1943, when the dramatic ferrying of the Jewish population to neutral Sweden occurred, but rather after the war ended in 1945, when that same Jewish population was welcomed home with open arms.

"To send Jews away, you can have many motives," Melchior told Heritage. "Maybe many of them wanted to help the Jews. Others wanted to harm the Germans. Others maybe wanted to have an exciting experience. Others again maybe saw a chance that if they would send out the Jews, there would be flats and houses and positions and shops and companies to be taken over."

Melchior said his father concluded "that the real proof came in the happy summer of 1945 when we returned home and were received by the royal house, by the government authorities and by neighbors and by competitors, and by people who had taken over our flats and positions, and who all said, 'Wonderful, please, come in to us.' I think my father was right.  That was the real proof."

But why should Danes feel that way about Jews, when Germans who lived in the immediately neighboring country to the south accepted the virulently anti-Semitic doctrines of the Nazis.

"Danes are relatively tolerant, but they also have their folk character," Melchior said.

"They have a very healthy skepticism...so a Dane will never fall for a demagogue like Adolf Hitler because the Dane won't  believe him.  Someone like Hitler speaks too well, gives too big a performance to appeal to the Danes...

"Danes are not ready to believe a man who tries to talk the clouds down from heaven.  They don't believe them... Danes are down to realities, down to earth. In the national song, we say 'to stay with both feet on the ground suits us best' ..."

The Danish folk character was only one element in the dramatic events of October, 1943, when Danish citizens rose en masse to hide Jews throughout the country until they could be smuggled in fishing boats to neighboring Sweden, a neutral country.

One could ask whether the Jews of Denmark somehow were different from the Jews of other countries in the manner in which they related to their non-Jewish neighbors. On that question, as with most questions relating to the Holocaust, there are different points of view.

Otto Hertz, who was in his late twenties when the rescue occurred, thinks that perhaps Danes were less jealous of Jewish accomplishments than were the nationals in other countries."

"We are more or less on the same level here," he told Heritage. "We are all much the same. When people talk about a rich man here, they do not talk about a Jew. They talk about the big ship owners."

Esben Kjeldbaeck, a Christian who serves as director of the Danish Resistance Museum, said that, during World War II, the Jews were not seen by other Danes as "a very separate community—except of course those who had come very recently to Denmark.

"The bulk of the Jews had been living in Denmark for generations, and many of them were not Jewish in the sense of practicing their religion and so on."

Those who had come recently either had fled the Nazis of Germany during the 1930s or had fled the pogroms of Russia earlier in the century.

Both groups generally were more religiously observant than the Danish Jews whose families had been in Denmark for several hundred years and who, by and large, traced their roots tothe 15th Century expulsion of Jews from Spain and Portugal.

In point of fact, Melchior said, the concern shown by Danish Christians for the welfare of the newly arrived Jewish immigrants confirms the thesis that "while there were some anti-Semites in Denmark, there was no anti-Semitism."

Melchior said no distinction was made between Danish Jews and immigrant Jews when the mass rescue was organized. Both were taken to safety.

This contrast with the experience in Bulgaria, another country which also gets some credit for saving Jews, Melchior said. "The difference between them and us was that they safeguarded only the Jews who were holders of Bulgarian passports—Bulgarian citizens—and delivered the others to the Nazis."

"We helped the refugees, who were here. Nobody asked, 'Are you Danish or not?' This is important to know," Melchior said.

A similar distinction was drawn by Ebba Lund, the Danish rescuer of between 500 and 800 Jews, who gained celebrity as "the girl in the red cap" for her bravery during the rescue 50 years ago.

She said she was horrified to learn many years later that Bulgaria had differentiated between Jews who were citizens and Jews who were not.

Notwithstanding that flash of Danish national pride, Ms. Lund told Heritage she does not regard the Danes as special, and thinks that circumstance, more than national character, contributed to the popular action to prevent the Nazis from capturing approximately 8,000 Jews who lived in Denmark during the Nazi occupation.

"We had the seacoast with something like 200 harbors," she said.  "We had Sweden nearby."

In a separate interview, Melchior expressed similar thoughts about Denmark's unique geography and topography. 

"What you needed was a neutral Sweden nearby, close enough to reach their border," he said. "If they had been occupied by the Germans, it would not have helped.  And you needed the acceptance by Sweden of these guests...

"Then you needed some Germans, outstanding Germans, who helped us in this situation. If you should mention one name, it was Mr. (Georg F.) Duckwitz (a naval attache in the German embassy in Denmark). "He gave the message. Without his action, all these rescue operations could never have taken place.

Melchior said taht Duckwitz learned in the first half of September that the roundup of the Jews was planned for Rosh Hashanah, which was to fall on Oct. 1 of that year.

"He went to Berlin in order to persuade them to stop it, but they had no interest in seeing this man," Melchior said.

"He went to Sweden, talked to the Swedish prime minister...told him the plan.. and planted the idea in the Swedish government that they should invite through a diplomatic note to Berlin all the Danish Jews to come to settle down as invited guests of Sweden, (an idea) which the Swedish government adopted and sent such a note to Berlin," Melchior said. "But there or four days later, there was no answer; there never came an answer.

"Then he (Duckwitz) came back to Copenhagen, where he looked up some politicians in the Labor Party with whom he had participated at an earlier stage and he asked them to give this message to the Jewish community, which they did. Without Mr. Duckwitz, this never could have happened."

"Also" Melchior added, :in the first days of the escape, when the fishing boats and row boats and other small boats were going from the coast, German soldiers saw what was happening but they didn't take action because they were against...the Gestapo."

Melchior noted that as soon as the war was over, and an independent Danish government was reestablished, Duckwitz was offered Danish citizenship, "which he refused, because he said it was his duty to go back to his nation and help them to develop in a democratic and humanistic way.

"He made a career, and later on, he became ambassador for Germany first in Helsinki, then later in Copenhagen. He was brought back to Bonn to head the German foreign office desk for Eastern European affairs.

"So without him and some other good Germans—the righteous people among the nations—and without Sweden, and Sweden's status as a neutral and geographically close country, this could not have been done," Melchior said.

Kjeldbaeck said another factor was extremely important: timing.

"The persecutions (of the Jews in Denmark) did not begin in 1940 or 1941, but in late 1943, at a time when there was the worst feeling, a great animosity, on the part of the Danish people toward the Germans," he said.

"There also was the feeling that the Germans would not win the war," the director said, pointing out that the attempted roundup came after the tide of the war had been turned by the Russian victory over the Germans in the Battle of Stalingrad.

Stalingrad not only stiffened the resolve of the Danes; it also emboldened the hearts of neutral Sweden to risk offending the Germans, Ebba Lund, the heroine of the Resistance, told Heritage.

Through most of the war, the Germans exercised benign control over the Danes, whom they considered "fellow Aryans." They were so tolerant of the Danes that they even permitted them to exercise self-government, a policy that enabled Denmark to resist German suggestions that the "Jewish problem" be solved.

The prime minister of Denmark, Erik Savenius, at one point told the Nazis: "There is no Jewish problem in Denmark."

The real proble for Danes was the Germans, and the population was divided on how to solve it. The government counseled legalistic cooperation. The Resistance movement called for sabotage. Over time, and especially after the Battle of Stalingrad in February of 1942, the Resistance movement gained more advocates and committed more sabotage.

The Germans began to pressure the Danish government to take action against the Resistance. It wanted Denmark to institute capital punishment, which the government refused to do.

When the Germans dissolved the Danish government in 1943, Danish citizens were outraged. When word about the planned action against the Jews leaked out, the government and the Resistance spontaneously made common cause.

In trying to answer the question, "Why the Danes?" spontaneous anger against the Germans also has to be considered," Ms. Lund told Heritage.

There were other factors, none necessarily more important than the other: 1) timing, 2) geography, 3) opportunity, 4) presence of "good Germans," and 5) the Danish folk character.