Danish Reactions to German Occupation

Front matter

R

CARSTEN HOLBRAAD

History and Historiography

Preface

In Danish Neutrality: A Study in the Foreign Policy of a Small State (Clarendon Press, Oxford 1991), I identified and analysed certain ideas and attitudes behind Danish foreign policy in modern and contemporary history. Focusing on situations of crisis or war in the region, I detected two opposing tendencies in Danish reactions, namely towards engagement in and withdrawal from international conflict.

At one stage, I considered the idea of following up with a briefer work which would explore a similar duality of attitudes to foreign affairs to be found in some modern Danish fictional literature. Instead, I decided to narrow the historical focus, and examine Danish reactions to the country’s most traumatic experience in recent history: the five years of German occupation during the Second World War. There were two reasons for this choice.

In a conversation with my son and his friend Morten A. Pedersen — both members of the small and exclusive group of Danish anthropologists with a PhD from King’s College, now known as the Cambridge Danes — Morten pointed out that there was a need for someone to get on top of the ongoing debate among historians and others about Danish conduct during the German occupation.

On a more personal level, a topic focusing on that relatively brief period had the attraction of taking me back to the subject matter of my initial introduction to historical research. As a high-school student at Sct. Knuds Gymnasium in Odense who had mastered the skills of stenography and typing, I spent most of my spare time in 1947-48 working as a secretary to Jorgen Hæstrup, a young and dynamic history master who recently had started collecting material about the resistance movement for the Danish Public Record Office. Destined to become the leading historian of Danish resistance and its links with Britain, he was in the process of locating secret archives and securing written verbal reports from key resistance figures.

Taking down reports and typing out archival material, I met quite a few members of the resistance and gained some knowledge of its activities. I also formed a good working relationship with Hæstrup. Though I was unable to accept repeated invitations in later decades to join his group of young occupation historians, my friendship with him lasted till his death in 1998. Thus, it is appropriate to dedicate this work to the memory of Jørgen Hæstrup. It offers a spectral analysis of Danish reactions to the German occupation and presents a critical overview of subsequent and recent historiographical debate about a crucial national experience not yet fully digested.

The first part of the book presents Danish conduct in the Second World War in a historical context by sketching out the foreign relations of the country in modern times and tracing its reactions to successive crises and wars in the region. For its earlier sections, I draw on my first book about the history of Danish foreign policy, mentioned above.

The second part lays outthe historically attested and widely known reactions to German occupation from the invasion on 9 April 1940 to the liberation on 5 May 1945. However, for analytical reasons, the order of presentation is logical rather than chronological, ranging from willing cooperation at one end to armed resistance at the other. Yet, that order happens to correspond fairly well with the actual chronological development over the five years.

The third part of the book deals with the historiography about the occupation period, from the first post-war decades till well into the present century. Three waves of writings have been distinguished. The post-war works, mostly written by historians and other writers who identified with the resistance movement, tended to present a picture of growing resistance backed by increasing public support. Subsequently a revisionist wave of scholarship took a more critical view of resistance, perhaps at the same time adopting a more sympathetic attitude to cooperation. More recently, a second wave of revisionism, less interested in the history of resistance, took up the cases of various groups of individuals who had engaged in some form of collaboration with the occupiers. That part closes with a tentative overview of recent trends in scholarly debate and a brief presentation of recurrent public discourse about Danish reactions to the occupation.

Though Norway occasionally has been brought into the picture, no attempt has been made in this book to make comparisons and draw parallels with other countries under German occupation. Each such country was in a geopolitical situation of its own in relation to the European

PREFACE vii viii conflict, and had its own history of interacting with rivalling great powers and its own tradition of dealing with a preponderant and threatening power. Moreover, the policy and conduct of the occupying power varied from country to country. Thus, as for both its situation and its conduct during the Second World War, Denmark was a special case, which should be examined separately rather than fitted into some quasicomparative framework.

Much of the book was researched and written while I was Honorary Research Associate in the Department of Scandinavian Studies at UCL. As such, I much enjoyed the use of the UCL Library’s excellent collection of books about the history, politics and culture of Denmark and other Nordic countries.

I am grateful to Knud J.V. Jespersen, professor emeritus at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense, for generous and useful comments on an early draft. The constructive criticism and good advice of the anonymous reviewers are also much appreciated. In particular, I am indebted to the expert on Danish occupation historiography for helping me find a way through recent literature.

London C.H.

PREFACE

Contents

Introduction 1 Traumas and trends 1.1 1814 1.2 1864 1.3 1914 1.4 1940 2 1940-45: From cooperation to resistance 2.1 Support 2.2 Cooperation 2.3 Opposition 3 Since 1945: From resistance to collaboration 3.1 Concord 3.2 Conflict 3.3 Discord 3.4 Debate 3.5 Discourse Conclusion Notes

Works cited Index

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