Danish Rescue of Jews Myth (Almost) Stauber

Collaboration with the Nazis: Public Discourse After the Holocaust, by Roni Stauber. 2010

A Planned Nazi German Expulsion of Danish Jews to Sweden, Less a Danish Rescue of Jews. Deflective Negationism Deconstructed

I focus on two salient issues, the fabled Danish rescue, and the concept of deflective negationism:

NAZI MODEL PROTECTORATE DENMARK EXPLOITED GERMAN-OCCUPIED POLAND

Historian Sofie Bak writes of the Danish advantages of the mild and largely-nominal German rule over Denmark, “Wealth was attainable in the occupied territories of Eastern Europe and plans for the Danes to do business in the German GROSSRAUM were initiated immediately after the German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941.” (p. 111).

SOME OF THE HALLMARKS OF A GERMAN-TOLERATED DANISH OPERATION

Fast forward to October 1943. Sofie Bak writes about how a few Gestapo officials interfered with the Danish shipment of Jews to Sweden. But these were tiny exceptions. Fully 1,600 German police sat idle during the relocation operation. (p. 116).

The 3-week operation moved 7,000 Danish Jews to Sweden. (p. 115). Following conventional Danes-were-rescuers thinking, we are asked to believe that a bunch of Danish fishing boats were too much for the mighty German Navy. So why didn’t the Germans immediately impose a quarantine on all boats leaving Denmark, and subsequently blow any Danish boat out of the water, no questions asked?

The answer is rather obvious, and is elaborated in the remainder of my review.

THE 1943 GERMAN ACTION AGAINST DENMARK’S JEWS WAS AN INTENTIONAL ACT OF EXPULSION, NOT A DANISH-THWARTED ATTEMPT AT EXTERMINATION

Does Final Solution mean physical extermination? Not necessarily. There was more than one way to make Europe JUDENREIN.

Historian Sofie Bak revives and extends the ideas of historians Tatiana Berenstein (pp. 115-on) and Gunnar Paulsson (pp. 123-124) on the “rescue” of Danish Jews actually being a deliberate Nazi-tolerated exile of Jews. She notes that the Nazis had earlier attempted the expulsion of Jews elsewhere, as in the policies that terrorized the pre-WWII Nazi Germany’s Jews into emigrating, and, later, the planned shipment of German-occupied Poland’s Jews to Madagascar. (p. 115). [To this might be added the plans to relocate Jews (and later Poles) to Siberia, which evaporated because of the failure of the Soviet Union to collapse in 1941, as had been planned and expected by the Germans.].

A Final Solution largely dependent upon extermination then emerged because of the impracticality or impossibility of all the efforts that depended upon the relocation of Jews. However, the expulsion option never died out in Nazi German thinking. Bak continues, “From this perspective the action on October 1 [in Denmark], was not a failure but the revival of an alternative policy of terrorizing the Jews into leaving.” (p. 115).

UNLIKE POLISH RESCUERS OF JEWS, DANISH “RESCUERS” DID NOT FACE ANY GERMAN-IMPOSED DEATH PENALTY. NOT EVEN CLOSE

Historian Sophie Bak makes the following eye-opening statements, “NOT EVEN ONE of the 600-700 illegal transports carrying Jewish refugees was seized by German police at sea. Rescuers caught by the Gestapo were handed over to the Danish courts to be charged with assisting illegal migration. The maximum penalty was three months’ imprisonment under relatively lenient conditions in a Danish prison. Most of the cases, however, never came to court, or court officials let the rescuers slip away through the back door. Thus the rescuers faced only very limited sanctions. CONTRARY TO MYTH, THE RESCUERS DID NOT RISK THEIR LIVES TO SAVE THE JEWS.” (p. 116; Emphasis added).

AN IRONY TO THOSE “GREEDY” PAID POLISH RESCUERS OF JEWS

The media-acclaimed neo-Stalinist Jan T. Gross is one of those who has been going around condemning paid Polish rescuers of Jews for their “greed” and (what else?) anti-Semitism. This is despite the fact that Polish rescuers worked under incomparably more difficult conditions than Danish “rescuers”. Even so, let us consider the well-paid Danish “rescuers” of Jews.

Historian Sophie Bak pulls no punches as she writes, “Danish historians now cautiously question the fairness of the high price the fishermen demanded for taking the Jews safely to Sweden. The cost per person ranged from Dkr 500 to Dkr 2,000 ($83–$330), when the average hourly wage for an industrial worker was about Dkr 2 ($0.33). The sources tell of families that paid exorbitant sums of up to Dkr 50,000 for the crossing. Prices were subjected to the mechanisms of supply and demand, regardless of the need for insurance of the material risk taken by the fishermen, or security for the families of the rescuers in the event of their arrest. Humanitarian motives were undoubtedly intertwined with THE DESIRE TO PROFIT FROM THE SITUATION.” (pp. 116-117; Emphasis added).

DANISH SELF-RIGHTEOUSNESS ON NAZI COLLABORATION: A REBUKE

The author does not mention the Danish Nazi Party or the FRIKORPS DANMARK (Danish Waffen SS). However, she brings up passive forms of Danish collaboration, such as that involving railway staff and the coast guard, which usually cooperated with the German police instead of taking part in the “rescue”. (p. 122).

Historian Sopie Bak concludes with the following rebuke of the attitudes of her fellow Danes, “The widespread tendency to deny complicity and responsibility, or to minimize the significance of collaboration, IS USUALLY A CHARACTERISTIC THAT DANES ATTRIBUTE TO OTHER NATIONS and ideologies, and is far from our own self-understanding.” (p. 122; Emphasis added).

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NEW HOLOCAUSTSPEAK IN ACTION: “DEFLECTIVE NEGATIONISM”

I have been studying this subject for a long time, and I just love the ever-expanding Orwellian language that surrounds the Jews’ Holocaust! “Deflective negationism” is a newfangled umbrella term of opprobrium against anyone who questions German guilt diffusion, who contextualizes crimes against Jews (e. g. Jedwabne) as an outcome (not necessarily justification) of Jewish conduct, or who points out the common-sense fact that small numbers of Nazi collaborators (in Poland) hardly make Poles collectively “complicit on the Holocaust” (another well-worn Holocaustspeak term).

But wait. It gets even better. “Deflective negationism” is now some kind of moral or cognitive disease that is on a continuum with Holocaust denial, that is, the questioning or rejection of 6 million Jews killed by the Germans (Nazis). In other words, questioning the guilt of eastern European nations is dumped into the same smelly bag as the questioning of the Nazi German murder of 6 million Jews! We live in a very interesting world.

In this book, Laurence Weinbaum (p. 30) endorses Michael Shafir and his work on deflective negationism. However, in doing so, Weinbaum himself engages in deflective negationism—of another sort. He brings up the canned exculpatory statements, for the Zydokomuna, of Jews suffering under Polish rule [at best, a half-truth], and of supporting the Soviets out of fear of the Nazis [total nonsense. The Zydokomuna flourished long before the Nazis, and persisted long after their demise. In fact, modernized versions of the Zydokomuna (e. g, cultural Marxism) persist to this day.]

Weinbaum neglects to bring up the common “Jewish Communists were not really Jews” exculpation, which is deflective negationism at its best.

LEADING POLISH JEWS SAY: JEWS SHOULD APOLOGIZE FOR THE CRIMES OF THE ZYDOKOMUNA

Laurence Weimbaum then performs an about-face, as he comments, “Poland’s American-born chief rabbi Michael Schudrich, who has lived in Poland for many years, himself suggested that such a public apology by Jews could serve as a catharsis. In that approach he was joined by Stanislaw Krajewski, a well-known Warsaw Jewish intellectual who played a leading role in the revival of Jewish life.” (p. 31).

This is unusual. Even so, words are only words, and so far nothing substantive has come of it.