9 April: It´s Danish Butter Cookie Day

75 years ago, next week, fantastic Queen Margrethe II of Denmark was born. Happy Birthday to her and all best wishes to the granddaughter of King Christian X, who realized that his Jewish citizens were in peril. Unfortunately the old King couldn´t do so much about that during the Nazi occupation of Denmark 1940-1945, except writing about it once in one of his four diaries. Meanwhile Danish politicians were systematically trying to get rid of refugee Jews, and even Danish Jews, to Nazi Germany.

Today it is also exactly 75 years since Nazis forces attacked Denmark. Only due to a breach in communication some minor fighting took place at the Danish-German border. The Danish Government instantly, or even before 9 April, decided to become the well behaved lapdog of the Third Reich.

About 73 year ago another queen, the Queen of Nazi terror, walked the streets of Copenhagen (see the image at top). She was the local Nazi beauty queen, wearing the uniform of the female division of the Danish Nazi Party. This "Blonde Gespenst" was the cheerleader of the Nazi-occupation, legitimized by the warm welcome which the Danish authorities decided to give the German aggressors on 9 April 1940. She was probably the pin-up babe for some of the 10.000 Danish men who applied for entering the the Waffen-SS as well as the little darling of the collaboration politicians, who encouraged Danes to join the SS while introducing grave penalties to Danes who engaged in the brave resistance fight.

Nazi collaboration was great, says historian Lidegaard

The Danish collaboration during the Nazi occupation has in later years been in the process of a major historic whitewash undertaken by few Danish historians, who don't seem to be able to live with the dark fact-sheet of their countries WWII past.

The Danes are now being told that the collaboration was the best possible thing to happen to the Danes. One of the revisionist historians preoccupied in this historical cleansing is Bo Lidegaard. According to Lidegaard the Danish Nazi collaboration also rescued the Danish Jews to Sweden in 1943. Jewish historians in Denmark disagree.

With support from the Danish Foreign ministry, which incidentally is now lead by his brother, Martin Lidegaard a member of a politically party most involved with the Nazis 70-75 years ago, his book Landsmænd (Countrymen in the English version) on the rescue of the Danish Jews to Sweden in 1943 has been published in several foreign languages. The nicer version of the Danish occupation year is now being launched as an export article.

The latest version of Bo Lidegaard´s book on the 1943 rescue of the Danish Jew, is the Italian volume (view here in some layout variations), which received the fantastic title Il Popolo Che Disse No (The people who said no) In the Italian volume the publishers argue that Bo Lidegaard is the first historian ever to tell the story of the rescue of the Jews to Sweden in 1943.

Of course Bo Lidegaard´s book is by far the first book on the subject. However, it is probably the first book where the obfuscation and revision have been brought to extremes. The book has to the Danish public been launched with this message from one of the publishers, Carol Janeway, a renowned, or rather notorious promoter of the the memoirs of  Bruno Grosjean, a Swiss national who hoaxed his childhood memories and created an alter ego, Binjamin Wilkomirski, to fool the world into believing he was a child-survivor of the Vilne (Vilnius) Ghetto and Auschwitz. :

"She [Janeway] believes that if one in France and the Netherlands had manoeuvred oneself half as well through the war as did the Danes, WW II had not been quite so bleak" (see here for more details)

Quite deliberately Lidegaard in his book on the rescue of the Danish Jews forgets to mention the fact that the Danish authorities made systematic attempts to get rid of Jewish refugees from Denmark and made it a crime for Danes to hide Jews in their homes. (See here and here). Are those atrocities compatible with the deeds of those people who Lidegaard calls 'good countrymen'?

Instead of publishing ridiculous claims that the Danish authorities had something to do with the rescue of the Danish Jews to Sweden in 1943, historian Bo Lidegaard should rather dwell on the facts which he and many of his colleagues weren´t interested in or which they ignored. Why didn´t they, but a foreign historian, write about the worst war-criminal from Denmark, Alfred Jepsen? Why did the Danish Ministry of Justice,

Danish War Criminal Alfred Jepsen

60 years after Jepsen committed his crimes, conceal information about Jepsen, which had been available in the National Archive in the UK a decade earlier. Why did the Danish authorities in the late 1940s manage to conceal his crimes and execution in Germany?  Why has a journalist and not a historian been the best  mediator of information about the crimes of recently deceased SS-officer Søren Kam (Photo to the left)? Why has the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem, and not the Danish government, demanded an investigation into the case of Søren Kam or demanded an expulsion of this war criminal from Germany, a country who gave him save haven from legal actions and prosecution? Will the present day terrorists of Europe receive the same "special treatment" in the future?

The explanation is simple. Many Danes like glossy pictures from their past and they have a severe problem with their country´s past. They don´t like to hear about the bad things or 'some Jews' that were expelled and killed. That is for instance the reason we did not until 2014 hear about Danish SS units acting in an infamous torture camp for Jews in Belorussia, near Bobruisk.

A new Danish WWII history is now being sold like Danish butter Cookies. In a nice tin, with a idealized picture on the lid. Beware though, the glossy image is false and the contents listing is insufficient. Most Danes did nothing to help Danish Jews and the free WWII government of Denmark was engaged in getting rid of them until 1943.

No Danish politician, nor high official, was ever brought to justice for their participation in the killing of Jewish refugees, Danish resistance fighters, nor German communists, who were handed over to the Nazis by the Danish authorities - often without any demand from the Nazi occupants.

Who benefits?

Bo Lidegaard is writing history as some Danes like to see it. He is not writing the correct history of the Danish Jews. He is exploitin the rescue of the Jews in 1943. His case studies are quite atypical for most Danish Jewish experiences during the Nazi occupation of Denmark. Diaries he uses are written after the war.

Writing history doesn´t make historians wealthy. Well, there are exceptions. Historian Bo Lidegaard has become a wealthy man creating his Potemkin curtains for a generation or two of Danes with bad or even no conscience.

I think I know what kind of people like Lidegaard´s WWII revisionist books: They are politicians and diplomats still busy polishing the Danish image of WWII. The kids of the many Danish collaborators and all the Waffen-SS men, and the descendants of the high officials and politician who committed war-crimes also buy the books of Lidegaard. So, when Lidegaard heads off for vacation in his summer residence in Tuscany, he can tell his neighbours, who have bought Il popolo che disse no to learn something from Danish high moral instead of all of that "heil´a Mussolini" stuff their ancestor where into, that not all the folks in Denmark are buying what he writes, nor are saying " Si " to it.

In fact the moral and altruism of the Danish people was not greater than that of the Italians during WW II. In countries like The Netherlands one can see from the bad sales of the Dutch version of Lidegaard´s Danish Butter Cookie Adventure, that the Dutch are not buying some crap which is launched by telling them that they should have done the same as the Danes did, and that the Danish Nazi collaboration was the best solution of all. The situation of the Dutch and the Danes and the Jewish populations of the two countries cannot be compared.

Vilhjálmur Örn Vilhjálmsson

Se also Danish Holocaust Distortion