So it´s October (1943) again, and what have you learned ?

Every year, Denmark remembers the days of early October 1943, when most Jews in Denmark fled/saved themselves/and in some cases were saved to Sweden - if they were not deported to Theresienstadt to take part in a weird window-dressing game of the Germans in Theresienstadt, made possible with the aid of officials of the Danish Red Cross.

Annually, at this time of year, you see the reaction of some Danes on social media, who are passionate about the Palestinian cause and compare Jewish survivors who were not murdered in the Shoah (Holocaust) to Nazis. They call the state of the Jews a "Nazi state" and the ideology behind the creation of a new Jewish state is dubbed "apartheid". Such a sick and distorted view of history should not be of much concern, but one is naturally forced to do so, because the children and grandchildren of Danish Nazis are still engaged in their fight against the Jews. Unfortunately, that phenomenon in some cases seems to be hereditary.

Also in 2023, on the 80th anniversary of the flight to Sweden,  in the days leading up to the celebration that "it all went a little better in little Denmark than everywhere else", politically biased Danes are comparing Nazism with Zionism and everything else they can do to screw up today´s Jews. There is no coincidence that that battle occurs in Denmark; It´s something of a tradition. Some Jews have even begun to thank Himmler for their rescue. Please listen to historian/journalist Bent Blüdnikow in an interview; Click here and on "Lyt videre", to listen to historian and journalist Adam Holm in the program Fight for History (Kampen om Historien); Approx. 39 minutes into the program, where Bent Blüdnikow, who probably has been Donald Trump´s biggest fan in Denmark, tells about his respect for "Himmler´s rescue of the Danish Jews".

Such a view comes as a surprises and will also surprise experts far beyond Denmark´s watery borders! In the above mentioned radio-broadcast Dr. Silvia Goldbaum Tarabini corrects Mr. Blüdnikow, invited in connection with the publication of her fantastic new Book on the Danish Jews in Theresienstard: Danske jøders liv og død i Theresienstadt, released a couple of weeks ago in Danish by publishing house Gyldendal in Copenhagen. Her book in Danish bases on her Ph.D. thesis from Technische Universität Berlin: The Jews of Denmark in the Holocaust; Life and Death in Theresienstadt Ghetto. Routledge 2021. (Now available in paperback).

However, when a special type of Danes think October´43 can be compared to the terrorist fight for Palestine´s freedom, I like to tell the story of two ungifted Icelanders (who were then,until 1944), still citizens of the Kingdom of Denmark). They were stranded in Denmark during the war, where one studied to be a telegraph operator and the other made ends meet as a convivial pianist in a restaurant north of Copenhagen. A network with the participation of a German spy leader in the Abwehr and, among other things, the notorious Danish policeman Max Pelving, who was one of many Jew-haters among Danish policemen, a dozen Icelanders were acquired in Copenhagen to go on spy missions to Iceland. But first they had to be trained in Germany. 

Two of the Icelanders, whom the Nazis recruited in Copenhagen were sent for training at a spy-academy run by the SS in the suburb of Lehnitz, Northeast of Berlin, not far from the concentration camp of Sachsenhausen.

Together with the Icelanders at the school in Lehnitz (seen on the mugshot above), there were men from different countries such as the Soviet Union (including many from the later Ukrainian area), Croatia, Italy, Ireland, England and Norway. The school in Lehnitz was not the only one of its kind in the Reich. Other Icelanders were sent to courses on a farm near the German-Polish border. The farm was owned by a German Abwehr-intelligence officer stationed in Copenhagen.

After completing a course, the two young Icelandic men were sent by boat from Norway to Iceland. British and American forces in Iceland intercepted communications to and from the Norwegian speedboat and arrested Iceland´s answer to Dum-Dumber on arrival. They were sent to Denmark and interrogated there. The photographs at the top were taken immediately after they were arrested. Although it doesn´t look good.

Fortunately, these two gentlemen from Iceland were quite cooperative and told the British everything they wanted to know. One of them also gave extra information about their two Palestinian schoolmates in the SS school in Lehnitz, Kotoup and Ramma(r)dan, sent there by the Grand Mufti over Jerusalem who was on speaking terms with both Hitler and Himmler, because he dreamed of the same things like them. In defence of my two less gifted compatriots, it must be stated that, after all, they did not have much respect for the two Palestinians and their cause.

One of the two Palestinians, Koutop, whose full name was Fawzi al-Qutb, boasted that in the 1930s in Jerusalem he had murdered many civilian Jews and British soldiers in a series of terrorist actions, during the wave of murderous violence known as the Arab Revolt 1936-39.

 

In 1943, Palestinian Fawzi al-Qutb was a student at one of the terror and spy academies. He was at Lehnitz outside Berlin together with Icelanders and, among others, Danes.

The Palestinians were going on different missions than the Icelanders in the picture at the top of this report. The mission of the two Palestinians was to murder Jews. Missions that certain Danes, to this day, find it appropriate to compare with Danish resistance during World War II. The Icelander who told the British about the Palestinian terrorist al-Qutb had apparently not passed by Sachsenhausen on the way to the SS school in Lehnitz, and or had not heard of the extermination of Jews that the Germans had gradually begun.

Please don´t forget that Danish authorities and politicians, who are still praised for having "saved the Danish Jews to Sweden", immediately after the war initiated attempts to deport Jews who had managed to escape to Denmark in the 1930s. Many stateless Jews, who also saved themselves to Sweden together with Danish Jews, received a greeting from the Danish authorities immediately after the war with a warning of immediate deportation. Jews who found their way to Denmark after the end of the war were branded in police reports as socialists or communist spies (without them being so). You can read about the love that the Jews met after the war in my book Medaljens Bagside (2005) for more details. It is not enough to believe - you must also read and know. This also applies to the Danish historian-journalist who now thanks Heinrich Himmler for saving the Danish Jews.

Can official Denmark, which has not done away with the continued anti-Semitism in Denmark after WWII, celebrate anything, and especially in these years when convicted xenophobes still sit in the Danish Parliament and boast of humanity? Yes, the only thing to do is to keep on going and hope that history is not perverted by people with a strange agenda, or historians who cannot read sources and think that the beast on the right in the picture below had something to do with the rescue of the Danes Jews.

Danish historians, who for some reason or another believe that Heinrich Himmler was involved in the rescue of the Danish Jews, and others still, who even believe that if other occupied states in Nazi-occupied Europe had introduced the same values of collaboration with the Nazis like the Danish Politicians did (read about that obfuscation here), are not good news for the further understanding of the 1943 Jewish experience in Denmark.

Fortunately, there is light at the end of a dark Danish research-tunnel. Silvia Goldbaum Tarabini´s above mentioned volumes are among the bright lights, which eliminates the dark and sometimes ridiculous nationalism and ignorance in some Danish WWII historiography.