Werner - A conspiracy of decency: the rescue of the Danish Jews during World War II

T he people of Denmark, a small country at the northern tip of the European mainland, managed to save almost their entire Jewish population from extinction in a spontaneous act of moral courage that has no equal in the history of World War II. I would like to tell the story of the rescue of the Danish Jews from the vantage point of eyewitnesses, both Gentiles and Jews. Most of these eyewitness were children and teenagers at the time. Today, they are among the last survivors of an extraordinary conspiracy of decency that took place in the midst of the horrors of the Holocaust and World War II.

This book chronicles the acts of people of goodwill from several nationalities. Among them was Georg F. Duckwitz, the German shipping expert who warned the leading Danish politicians of the German plans for a forced deportation of the Jews; members of the German navy who placed their ships in dry dock, so that Danish fishing boats with their Jewish cargo could pass unharmed across the resund; teenage members of the Danish resistance movement and Danish policemen who assisted in the rescue and in the armed struggle of the underground, and physicians and Red Cross workers who looked after the Jewish children and their families after they found refuge in neutral Sweden.

opens with the invasion of Denmark by German troops on April 9, 1940, and chronicles the slow but steady growth of passive resistance and individual acts of defiance by the Danes against the occupation forces in 1941 and 1942. The eyewitness accounts are those of grade school children from Copenhagen and provincial towns in Jutland and on the isle of Funen (Fyn).The chapter includes an account of the first organized acts of sabotage by members of the Churchill Clubeleven teenage boys from Aalborgwho were arrested, tried, and jailed in the spring of 1942. It ends with the imposition of martial law by the German occupiers and the resignation of the Danish government in August 1943.

deals with the events set in motion after the representative of the German Reich, Werner Best, sent a telegram to Berlin on September 8, 1943, requesting police support for the arrest and deportation of the Danish Jews. Georg Duckwitz, the German maritime expert, when told about the telegram, flew to Berlin and made an unsuccessful attempt to intercept the fateful message before it reached Hitler. On September 28, when informed about the date of the pending deportation, Duckwitz passed on the news to leading members of the Danish parliament and to the Swedish ambassador in Copenhagen.