Andrew Sullivan links to a site commemorating Denmark’s famously heroic defiance of the Nazis in defense of the Danish Jews. There’s nothing wrong with that, and I’m totally down with getting the Dane’s side in this global cartoon conflict — even if I think the issues involved have sometimes been over-simplified. But, since the issue of Denmark and the Jews comes up in my email a lot too, it’s probably worth noting that a lot of mythology has accreted around the story of Danish “resistance” to the Holocaust. First of all, the King of Denmark never wore the Star of David, declaring “we’re all Jews.”
Second, and more important, the Danes were brave in defying the Nazi assaults on their sovereignty and the seizure of the Jews was seen as an affront to Danish sovereignty. I don’t mean to say that the Danes would have been fine with the confiscation of Danish Jewry if such an affront could be avoided. The stories of individual Danes doing everything they could save the Jews are morally powerful and important to remember. And the Danish government’s defense and rescue of its Jews was itself a moral highwater mark for much of northern Europe. But it’s important to keep in mind that the issue was always Denmark’s Jews. In all other ways Denmark was an unremarkable European nation when it came to the hordes of desperate non-Danish Jews trying to escape the Nazis before the war. They took few to no Jewish refugees when doing so would have cost them little and saved many.
None of this is relevant in any direct way to the current controversy, save perhaps the point that waiting for totalitarianism to come pounding on your own door is usually a recipe for waiting until it’s too late.