Peter H. Tveskov. Conquered, Not Defeated: Growing up in Denmark during the German Occupation of World War II. Central Point: Hellgate Press, 2003. Photographs and map. $14.95 (paper), ISBN 978-1-55571-638-7.
Reviewed by Ethan J. Hollander (Department of Political Science, University of California, San Diego)
Published on H-German (April, 2004)
Escaping the Danish Rescue
Escaping the Danish Rescue
Many reflections on the German occupation of Denmark treat the Danish reaction to that occupation as a "ray of light" in a world of "spiritual darkness."[1] But far from shedding light on the rescue of Danish Jewry, such reflections often cast a glare on the motives of those who made the rescue possible. In Conquered, Not Defeated, Peter H. Tveskov reflects on his life as child in German-occupied Denmark. As a non-Jewish Dane, Tveskov is one of only a handful of writers who shows us the German occupation from the standpoint of an uninvolved bystander. With the innocence and objectivity of a child, dazzled by German aggression but relatively unharmed by it, Tveskov's memoir thus brings us to see the German occupation of Denmark in a new and interesting light.
Tveskov is not a scholar, at least not in the formal sense of the word. He was a five-year-old child in a suburb of Copenhagen when, on April 9, 1940, he looked into the sky to see a "swarm of airplanes flying overhead, more planes than [he] had ever seen before or since" (p. 1). For the next several years, Tveskov observed the German occupation first-hand, but with the distance and relative comfort of a "racially pure" Nordic in Hitler's "Model Protectorate." Conquered, Not Defeated was written well-into his adult life, long after his emigration to America and his subsequent retirement.
In some ways, the fact that Tveskov is not a product of the academy or of the historians' "establishment" is obvious by the content, tone and structure of his argument. The organization of his book is somewhat haphazard; and he seems to spend as much time reciting the ancient history of Denmark as recounting his own personal experience. He slips seamlessly--too seamlessly, perhaps--from a history of Slesvig-Holsten in the middle ages to a story of the martyrdom of a resistance fighter to an amusing anecdote about how, as a child, he re-painted his toy-German-soldiers to look like Allied combatants. But for all the supposed shortfalls to which a bookish academic might point (a number of significant works are notably absent from his bibliography), Tveskov's childhood observations convey a remarkably fresh and novel understanding of how ordinary Danes from all walks of life experienced, accommodated and acted under German occupation. It is sometimes not clear whether he intended to write a personal memoir or an academic history; but, in this very ambiguity, his memoir has given us one of the most nuanced accounts of the period I have encountered.
Not surprisingly, the rescue of Danish Jewry--where nearly all of Denmark's 7,800 Jews were ferried over to survive the war in neutral Sweden--has a tendency to dominate historical reflections on wartime Denmark. Indeed, the rescue has come to be seen as a dramatic finale of sorts, in the shadow of which the rest of the occupation seems an anti-climactic denouement. Without diminishing the incredible significance of this unique and heroic event, this "ray of light" in Holocaust historiography has a tendency to obscure our vision when it comes to observing the most brutal phase of the German occupation, that which immediately followed Denmark's "Little Dunkirk" in October 1943.
In this context, the scope of Tveskov's project--which includes, but is not limited to, the Jewish rescue--provides one of its most welcome contributions. His observations seem to pick up right where other reflections leave off. Certainly, Tveskov discusses the rescue of the Danish Jews. Indeed, he devotes an early and entire chapter to it, replete with stories of neighbors, friends and family who participated in this dramatic event, both as survivors and rescuers. But Tveskov also tells us of the more militant side of Danish resistance--the sabotage of German targets, the acquisition of illegal weapons, the execution of Danes who collaborated with Germany--operations which, for the most part, only proceeded with full fury once the Jews of Denmark were already gone. (The Frihedsradet or Freedom Council, for example, was not even founded until September 1943.) Thus, Tveskov brings attention to the "darker" side of the German occupation: the collaborators, the opportunists, and even the Danish veterans of the Nazi SS who collect military pensions from the German government to this day! Needless to say, this part of the story is largely ignored and certainly overshadowed in most histories of the occupation in Denmark.
Tveskov also tells us of the war's endgame in Denmark. As the war drew to a close, with German troops in full retreat, 200,000 ethnic Germans flooded Denmark from eastern Germany and Soviet-conquered territories. No doubt, such an influx of "enemy nationals" would have a profound influence on any country involved in the war. But the effect must have been particularly salient in Denmark, which itself had long been home to a sizeable population of sometimes-threatening ethnic Germans. Thornier still was the issue of what to do with Soviet prisoners of war, brought to Denmark as slave laborers while the war was under way. Since Stalin considered any surrendering Soviet soldier a traitor, repatriation of these POWs was equivalent to a death sentence. But the accommodation of so many Soviets in a country of only four million must not have been easy, especially when, with Germany's defeat, many Danes came to fear a new and potentially greater threat: the militant and popular Communist resistance which, many feared, was ready to "take over the country on its 'liberation' by the Soviets" (p. 89). Finally, there was the question of what to do with those Danes who collaborated with the Germans. As in much of formerly-occupied Europe, accusations flew, heads were shaved, and an entire generation fled its past, rewrote its history, or simply claimed to be more of what it was not. Unbeknownst to many, I am sure, Denmark even reinstated the death penalty retroactively--a move of "questionable" constitutionality (p. 94), but not one likely to provoke a great deal of resistance.
In focusing on how Denmark dealt with its collaborators, however, Tveskov makes the rare and welcome move of turning the spotlight on Denmark's own ambiguous past. Of all the countries touched by German occupation during World War II, few, if any, come out smelling so clean as Denmark. Nonetheless, historians have done such an able job in re-writing Denmark's past, that many have overlooked, forgotten or simply under-emphasized the moral ambiguity of Denmark's wartime role. Tveskov's status as an innocent bystander, however, put him into contact with ordinary Danes who exhibited virtually every attitude towards the German occupation, including those who actively supported it and those who simply made it possible. He tells us of his Uncle M, who was "probably ... closer than necessary" to German authorities in Denmark (p. 33); and he makes the important but rare distinction between those who simply joined the resistance and those who did so in the early days, before it was the "popular thing to do" (p. 53). In so doing, Tveskov points to the astounding complexity of any post-war moral judgment--the complexity involved in the realization that collaboration and resistance are not mutually exclusive facts, but matters of judgment and degree.
At one point in his memoir, Tveskov observes that "[i]n order to live and survive, every member of Danish society [even the king!] collaborated [in] one way or another" (p. 45). It is in his observation that everyone, even the innocent, shares in a country's wartime guilt, that Tveskov makes his most important contribution to Denmark's wartime history and to Holocaust historiography generally.
Note
[1]. See Leni Yahil's Rescue of Danish Jewry (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1969), p. xi; and Leo Goldberger's, ed., Rescue of the Danish Jews: Moral Courage under Stress (New York: New York University Press, 1987), p. 11.
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Citation:
Ethan J. Hollander. Review of Tveskov, Peter H., Conquered, Not Defeated: Growing up in Denmark during the German Occupation of World War II.
H-German, H-Net Reviews.
April, 2004.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=9157
Copyright © 2004 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For any other proposed use, contact the Reviews editorial staff at hbooks@mail.h-net.org.