The state of emergency in Denmark

In the early hours of 29 August 1943 German troops in Denmark attacked the barracks and bases of the Danish army and navy. The Wehrmacht commander in Denmark, General Hermann von Hanneken, proclaimed a military state of emergency throughout the country and informed the prime minister, Erik Scavenius, that executive power was passing to the German army. The Danish navy responded by scuttling most of its ships, and the government ceased to function. So ended the policy of cooperation, pursued since April 1940, that had made Denmark the Reich’s “model protectorate”. The occupation changed its character: from a formally sovereign state in which the king, government and parliament still functioned, Denmark became a country ruled by the occupier and by civil servants, in which the resistance acted ever more boldly.

The common description of this day as the moment when martial law replaced the Danish government needs qualifying. The Germans did not set up their own civil administration in Denmark, and the Danish government never formally resigned. It simply stopped acting, and from September the day-to-day business of the state was taken over by the most senior officials of the ministries.

The model protectorate

On 9 April 1940 Germany occupied Denmark almost without a fight. King Christian X and the government decided to remain in the country and cooperate with the occupier in order to spare the population the fate of Poland or Norway. In return the Germans promised to respect Denmark’s territorial integrity and political independence. For three years Denmark kept its own government, parliament, police and courts, and even a small army and navy. Danish farms supplied the Reich with butter, meat and eggs, and German soldiers called the country the “cream front”.

The price was a policy of concessions. Denmark banned the Communist Party, joined the Anti-Comintern Pact in 1941 and agreed to the recruitment of volunteers to fight in the east. In the autumn of 1942 came the so-called Telegram Crisis: Adolf Hitler took offence at the king’s curt reply to his birthday greetings and demanded a more compliant government. Werner Best, a senior SS functionary, arrived as Reich plenipotentiary, and the Social Democrat Vilhelm Buhl was replaced as prime minister by the foreign minister, Scavenius, an advocate of close cooperation with Germany.

Best, formally answerable to the Foreign Ministry but in practice guided by Heinrich Himmler, at first pursued a mild policy. He even allowed parliamentary elections to be held in March 1943, in which the parties supporting the policy of cooperation won a decisive majority and the Danish National Socialists just over 2 per cent of the vote. He sent optimistic reports to Berlin. At the same time he was in competition with General von Hanneken, who had long wanted to disarm the Danish forces and was receiving far harsher instructions from Hitler than Best.

A summer of strikes

In 1943 the situation began to change quickly. The German defeats at Stalingrad and in Africa, and in the summer the Allied landing in Sicily and the fall of Mussolini, convinced many Danes that the end of the war was near. The resistance – in which the tone was set by the communists of the Communist Party of Denmark, alongside groups such as Holger Danske, and which was supported by supply drops and agents of the British SOE – stepped up sabotage on the railways, in the ports and in factories working for the Germans.

At the end of July 1943 an explosion at the shipyard in Odense damaged a newly built German minelayer, the Linz, just before it was to be handed over. When the Germans posted armed guards in the yard, the workers walked out. The strike spread to other works in the town and then to other towns. The wave of strikes, riots and demonstrations, later called the August Uprising (Danish Augustoprøret), lasted from 9 to 29 August and affected seventeen towns. It was strongest in Esbjerg (10–11 August), Odense (18–23 August) and Aalborg (23–29 August), and also in Aarhus. Factories, shops and offices came to a standstill, there were street fights with German soldiers, the property of collaborators was wrecked, and women who had associated with Germans had their hair cut off. The strikes were organised mainly by communists in the large industrial plants, while the Social Democratic trade-union leadership and the government called for calm.

In Copenhagen the Holger Danske group blew up the Forum exhibition hall, where German soldiers were quartered, in broad daylight. In Odense a crowd beat up a German officer in the street. Von Hanneken presented such incidents to Hitler as proof that the situation in Denmark had got out of control – and that Best’s reports had been far too rosy.

The ultimatum

Hitler summoned Best to his headquarters in East Prussia and demanded a hard line. Best returned to Copenhagen with an ultimatum, which he handed to Scavenius on 28 August 1943 – reportedly with the words “I am a dead man”. Both understood that the demands could not be met. The Germans required a state of emergency throughout the country, a ban on public gatherings of more than five people, a curfew from 8.30 p.m. to 5.30 a.m., a ban on strikes and on supporting strikers, and above all the immediate introduction of the death penalty for sabotage and for taking part in it, for attacks on the Wehrmacht and its soldiers, and for possessing weapons and explosives after 1 September 1943. For the assault on the German officer in Odense, hostages were to be taken if the culprits were not found.

The death penalty, which Denmark had not used for decades, imposed on Danes for resisting the occupier, was a line the politicians would not cross – just as throughout the occupation they had refused any part in discriminating against the Jews. Most of them had no wish at all for a break. They feared that once the policy of cooperation collapsed, power would pass to the occupier, the saboteurs or the communists, and Denmark would end up in the position of Norway. The ultimatum, however, left no choice. At 3.30 p.m. on 28 August, after consulting the party leaders, the government delivered its refusal to Best.

The night of 28–29 August

The German plans for disarming the Danish forces had been ready since the summer. The order to carry out Operation Safari was issued some fifteen minutes after midnight on 29 August, and the attack was set for 4 a.m. While it was still night the Germans seized the camp at Horserød, where the Danish authorities had interned communists: about 150 prisoners fell into their hands, while about 90 managed to escape. Those captured were later sent to concentration camps in Germany, and many of them died there.

At 4 a.m. Wehrmacht units, some 9,000 soldiers in all, attacked every major military installation on Zealand and Funen; most of the Danish forces had earlier been withdrawn from Jutland under German pressure. The defence minister had ordered the day before that no armed resistance be offered, and the army commander, Lieutenant General Ebbe Gørtz, loyal to the government, gave no order to fight. Even so, there were exchanges of fire at many barracks: in Copenhagen, in Næstved, in Odense, at Sorgenfri Palace, where the royal family was staying, and elsewhere. Some 23–24 Danish soldiers were killed and several dozen wounded; a few civilians also died, and according to Danish sources German losses were similar. Around 4,600 Danish officers and men were interned.

The most spectacular resistance came from the navy. Its commander, Vice Admiral Aage Vedel, had long been preparing secret orders for the event of a German attempt to seize the fleet: the ships were to escape to neutral Sweden or, if that proved impossible, scuttle themselves. The day before, the defence minister had instructed that the seizure of ships was not to be resisted by force; the naval command added on its own account that the ships “may in the circumstances be scuttled”. At 4.08 a.m. the agreed signal was sent from headquarters in Copenhagen, and a few minutes later charges began exploding at the Holmen naval base. Within half an hour the crews there had scuttled or burned most of the vessels, including the largest ship in the fleet, the coastal defence ship Peder Skram, and all the submarines. The coastal defence ship Niels Iuel, which tried to get out of the Isefjord to the open sea, was attacked by German aircraft and run aground by her crew. At Korsør and Nyborg the Germans, who were stationed close by, took the ships by force before their crews could destroy them.

According to the most frequently cited tally, of the 52 vessels of the Danish navy two were in Greenland, 32 were scuttled by their own crews, 4 reached Sweden and 14 were captured intact by the Germans. Swedish sources speak of a dozen or more smaller craft that reached harbours in Scania and passed under Swedish escort to Karlskrona, where they were interned – the difference stems from how small boats and cutters are counted. Several sailors were killed. The Germans later raised most of the scuttled ships and took fifteen of them, in one form or another, into their own navy. Photographs of warships lying on the bottom of Copenhagen harbour went round the Allied press as proof that Denmark had taken the Allied side.

A government that was not there

On the morning of 29 August von Hanneken sent Scavenius a letter stating that the government was removed from power and that the German army was assuming executive authority; officials were to carry on working on pain of punishment. The military state of emergency included a curfew, a ban on gatherings and strikes, and censorship. The same day the Germans took several hundred prominent Danes hostage.

Scavenius still wanted to salvage cooperation, but the ministers from the political parties saw no way back. The solution chosen was typical of the Danish occupation: the government ceased to act and submitted its resignation to the king, and Christian X, as previously agreed, did not accept it. From then on the ministers bore no responsibility for anything that happened in the country, yet formally Denmark still had a lawful government, and the Germans were denied a pretext for appointing a new, compliant cabinet. Scavenius’s government remained in this state of suspension until the liberation in May 1945.

The occupier soon discovered that it could not govern Denmark on its own. The Wehrmacht had neither the administration nor the people, and Danish officials were willing to take instructions only from some Danish authority. Hitler had imposed the state of emergency on his personal order, against Best’s advice, but it was Best, backed by Himmler, who soon regained the upper hand over von Hanneken. From September 1943 the day-to-day administration was run by the permanent secretaries of the ministries, the most senior officials of the state, acting in agreement with the party leaders. This “government of permanent secretaries” negotiated with the Germans until the end of the war.

Place in the war

In Denmark 29 August 1943 became the symbolic turning point of the occupation – the day the country ceased to be a “model protectorate”. In mid-September representatives of the resistance groups formed the Danish Freedom Council (Danmarks Frihedsråd), which coordinated the Danish resistance and acted as the country’s underground representation. Sabotage intensified, and the Allies began to treat Denmark as an ally, although formally it was not a party to the war.

The collapse of the policy of cooperation also opened the way to the heaviest blow the occupier meant to strike at Denmark. On 8 September Best, in a telegram to Berlin, called for the deportation of the Danish Jews. News of the planned round-up, however, was passed to the Danes by the shipping attaché at the German legation, Georg Ferdinand Duckwitz, and in October 1943 some 7,000 Jews, hidden by neighbours, friends and strangers, were ferried in fishing boats across the Øresund to Sweden, which had just ended German transit and was openly taking in refugees. The Germans caught about 470 people, whom they deported to the Theresienstadt (Terezín) ghetto. In time many Danish soldiers and officers also made their way to Sweden, where the Danish Brigade was formed from among the refugees. After 29 August 1943, until the surrender of the German forces in May 1945, Denmark was an openly occupied country rather than a merely “protected” one.