The Danish Right and the Resistance 1941-45
by Norman Berdichevsky (March 2010)
The first steps at active resistance in occupied Denmark during World War II were taken by a small “Ultra-Rightist” party, often denounced by many observers before the war as “Fascist” and known as “Dansk Samling” (Danish Unity) led by a charismatic founder, Arne Sørensen (1906-1978). This contradicts the established conventional wisdom that the political Left was everywhere in occupied Europe the source of opposition to the Nazis.
In three previous NER articles, I provided additional support for Jonah Goldberg’s brilliant book “Liberal Fascism” (Doubleday, 2008), laying bare the century long manipulation of the terms LEFT and RIGHT in “political science.”
These items dealt with..……..
1. The 20 year long Communist Party support of Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, (Aug. 2008) i.e. Far Left Party supports Far Right Dictator.
2. The armed resistance mounted by Fascist leader Engelbert Dollfuss that crushed the Nazi attempt at a coup in Austria in 1934, (September, 2009), i.e. Far Right Dictator opposes Far Right Dictator.
3. The broad attraction of the Falange “Fascist” Party to many Spanish workers and its opposition to much of the program of the clerical and arch-conservative supporters of General Franco (September 2008); i.e. Far Right Party appeals to segment of electorate identified with Far Left.
Goldberg documents how the false and often irrelevant dichotomy of LEFT vs. RIGHT obscures the basic similarities uniting the two wings of political thought at their extremes that glorify and deify abstractions such as THE leader, party, race, church or class that embody THE NATION. Both ideologies at their extremes grant ALL POWER to a demagogic leader who, once in power, promises to wipe away the humiliation and suffering of the past as well as the privileges of the "ruling class."
What makes Goldberg’s book so powerful is the unassailability of its evidence. What enrages most American Liberals about his book is how the imagined iconic heroes of the past consistently pushed their domestic agendas on behalf of the “common man” and the “poor” or for “civil rights” or “minorities” yet committed the worst abuses among our many Presidents in the direction of more and more centralized federal power – Abolition of Habeus Corpus (Lincoln), the “Red Scares” with their wholesale incarcerations and deportations of all those opposed to American entry into World War I (Wilson), and the internment of Japanese-Americans including those who were American citizens in “relocation camps” (FDR).
Goldberg correctly argues that the Left-Right continuum is a false paradigm. The extremes meet and it is often the liberal agenda so universally proclaimed today as “progressive” rather than conservative policies that lead the way to abolishing the restraints of local government and individual rights. The end result is the government’s reach for unlimited power.
Those on the political Left continue to bask in the false glow of Hollywood’s traditional bias that created dozens of movies dealing with how liberal heroes, often portrayed by macho types such as Humphrey Bogart, Gregory Peck, John Garfeld and Gary Cooper, praised to the sky when he played the hero of "For Whom the Bells Toll," but reviled when he played 'Howard Rork', the brilliant architectural genius, whose innovative designs are rejected by his envious colleagues. Cooper's role in 'The Fountainhead', based on Ayn Rand's novel of the same name made him an almost immediate outcast among Hollywood Liberals.
This was not the expected hero who outwits and outfights the Fascists, Nazis and home grown Conservative politicians who are Southern racists, antisemites and misogynists, or worst of all, the very symbol of evil, Senator Joseph McCarthy. The Fountainhead stands alone as a statement of the individual's right to cultivate and exploit his own talents without any obligation to 'serve' society.
Contrast the hundreds of Hollywood films portraying the standard hero with the total absence of any attempt to deal in a realistic way with the Soviet Gulags, the Moscow Purge Trials, or the Katyn Massacre of Polish officers by Stalin. While outstanding Russian and Polish film producers have honestly portrayed the gruesome incredible horror of all these events, they are still taboo for the American film industry.
A month ago on the "O'Reilly Factor" TV commentary program, Joe Klein, managing editor of Time, compared Glenn Beck to the ultra bigoted Catholic priest, Father Coughlin from Detroit, who preached a rabid anti-Semitism throughout the 1930s. He was an early supporter of Roosevelt's New Deal reforms and coined the phrase "Roosevelt or ruin". Coughlin went so far as to proclaim that "The New Deal is Christ's Deal." In January 1934, Coughlin testified before Congress in support of FDR's policies, saying, "If Congress fails to back up the President in his monetary program, I predict a revolution in this country which will make the French Revolution look silly!", and added at a Congressional hearing, "God is directing President Roosevelt."
The absurdity of Klein's charge is evidence that a large class of Jewish intellectuals, subjected to 40 years of Woody Allen films, continue to live in an imaginary world of their own making and refuse to read easily documented evidence from a thousand sources that Coughlin was originally an enthusiastic supporter of President Roosevelt and his "New Deal" (and just as fanatically anti-Jewish then).
In spite of massive evidence, Klein and others cannot accept that anti-Semitism has often been a common product of the political Left in Europe, Latin America and increasingly so in the United States. It was exactly what August Babel, a founder of the the Socialist Workers' Party in Germany warned about in 1890 - the tendency of populist parties to use the Jews as their scapegoat. He accurately described this trend proclaiming that "Anti-Semitism is the Socialism of fools".
But for the many Kleins on the American political scene, if someone like Glenn Beck or Senator Joe McCarthy in the 1950s is/was an active figure on the political Right, then, ipso-facto, he/she must be an anti-Semite or a potential anti-Semite, or a closet anti-Semite without a shred of evidence. This "McCarthyism of the Left" is standard fare throughout much of the media today.
Just prior to World War II, liberal “Left” Social-Democratic dominated governments in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Denmark were all reluctant to oppose German expansionism and aggressive Nazi designs. Under the occupation, collaborators in these countries were readily found to offer a façade of home rule like the Vichy government under German protection.
During the “honeymoon” between Stalin and Hitler from August 1939 to the invasion of the USSR on June 22, 1941, the governments and Communist Parties in these countries more than acquiesced and opposed any renewal of the war effort against the German occupier. All of them discouraged attempts at sabotage and resistance of any active kind.
Denmark as the "Model Protectorate" Under German Occupation
In Denmark, King Christian X was a puppet monarch. He did not choose, as did other monarchs, such as Queen Wilhelmina of Holland and King Haakon of Norway, to flee to England and help in the establishment of a government in exile. During the first three years of the occupation and in full agreement with the Danish government, the king warned his fellow countrymen not to participate in acts of sabotage against the German occupation forces. This was the government line which he adhered to and that also guaranteed Denmark a special relatively mild status, including no discriminatory measures against the Danish Jews until the planned deportation in October, 1943 (see NER article “Boris and Christian, Two Kings, The Holocaust and Hollywood”; November, 2009).
Dansk Samling and Arne Sørensen in Denmark
The party was founded in 1936 and contested elections in 1939, 1943, 1945, 1947, 1953 and then once more in 1964. Based on a form of Christian nationalism, it presented itself as a “Third Way” between socialism and liberalism. Its rejection of Denmark’s parliamentary system of multiple political parties, each catering to selected interest groups, led to accusations of Fascism, although it clearly rejected anti-Semitism and denounced Nazi doctrines as evil, pagan and a threat to Western civilization.
Arne Sørensen was born in 1906 in the Northern “Himmerland” region of Jutland and was originally educated in business administration. He became a teacher, journalist and author, taking part in the debate over Denmark’s social, economic and political future and attracting attention by criticizing the traditional parties of both the Right and the Left. He expressed support for “dynamic” leaders who were not bound by catering to divisive and selfish interests, a view that initially was misunderstood as support for a Mussolini or Hitler in Danish politics. What he meant was a leader who could rally a large segment of the people across party, social, regional, confessional and class lines.
Sørensen came from a humble rural background far from the center of power in Copenhagen. His father was a smallholder eking out an existence and unable to provide support for his ambitious son. In quick succession, the young Sørensen was drawn to the capital, involved with politics, became a modern poet, teacher, and free lance journalist for the great liberal Copenhagen daily Politiken. He gradually veered away from the radical-socialist milieu in the capital and adopted his vision of a “Third Way” in politics between with the traditional standpoints of the Labor Movement and the Conservative/Liberal camps.
Although he was dismayed by the parliamentary form of Danish democracy, any brief attraction Sørensen may have had for European Fascism quickly faded with the growing fanaticism of Hitler’s antisemitism and its anti-Christian ideology. Added to this repulsion was the growing conviction that a large part of the Danish public had failed to rally around any strong sense of national will. This belief, aided and abetted by the Social Democratic Party in power, failed to understand the threat of German expansionism. Sørensen felt that the threat necessitated strong support for the Danish minority in South Schleswig and he became strongly involved with the movement to protect Denmark’s border with Germany.
In the 1939 election to the Rigsdagen (Danish Parliament now called the Folketing) when Dansk Samling received only 8,000 votes and no seats, Sørensen had appealed unsuccessfully to all the Danish parties to present a common “Danish Front” in South Jutland (the area also known as Schleswig), the critical border, where an aggressive German minority was increasingly being financed and encouraged to exhibit irredentist demands for a revision of the 1920 border in Germany’s favor.
He had been in touch with both ethnic Danes in German ruled South Schleswig (see NER article February 2007, History Worth Remembering; The Danish Minority and the “Jewish Question”) and with refugees who were able to provide realistic and reliable information on the anti-Nazi “Confessional Church” led by Dietrich Bonhoeffer whose 700 pastors had been imprisoned by the Gestapo in 1937.
Dansk Samling became much more widely known in the Summer of 1940 with the adhesion of the distinguished historian Vilhelm la Cour. By the autumn of 1941, both Sørensen and la Cour were arrested by the government for their publication of illegal leaflets calling for a restoration of Danish pride and resistance to the German occupation.
It continues to rankle many historians and political “pundits” that it was the "anti-democratic" Dansk Samling on “The Far Right” of the Danish political spectrum under Arne Sørensen that took the lead as early as the Spring of 1941 to call for active resistance against the German occupation. For all those without ideological blinkers, it is not difficult to understand. The call for resistance was based on Danish nationalism, Christian based anti-Nazism and a continued mistrust of the established parties’ politicians for appealing to small and divided constituencies on bread and butter issues only that ignored the larger national questions.
In the Spring of 1942, British Special Operations Executive (SOE) began to infiltrate agents into Denmark by parachute to organize armed resistance. The Danish agent in charge of operations for the British, Christian Michael Rottbøll, contacted Dansk Samling’s leaders as the most promising initial address with requests for assistance. They arranged for the accommodation, identification documents, and ration coupons for the agents as well as transmission locations for the radio operators. Active members of Dansk Samling (a few of whom were former volunteers for Finland during the 1940 Winter War) organized the Holger Dansker resistance group that carried out sabotage against the German occupying forces and their installations.
At this juncture, the King and Government continued to broadcast appeals to the Danish population not to engage or help in sabotage or threaten the relations between the civilian government and the German occupying forces. The Danish Communist Party had only just begun to recover from the shock of the German invasion of the USSR in June 1941 and begun to seriously mount an effective campaign of resistance, after almost two years of criticizing the Allied war effort as, “The preservation of the British and French colonial empires and of no interest to the Danish working class.”
In the last election of the Danish parliament under German occupation in the summer of 1943, Dansk Samling won three seats and a popular vote of over 40,000. It was the only party to openly reject the government's policy of limited cooperation with the occupation authorities and the first to condemn any planned German action against the country's Jewish citizens. The vote was also a wakeup call for the majority party, the Social Democrats to undertake a major shift in policy and defend Danish rights even if it meant a break with the occupying German forces.
In the 1943 parliamentary election, the Danish Protestant pastor, author and poet Kaj Munk recommended voting for Dansk Samling. He was later murdered by the Gestapo in January, 1944 for having spoken out against the occupation, and rallied fellow clergymen to urge their congregants to support the resistance movement. He had already become a national celebrity as early as 1938 for writing an open critical letter to the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, published on its front page, and addressed to Italian leader Benito Mussolini for imitating Hitler's persecutions against the Jews.
In September 1943, the 'Danish Freedom Council' in London was created as a shadow government-in- exile. This body attempted to unify the many different groups that made up the Danish resistance movement. The council was made up of seven resistance representatives including Arne Sørensen and the Danish Communists and one member of SOE.
The Resistance Movement had grown to over 20,000 activists by the summer of 1944 and in the lead-up to D-Day, acts of sabotage markedly increased. Though the D-Day landings were to be in Normandy, SOE believed that the more German soldiers tied up elsewhere in Europe, the less that could be present in northern France; therefore, the more acts of sabotage in Denmark, the more German troops would be tied down there.
In 1944, the 'Danish Freedom Council' stepped up its efforts and more than 11 million copies of underground newspapers were published. That June, following a declared state of emergency, the entire city of Copenhagen went on strike. Infuriated, German troops cut off water and electricity, and established a blockade. From this time, all Danes under occupation looked towards London and the Freedom Council as their legitimate government-in- exile.
By then, Sørensen had reached London where he was instrumental in trying to formulate a policy that would gain recognition for the Danish minority in the North Schleswig region following the collapse of Nazi Germany. He was encouraged to believe that the British would favor the internationalization of the Kiel Canal and involve Danish troops to occupy a zone north of the Canal.
Conservative Youth Movement Also Takes Up Arms Against the Occupation
The more established veteran and traditional Rightwing Conservative Party in Denmark also had a strong tradition of Danish national pride and its youth organization Konservativ Ungdom (KU; Conservative Youth) played a major role in the resistance against the German occupation. Although the youth movement briefly paraded in green uniforms and leather straps designed to impress the public and protect Conservative speakers from violent assaults by the socialists and communists in the 1930s, the KU, like Dansk Samling, was not directly inspired by Nazism and anti-Semitism. It too viewed the collaboration policy of the government as national treason committed by the Social Democrats and their Liberal allies. These two 'Leftwing' parties had followed a consistent policy of disarmament leaving Denmark militarily defenceless. As the war went on, KU began committing sabotage and employing guerrilla tactics. More than 50 KU members (mostly teenagers) gave their lives in Denmark's fight for freedom.
Post-war Election
In the first postwar Folketing election in 1945, Dansk Samling won 64,000 votes (just over 3%) and increased its representation to four representatives but the Communists emerged as the major force profiting from their war time resistance (however belated) garnishing more than a quarter of a million votes (about 12%) and 18 seats. It proved a major disappointment for Sørensen who saw his fears realized that the old style division of the electorate and cultivation of narrow special interests would return as the standard format of "politics as usual."
By the Liberation of Denmark on May 5, 1945, the Communists were widely regarded as the most effective underground resistance movement. This was due in part to their greater experience in military training that included several dozen veterans of the Spanish Civil War and the rise in prestige of the Party due to the success of spectacular sabotage actions, especially the destruction of several factories in Copenhagen carried out by their resistance unit known as BOPA.
Both la Cour and Sørensen became deeply involved in the postwar effort to support the Movement of the Danish Minority in Germany (SydSlesvig Forening SSF -The South Schleswig Association) that experienced an explosive growth from 1945 to 1947. The Danish government was astounded by the renewal of sentiment for Denmark in South Schleswig and a twenty-fold growth in membership of the "official" Danish Minority Oranization, the SSF, compared to its 1939 size.
The failure of most of the traditional Danish political parties and the opposition of the Communists to any border change and a general desire to return to normalcy meant that Dansk Samling had no further prospects for continued growth. It has since stagnated and declined. The grandiose plans and commitment to win back part of South Schleswig formulated by Sørensen and others among nationalist circles were regarded by the majority of the Danish public as too ambitious and risky.
The Communist Party with its halo of wartime resistance (post June 1941) might have been expected to garner additional nationalist support by taking a stand in favor of the Danish minded minority in Germany but the Soviet line was cautious not to offend national sentiments in their occupied zone of East Germany. For the same reasons, neither the British or American foreign policy offered any support to a revision of the border.
Dansk Samling still exists today as a political organization but not a party. Many of its former supporters lost faith in its ability to present a realistic alternative to the traditional Danish multi-party system catering to special interests. It opposed Denmark’s membership in the European Union and is highly critical of the large scale immigration from North Africa, the Middle East and East Asia that has created a substantial foreign population of “residents” or citizens who do not identify with Danish history, language, values and traditions.
Former supporters of Arne Sørensen believe he made a critical mistake in joining a postwar government after the rejection of his South Schleswig policies and became “Kirkeminister” (a Danish Minister of Religious Affairs tied to the State Affiliated Danish Lutheran Church), a position without any real influence and easy to satirize and even lampoon. Opponents have sarcastingly referred to the remnants of the party as a form of “Danish Chaos.”
Dansk Samling continues to be against “all isms.” It unabashedly proclaims that its central point is to embrace and cultivate all that is essentially Danish and the belief that Denmark cannot just be the address of new immigrants but the home of the Danish People and all that it has created of lasting value, the Danish language, its Christian heritage, tolerance, culture and ideals without any disrespect for other peoples.
The Wikipedia entry on the internet under the title “Danish Resistance” mentions the Holger Danske Group but has nothing to say about Dansk Samling or Arne Sørensen in its list of prominent members of the Freedom Council. The Holocaust Research Project, a Jewish website called HEART (Holocaust Education and Archive Research Team) mentions both BOPA and the Holger Danske group but is likewise totally silent about Dansk Samling and Arne Sørensen. Like the Anti-Defamation League over the past 40 years, anti-Semitism can only be mentioned in the same breath as "The Far Right."
For them, and on other sites as well, mention of the Danish Resistance gives full credit to the Danish Communist Party. This is the same hard-line Stalinist party that endorsed the Soviet invasion of Finland in December 1939, referred to the outbreak of World War II on September 1st as a conflict between the European imperialist powers which meant nothing for the international working class except needless bloodshed. On the same day that Denmark was invaded by the German army (April 9th, 1940), Stalin’s henchmen were busy murdering eleven thousand Polish army officers in the Katyn Forest and another ten thousand elsewhere, an unprecedented atrocity against helpless POWs of the most gruesome proportions, an event denied by the Soviet and Danish Communist parties from 1943 onwards until admitted by them during the last days of the existence of the USSR.
On the eve of World War II, various so called “right wing” authoritarian regimes of the conservative, traditional, national and religious type, namely Ethiopia’s Emperor Haile Selassi, Austria’s “Clerical-Fascist” regime of Engelbert Dollfuss and Kurt Schuschnigg, Poland’s President and "right wing" military leader General Jozef Pilsudski, Yugoslavia’s General Simovic and his supporters in the armed forces and Greece’s authoritarian Rightwing leader Ionnas Metaxas all resolutely opposed the expansionist ambitions of Hitler and Mussolini.
The idea that the wartime resistance to the Nazis anywhere could have been initiated by a right-wing or “Fascist Party” is supposed to be an oxymoron. In general, a very large proportion of Liberals and many Jews accept the thesis that to be “Right Wing” is ipso facto to be “Fascist” and therefore anti-Semitic or, the contrary, that to be a Liberal means you necessarily must be anti-anti-Semitic. Neither is necessarily true.
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