Herbert Pundik's Invasion Of Denmark

On the afternoon of September 29, 1943, Herbert Pundik’s childhood ended. On that day, his school’s headmaster dismissed teenage Pundik and his fellow Jewish classmates after he learned about the upcoming deportation of Danish Jews. He rushed home and when he arrived, he found his parents and siblings already packed to leave; his father had learned of the news earlier in the day from a friend who attended morning service at the synagogue and heard the rabbi’s warning of impending danger. The warning, although appreciated, sent Copenhagen’s Jewish population into a panic. According to an excerpt from a young Danish girl’s unpublished diary: “But today it is different. Today you are a refugee. The quiet days, they finished yesterday. When

Renthe-Fink presented Munch with an ultimatum: submit peacefully and a hostile occupation would be avoided. Germany was more interested in controlling Denmark’s western coast than in forcefully governing another country. In return for the Danes preventing any further resistance during the occupation, Germany would not interfere with Denmark’s internal government while guaranteeing their political independence by “protecting” Denmark’s neutrality against British influence. A meeting between Denmark’s King Christian X, Munch, and other senior cabinet and military officials was quickly convened. As German naval and aircraft approached, Denmark, a country with no natural barriers to hold off its attackers and a small military, surrendered and agreed to Germany’s terms of occupation. By 6:00am, within two hours of invasion, Denmark was under Nazi

After seeing the repercussions of The Night of Broken Glass, Kristallnacht, in Germany, the Danish government amended the Criminal Law of 1939 to include a provision that would imprison anyone who was slanderous to another on the basis of religion, origin, or citizenship. Because of this and hearing of the actions and policies of the Nazi government, such as the belief in Germans’ genetic superiority and destiny to expand, the Danish people maintained a fierce dislike for all things German. For example, Helen Lang, a Holocaust survivor originally from Czechoslovakia, was eventually brought to Denmark by SS doctors while she was posing as a Hungarian gentile. While still maintaining her disguise, Lang went into the city to see if any Jews remained in Denmark. However, because she only spoke German and used German money, the Danes refused to help her; “And here I was afraid to tell ‘em I am Jewish… That was my mistake because after I heard that the Denmarks [sic] – how good they were to Jews”. There is no evidence that any inherent anti-Semitism existed in Denmark before the war. The Nazi organizations that were formed in the 1930s consisted mainly of Danes of German ancestry from Slesvig, the Danish name for the German town of Schleswig. The Danish Nazi Party was never a popular movement and its leader, Frits Clausen, continuously failed to win government