Ranticles

Speaker: “I see negroes holding jobs that belong to me! And you! I’ll ask you, if we allow this thing to go on, what’s gonna become of us real Americans!”

Hungarian man with clear foreign accent: “I’ve heard this kind of talk before, but I never expected to hear it in America.”

Young man: “This man seems to know what he’s talking about.“

Speaker: “What are us real Americans gonna do about it? You’ll find it right here in this little pamphlet—the truth about negroes and foreigners! The truth about the Catholic Church! You’ll find…” [audio grows quieter as camera shifts to the onlookers]

Hungarian man: “You believe in that kind of talk?“

Young man: “I dunno, it makes pretty good sense to me.“

Speaker: “And I tell you, friends, we’ll never be able to call this country our own until it’s a country without… without what?“

Other man: “Yeah? Without what?“

Speaker: “Without negroes, without alien foreigners,”—the young man is nodding, following along—“without Catholics, without Freemasons! You know these…“

Young man: “What’s wrong with the Masons, I’m a Mason.” Looks to European man worriedly, “hey, that fellow’s talking about me!“

Huungarian man: “And that makes a difference, doesn’t it.“

Speaker: “These are your enemies! These are the people who are trying to take over our country! Now you know them, you know what they stand for. And it’s up to you and me to fight them!” A bunch of the onlookers in the vicinity wave him off like he’s crazy and turn away, “fight them and destroy them before they destroy us!”

Speaker: “Thank you.“

One man in the now somewhat awkward crowd: “claps“

Young man: *is visibly uncomfortable*

Hungarian man: “Before he said Mason, you were ready to agree with him.”

Young man: “Well yes but, he was talking about… what about those other people?“ *the pair sit down on a park bench*

Hungarian man: “In this country, we have no ‘other people.’ We are American people, of course.“

Young man: “What about you? You aren’t American, are you?“

Hungarian man: “I was born in Hungary. But now, I am an American citizen. And I have seen what this kind of talk can do. I saw it in Berlin.”

Young man: “What were you doing there?“

90% of Denmark’s Jews survived the Holocaust, because starting at the top, Denmark’s government and prominent citizens and all the way down emphasized this.

And all this was openly supported by King Christian. He did not, contrary to popular myth, ride his horse through Copenhagen wearing the Star of David, but he did make it clear, as he wrote in his diary, that he considered “our own Jews to be Danish citizens, and the Germans could not touch them”.

Denmark had, in essence, inoculated itself against Nazi propaganda because its citizens believed that Jews were not “other people.” As Bo Lidegard writes in Countrymen:

The Danish exception shows that the mobilisation of civil society’s humanism and protective engagement is not only a theoretical possibility: It can be done. We know because it happened.

Being a Jewish Dane or a Danish Jew might have made you a little different, but it didn’t make you other people.

Unlike Niemoller, they didn’t have to see atrocities visited on a series of Other People and only start caring when it happened to themselves. They understood it as happening to themselves from the start. Because their Jewish neighbors weren’t Other People.

As Denmark’s Jewish population sprang into panicked action, so did its Gentiles. Hundreds of people spontaneously began to tell Jews about the upcoming action and help them go into hiding. It was, in the words of historian Leni Yahil, “a living wall raised by the Danish people in the course of one night.”

Many of them didn’t even see it as “resistance work” on behalf of the Jews because it was simply fighting back against an attack on their own community.

Though there was anti-Semitism in Denmark before and after the Holocaust, the Nazis’ war on Jews was largely viewed as a war against Denmark itself. After the war, most Danes refused to take credit for their resistance work, which many had conducted under false names. Ordinary people who never considered themselves part of the Danish Resistance passed along messages, gathered food, gave hiding places or guarded the possessions of those who left until they returned home from the war.