The Danes surrendered to Nazi Germany on 9 April 1940, after only a few hours of fighting, the Danish government feared that there would be needless deaths and destruction if they continued a hopeless fight against overwhelming odds. Having inflicted very few German casualties, and surrendering quickly, resulted in the Danes being initially treated comparatively well by the Germans who considered them as their Aryan brothers.
Although the Danish Nazi Party was loud and forceful in the parliament of occupied Denmark, senior Danish politicians hoped that the Nazis would remain a minority within the parliament, with little influence if the Danish government appeared to be willing to co-operate with the occupiers, this resulted in the Danes being allowed to govern themselves, but however administrating the occupiers edicts under the watchful eye of the SS administrator Werner Best.
Although the Danish population endured blackouts, rationing, shortages and travel restrictions, they were able to resume a somewhat normal life without too much interference from the occupiers.But while many Danes understood their government's attitude, there were some who loathed the Nazis and all they stood for, they organised themselves into underground units, distributing anti-German leaflets and newspapers and conducting acts of sabotage, targeting armaments factories taken over by the Germans, and military equipment, also Danish companies producing war materials for Germany. As these attacks increased, relations between the Danes and Germans deteriorated rapidly, with distrust for the Danish civil administration taking place, also the suspicion that they were harbouring the resistance and offering its members moral support.
Resistance fighters were sensitive to their countrymen's opposition to violence and so staged peaceful protests, including raids on cinemas where they showed caricatures of Hitler accompanied by pre-recorded anti-Nazi speeches to the audience, the Germans were incensed by this sort of behaviour, and further angered by the unwillingness of the Danes to implement anti-Jewish policies, together with the protection given to Jews by the Danish civil court's, who quite incredibly imprisoned two editors of a National Socialist weekly the Battle Sign, for anti-Semitic libel in May 1942.
The Nazi had a hope that Denmark would be a model protectorate, with peaceful collaboration that might encourage other countries to join Hitler's New Order, but the Danes were not as compliant as Germany assumed they would be. They had not surrendered with the view of being an ally of the Third Reich, but only because they wished to avoid in Copenhagen the mass destruction that had resulted in Rotterdam and Warsaw, however many Danes felt they had stuck to their pacifist principles, at the cost of their self-respect.
To their credit the Danish people stubbornly resisted Nazi attempts to indoctrinate them with racist ideology, they listened to the Nazis and read what they had to say, but ignored it with quiet contempt. They ridiculed the Danish Nazi Party, cold-shouldered the Germans on the streets and in cafes and restaurants, they kept their distance from the invader, even when on overcrowded public transport.
The Danish situation was rather unique for an occupied nation, they did not suffer the restrictions imposed on citizens of other nations under the Nazis, they could listen to foreign broadcasts and their underground press was less restricted, with copies even being delivered by regular mail. Resistance was low-key and more of a symbolic nature, acts of sabotage amounted to no more than a few isolated incidents, trains were derailed, factories subject to arson, some of the fires being attributed to faulty wiring and acts of god, but the Germans would only tolerate so much, 3,000 Danes were imprisoned in the first three years of occupation, for various anti-German acts.
What did the Germans get from Denmark, as much butter and bacon as they could ship back to Berlin, one and a half million pigs and 1.3 million chickens. The Germans also shipped back to Germany 42,000 Danes to work in factories.
As news emerged of the first German defeats on the Eastern Front in 1943, young Danes took to the streets to carry out armed attacks on German soldiers, strikes and demonstrations were organised in major cities and towns, beginning in Esbjerg and Odense and rapidly spreading across the country, as workers clashed with the Danish police. After the Danish government refused to implement the death penalty for sabotage, the Germans imposed a state of emergency on the 29 August 1943 and shut down the Danish parliament. They disarmed the Danish army and attempted to seize sea-worthy ships, but these were deliberately sunk by the Danish navy, to prevent their use against the allies.
In October 1943 a German embassy attaché Georg Duckwitz informed a Danish politician of a planned round-up of Jews, this triggered a remarkable effort by the many Danes opposed to Nazi racial policy to save the nations Jews, this was very successful with all but 485 of Denmark's 8,000 Jews shipped to neutral Sweden, where they survived the war. Most of the Jews who were deported remained in Theresienstadt concentration camp,and through the efforts of the Danish Red Cross, they were not sent on to the extermination centres and most survived the war.
Incensed by what they saw as Danish interference, the Germans imposed further restrictions on the population and threatened reprisals for acts of sabotage and spreading anti-German propaganda. This created more acts of defiance by a population emboldened by the news of the Allied invasion of France on June 6 1944. For the last six months of the occupation, there were a number of major strikes, and there was a possibility that the Danish police might join them, this was a threat they considered they could not risk, so they disbanded the police, leaving Denmark under martial law. But on 4 May 1945, before the situation reached a crisis, the Germans surrendered, although at that moment not a single Allied soldier had crossed the border to liberate Denmark.
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