In return for a guarantee of the kingdom’s territorial integrity, the Danish government decided to surrender immediately when German troops crossed the border on 9 April 1940. Denmark’s occupation status was a special case in Europe: the Danish government, parliament and civil administration remained in office and accepted a ‘peaceful occupation’ by the German Reich. Under international law, the two countries were therefore not at war. The acting German ambassador Cécil von Renthe-Fink (1885–1964) was appointed Reich Plenipotentiary.
On 29 August 1943, however, the illusion of a model protectorate was shattered. The Danish government was deposed and, taking advantage of the state of emergency, Werner Best (1903–1989), German Reich Plenipotentiary since 1942, proposed the deportation of around 6,000 Jewish Danes and almost 2,000 Jewish emigrants from Germany and Austria. This was largely prevented by an unprecedented rescue operation supported by broad sections of the population. Around 7,200 Jews and around 700 non-Jewish relatives of Jews were sent to safety in Sweden within three weeks. Despite the refusal of the Danish police to co-operate in deportations, around 500 Jews were arrested and deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto.
There was no coordinated registration or even deportation of the Sinti and Roma in the country by the German authorities. While there were some reasons for this, it was by no means to be expected. Sinti and Roma were subjected to police harassment in Denmark as in other European countries during the interwar period. An Aliens Act in force since 1875 prohibited the entry of foreign ‘Tatere’ (a term commonly used at the time for Sinti and Roma, circus performers and other travellers) into the kingdom and made it possible to deport those who were already in the country and did not have Danish citizenship. The restrictive Danish immigration policy impacted, among others, a group of 68 Norwegian Roma who were turned back at the German-Danish border in 1934 and many of whom were later deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camp, particularly via the Mechelen camp in German-occupied Belgium. Compared to the German Reich and neighbouring Scandinavian countries, however, Sinti and Roma and other population groups referred to as ‘Gypsies’ received little state attention in Denmark for a long time and were more a topic for local amateur researchers.
Racial Biology Research at the Institute of Hereditary Biology and Eugenics
This changed in 1938, when the recently founded Copenhagen University Institute of Hereditary Biology and Eugenics began a scientific study of ‘Gypsies in Denmark’. The commission came from the municipal social welfare authority in Copenhagen after caseworkers there had noticed a number of families whose members were often travelling in the summer, had a ‘southern appearance’ and applied for an above-average number of social benefits in the winter. The institute was asked to clarify whether this was a ‘racially’ identifiable group and whether this group posed a socio-political danger. Since the 1920s, social-democrat governed Denmark had been considered a pioneer in the implementation of eugenic measures, which were intended to ensure financial sustainability in the expansion of welfare state benefits: Help for those in need through no fault of their own could only be provided, leading social democrats were convinced, if at the same time the blessings of the welfare state were used to prevent the supposedly ‘hereditarily burdened’ from multiplying further.
Although the official enquiry referred to one municipality, it was decided to investigate the ‘Gypsy population’ of the whole country and their relationship to the welfare state, taking into account only families with Danish citizenship.
The German invasion slowed the ongoing study, but did not stop it. In spring 1943 the results were published in English in the official series of the Copenhagen University Institute of Hereditary Biology and Eugenics under the title ‘Gypsies in Denmark. A socio-biological study’. Denmark had been occupied for three years at the time. The two authors, the physician Erik D. Bartels (1912–1981) and the physician and psychiatrist Gudrun Brun (1906–1993) adopted the methods of the German National Socialist ‘Gypsy researcher’ Robert Ritter (1901–1951). The main part of their study is a systematic and detailed examination of eight identified families, each accompanied by a fold-out, anonymised genealogical table with information on employment, social benefits received and family relationships. Bartels and Brun estimated the group of ‘Danish Gypsies’ at around 700 to 800 people. They also adopted Ritter’s ‘racial’ definition: According to this, 80 per cent of the family members investigated were considered ‘Gypsy Mischlinge’. The interviewees themselves, who were presumably not fully informed about the purpose of the investigation, mostly called themselves ‘travellers’.
A Danish Special Path?
Despite often uncritically adopting and reproducing Ritter’s vocabulary, Bartels and Brun rejected his thesis of a class of ‘asocial vagabonds’ that had developed over generations and criticised his negative assessment of supposed ‘Gypsy Mischlinge’. They also did not recognise the diagnosis of ‘camouflaged feeblemindedness’ deployed by Ritter—which could lead to forced sterilisation in the German Reich. Instead, they cited milieu, poverty and lack of education as explanatory factors for economic hardship and assumed that ‘mixed marriages’ with ethnic Danes would stabilise families socially. They explicitly rejected coercive measures such as child removal, sterilisation or even deportation.
However, Bartels and Brun did not doubt that the families studied were ‘racially’ different from the rest of the population. Like Ritter, they saw a ‘Gypsy problem’, which they sought to solve not through coercive measures, but through assimilation, i.e. through ‘mixed marriages’. However, they emphasised that the prerequisite for this was strict application of the Danish Aliens Act to prevent renewed immigration of Sinti and Roma.
If Bartels and Brun were explicitly in favour of further ‘racial mixing’, they were ultimately—and they openly admitted this—striving for the same goal as Ritter: A homogeneous society without ‘Gypsies’. The Danish special path thus manifested itself less in articulated population policy goals or even an anti-racist course, but rather in the explicit rejection of coercive measures and a more neutral attitude towards supposed ‘Mischlinge’, whom scholars in Finland, Norway and Sweden as well as in National Socialist Germany identified as the ‘main problem’.
It was undoubtedly illegal and unethical to create family trees of Danish citizens whom National Socialist racial doctrine labelled ‘Gypsies’ or ‘Gypsy mongrels’ at a time when members of that population group were being deported and murdered in other countries. It is difficult to say whether the authors and others responsible for the project merely considered the risk of the research data being used by the occupying authorities to be low or simply ignored it. Despite numerous reviews and interviews published after the book was completed, including articles in the newspaper of the National Socialist Party of Denmark, the German occupation authorities were apparently not interested in the results or in such documentation as the de-anonymised family trees of the subjects. The attempt to deport all Jewish Danes and the actual deportation of over 400 Danes as alleged ‘asocials’ and ‘habitual criminals’ to the Neuengamme concentration camp from September 1944 show that this material could pose a danger to those affected. In both of those cases, police registers were used.
Since 2003, 27 January has been celebrated in Denmark as an official day of remembrance (‘Auschwitz-dag’) in memory of the victims of the Holocaust and genocide. There are no specific memorial initiatives to commemorate the genocide of the Sinti and Roma.
