This section attempts to answer the question: “How much of this story is true?”
“Denmark Rising” is a novel, a work of fiction. However, the novel incorporates a good bit of actual history and reflects, to the best of my ability, what we now know about the dynamics of strategic nonviolence when used against an opponent with no scruples about mass murder.
The basic conflict of the novel, the struggle between Germany and Denmark, accurately reflects what Germany wanted from Denmark, what was going on in the rest of the world at the time, and Germany’s concern for world opinion. The novel also accurately reflects the brutality of the Gestapo and the SS toward a subjugated people, as well as the much more humane attitudes of the ordinary German soldier, the Wehrmacht troops.
There are two main areas in which I have invented this story. The first is in pretending that Denmark did serious preparations for a campaign of strategic nonviolence. In 1940 there was little in the way of theoretical framework or even case studies of previous instances of strategic nonviolence, so the relevant knowledge for such a campaign did not exist.
Second, unlike the novel, the resistance that did develop in Denmark did so slowly and mostly from the grass roots. In reality, the people dragged along the government and most other key institutions. For the first couple of years of the occupation, the Danish government and the Germans did an uneasy dance of accommodation and the Danes mostly acceded to the German requests for food and war materiel, including submarines.
In October 1943 the Germans tried to arrest the Danish Jews and the government finally said an unequivocal “no”.
In the novel, given that the Danish government said “no” to the Germans immediately, everything was speeded up and, for instance, the fictional arrest of the Jews occurs in 1940 rather than the actual date of 1943.
One other literary device should be mentioned. I used the names of many of the actual Danish and German characters, especially for the high officials but also in several cases for members of the resistance. Where I used the names of members of the resistance, I tried to roughly reflect the degree of importance of the historical characters, but otherwise did not attempt to be accurate in the specifics of their roles.
In a section below, I list all of the names of real people that appeared in the book, along with a brief note on the actual role they played.
For the real Germans used in the book, their fictional roles are essentially identical to their actual roles. With the exception of General Dr. Werner Best, I had very little information on the German generals other than their titles. In General Best’s case, there was significant information on him, especially on his role in the arrest of the Jews and in subsequently sabotaging the effort. In real life, General Best did walk a tight rope between Hitler’s demands that he “rule with an iron hand” and his personal belief that a moderate policy would be most effective in getting what they wanted from the Danes.
The historical record on George Duckwitz is very rich and includes both his and his wife’s diaries. The novel accurately reflects his role and departs from the historical record only in that it omits some of his efforts, e.g. his meetings with high Swedish officials to convince Sweden to accept the refugees. Duckwitz made extraordinary efforts to help the Jews and did warn the Danes about the impending raids. Duckwitz’s friends in the German army did help the Jews and several were punished by being sent to the Russian front, where at least some of them died.
I took more fictional liberties with my main Danish characters, especially Arne Sejr, King Christian, and Prime Minister Stauning. This was necessary in that these people had to act out the strategies and tactics of strategic non-violence. Prime Minister Thorvald Stauning is given a much more important and heroic role in the novel than he was given in actual life. Arne Sejr, at age 17, did write the ten commandments for Danes and worked for the resistance throughout the war.
King Christian did in fact play an important and rather heroic role. His daily horseback rides, all alone, through Copenhagen were an important element in maintaining Danish morale. General Best’s attempt to fly the Nazi flag over the King’s palace and the King’s response are both true.
I have six substantial books on the rescue of the Jews. The spontaneous outpouring of help for the Jews by vast numbers of Danish citizens is well documented … practically the entire population of Denmark rose up overnight and made extraordinary efforts to save their Jewish neighbors. My entire account of the rescue of the Jews is very close to the historical record except that I combined the misadventures of half a dozen families into the account of the Melchior and the Pundik families (e.g., the incident in which the German officer found a fishing boat full of Jews and simply let them go happened to some other family but the novel has it happening to the Melchiors). The anecdotes about David Levine (i.e., the kosher food and shaving vs. cutting his beard) are true.
Where I have my fictional characters helping with the rescue, they are merely doing what some of the actual people did in reality. This whole section of the book is true in the sense that real people did these things. Perhaps this section’s greatest departure from the actual history is not adequately showing the sheer number of Danes who assisted in the rescue of the Jews. In some seacoast villages, essentially the entire population helped arrange transport to Sweden.
The story of the Danish collaborators, mainly Fritz Clausen and the other members of the Danish National Socialist Workers Party (Danish Nazis), is also fairly close to the actual history, including the bombing of Tivoli Gardens.