In making the point that “totalitarianism, not to mention ethnic cleansing and ethnic extermination, always requires a great deal of collaboration,” Michael Ignatieff describes Denmark’s unique resistance to the Nazis:
Both the Danish king and the Danish government decided that their best hope of maintaining Denmark’s sovereignty lay in cooperating but not collaborating with the German occupiers. This “cooperation” profited some Danes but shamed many others. The Danish population harbored ancestral hostility to the Germans, and the occupation reinforced these feelings. The Germans, for their part, put up with this frigid relationship: they needed Danish food, and Danish cooperation freed up German military resources for battle on the Eastern Front, and the Nazis wanted to be liked. They wanted their “cooperative” relationship with Denmark to serve as a model for a future European community under Hitler’s domination.
From very early on in this ambiguous relationship, the Danes, from the king on down, made it clear that harming the Jews would bring cooperation to an end and force the Germans to occupy the country altogether. The king famously told his prime minister, in private, that if the Germans forced the Danish Jews to wear a yellow star, then he would wear one too.
And it worked; “thanks to his opposition, the Germans never imposed such a regulation in Denmark.” Update from a reader:
Your quotation of Ignatieff’s article compounds an issue that was in the article itself. After the part that you quote, Ignatieff goes on to say that the part about the Danish King riding out to the streets with a gold star is a myth. But in fact, even the threat to wear the star might be false. This blog post from The Forward explains it. And here is Snopes. Of course, this isn’t to say that there is much to learn from the Danish resistance. But it is a danger to over-glorify it. I find the distinction between “cooperation” and “collaboration” to be specious.
The Dish 