In Celebration of the One Country in Europe that Blocked Germany from Exterminating its Jews in WWII
An Important Story for Passover
Friday, April 11, 2025
The world’s 16 million Jews, representing an infinitesimal fraction of one percent of our planet’s population, will celebrate Passover this year beginning Saturday evening. The 8-day holiday is in memory of the Jews’ exodus from slavery in Egypt 3,500 years ago.
It was not the only time the world has attempted to destroy Jews and Judaism. More recently, Hitler made a run at it in the late 1930s and early 1940s with the murder of 6 million Jews, one-third of the world’s Jewish population and two-thirds of Europe’s Jewish population at the time.
The Holocaust victims will be remembered worldwide as part of the Seder ritual dinner on April 12 and 13. Yes, the lengthy dinner of remembrance is done twice; freedom is that precious, that important among Jews.
There is another small, but important event in world history, however, that also is worth remembering and Passover seems the right time to bring it up for review and celebration. This, too, is a story about the Jews and the pursuit of freedom. It is a story, however, that most of us have forgotten or never knew.
The year is 1943 and the place is Europe
World War II had been in process for almost four years in mid-1943. Germany had seized control of most of the countries of Europe. It also had conceived and constructed facilities that could efficiently murder and dispose of the remains of masses of people every hour of every day. It was designed to be the end of Jewish life, at least in Europe.
There seemed to be no way to stop the ongoing process of genocide — except that the non-Jews of one country in Europe stood alone to save the lives of almost its entire Jewish population.
One country, working against overwhelming odds, decided that the lives of the Jews who lived in that country were worth saving, even if it meant risking their own lives.
One country, among the 30+ countries of Europe that the Nazis invaded and occupied, managed to foil Hiter’s attempt to execute its Jews.
And amazingly, that one country got the job done!
This is the story of Denmark’s remarkable and successful effort to save the lives of the great majority of its roughly 7,700 Jews plus almost 700 non-Jews who were married to Jews.
It was an effort that required the active participation of an estimated 400,000 Danes.
One of them was Henny Lilian Sinding, who was born in Copenhagen in 1921, the daughter of an official in Denmark’s Lighthouse and Bouy Service. With almost all of its borders surrounded by water, Denmark’s dozens of lighthouses still today play a critical role in guiding vessels into and out of treacherous harbors where shorelines are lined with precarious shallows and perilous rocky coasts.
Henny Sinding’s story
Henny studied language in London for several years while she was growing up, before returning to Denmark and taking a job as an apprentice to her father at the national Lighthouse Service.
There, she met the four-man crew of a small oak and pine work boat, known as a lighthouse tender. The boat, named Gerda III, was designed to transport workers to and from the Drogden Lighthouse and to deliver such things as food, mail, and newspapers to the lighthouse.
Drogden Lighthouse, built in 1937 and rising 66 feet out of the water, is situated in the Øresund Strait, which separates Denmark and Sweden off Denmark’s easternmost coastline. The strait is just 11 miles wide at this point and the lighthouse is positioned about 2 ½ miles into the strait from the Danish landmass.
It was the late summer of 1943; Henny was 22 years old, full of courage and filled with a love for the people of her homeland.
We’ll come back to her story soon.
First, we need to set the scene for the story.
German troops had invaded Denmark and taken control of the country on April 9, 1940 – 85 years ago this week. The Danish government and king, however, struck an unusual bargain with their invaders. Denmark had industry that produced goods that were useful to the German Army. Germany would allow Danes to officially remain neutral and maintain control of their country so long as Denmark continued to provide needed goods as well as money to Germany.
Moreover, Denmark got some other important concessions in the bargain – things Germany did not allow in its other occupied countries. There would be no capital punishment in Denmark. The Danish military would not participate in the war in support of Germany. There would be no new laws based on racism or national origin enacted in Denmark.
Also, Denmark’s Jews would not be subjected to the restrictions Jews faced in all the other occupied countries. The Jews of Denmark, for example, would not be required to wear yellow Stars of David on their clothing, nor would they be forced to sell their businesses to Germans at prices that represented a small fraction of their value.
During the first three years of this arrangement, something unexpected happened in Denmark.
The country’s Christian and socialist values, which ran deep and were consistent with Danish history and tradition, took hold of the country’s masses. Training for ordinary citizens in grass-roots activism and the foundations of democracy became widespread. A strong Danish underground resistance movement emerged and was widely supported.
Then, in the summer of 1943, a wave of strikes, demonstrations, and sabotage resulted in the Nazis deciding to change course in Denmark. It was time to try to force Denmark to punish its resistance with capital punishment and, in line with the Nazi policy and practice in virtually every other country it had invaded, Denmark’s Jews would be deported to execution camps.
The Resistance in Denmark would not let it happen
No. Not in Denmark, came the resounding response from this proud country’s 4 million residents.
Henny Sinding could not wait to get started.
The crew of the Gerda III came to her and asked for her help in smuggling Jews across the strait to Sweden, a neutral country that the Nazis had considered not worth the time or resources needed to invade.
Henny knew the risks she was encountering, perhaps including death. Still, she approached her father with the following request:
“Could you please see that the Gerda III gets another key, and would you close your eyes and pretend not to notice if Gerda III doesn’t sail its usual route and at the usual time? And would you inform the lighthouse master . . . that Gerda III will not be coming at certain hours? It will vary very much when it comes out to the lighthouse.”
Her father stoically gave silent approval. History does not tell us, but it seems likely that her father was proud of his daughter.
Henny went to work immediately. But it was a task that proved harder than expected. Most of the country’s Jews had heard word of what was about to happen. They had gone into hiding, often with the assistance of friends and neighbors, sometimes into remote areas of the forest surrounding the city. She would have to begin by finding Denmark’s Jews.
“My task was every evening to look for the Jews, to assemble them in groups of 20 or 25, and to guide them to the warehouse, where we hid them. From there, they had to cross the quay in the dark to get to the boat . . .”
The Jews were escorted to a warehouse near where Gerda III was docked. Food and drink was provided as well as sedatives for the children to make sure they would sleep through the endeavor. Silence would be essential.
Gerda III would not lift anchor until 7 a.m., its usual time. An hour earlier, the Jews would begin making their way to the boat. They would gather in the shadows and one by one as the German guards turned their backs, they would run to the Gerda III, often with children in arms. They were taken under deck and told to remain silent. Shortly before departure, as a matter of practice, two Germans would board the boat to inspect its papers.
The crew would offer them beer. They toasted each other and talked about the weather. It never occurred to them to check below deck.
The Germans departed. Henny and her Jewish comrades began their two-hour trip to Sweden, where the Jews would spend the rest of the war in safety.
How many Danes did it take to save one Jewish life? Incredibly, 50!
The process continued night after night for three weeks with several hundred small boats participating. It is estimated that for every life saved, 50 Danes worked in secret to secure safe hiding places near the strait, find the Jews and move them to the new locations, escort them to the boats, secure and transport several days of provisions for each of them without being discovered, transport them across the strait, and work with them to get settled in a new country.
It was the largest sea transport rescue mission in history.
In the end, 7,220 Jews and 686 non-Jewish spouses would be transported to safety in Sweden.
Another 580 Jews, roughly, remained in hiding in Denmark and 464 of them ultimately were caught and deported by the Germans to Theresienstadt, a concentration camp in occupied Czechoslovakia.
The numbers do not add up exactly because of births along the way, but only 51 Jews, a fraction of one percent of all Danish Jews, died in the war, all of them from disease or starvation in Theresienstadt, and most of them elderly.
In more than 30 other European countries the Nazis invaded and occupied, the death rates among Jews ranged from 18 percent in Italy to 97+ percent among the 3 million Jews in Poland.
The 51 Jewish deaths at Theresienstadt stood in sharp contrast to the 30,000 Jews who died in Theresienstadt, and 90,000 more who were deported from Theresienstadt and gassed in the death camps.
The Danish rate was relatively low in part because the Danish resistance continued to protect the country’s Jews who had been imprisoned at Theresienstadt by providing aid packages of food, vitamins, and clothing for them. Remarkably, none of the Danish Jews in Theresienstadt were transferred to death camps.
As for Henny Sinding, a resistance fighter approached her after her work with the Gerda III, to seek her participation in other resistance missions. She agreed. One of her assignments was to determine the number of German soldiers patrolling specific areas. She did so by gaining information from one of the soldiers while pretending to be in love with him.
Ultimately, in 1944, she became one of the few in her resistance group to escape from Denmark to Sweden. She was bored there. In the end, she wished she had been able to do more.
In April 1945, at the end of World War II, the 425 surviving Danish prisoners at Theresienstadt were rescued by the Swedish Red Cross.
Denmark: Where people consistently have tried to do the right thing
Denmark’s history is filled with instances of doing the right thing during difficult times.
In World War I, America feared that the Danish West Indies off the east coast of the U.S. could provide a landing point for Germany to invade America. Denmark at the time was not in a position to provide a military defense if that were to happen. The issue was resolved when Denmark agreed to sell the islands to the United States for $25 million. These islands, originally known as Saint Thomas, Saint Croix, and Saint John, were renamed the Virgin Islands, now a U.S. territory.
After World War II, Denmark turned its back on its long history of neutrality and agreed to become a founding member of NATO.
In 2001, after the 911 terrorist attack on America, Denmark was among the early countries to join America’s coalition war effort in Afghanistan, aimed at destroying al-Qaeda, which was responsible for the attack and had gone into hiding in Afghanistan. Denmark sustained 43 fatalities in Afghanistan, the highest fatality rate as a percentage of population among the 30 countries in the coalition force. An additional 214 Danish soldiers were wounded in Afghanistan.
And yet, today, Denmark is facing a new threat that seems out of sync with the country’s proud history and record of doing the right thing.
That threat comes from the United States and is aimed both at Denmark and Greenland, now Denmark’s prize autonomous territorial partner. America wants to take over Greenland, against the wishes of both the people of Greenland and the country of Denmark.
Some of the things going on in today’s world just don’t feel right.
Sources for this newsletter include: Danish Jews Escape, encyclopedia.ushmm.org; Special Mission for a Lighthouse Tender, Marilyn Turk, 2018, pathwayheart.com; Denmark’s Daring Rescue of Jews During World War II, Therkel Straede, TIME, November 8, 2023, time.com; Coalition casualties in Afghanistan, en.wikipedia.org; Henny Sinding Sundo, wikipedia.org, based on content from United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; Rescue of the Danish Jews, wikipedia.org.
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Linking readers and professional writers who care about Iowa.
Thank you for writing this story. The time is right for all of us to read about the heroics of the people of Denmark in time of great danger. We need to be like Denmark.
Thanks again for your research and writing. So much is going wrong, yet we are fortunate to have freedom of thought and press and speech to fight for…. and writers like you to spur us on.