Why?: Explaining the Holocaust

by Peter Hayes

This gave the Jews time to get away from their homes before the German police came to apprehend them on the evening of October 1, 1943. During the ensuing weeks, the Jewish Danes had two more priceless advantages in making their escape: an offer of asylum from the Swedish government for anyone who got to its shores, and only a narrow body of water to cross. Even so, most of them got away only because German navy patrol boats off the Danish coast made no attempt to interfere with the roughly 700 vessels—mainly fishing boats—that carried the exodus. Only 284 Danish Jews fell into Nazi hands in the roundup of October 1, and 22 more drowned while trying to escape. Ultimately, 7,742 reached Sweden, including 1,376 German Jewish refugees, along with 686 non-Jewish spouses. Perhaps even more amazing than these numbers is the fact that after the war, when these people returned to Denmark, they found their homes and property not only unmolested but also often carefully tended in their absence. In Italy, Mussolini had just announced the imposition of forced labor on Italian Jews and was on the verge of commanding deportations when he was overthrown in July 1943, and the Jews in Italian-occupied Croatia already had been interned in a potential transit camp. But in the chaos that surrounded the influx of the German army, the remaining 2,600 Croatian Jews could escape, and most of the 32,000 Italian ones remaining in the northern two-thirds of the country had time to go underground. Th...