The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany

by William L. Shirer

For nearly four years, until the tide of war had changed, the Danish King and his people, a good-natured, civilized and happy-go-lucky race, offered very little trouble to the Germans. Denmark became known as the “model protectorate.” The monarch, the government, the courts, even the Parliament and the press, were at first allowed a surprising amount of freedom by their conquerors. Not even Denmark’s seven thousand Jews were molested—for a time. But the Danes, later than most of the other conquered peoples, finally came to the realization that further “loyal co-operation,” as they called it, with their Teutonic tyrants, whose brutality increased with the years and with the worsening fortunes of war, was impossible—if they were to retain any shred of self-respect and honor. They also began to see that Germany might not win the war after all and that little Denmark was not inexorably condemned, as so many had feared at first, to be a vassal state in Hitler’s unspeakable New Order. Then resistance began.