THE JEWISH COMMUNITY

There are 7,000 Jews in Denmark, out of a total population of 5.25 million. Most Jews are concentrated in Copenhagen, but smaller communities exist in Odense and Aarhus. About one-third are Polish Jews (or their children) who found sanctuary in Denmark after the anti-Semitic campaign in communist Poland in 1968. The central communal organization is the Mosaiske Troessamfund. The community operates several synagogues as well as the Caroline Jewish Day School (established in 1805). Jodisk Orientering is the main Jewish publication.

POLITICAL PARTIES AND EXTRA-PARLIAMENTARY GROUPS

Opinion polls showed a sharp rise in favor of the anti-immigrant Dansk Folkeparti (Danish People’s Party -- DPP) and its party leader Pia Kjaersgaard. Accordingly, the party could obtain 15 percent of the vote (26 parliamentary seats) in the national elections scheduled for 2002, compared to 7.4 percent in the March 1998 election. The party generates a climate of anti-immigrant hatred by suggesting, for example, that Muslims are appropriating apartments that should go to homeless Danes. The party also opposes the establishment of mosques and Muslim cemeteries. After a heated debate both in parliament and in the media in October, the party proposed the deportation of entire Muslim families if one family member was involved in a criminal offense. The party’s representative in the European Parliament, Mogens Camre, was until 1999 a member of the Social Democrat Party, but was expelled after protests over his racist outbursts (see ASW 1998/9). Since his arrival in Brussels, however, Camre has been relatively subdued, in keeping with Kjaersgaard's attempts to prevent her party from drifting into open racism. (During the year she ejected 19 members associated with the Danish Forum -- see below.)

In one of the harshest personal attacks ever in Danish politics, Peter Duetoft, vice-president of the Center Democrats compared Kjaersgaard to Hitler: “Hitler and Pia Kjaersgaard are of one piece. I do not say that she is a Nazi, but she has the same attitude, dividing people into Unter-Menschen and Uber-menschen, as Hitler did,” Duetoft said to the Danish mainstream newspaper Jyllands-Posten (30 January 2000).

The Fremskridtspartiet (Progress Party) has not recovered from the split at its 1996 national assembly and the resulting establishment of the Danish People’s Party. The party is violently anti-Muslim and in March its ageing leader Mogens Glistrup was convicted of violating Denmark’s anti-racist law. Later, on a radio program in September, Glistrup expressed the opinion that Muslims should be allowed three months to leave the country after which they should be “captured and placed in camps… and simply auctioned off to the highest bidder.” In 1999 Glistrup co-authored a book, The Court Case Against the Islam Lobby, together with Peter Neerup Buhl from the Danish Society (see below). Glistrup’s supporter Bo Warming was also convicted of racism for anti-Muslim statements on Glistrup’s Internet site.

On 6 November 1999 the Danish mainstream newspaper Politiken published an article by journalist Mikael Ekmann from the Swedish periodical Svarttvitt med Expo. Ekmann warned that the neo-Nazi wave of violence in Sweden would soon spread to Denmark and that Denmark had become one of the main sources of Nazi propaganda.

The Danish National Socialist Party (DNSB) has a small membership, but gets considerable media attention due to the anti-Semitic and racist views of its members. In the first of two TV programs, entitled ”Right-Wing Extremism in Europe,” broadcast in August 1999 by one of the two main Danish channels (TV2), DNSB leader Jonni Hansen replied in the negative when asked whether Jews should be allowed to live in Denmark. In connection with the Holocaust, he said: “No Jews were gassed in the concentration camps. You can blame the British and the Americans for their starvation at the end of the war.”

As of early 2000, Jonni Hansen was in custody pending investigation of charges of attempted manslaughter, after he had accelerated his car into a group of left-wing activists who were trying to break down the fence of the neo-Nazi headquarters in Greve, south of Copenhagen, on 21 December 1999. Hansen denies charges that he intended to inflict grievous bodily harm, claiming he acted in self-defense.

In August the DNSB lodged a complaint against a police decision to ban a neo-Nazi march in central Copenhagen to commemorate the death of Rudolf Hess. The police proposed an alternative route, which was rejected and no march took place. In Langeland, however, the Danish branch of the Blood & Honour movement (see below) organized an unauthorized march.

The DNSB has lost considerable ground to the newer and more violent Nazi group Blood & Honour/Scandinavia (see Sweden), which opened its Danish branch on 31 October 1998. The text on its homepage reads, inter alia: “Our goal is to start a revolution over the next ten years, to exterminate all the scoundrels from the world of the white man and the swines in Christiansborg [the seat of the Danish Parliament]. You have destroyed and ruined our race. We will let you pay at the end of the rope when judgement comes.”

During the year Danish Blood & Honour organized a series of six concerts. At one concert held on 25 June 1999 in Langeland, and attended by Blood & Honour members from Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Germany, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, police arrested 15 neo-Nazis. The following day, on its Internet homepage, the group threatened a policeman, who they claimed had been particularly aggressive. At another concert held in Torup to commemorate the death of Spain’s former military ruler General Franco in November, clashes broke out between police and stone-throwing anti-fascist demonstrators, resulting in injury to several policemen. It was revealed in January 2000 that the Blood & Honour group in Langeland was connected to malicious attacks on Bosnian refugees. Doors to Bosnian homes were kicked in and broken, tires slashed, and the refugees threatened with knives and clubs. Following an investigation, charges were brought against the perpetrators.

Members of Blood & Honour produce Nazi CDs and videos. One video, called Kriegsberichter 4, identified four anti-racists with names and pictures and showed them being executed in effigy with a single shot to the back of the head. As of early 2000, the Danish authorities had not been able to prosecute those responsible due to political complications arising from Swedish involvement in the case.

Dansk Forum (Danish Forum) was founded by members of the youth wing of the now almost defunct Danske Forening (Danish Society) after the press exposed some members of the society as active neo-Nazis. In 1999 the University of Copenhagen, where Dansk Forum has a student group, ordered it to cease distribution of its magazine Alaetheia after repeated violent confrontations with anti-racist students.

Nationalpartiet Danmark (National Party Denmark), under the leadership of Kaj Vilhelmsen, runs a website called the Common List Against Immigration (Faelleslisten mod Indvandringen). The website includes a variety of racist, anti-Semitic and ultra-nationalistic information, including a “black list,” with the names and pictures of Danes proclaimed to be public enemies. There were five Jewish names on this list in 1999, including the president of the Jewish community.

In September 1999 a priest, Rolf Slot-Henriksen, founded a new organization called Dansk Kultur (Danish Culture). The stated purpose of the organization is to advance and protect Danish culture, and its members have spoken out against the threat of Muslim culture to Danish society.

In 1999, an unlicensed Nazi radio station began operating in the new neo-Nazi strongholof Aalborg, north Jutland. Neo-Nazis also established a base at Fynen, in Noerresundby, but their house is the subject of a legal dispute. Neo-Nazi activity was met by organized and continual opposition everywhere. In Aalborg, 12 anti-fascists were arrested in February for possession of explosive materials when they demonstrated against the new Nazi base.

Threatening letters, signed “C18,” “Denmark’s National Front,” “Blood & Honour” or “White Brotherhood,” were received by politicians and publicists. Inter alia, they read: “You are registered and under surveillance. The day is not far off when you will be held responsible for your traitorous and subversive activities.”

ANTI-SEMITIC ACTIVITIES

Several anti-Semitic incidents were reported in 1999. In one violent incident in December, a man threw bottles at the Great Synagogue in Copenhagen, breaking some windows; however, his motive was unknown

A number of groups and individuals, including the Progress Party, have long campaigned against Jewish and Muslim ritual slaughter, as well as circumcision. Hundreds of letters were published in the Danish media during 1999 protesting ritual slaughter as “bestial” and as a practice from the Dark Ages. An anonymous letter sent to the Jewish community in October warned that ”If you continue your cruelty to animals” (shechita) you ought to try concentration camps again… You should try to die yourself by having your throat cut.” A booklet sent to the chief rabbi by a man professing to be a devout Catholic included such phrases as “Circumcision is a Jewish plot to destroy Gentiles,” and “The political Zionist Jew has tried to make slaves of all mankind.”

ATTITUDES TOWARD THE HOLOCAUST AND THE NAZI ERA

The Danish government has allotted funds for the Danish Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, in Copenhagen, which is to be inaugurated in 2000. The center, which will be headed by the historian Uffe Oestergaard, will complement the existing Danish Center for Human Rights and Treatment and Research Center for Torture Victims.

The Danish Raoul Wallenberg Society has awarded an honorary medal to Orla Krakou for his efforts to save Danish Jews during World War II. The Women’s Museum in Denmark showed an exhibition of Anne Frank’s life from June to December 1999.

About one hundred people participated in a Kristallnacht march, held on 9 November, in Copenhagen, to commemorate the victims of Nazism and to protest racism and discrimination. The march was promoted by Jewish, anti-racist, humanitarian and ethnic organizations, as well as trade unions.

The King Frederick and Queen Ingrid Foundation has given financial support to the opening of a Danish Jewish Museum in the offices of the Royal Library. The museum was due to be opened in 2000.

The impact of the Dansk Selskab for Fri Historisk Forskning (Danish Society for Free Historical Research -- DSIHR) on Danish public opinion is minimal. Its 30-40 members exchange views on the so-called Holocaust myth and host Danish and international revisionist speakers. The society’s main activists include Dr. Christian Lindtner (see ASW1998/9) and webmaster Ole Kreiberg. Kreiberg’s Internet site hosts a variety of Danish and foreign deniers and provides links to racist and anti-Semitic groups around the world. The couple Marianne Herlufsdatter and Lars Thirslund continue to publish their virulently anti-Semitic Vestlig Samisdat on this site.

Hans Krog Petersen is a veteran Nazi activist who publishes a magazine called Revision. The magazine, which is virtually unknown in Denmark, is financed by German deniers. In 1999 he sued his municipal library for refusing to place Revision on its bookshelves. A supervisory committee under the Home Office denied his petition.

Holocaust denial is fought on the Danish website <holocaust-info.dk>, operated by a young student, Mikkel Andersson.

In March the Danish Ministry of Justice applied to the Bavarian authorities for the extradition of former SS man Soeren Kam, who is accused of participating in the murder of the Danish anti-Nazi journalist Henrik Clemmenson during World War II. Kam, now a German citizen, was reported to have been attending meetings of SS veterans in Germany. The application was rejected, but the Danish Justice Ministry did not consider the matter closed and was intending to pursue it further.

The Danish parliament intends to force the Danish Immigration Service to open its archives after it rejected the application of Danish historian Wilhalmjur Ôrn Wilhjalmsson to investigate the denial of entry to Jewish refugees during World War II. In the course of his research in foreign archives, Wilhjalmsson discovered that 132 Jews were returned to Germany after attempting to enter Denmark.