WIESENTHAL CENTER CALLS UPON DENMARK TO APOLOGIZE FOR DEPORTATION OF JEWISH REFUGEES TO NAZI GERMANY DURING WORLD WAR II AND COMMEMORATE THEIR FATE

The Simon Wiesenthal Center has called upon the Danish government to apologize for the deportation from Denmark to Nazi Germany during the years 1941-1942 of twenty-one stateless Jewish refugees, nineteen of whom were murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators, a historical fact revealed in a book published last week by historian Vilhjalmur Vilhjalmsson entitled Medaljens Bagside;Joediske flytgningeskaebner I Danmark 1933-1945(The Other Side of the Coin;Jewish Refugees in Denmark 1933-1945).

In an op-ed published this week in the Jerusalem Post , the Center’s Israel director Dr. Efraim Zuroff called upon the Danish government to issue an official apology on behalf of his country to the State of Israel and to the surviving relatives of the refugees expelled; to find an appropriate manner in which to commemorate the fate of the victims in Copenhagen( as was done in Helsinki in memory of the Jewish refugees deported from Finland);and to make sure that these events are incorporated into Danish history books.

According to Zuroff: "Although the murder of nineteen Jews is hardly numerically significant in the context of the Shoa, this episode is particularly disturbing on a symbolic level. If for decades we could console ourselves that here was at least one entire nation that acted honorably toward Jews during the Holocaust, we have been stripped of that comforting illusion…[But] now that the truth has been revealed, the manner in which Copenhagen officially reacts to the deliberate misdeeds of the Danish authorities during World War II will be a genuine test of whether the critical lessons of this tragic chapter of the history of the Holocaust have indeed been learned in Denmark."

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