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No. 25, January 20, 2004 [ German translation ] COPENHAGEN, Denmark, September 19, 2003: The last time I was in this city was in 1965, when I took a train through it, to interview Col. Knut Haukelid of the SOE for my book THE VIRUS HOUSE , in Norway. Several Scandinavians have contacted me, asking to attend tomorrow’s little luncheon, including some from Sweden.
Alex tells me that a (now former) friend of his has been phoning around the guests, suggesting that they not attend, as I am so “notorious.” Three have cancelled; their loss, not mine. I am not talking tomorrow about the Holocaust, whatever it was, but about Adolf Hitler , whoever he was, and the problems of writing factually about him (and surviving afterwards). Excellent supper, in a restaurant across the Nyhaven dock from the house where another writer, Hans Christian Andersen , once lived.
It looks like an office block to me. Copenhagen has hardly been damaged in the war. We’ll have a look at the former Gestapo prison tomorrow, and at the site of a children’s school which a low-level Royal Air Force attack flattened, in the city’s worst tragedy, when we tried to breach the prison walls in March 1945. That slick phrase “collateral damage” didn’t exist in those times, but the military’s insouciance about it certainly did.
Tomorrow too we’ll go to a museum which has some Heinrich Himmler stuff, including his fake eye-patch, donated to the Danes by Field Marshal Sir Bernard Montgomery ; I wonder what else Monty had that he retained? I am still hoping one day to locate the diary of Werner Best , left , which I suspect is in this city. He told British interrogators that “the Danes” had taken it from him. My hunt for new documents never ceases.
Best, one of the most brilliant National Socialist officers, was the Gestapo official who interrogated General Werner von Fritsch in 1938, and then became governor of Denmark.
I WAKE TO FIND THAT MY sixth-floor hotel Copenhagen bedroom, which is on two levels connected by a spiral metal staircase, is on a level with the middle decks of a large ferry, Pearl of Scandinavia , which has throbbed into a dock fifty feet away, almost silently – you can feel the thud of its engines rather than hear it through the double glazed windows. The rest of the boat towers thirty or forty more feet above my windows.
Cars from Norway are clanking across the steel drawbridge onto Danish soil. Alex picks me up with his driver. The Freedom Museum is well organised, and I take pictures of the Himmler eye-patch and other items. The operations of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) are well portrayed. We drive across the town to the Shell House — still Shell’s headquarters — of which the top floor housed the Gestapo cells holding the Resistance workers whom the air raid was supposed to liberate.
A small bronze plaque with the Royal Air Force crest names ten men with very English names, and bears just a date, March 21, 1945, but no other legend. It commemorates a historic raid. Unfortunately one of the Mosquitoes crashed a mile away; the other pilots thought the blaze marked the target and unloaded their bombs there. It was a French convent school. A statue marks the site, showing a nun clutching two scared children looking up at the sky.
About forty hexagonal paving slabs surround the statue displaying, rather in the fashion of the Hollywood Walk of Fame, the names and ages of the 170 who died, the youngest aged four or five, the oldest a Sister born in 1869, without stating that they died in a British raid.
It seems odd, but I suppose that respect for the sensitivities of the English dictates a proper element of tact, rather like that monument on the beach at Timmendorfer Strand in northern Germany: it records the burial place of the seven thousand refugees drowned aboard the liners Cap Arcona and Deutschland , sunk by a Canadian pilot of the 2nd Tactical Air Force in May 1945. It describes the victims as “concentration camp prisoners,” which is rather less than accurate.
The folks meet me for the luncheon at the restaurant at one PM and to hear my talk on writing about Hitler. Nobody dies. Two guests have travelled from Sweden. Some bright questions at the end, and we’ll do it again, this time with some students if we can convey the meeting time and place safely to them. We all know how the traditional enemies of the truth just love to let me speak. So my visit to Copenhagen ends.
Impressions — a bright, clean, bustling town; ancient buildings, palace guards with bearskins, Disneyesque palaces; and thousands of blonde girls pedalling around looking like Benté. I see no Blacks, and no obese people, but I do once glimpse a gaggle of hooded, cotton-shrouded Somali “refugee” women huddling along the sidewalks to nowhere in particular. THAT IS THE REAL MYSTERY OF this last half century, ever since World War Two.
Why have the European countries, with all the ugly lessons of racial conflict offered by the United States before them, inflicted this same injury upon themselves, and unhappiness on the newcomers too? When the Black hordes of Tamils were first being flooded into West Germany through East Berlin in the 1970s, I ventured that this was Moscow’s new ploy: they were replacing the old Marxist Klassenkampf with Rassenkampf. Nothing that I see now diminishes that view.
Marxism feeds on social discontent, and what better way to degrade one society than by inflicting another, alien, society on it, to destroy it from within?