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Magazine / History / Narrating the Nation / Article | 06/05/2008
The holocaust and European values
by Uffe Østergård
A European memory of the holocaust was named by almost all EU countries over the last twenty years as an important assignment.
Almost all countries in the European Union over the last 15 to 20 years have been engaged in preserving the memory of the Holocaust.[1] Even the small and presumed innocent Nordic countries have been implicated in the general European attempt to commemorate the Nazi annihilation of the Jews in WW2.
Norway has paid compensations for Jewish property confiscated from the Jews who were arrested and deported in November 1942. Some of the reparations which could not be directed to relatives of the vanished have gone into the setting up of a Center for the "Study of the Holocaust and Religious Minorities” which opened to the public in August 2006. As a sign of poetic revenge on history, this Center is located in Vidkun Quisling's luxurious villa in the museum peninsula in central Oslo after the building was renovated at great expense. Even Denmark, with her good reputation for having saved the majority of her Jews October 1943, in 2000 commissioned an official investigation of her refugee policy prior to and during the German occupation 1940-45.
The results have been published in four massive volumes which document the restrictive Danish policy towards refugees in the whole of the period 1933 to 1945 and the deportation of a number of Jews who were not Danish citizens during the German occupation. [2] An investigation of the economic collaboration of Danish industry and agriculture at the Copenhagen Business School is about to be published. Neutral Sweden, too, has faced up to her complicity by initiating mass information campaigns about the Holocaust and other genocides, and the setting up of a permanent institution called "Living History” (Levande historia) [3].
The article is the unedited original version.
[1] An earlier version of some of my thoughts can be found in Uffe Østergård, "Holocaust, Genocide and European Values”, in Steven Jensen (ed.), Genocide: Cases, Comparisons and Contemporary Debates, Copenhagen: The Danish Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 2003, 175-192 and ”Denmark and the New International Politics of Morality and Remembrance”, Danish Foreign Policy Yearbook , Copenhagen: DIIS, 65-101.
[2] Hans Kirchhoff, Et menneske uden pas er ikke noget menneske. Danmark i den internationale flygtningepolitik 1933-1939, Odense: University Press of Southern Denmark 2005; Lone Rünitz, Af hensyn til konsekvenserne. Danmark og flygtningespørgsmålet 1933-1940, Odense: University Press of Southern Denmark 2005; Cecilie Felicia Stokholm Banke, Demokratiets skyggeside. Flygtninge og menneskerettigheder i Danmark før Holocaust, Odense: University Press of Southern Denmark 2005; Hans Kirchhoff og Lone Rünitz, Udsendt til Tyskland. Dansk flygtningepolitik under besættelsen, Odense: University Press of Southern Denmark 2007.
[3] http://www.levandehistoria.org/om
Uffe Østergård, professor in European and Danish History, International Center for Business and Politics, Copenhagen Business School, formerly director of the Danish Center for Holocaust ...
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Original in English
Published 31/12/2007
First published in Aus Politik und Zeitgreschichte APuZ 1-2/2008
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