One of the main debates today about the Third Reich concerns the centrality of race. Did racial thinking, racial hierarchies, and associated “biology” fundamentally determine the decisions within the Nazi Empire? Or was it the case that, beyond a few fanatics, pure biological racism was rarely more than a political instrument to be used or discarded in any given context? Until now, and for obvious reasons, this debate as it concerns occupied Europe has been almost totally focused on the eastern front, where it is easiest to push the “race as fundamental” theme. The argument becomes messier for occupied France, where Germans were dealing with a “lesser” people whose language, art, food, and wine they nevertheless found to be worthy. But it is in the book under review, Steffen Werther's study of occupied Denmark, and his analysis of the German occupation of an arguably even “purer” stock, that Nazi thinking around race moves from horror to farce. Yet while Werther's obviously narrow focus tends strongly to support the argument that race, in the end, was not a trump card in Nazi thinking, when one pulls back from his study and places it in the emerging comparative “colonial” history of Nazi occupation across Europe, race again seems to assert a goodly amount of its hegemony.

With his thorough use of a variety of Danish and German language sources, Werther manages to walk us carefully through the post-1918 history of the German-Danish borderland, the 1920 plebiscite that created a substantial German minority in southern Denmark, völkisch politics throughout the 1920s, and the rise of National Socialism among both that German minority as well as among Danes. During the 1930s, Werther shows us, a fundamental split emerged between “race” thinkers and “Volk” (or we could say “imperial”) thinkers. Race thinkers in Berlin tended to believe that once all Aryans (here Scandinavians) were brought under the loving yoke of National Socialism, there would be a happy “melting” together of these similar races. At the same time, those with perhaps a more realist political point of view wanted to reassure budding Scandinavian Nazis that their national identity would be preserved in a Greater German Reich. These mixed signals coming out of 1930s Germany only served further to exacerbate the fundamental National Socialist problem in Denmark: German minority Nazis and Danish Nazis hated each other. At the heart of the disagreement was a fundamentally nonracial and completely “old school” ethnic-nationalist issue: the borderline. Danish Germans wanted the border “revised” so they could return to Germany, while their Aryan Danish nationalist brothers desired that the new and “correct” frontier of the Danish nation remain in place in perpetuity. Both sides heard what they wanted from Berlin and both believed that in the interests of empire the border would eventually be either moved or guaranteed.

As Werther explains, however, once the occupation began in 1940, old-fashioned ethnic, or Volk, thinking won the day. First and foremost, and to the utter astonishment of the patient Danish Germans, the border never budged. Although at the beginning of the occupation the radical racists spoke of searching for the “purest” Danes, and a failed attempt was made to entice racially fit Danes to join the German SS, the realists, those who recognized Volk over race, soon won the day by proposing an all-Danish SS troop formation, the Freikorps Danmark. The Danish nationalists were treated relatively well by the occupying Germans. Indeed, the Nazi Terror was so light on the ground that Danes managed first to protect the 6,000 to 7,000 Danish Jews, and then, when Hitler called for their deportation after the National Socialist party won only 2.1 percent of the vote in 1943, all save a few hundred were safely spirited away to Sweden.

Thus, Werther is able to make a strong case that the racism of Darré and “Rassengünther” was simply not the overriding concept in the Third Reich when one focuses on the occupation of Scandinavia. But then, when one widens the focus and compares the occupation of Denmark to the occupation of Poland, each population was treated the way it was because one was “Aryan” and the other “Slavic.” What the Danes “got away with” is simply astounding to one most familiar with the occupied east. I will end, though, with another explanation that Werther does hint at, and which again puts the question of the centrality of race in doubt. Simply put, since the 1866 confrontation Germans had never feared, nor really thought that much about, Danes. There was never a Danish Flood, never serious worry that northern Germany's emptying agrarian lands would be filled with cheap Danish field workers. Well, for more than a century Poles had not only been referred to as “uncivilized,” but they were also seen as an existential threat. The loss of German lands to the new Polish state in the wake of World War I made clear to many Germans the reality of Polish power. While race is, of course, central to the history of the Holocaust, Werther's excellent analysis of Nazi imperialism in Denmark, when set alongside other recent histories of the occupation of both western and eastern Europe, provides strong evidence that the Nazi Empire was much more fully grounded in the history of the previous century of colonialism and imperialism than is acknowledged by historians that place the biological turn of 1933 at the center of their analyses. Lastly, with regard to the audience for this book, it is almost solely for specialists. In the German tradition, it is a largely unrevised reprint of a dissertation, and thus narrowly focused and not an “easy” read.