In spite of this fiction, the Germans did commit in this country which they pretended they were not occupying, usurpations of sovereignty. These usurpations were all the more blatant, inasmuch as they had no juridical justification whatsoever, even from the Nazi point of view.
During the first period, which extended to the middle of 1943, German usurpations were discreet and camouflaged. There were two reasons for this. The first was that one had to take into account international public opinion, inasmuch as Denmark was not officially occupied. The second reason was that the Germans had conceived the plan to germanize the country from within by developing National Socialist political propaganda there.
I think it should be noted, very briefly, that this Germanization from within had already begun before the war. It is set forth in detail and in a most interesting manner in a part of the official report of the Danish Government, which I place before the Tribunal as Document Number RF-901.
This Document Number RF-901 comprises the whole of the green dossier which the Tribunal has before it. There are several sections. The subject of which I am now speaking is to be found in the first document of this bundle. This first document starts with the heading “Memorandum.”
This document shows that even before the war the Germans had organized an information service which was supplemented by a clever espionage service. In particular they had established a branch of the National Socialist Party, into which Germans living in Denmark were recruited. The idea was first of all to form a party made up of Germans and we shall shortly see how this National Socialist Party was afterwards called the Danish Party.
This branch of the German Party was called NSDAP, Ausland-Organisation, Landeskreis Danemark (Foreign Section, Regional District Denmark). It acted in co-ordination with other institutions; particularly, the Deutsche Akademie, the Danish-German Chamber of Commerce, and the Nordische Gesellschaft (Nordic Association).
A German organization in Hamburg called the Deutsche Fichtebund, which was directly under the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, undertook a systematic propaganda campaign in order to gain favorable Danish public opinion.
In this connection I should like to quote a passage of the document which is worthy of note from the point of view of German premeditation and of the methods employed. This passage is in the first document which I have just mentioned and which is called “Memorandum”—on Page 6 of this first document. I shall skip the first sentence of this paragraph.
I would point out to the Tribunal, in case it should be more convenient for them because of the length of the document, that these quotations are to be found in the exposé:
“This information agency, which functioned in Hamburg with no less than eight different addresses, gave in one of its publications the following details about itself. It was established in January 1914 in memory of the German philosopher, Fichte, and was to be looked upon as a ‘union for world truth.’ The objects were: (1) The promotion of mutual understanding by the free publication of information on the new Germany. (2) The protection of culture and civilization by the propagation of truth concerning the destructive forces in the world.”