Comment by verisimi
1 year ago
What an exciting story, but I doubt it has anything to do with history. It's chockablock full of narrative candy, eg:
> Bohr and his wife, Margarethe, left their home at the Carlsberg brewery estate within hours of the tip-off from Harald. As they slipped out of the back of their house a Nazi snatch squad was already on its way. When the couple later crawled on all-fours from a beach hut to a waiting boat, the most famous man in Denmark had with him a single bag, a beer bottle full of heavy water retrieved from the lab, and a sketch purporting to be of the Nazi’s reactor design.
How could we possibly know the such things as 'Nazi snatch squads' even existed, nevermind that such a thing was on its way just as he decided to leave.. It's all very Biggles. These read to me like narrative plot twists to hold the reader's attention, rather than anything relating to what actually occurred.
Basically every paragraph is like this.
Still, it adds to the drama, brings story narratives vividly to life in the imagination.
The question for me, it's why is the history we are presented turned into these types of evidence-free stories? It's almost like its purpose is to propagandise the population into believing fantasies.
While the article did use very dramatic language, that the Nazi snatch squads in Denmark existed, were about to strike, and indeed did end up arresting many Danish Jews just a few days later over the Jewish New Year is very well documented history.
I find it surprising that you decided to write a skeptical comment here rather than just Googling it, as sources are plentiful. What are those 'fantasies' that you believe people are being made to believe?
For instance:
https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/rescue-of-the-danish-jews
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-24427637
https://www.yadvashem.org/articles/academic/denmark-and-the-...
https://echoesandreflections.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/...
https://natmus.dk/fileadmin/user_upload/Editor/natmus/frihed...
https://sprawiedliwi.org.pl/en/node/17135
Let's accept your defence of the article:
> While the article did use very dramatic language, that the Nazi snatch squads in Denmark existed, were about to strike, and indeed did end up arresting many Danish Jews just a few days later over the Jewish New Year is very well documented history.
But contrast this with the article author says:
> As they slipped out of the back of their house a Nazi snatch squad was already on its way.
It's not the same thing.
What you said was:
> How could we possibly know the such things as 'Nazi snatch squads' even existed
Now you’re pretending you were only questioning the imminence of the arrest as described in the article, rather than the existence of the Nazi snatch squads themselves. That’s dishonest.
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> How could we possibly know the such things as 'Nazi snatch squads' even existed
Even setting aside the description "Danish woman working for the Gestapo saw an order for Bohr’s arrest and tipped off Bohr’s brother" from this account, we can look at other accounts, like the chapter "Escape" from his biography at https://archive.org/details/nielsbohrmanhis00moor/page/300/m...
"Many years later at the Nuremberg trials it was revealed that the Nazis had intended to arrest Bohr on the day martial law was declared. There was, however, a dispute about it, and the decision was made to put off his arrest and deportation to Germany until the Nazis began their roundup of the Jews. In the general excitement, they thought the arrest of Bohr would attract less attention and the furor would be less."
The contents of the chapter are mostly aligned with the linked-to account, though the chapter says the beer bottle of heavy water was not true:
"The prosaic truth was quite different. Heavy water was used in the institute's accelerator. When the supply had to be replenished, someone remembered that Bohr had once had a bottle the Norwegian manufacturer had presented to him. The institute men were unable to find it and sent an underground query to Rozental in Stockholm. Rozental sent back full instructions about where to find it and pointed out that the bottle was unlabeled." - https://archive.org/details/nielsbohrmanhis00moor/page/308/m...
> Basically every paragraph is like this.
That is not lost on anyone. From the second page of the book chapter I linked to, "Bohr and Margrethe, feeling like the principals in a spy melodrama, as indeed they were".
People have eyes. People see Nazi snatch squads. People write it down in their journal. People write news articles.
You seem to have zero clue about what happens in a society in wartime. This is how people sleepwalk into facism.
_Extreme_ bit of HN’s signature “nothing ever happens” tendency there.
>How could we possibly know the such things as 'Nazi snatch squads' even existed
Germans keep good records, and after the war all the archives were captured and read through and cross indexed. Every incident in Allied logs was compared with German logs to see what matched.
And are you prepared to state that you've verified this? Or is this something you imagine?
So, how have you verified that your statement about this being made up by the author is correct? Or is it something you imagine?
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have you verified that the country of belgium exists? have you ever been there?
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If GP said they did, would you be prepared to accept that verification?
My intuition is that you wouldn’t.