Twig on Nostr: Ft. @professorTom President-elect Trump wants the United States to buy Greenland. In ...

Ft. @professorTom

President-elect Trump wants the United States to buy Greenland. In fact, Trump wanted the United States to buy Greenland during his first term as President of the United States. Trump still wants to buy Greenland.

There has been much speculation on why Trump wants Greenland. Some think it’s about minerals. Attorney Robert Barnes speculated that Trump wants to protect US Shipping lanes; ergo, wanting the United States to purchase Greenland, taking control of the Panama Canal and remarks about making Canada the 51st State.

Trump is not the first to see Greenland’s value. Eighty years ago, a Danish diplomat made a move that changed its fate.

The film The Good Traitor tells the story of the Danish ambassador to America, Henrik Kauffmann, and his actions when the Nazis invaded his country.

The Good Traitor was my introduction to Kauffmann; there are scant English-language resources available on Kauffmann, namely, Defiant Diplomacy: Henrik Kauffmann, Denmark, and the United States in World War II and the Cold War, 1939-1958.

When the Nazis invaded Denmark on April 9th, 1940, Kauffmann had a problem: the Danish government had cooperated with the Nazis; therefore, any instructions Copenhagen gave Kauffmann were really instructions coming from the Nazis. If Kauffmann didn’t obey the puppet government, he would be guilty of treason because a government cooperating with the Nazis was, in political reality, still a functioning, geopolitical government.

Kauffmann needed another option.

Denmark Cooperates, Not Capitulates

So on April 10th, 1940–the day after the Nazis invaded Denmark–Kauffmann “declare[d] that we couldn’t receive and act on orders from an occupied Danish government¹”. Ever the diplomat, Kauffmann concocted a middle ground out of thin air: Kauffmann proclaimed himself as acting in the name of the Danish King, Christian X representing a free and independent Denmark.

To understand the significance of this proclamation, we have to understand both the position Kauffmann was in post Nazi invasion of Denmark and how Denmark conducted itself during the Second World War.

Denmark did not capitulate to the Nazis. Nor did they collaborate. Instead, Denmark cooperated under protest. In other words, Denmark did not resist the Nazis, but neither did they aid the Nazis. This is in contrast to Norway which fiercely fought the Nazis for two months only to be heavily oppressed and subdued by the Nazis when they could no longer resist.

In exchange for not actively resisting the Nazis, the Danish government was allowed to remain intact and run its affairs with Nazi oversight vs becoming a total puppet state. There was enough autonomy and agency given to the Danish government that later in the War, Denmark would refuse to execute ethnic cleansing orders without major repercussions.

Ambassador of a Free and Independent Denmark

After Denmark agreed to cooperate with the Nazis, Kauffmann was recalled to Denmark because he no longer represented what then existed of the Danish government. Kauffmann didn’t want to go back to Denmark: he wanted to stay in the United States, resist the Nazis and serve the ideological Denmark he was de facto representing prior to the Nazi invasion of his homeland.

“free and independent Denmark” was not a real country: it was a political fiction. But it was a useful fiction because in April of 1940, the United States was still officially a neutral country–the keyword being “officially”.

The attitude of Americans was slowly shifting in favor of war, though nonintervention was still the dominant public opinion; Lend-Lease, one of the first acts of American intervention in the growing European conflict, was one day shy of being a month old when Kauffmann made his proclamation.

Kauffmann desperately needed the United States to officially recognize him as the ambassador of a free and independent Denmark so he would have diplomatic cover.

The good news for Kauffmann was that the Americans saw no reason to expel Kauffmann from the United States, so he was in no immediate danger of being sent to occupied Denmark. The bad news was that the United States couldn’t officially recognize Kauffmann as ambassador of the free and independent Denmark because doing so risked the wrath of the Germans, wrath that would pull the United States into a war in which it did not wish to become a belligerent.