^^Yes. The difference was strong, bold leadership. Immediately after the occupation of Denmark, the Gestapo representative and his troops showed up at Amalienborg Palace, the royal family residence in Copenhagen. They were there to lower the Danish flag and raise the Swastika. When King Christian X of Denmark saw what they were doing, he alone walked right out the front door of his palace, stood in front of the flagpole and declared that they would have to shoot him first. “Not here,” he said. And they blinked.
Every morning for the length of his reign, the king would ride horseback without guards through Old Town, Copenhagen. Before the war it was a tourist attraction and he would sometimes answer his citizen’s questions from horseback.
When the expected order for the citizenry to surrender all Danish Jews and for every Jew to wear a yellow Star of David prominantly on their chests for identification purposes came from Gestapo HQ on Hans Christian Andersen Boulevard, the king himself donned the five-pointed star to show solidarity with them and as a signal to his people not to obey the order. Nearly every Dane was soon wearing the Star of David. Many were arrested. But throughout the war, Danish citizens, and their King, continued to wear it. They couldn’t arrest them all.
Throughout the occupation, the smuggling of Jews across the Oresund Strait in small Danish fishing vessels to neutral Sweden was relentless and at great cost of some of these fishermen. One, two, four at a time. By war’s end, the tally was over 40,000 by Swedish government estimations.
In France, the top government officials including Vichy government leader, Marshall Petain, were threatened with summary imprisonment if they did not hand over their Jews. The next day, the Paris Police marched twenty thousand Jews to the Metro railroad stations of Paris for exportation to the extermination camps.
Big, Big difference in leadership, commitment to humanity, justice, determination and resilience.
And a huge lesson to all of us, especially now.