Nazi sympathisers try to rewrite history, by stealing it
Two men are being questioned in connection with the theft of valuable documents about Danes who fought for Nazis
A big chunk of Danish history has literally been rediscovered, after police recovered several boxes of Second World War documents during a sweep of Copenhagen flats yesterday.
Rigsarkivet, the state archives, had reported the documents missing earlier this year after officials there realised they had been robbed a number of times over the span of a decade.
The documents, including police reports, personal accounts and court papers, were reportedly taken from the archive in a systematic operation by two men, who are now in custody.
“These are no ordinary documents,” national archivist Asbjørn Hellum told Berlingske. “We’re talking about invaluable and irreplaceable cultural blueprints of Denmark’s past that were taken.”
The two suspects are known Nazi-sympathisers and have been strongly linked to criminal rings in the past.
The records in question refer to a Danish soldier named Kaj Buchardt, who enlisted and fought for the Third Reich’s Wehrmacht during the 1940s.
Although Buchardt is not a widely recognised by most Danes, his personal story is one that has sparked plenty of debate in the past, as an example of Nazi sympathisers who served under the German banner during the war.
The debate was recently reignited on a closed internet forum called ‘slettet-af-rullen.dk’, which focuses on Danes who volunteered for the German division ‘Nordland’ and fought on the Eastern Front against Russia.
Both men are understood to have known Buchardt personally, and were trying to cover up the fact that he had deserted the army, only to join up again in the final stages of the war. It has also been revealed that the two men were planning to sell the stolen documents to a single person, giving rise to suggestion that the suspects had were stealing the documents on someone else's behalf.
