Tarnished Gallantry

A NIGHT OF WATCHING by Elliot Arnold. 441 pages. Scribner. $5.95.

Not the least of Hitler's crimes is the literature he is responsible for--notably the never-ending novels that make pale fiction out of the Nazi madness.

In 1943, after 3 1/2 years of comparatively peaceful occupation of Denmark, Hitler suddenly decided to apply me final solution to the approximately 8,500 Danish Jews. To start the roundup, the Gestapo chose a date when most Jews would be at the synagogues--the Jewish New Year, or Rosh Hashana, which fell on Sept. 30. Early that evening, Dr. Werner Best, the ranking Nazi in Denmark, was so confident of the outcome that he happily wired Hitler, "Denmark is free of Jews."

Far from it. An official of the German consulate in Copenhagen had leaked news of the plan to the Danes, and working in part with other sympathetic Germans, the Danish underground boldly thwarted the Nazis. Within two weeks 8,007 Jews were smuggled into Sweden; the Nazis snared only 460--of whom 400 survived in the Theresienstadt concentration camp largely because of continuing Danish political pressures. Clearly, the rescue of the Danish Jews by their fellow countrymen stands among the few bright moments in the dark night that fell upon European Jews.

Redeeming Facts. Unfortunately, Elliot Arnold, a sometime screen writer (Flight from Ashiya, Broken Arrow), comes close to tarnishing a gallant tale by treating it with shabby slickness. He lays out staccato scenes in simplistic scenarist terms and somehow manages to include every cliche possible--plus a few that are highly improbable.

His hero is a pipe-smoking industrialist by day, the head of the Danish underground by night, and a skin-deep thinker on the side ("The whole world is a bloody sickness"). Bad Nazis perform the usual tortures, while protesting "We are a civilized people." Good Germans lament, "What a day we live in!" Arnold even has the chutzpah to have a Jewish housewife prescribe the hot-chicken-soup cure for an ailing dog. Worse, he blithely puts 1967 American words in 1943 Danish mouths: after deciding "that wasn't the name of the game," a member of the underground "made book with himself."

Occasionally, the cliches do part long enough to let through the eloquent facts that sustain the book. It is mainly those facts that account for its presence on the bestseller lists--and strongly suggest that Novelist Arnold might better have written straight nonfiction.

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