One Country Saved Its Jews. Were They Just Better People? Denmark in the Holocaust

You didn't read the article.

You say "it is quite offensive to single out the Danes as specifically good people and in the process belittling the sacrifice of so many others during the war." So let me quote a couple paragraphs where the author writes that what happened in Denmark was not because they were better people:

the German occupation’s presence in Denmark was lighter than in either France or Holland. The Danes, like the Bulgarians, kept their king and maintained their own government throughout the occupation. Self-government gave them a capacity to defend Jews that was never possible in the occupied zones of France or Holland.

Why did the Danes behave so differently from most other societies and populations in occupied Europe? For a start, they were the only nation where escape to a safe neutral country lay across a narrow strait of water. Moreover, they were not subject to exterminatory pressure themselves. They were not directly occupied, and their leadership structures from the monarch down to the local mayors were not ripped apart.

Denmark offers some confirmation of Rousseau’s observation that virtue is most easily fostered in small republics.

And here the author disagrees with Lidegaard:

Lidegaard is an excellent guide to this story when he sticks close to Danish realities. When he ventures further and asks bigger questions, he goes astray. At the end of his book he asks: “Are human beings fundamentally good but weak? Or are we brutal by nature, checked and controlled only by civilization?” He wants the Danish story to answer such questions, but it cannot bear such weight. There simply are no general answers to the question of why humans behave as they do in times of extremity. What Lidegaard’s story really demonstrates is that history and context are all. Denmark was Denmark: that is all one can truthfully say.

Lidegaard makes the argument, in his conclusion, that had resistance been as strong elsewhere in Europe as it was in Denmark, the Nazis might never have been able to drive the Final Solution to its conclusion... This strikes me as only half-right. Anti-Semitism was indeed not “a primordial force” that the Nazis simply tapped into wherever they conquered. Jews met different fates in each country the Nazis occupied—or at least the rates of destruction and escape varied. But it does not follow that what the Danes did other peoples could have also done.

Countrymen is a story about a little country that did the right thing for complicated reasons, and got away with it for equally complicated reasons.

This is mentioned in the article:

The Danish response to the Nazis illuminates a crucial fact about the Holocaust: the Germans did not always force the issue of extermination where they faced determined resistance from occupied populations. In Bulgaria, as Tzvetan Todorov has shown in his aptly titled book The Fragility of Goodness, the Jews were saved because the king of Bulgaria, the Orthodox Church, and a few key Bulgarian politicians refused to assist the German occupiers. Why did a similar civic sense of solidarity not take root in other countries? In Holland, why did 80 percent of Dutch Jews perish? And what about France: why did liberty, equality, and fraternity not apply to the citizens driven from their homes by French police and sent to deportation and death? These questions become harder to answer in the light of the Danish and Bulgarian counterexamples. One possible explanation is that the German occupation’s presence in Denmark was lighter than in either France or Holland. The Danes, like the Bulgarians, kept their king and maintained their own government throughout the occupation. Self-government gave them a capacity to defend Jews that was never possible in the occupied zones of France or Holland.

Not sure what's going on with the title.

More whitewashing of the Dutch record. They had the highest ratio of Jews killed in World War Two of any European country and have sold the world the idea that they fought a brave resistance

http://www.jcpa.org/jl/vp412.htm

Simon Kuper covers this in some detail in his excellent book, ajax, the Dutch, the war.

I too think the subject is interesting, but I also think the title could be seem as offensive to other countries of Europe who also didn't massacre their Jewish population, like the Swedish, the Fascist from both Italy and Spain, the Swiss, or your own country.

Well, the topic has "one country only" in the title when there were several European countries that saved their Jews from holocaust one way or another. After false claim like that you don't really expect people to read the article?