Poul Nyrup Rasmussen

December 3, 1999
Web posted at: 12:57 p.m. EST (1757 GMT)

From staff and wire reports

COPENHAGEN, Denmark (CNN) -- The prime minister of Denmark, Poul Nyrup Rasmussen, said Friday on national television that he's made a surprising discovery -- his father was a member of Denmark's Nazi party during World War II.

"I knew that my father had been pressured into working in Germany during the war," the prime minister said in an interview on a morning television show. "But it was shocking to hear that he had joined the Nazi party."

Nyrup Rasmussen, a Social Democrat who took power in 1993, said he didn't know anything about his father's membership until three weeks ago when a friend, parliamentarian Frank Aaen, told him that his father had joined the Danish Nazi party in 1941.

The prime minister, who was born in 1943, confirmed the information with official archives.

Nyrup Rasmussen decided to tell the public himself.

"I felt that this was a secret I just couldn't keep for myself," he said. "I could perhaps as an individual. But not as a prime minister."

The prime minister said his father, Oluf Nyrup Rasmussen, probably joined the Nazis because of the family's poor financial situation. Oluf Nyrup Rasmussen, who died in 1993 at the age of 83, was a workman in the port city of Esbjerg, about 200 miles west of Copenhagen.

The prime minister said the revelation had not changed his opinion of his father, who he "loves and respects very much."

Bo Mikael of CNN Danmark and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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