The Boys Who Challenged Hitler Read online

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  For young people everywhere who find the courage to make up their own minds

  The author (left) with Knud Pedersen outside the Art Library in Copenhagen, 2012

  INTRODUCTION

  In the summer of 2000 I took a bicycle tour of Denmark. On the final day I visited the Museum of Danish Resistance in Copenhagen, the nation’s capital. German forces had occupied Denmark between 1940 and 1945, and the Danes are known for having put up a staunch resistance to their occupiers. One of the most dramatic episodes in all of World War II was the famous Danish boatlift of most of the nation’s Jewish population to Sweden in late 1943, just before German forces could round them up and pack them by rail to death camps.

  But what isn’t so well-known is that resistance in Denmark took quite a while to get off the ground. Exhibits at the museum showed that for the first two years most Danes felt hopelessly overwhelmed by the German Goliaths. They kept hope alive by gathering in public spaces to sing patriotic Danish songs or by purchasing “King’s Badges,” pieces of jewelry that identified the wearer as a proud Dane.

  Then I came upon a special little exhibit entitled “The Churchill Club.” With photos, letters, cartoons, and weapons such as grenades and pistols, the exhibit told the story of a few Danish teens, schoolboys from a northern city, who got the resistance started. Mortified that Danish authorities had given up to the Germans without fighting back, these boys had waged a war of their own.

  Most were ninth-graders at a school in Aalborg, in the northern part of Denmark called Jutland. Between their first meeting in December 1941 and their arrest in May 1942, the Churchill Club struck more than two dozen times, racing through the streets on bicycles in well-coordinated hits. Acts of vandalism quickly escalated to arson and major destruction of German property. The boys stole and cached German rifles, grenades, pistols, and ammunition—even a machine gun. Using explosives stolen from the school chemistry lab, they scorched a German railroad car filled with airplane wings. They carried out most of their actions in broad daylight, as they all had family curfews.

  The Churchill Club’s sabotage spree awakened the complacent nation. One photo at the museum showed eight boys standing shoulder to shoulder in a jail yard, all but one holding up a number as a guard looked sternly on. Another snapshot captured the boys posing in front of an ancient monastery, identified as their headquarters. They looked cocky and innocent; one was smoking a pipe. A few were clearly some time away from their first shave. This group of students looked like the last people you’d expect to risk their lives in daring raids against Nazi masters. That charm was surely part of their power. You could imagine them running errands for freight-yard guards to soften them up.

  The museum curator said a few of the boys—now old men—were still alive. Knud Pedersen, he said, was the best-known and most knowledgeable of the survivors. He ran an art library downtown. The curator wrote Mr. Pedersen’s e-mail address on a business card, which I tucked into my coat.

  A week later, back in the United States, I fished out the card and wrote a message to Knud Pedersen. I wondered if the Churchill Club story had been written in English.

  Mr. Pedersen’s reply came within hours:

  Dear Phillip Hoose,

  Thank you for your interest in the story about the Churchill Club … but unfortunately a contract has been signed with another American writer … I am sorry that I’m not in a position to help you.

  So that was that. Someone had beaten me to the story; it wasn’t the first time. I printed out our e-mail correspondence, tucked it in a file, and forgot about it for more than a decade.

  * * *

  Fast-forward to September 2012. I was between books and looking for a new project. Rifling through old papers, I came upon a little manila folder labeled “Churchill Club.” Inside I found the long-ago exchange with Knud Pedersen—among the first e-mail messages I had ever written or received. I wondered if he was still alive and in good health. I also wondered if the other American writer’s book had ever been written. It seemed like something I would know about if it had. I jotted a reintroductory message to Knud Pedersen at the ancient address, pushed the Send button, and turned off the laptop for the day.

  The following morning a message from Knud Pedersen was waiting: the other writer had not come through, he said. Now he was free to work with me. Immediately. “When can you come to Copenhagen?” Knud wanted to know. I glanced at my calendar and typed, “Oct 7 to 14.” Seconds after I’d sent my e-mail, you could almost hear his reply rocketing across the Atlantic: “My wife, Bodil, and I will meet you at the airport. You will stay with us at our cottage.”

  I booked the flight.

  * * *

  Two weeks later my wife, Sandi, and I were met at the Copenhagen airport by a white-haired man, half a head taller than anyone else in baggage claim, and his wife. Knud dressed with the dash of an artist. Though we were jet-lagged, he drove us immediately to the Kunstbiblioteket (Art Library), which he had founded in 1957. The library is a below-street-level warren of rooms, some of which contain hundreds of paintings, kept off the ground in wooden racks. For a small lending fee, a patron can take out a painting for a period of weeks, just as one can take out a book at a library. If the borrower falls in love with the painting, he or she can buy it for a reasonable price—the artist has already agreed to sell it. The Art Library stems from Knud’s firm belief that art is like bread, an essential ingredient for nourishing the soul. Why should paintings only be available to the rich? And so he started this modest underground library. It was the first art library ever created, now beloved in Copenhagen and world-famous.

  While Bodil and Sandi went off to see some local sights, Knud wanted to get right to work. We pulled his office door closed and settled into chairs on opposite sides of a desk. I placed a recording device on the center of the desk and turned it on. We barely budged for the next week—I got very used to Knud Pedersen’s face, and he mine. In all we spoke for nearly twenty-five hours, pausing only for meals or to take a walk.

  Since I remembered just a few Danish words from my bicycle tour so long before, we had to rely on Knud’s English. Knud is a fluent speaker, but conducting a weeklong conversation in his second language clearly fatigued him. Still, he never complained.

  That week Knud told me the story of middle-school students who refused to surrender Denmark’s freedom no matter what the country’s adult leaders did or said. German warplanes buzzed Denmark on April 9, 1940, dropping leaflets informing Danes that their nation had just become a “protectorate” of Germany. The German occupation was presented to Danish authorities as a choice: Comply, give us your food and transport system, work for us, and we’ll leave your cities standing. You can continue to police and govern yourselves. We’ll even buy materials and goods from you. You’ll make money. You’ll learn to like us. And after the war you’ll share in a glorious
future with us. Or you can resist and be demolished. Denmark’s king and political leaders accepted.

  On the very same day, Germany invaded Norway. Unlike the Danish, the Norwegians fought back early on. When Hitler demanded that Norway surrender, the Norwegians officially replied, “We will not submit voluntarily: the struggle is already in progress.” Skirmishes erupted throughout the Norwegian countryside and at sea. Germany captured key Norwegian ports and cities, but the Norwegian army kept fighting, moving inland to take up positions in Norway’s rugged interior. Losses were heavy.

  As these events transpired, fourteen-year-old Knud Pedersen, a lanky schoolboy growing up in the industrial city of Odense, Denmark, experienced deep emotions, some for the first time. He was at once outraged by the German invasion, inspired by the Norwegians’ courage, and ashamed of the Danish adults who had taken Hitler’s deal.

  Knud and his brother Jens, a year older, gathered a group of boys around them and vowed to fight back—to achieve what they called “Norwegian conditions.” When the Pedersen family moved to a different city, Aalborg, Knud and Jens organized a new group of brave and like-minded classmates to perform acts of sabotage. While most students were oblivious, these few stormed the streets of Aalborg on their bicycles to try to even the score. They called themselves the Churchill Club, after Britain’s leader Winston Churchill, whose fighting spirit they admired. The German occupiers, first annoyed and then enraged, called for the speedy arrest and punishment of whoever was stealing their weaponry and destroying their assets. Move fast, they warned Danish authorities, or the Gestapo will take over police functions. The chase was on. The events, which became widely known, awakened and inspired Danes everywhere.

  German transport planes flying over Danish rooftops (above) and dropping propaganda on Copenhagen (below), April 9, 1940

  1

  OPROP!

  April 9, 1940. It was a breakfast like any other until the dishes started to rattle. Then an all-alert siren pierced the morning calm and the sky above Odense, Denmark, thundered with sound. The Pedersen family pushed back their chairs, raced outside, and looked up. Suspended above them in close formation was a squadron of dark airplanes. They were flying ominously low, no more than three hundred meters above the ground. The black marks on each wing tagged them as German warplanes. Scraps of green paper fluttered down.

  Knud Pedersen, fourteen, stepped over and plucked one from the lawn. “OPROP!” it began. Slightly misspelled, that meant something like “Attention!” in Danish. Though the leaflet, addressed to “Danish Soldiers and the Danish People,” was written in an error-filled garble of German, Danish, and Norwegian, the point was unmistakable. German military forces had invaded Denmark and were now occupying the country. The leaflet explained that they had arrived to “protect” the Danes from the sinister English and French, that Denmark had become a “protectorate” of Germany. So there was no need to worry: everyone was protected now. Danes should go on with their lives as usual.

  Propaganda leaflet dropped across Denmark by German planes, April 9, 1940

  Knud looked around at his neighbors. Some, still in their pajamas, appeared dazed. Others were furious. Across the street a father and his two sons stood at rigid attention on their apartment balcony, right arms thrust reverently upward toward the German planes. Mr. Anderson, the merchant who sold Tarzan comics from his kiosk on the corner, was shaking his fist at the sky. All four neighbors would be dead within three years.

  The following day Denmark’s prime minister, Thorvald Stauning, and the Danish king, Christian X, put their signatures to an agreement allowing Germany to occupy Denmark and take control of the government. A terse proclamation explained Denmark’s official position:

  The government has acted in the honest conviction that in so doing we have saved the country from an even worse fate. It will be our continued endeavor to protect our country and its people from the disasters of war, and we shall rely on the people’s cooperation.

  All day long German soldiers poured into Odense and other cities by boat, plane, tank, and transport wagon. Ordinary German foot soldiers of the German defense force—the Wehrmacht—wore brownish-green uniforms with black hobnail boots and rounded green helmets. Well prepared, they quickly took over the town, setting up barracks and command centers in hotels, factories, and schools. They pounded German-language directional signs into public squares and strung miles of telephone lines between headquarters, operations centers, and barracks. By the end of the day, there were sixteen thousand Germans on Danish soil and Germany was in total control.

  A German soldier in Copenhagen, April 9, 1940

  * * *

  Operation Weserübung

  Just after dawn on April 9, 1940, a merchant ship that normally carried coal sailed by Danish security forces and docked at Langelinie Pier, in Copenhagen. Like the Trojan horse of Greek mythology, it carried a secret: hatches opened and German soldiers poured from the hull, fanning out through the city, seizing control of key installations. At the same moment, German forces were invading other Danish cities, pouring in by air, sea, rail, and even (to secure a strategically important airport in the key city of Aalborg) paratrooper. This well-coordinated invasion, which also targeted Norway, had the German code name Operation Weserübung (after the Weser river in northern Germany). It was over by noon. Danish forces were stunned and overwhelmed.

  * * *

  When darkness fell, the Wehrmacht took to the streets of Denmark to explore their new home. In Odense, Denmark’s third-largest city, many Danish merchants were delighted to open taps of beer or sell pastries to German troops—in fact, the huge new market seemed a windfall. German soldiers pushed into Odense’s theaters, taverns, bakeries, and cafés.

  In the evenings, the Wehrmacht soldiers marched arm in arm through Odense’s streets, weapons strapped to their shoulders, bellowing folk songs in unison as onlooking Danes cocked their heads in curiosity. Knud Pedersen watched from the crowd: “The commander would shout ‘Three! Four!’ and they would all begin to sing. Some songs were romantic ballads, others military marches. Either way they looked ridiculous. They actually seemed to believe that we liked them. They behaved as if we wanted them there, as if we had been waiting for them, like we were grateful to them.”

  * * *

  A tall, slender teen, Knud Pedersen had known and cared little about war or politics until that Friday morning in April. He was a reasonably good student and handy with his fists, as you had to be at his all-boys school. But Knud’s real loves were drawing and painting. Each Saturday morning he met his favorite cousin, Hans Jøergen Andersen, at the Odense library. They went straight for the big volumes of art history, flipped to the breathtaking nudes of Rubens or to Greek sculptures of the female figure, and started drawing. To Knud and Hans Jøergen, the half-draped Venus de Milo was a hundred times more interesting than the fully clothed Mona Lisa.

  On Sundays, after Knud’s father, the Reverend Edvard Pedersen, completed his Protestant church service, the Pedersen family would convene in the church residency with aunts, uncles, and cousins from other branches, forming a great tribe. In the office, uncles drank and swore their way through a fast-moving, table-slamming card game called l’hombre. Knud’s mother, Margrethe, and his many aunts occupied the sitting room, knitting, sipping tea, and talking nonstop, getting up now and then to tend the slow-cooking chickens whose aroma grew stronger from the kitchen by the minute. Children, including Knud, his brother Jens (a year older), his sister, Gertrud (two years younger), and his much younger brothers, Jørgen and Holger, played on the second floor, creating and painting scenery for the evening performance of Robin Hood or Snow White or Robinson Crusoe. Each child got to invite a friend. By evening there were dozens of laughing, drinking, applauding friends and family, full and satisfied. It was like growing up in a cocoon.

  Hans Jøergen Andersen

  Children watching the invaders from a bus

  Knud had been only dimly aware that Germany had inva
ded Poland the year before, and he was oblivious to the special peril that Jews faced with Hitler in control. Before its planes arrived on April 9, Germany had seemed no more than the neighborhood bully, a bordering country with twenty times Denmark’s population and an undue influence on Danish history and culture. Even before the war, Danish students had to study German in school, learn German literature, and play German music.

  Adolf Hitler had not seemed a particular menace either. In 1937, the fourth year of Hitler’s Nazi regime, the Pedersen family had gone on a motor tour of Germany in the family’s big green Nash Rambler. As they rolled through neatly cropped pastures and well-managed towns, Knud’s parents expressed admiration for what Hitler had accomplished. There was a sense of order and industry in the small towns and cities. Germans were at work while many other nations were still mired in a worldwide economic depression. At the end of the trip their father had pinned a small flag with a swastika to the windshield of the car. When they reentered Denmark, Danes in the border villages, neighbors who knew the Nazis well, suggested they remove it at once.

  But now all this innocence was gone, a bubble popped. German forces had also stormed into Norway on April 9, but Norway had fought back, standing up to the mighty German war machine and paying with a heavy loss of life. In those early days after the German invasion, there were sickening news accounts of Norwegian soldiers slaughtered in defense of their nation. Many were boys in their late teens.

  * * *

  The Invasion of Norway

  The German attack on Norway on April, 9, 1940, brought war to Norway for the first time in 126 years. Nearly fifty thousand Norwegian troops were mobilized, but they were overmatched by German forces. Germans quickly seized control of coastal cities and then, deploying troops especially trained for mountain warfare, went after Norwegian soldiers in the country’s rugged interior. Norway held out for two months, hoping for support from Great Britain that turned out to be too little and too late.