The Boys Who Challenged Hitler Page 14

  Harald Holm joined the British Army after the war and was stationed in West Germany. His behavior became erratic. To ensure that peace would be permanent, he began to destroy stockpiles of British ammunition. The behavior earned him a bed in a mental hospital, and he was sharing a room with a Nazi collaborator when Knud Pedersen found out and got them separated.

  Hans Jøergen Andersen died in his German prison cell. He was confined in an overcrowded, disease-ridden camp where prisoners were simply worked to death. Hans Jøergen’s death certificate identified him as an artist and said he died of tuberculosis.

  Orla Mortensen likewise died a German prisoner. Little is known about his exact cause of death. It occurred while he and other prisoners were cleaning up at a railway plant in a small German city after an Allied bomb attack.

  Once captured, most other RAF Club members were sent by the authorities to Western Prison in Copenhagen and placed in a special section reserved for political prisoners and resistance fighters. Probably they were deported to Frøslev, a camp near the German-Danish border, a stop to final transport to Germany.

  PEDERSEN FAMILY AND FRIENDS

  Edvard and Margrethe Pedersen, Knud and Jens’s parents, moved from Aalborg to Copenhagen when the Reverend Pedersen retired from the ministry. He died at age seventy-four. Margrethe lived to age ninety-four.

  Gertrud Pedersen, Knud and Jens’s sister, moved to South Africa, where she worked at the Danish consulate. After her husband died she moved to Bath, England, to be close to her friend Patricia Bibby. Gertrud died at seventy.

  Photo of the Pedersen family in 1950, taken in the monastery’s garden. Standing, from left: Jens, Knud, Gertrud, Jørgen. Front row from left: Their youngest brother, Holger, beside their mother and father

  Patricia Bibby remains to this day a friend to the Pedersens and later married John Moore Heath, an Englishman who became British ambassador to Chile. She lives in England and Mexico with her children. “Pat and I are still lifelong friends,” said Knud shortly before his death.

  Grethe Rørbæk, Knud’s prison fantasy love, went to college and received an education as a technical designer.

  Aalborg Cathedral School (Danish: Aalborg Katedralskole) is still educating students. It is the oldest college prep school in North Jutland. Historical documents date its founding as far back as 1540. In those days, the school was housed in the wing of the monastery that became the headquarters of the Churchill Club. Aalborg Cathedral School has been rebuilt and expanded several times, most notably when it first admitted girls in 1903. There are about eighty teachers and seven hundred students at the school today.

  SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

  I consulted many Web sites, articles, and books in writing this book. Some material was in Danish, which I translated through software applications and with the assistance of professional translators. These resources were among the most helpful.

  BOOKS

  Ackerman, Peter, and Jack Duvall. A Force More Powerful: A Century of Non-Violent Conflict (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000). Shows how popular movements used nonviolent action to overthrow dictators, obstruct military invaders, and secure human rights in country after country, over the past century.

  Bartoletti, Susan Campbell. Hitler Youth: Growing Up in Hitler’s Shadow (New York: Scholastic, 2005). Explains the roles that millions of boys and girls unwittingly played in the horrors of Nazi Germany.

  Lampe, David. Hitler’s Savage Canary: A History of the Danish Resistance in World War II (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2011). A detailed story of the Danish resistance movement.

  Laursen, Peter. Churchill-Klubben som Eigil Foxberg oplevede den (The Churchill Club as Eigil Foxberg Experienced It) (self-published, 1987). Eigil’s memoir of the Churchill Club.

  Levine, Ellen. Darkness Over Denmark: The Danish Resistance and the Rescue of the Jews (New York: Holiday House, 1986). A detailed account, structured around heroic characters, of Danish resistance to German occupation, and of the dramatic, just-in-time rescue of thousands of Danish Jews.

  Lowry, Lois. Number the Stars (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989). Classic work of fiction in which a ten-year-old Danish girl shelters her Jewish friend from the Nazis.

  Pedersen, Knud. Bogen om Churchill-klubben: Danmarks Første Modstandsgruppe (The Book of the Churchill Club: Denmark’s First Resistance Group) (Copenhagen, Denmark: Lindhardt og Ringhof, 2013). Knud Pedersen’s account was first published in 1945 by Poul Branner and is now available in this revised and updated edition.

  Tveskov, Peter H. Conquered, Not Defeated: Growing Up in Denmark During the German Occupation of World War II (Central Point, Oregon: Hellgate Press, 2003). Peter Tveskov was five years old when Germany invaded Denmark in April 1940. He blends vivid childhood memories with historical fact to tell the story of Danish resistance.

  Werner, Emmy. A Conspiracy of Decency: The Rescue of the Danish Jews During World War II (New York: Basic Books, 2009). Living eyewitnesses detail acts of goodwill by people of several nationalities, including German Georg F. Duckwitz, who warned the Jews of their impending deportation, and the Danes who hid them and ferried them to Sweden.

  ARTICLES

  Jacobsen, Eigil Thune. “Who-What-When 1942?” (Copenhagen, Denmark: Politken Publishers, 1941).

  Palmstrom, Finn, and Rolf Torgersen. “Preliminary Report on Germany’s Crimes Against Norway,” prepared by the Royal Norwegian Government for use at the International Military Tribunal, Oslo 1945. Available with a search on “Crimes against Norway” at Cornell University Law Library’s Donovan Nuremberg Trials Collection, ebooks.library.cornell.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?page=simple;c=nur.

  WEB SITES

  www.aalkat-gym.dk is the link to Aalborg Cathedral School’s Web site. The site can be translated to English, and includes source materials on the Churchill Club. See especially section 9, www.aalkat-gym.dk/om-skolen/skolens-historie/churchill-klubben-og-besaettelsen/churchill-9/.

  www.kilroywashere.org/009-Pages/Eric/Eric.html will take readers to “A few personal notes on the life in Occupied Denmark 1940–45” by journalist Erik Day Poulsen. Poulsen grew up in Aalborg and went to Cathedral School a generation after the War. He has written a fine personal history, with a tribute to the Churchill Club.

  natmus.dk/en/the-museum-of-danish-resistance is the link to the Museum of Danish Resistance 1940–1945, located in Copenhagen. The museum building was demolished following a fire in 2013, but its archives were saved and are still open at a new location. The museum is scheduled to be reopened in 2018.

  TELEVISION PRODUCTION

  Matador is a 24-part Danish TV series directed by Erik Balling, originally produced and broadcast between 1978 and 1982. It is set in the fictional Danish town of Korsbæk between 1929 and 1947, focusing on rival families. This television series so completely hooked Danish viewers that the entire series has been re-released a half-dozen times since it was first aired. It offers a fine way to understand turbulent Denmark from around the start of the Great Depression and through Nazi Germany’s occupation of Denmark in World War II. Caution: The series can be ordered online with English subtitles, but as of this writing it will not play on a standard North American DVD player. You need a multiregion PAL/NTSC DVD player to view it.

  RECORDINGS

  The BBC broadcast of Danish liberation can be heard on YouTube at www.youtube.com/watch?v=78pDhZb8hZo.

  www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKSj_zOfOw8 provides over an hour of German marching songs such as those Knud Pedersen heard in the streets of Odense and Aalborg.

  The opening page of the Churchill Club’s story in the September 1943 issue of True Comics (see here)

  NOTES

  The first-person accounts in Knud Pedersen’s voice derive from personal interviews and e-mail messages. Knud and I recorded interviews in Knud’s office in the Copenhagen Art Library each day between October 7 and 14, 2012. We spoke for nearly twenty-five hours in all, generating hundreds of pages of typed transcript.

  When I returned
home to the United States, we communicated by e-mail. Though Knud and I lived nearly four thousand miles apart, if I sent a question to him in the midafternoon Eastern Daylight Time—9:00 p.m. in Copenhagen—he would usually have a reply waiting for me when I arrived at my laptop the next morning. The deeper into the book I got, the more precise my questions became, and the more revealing Knud’s answers. When something didn’t make sense to me, I enjoyed the luxury of simply being able to ask a living protagonist to clarify seventy-year-old events. For example:

  Phil: When you torched the wagon full of airplane parts, you say you used a magnesium “plate.” I don’t understand what this “plate” is or how it works. Can you help me clarify this?

  Knud: The disc itself was made of magnesium. It was flammable by the use of a match. It did not explode. It burned but with an extremely clear flame.

  During the course of two years, we exchanged nearly one thousand e-mail messages.

  A third source of information is Knud’s published writing. Before his death, Knud was one of only two surviving Churchill Club members—the other being his Cathedral School classmate Helge Milo. Knud was the Churchill Club’s principal spokesperson from the very beginning. In May 1945, just after Denmark’s liberation from the German occupation, a publisher contacted Knud’s father seeking the opportunity to publish a book detailing the true story of the renowned Churchill Club.

  Edvard Pedersen relayed the offer to Knud, who put it before the other club members (except for his brother Jens, who was away at university). He asked, “Is this something we want to do? If so, how shall we go about it?” There was general agreement that it was worth doing. Each Clubber solemnly agreed to write a chapter and read it aloud to the group when they met again in two weeks. But when they reconvened, only Knud had written anything. Knud read his piece aloud, to applause. “Why don’t you just keep going?” said his mates, and so he did.

  Edvard Pedersen arranged to have a secretary type the finished manuscript, but—unbeknownst to Knud and his club mates—he had the typist cross out all the curse words just before publication. This angered the group when they finally saw the book, published in Danish in 1945 with the title Bogen om Churchill-klubben (The Book of the Churchill Club). It was revised by Knud and reissued by several different publishers over the years.

  Knud supported his narrative by publishing police records and military documents. He became a dogged and creative researcher. He found photos and newspaper accounts, digging up an incontrovertible record of the group’s pioneering impact. He unearthed ministerial letters, correspondence between German and Danish authorities, prison documents, and newspaper accounts. He amassed an unusually rich trove of images—cartoons, photos, headlines. He made this material freely available to me and helped me sift through it since the treasure is entirely in Danish.

  All this is to say that by far the richest source for this book was Knud Pedersen himself. A week of interviewing in Copenhagen, the hundreds of e-mail messages we exchanged, and translations of the books he wrote in Danish so long ago—these were the prime sources that this very lucky writer had to draw from.

  In addition, Clubber Eigil Astrup-Frederiksen (who later changed his name to Foxberg) wrote his own account of his Churchill Club experience in a 1987 book in Danish, whose title translates to The Churchill Club as Eigil Foxberg Experienced It. It is especially helpful in describing the boys’ incarceration at Nyborg State Prison. Churchill Clubbers Helge Milo and Mogens Fjellerup have also been briefly quoted in published sources.

  Patricia Bibby Heath, who developed a special friendship with Knud after his release from prison, granted me a telephone interview of a little more than an hour on April 26, 2014.

  The notes here present sources of information used to supplement the material derived from Knud Pedersen. Abbreviated source references refer to works cited in the Selected Bibliography.

  1 OPROP!

  Operation Weserübung: For insight into the German invasion of Denmark and Norway on April 9, 1940, see www.nuav.net/weserubung2.html. Also see C. Peter Chen, “Invasion of Denmark and Norway, 9 Apr 1940–10 June 1940,” ww2db.com/battle_spec.php?battle_id=93. Chen’s article includes an extensive timeline of Operation Weserübung and a collection of over fifty photographs.

  The Invasion of Norway: An extensive description of Germany’s invasion of Norway and Norway’s response can be found at Wikipedia’s page “Norwegian Campaign,” en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_Campaign.

  2 THE RAF CLUB

  stories of Norwegian civilians being murdered by German troops: See Palmstrom and Torgersen, “Preliminary Report of Germany’s Crimes Against Norway.”

  Hitler Youth: See Bartoletti, Hitler Youth, for an excellent treatment of the Hitler Youth movement.

  RAF: See the documentary film “The Battle of Britain,” narrated by Ewan and Colin McGregor (Toronto: BFS Entertainment, 2011), available on DVD.

  Hitler and Bicycles: Niels-Birger Danielsen. Werner Best (Copenhagen: Politikens Forlag, 2013), pp. 274–75.

  3 THE CHURCHILL CLUB

  Why the Aalborg Airport Was So Important: During the course of the war the airport was expanded enormously. More than two hundred farmers were relocated, and the farms adjoining the airport were taken over by the Germans. Hangars, repair depots, and command posts were erected in haste and camouflaged to look like barns and farm buildings. At the peak of Germany’s Norwegian campaign, 150 planes of several types, the majority being Stuka dive bombers, attacked locations in Norway from the Aalborg airport. They also served to protect submarines stationed along the piers in Aalborg and German ships traveling between Norway and northern Germany. For more about the airport and the sabotage efforts of another young resistance fighter in Aalborg named Frode Suhr, see Lyle E. Davis, “The Making of a Spy,” The Paper, December 17, 2009, www.thecommunitypaper.com/archive/2009/12_17/index.php.

  Holy Ghost Monastery: See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hospital_of_the_Holy_Ghost,_Aalborg.

  Cathedral School: The school where six of the Churchill Club members studied has a fine Web site that includes material on the Churchill Club, www.aalkat-gym.dk.

  4 LEARNING TO BREATHE

  Danish folk songs … “King’s Badges”: See Ackerman and Duvall, A Force More Powerful.

  The Limfjorden Bridge: Aalborg and the neighboring town of Noerresundby are separated by a fjord—a long, narrow, water-filled inlet with steep sides or cliffs, created by glacial erosion—known as Limfjorden. During the war, the two towns were connected by a road bridge and an iron railway bridge. Because the strategically important Aalborg airport is on the Noerresundby side, armed German soldiers guarded access carefully with checkpoints on both ends of the bridges. Visit the Limfjord Museum’s Web site for more information about the waterway: www.limfjordsmuseet.dk.

  5 FLAMES OF RESISTANCE

  Marie Antoinette had used the same code pattern: Hans Jøergen Andersen and Jens Pedersen developed a code for sending sensitive messages between the Churchill Club in Aalborg and the RAF Club in Odense. It was based on a famous code used by Marie Antoinette and her friend Count Axel von Fersen of Sweden in their secret correspondence during the French Revolution. For more, and an example of how the code actually worked, see www.h4.dion.ne.jp/~room4me/america/code/fersen.htm. For background about Count von Fersen and Marie Antoinette, see en.chateauversailles.fr/history/court-people/louis-xvi-time.

  7 WHIPPED CREAM AND STEEL

  eastern front: In August 1942, Hitler’s huge Sixth Army fought Russian troops at the Russian city of Stalingrad. That was the key battle of the eastern front and a turning point of World War II. Over five months of brutal fighting, Russian forces held on to Stalingrad and then turned the tables on their Nazi enemy. There are many Web sites about this brutal battle. A fine book is Antony Beevor, Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege, 1942–1943 (New York: Viking, 1998).

  Kristine: Lovely photos and lush remembrances of this, the classiest bakery in Aalborg and the favorite of sweet-toothed Nazi of
ficers, to be found at www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.205034729522481.61915.203935242965763&type=1.

  12 KING HANS GADES JAIL

  Rector Kjeld Galster: Kjeld Galster, Aalborg Cathedral School During the Occupation (Aalborg, Denmark: 1945).

  Some students rose from their seats: See the source materials on the Churchill Club at the Cathedral School Web site, especially section 9 (www.aalkat-gym.dk/om-skolen/skolens-historie/churchill-klubben-og-besaettelsen/churchill-9/).

  Kaj Munk: For more information about the life and activities of Denmark’s best-known playwright and most famous supporter of the Churchill Club, see www.kirjasto.sci.fi/kajmunk.htm.

  13 WALLS AND WINDOWS

  The Nazis had … allowed Sweden to be officially neutral: Here is a link to a good discussion regarding why Germany did not invade Sweden and instead allowed the nation to be officially neutral: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweden_during_World_War_II.

  songs about Hitler: There were hundreds of anti-Nazi songs during World War II, many obscene. Some derided the “big four” Nazi leaders—Hitler, Goebbels, Himmler, and Göring. For a broader treatment of the songs of World War II, see www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/ww2-music-uk.asp.

  15 NYBORG STATE PRISON

  “I missed my mates”: See Laursen, Churchill-Klubben som Eigil Foxberg oplevede den, p. 46.

  “His tone was apologetic”: Ibid., pp. 56–57.

  The Telegram Crisis: See Ackerman and Duvall, A Force More Powerful, p. 218.

  August 29, 1943: Ibid., p. 221.

  The turning point for Denmark: See Ackerman and Duvall, A Force More Powerful, p. 230; Levine, Darkness Over Denmark; and Tveskov, Conquered, Not Defeated.