COPENHAGEN, Denmark—The past makes demands.
It demands acknowledgment. It demands accountability.
It demands a commitment to the truth.
This is the overarching lesson taught by the superb Museum of Danish Resistance here in this lovely Scandinavian city. Neither the past nor the truth will be denied.
The museum tells the story of a tortured period in the history of Denmark and the world. It covers the years from 1940 to 1945, when Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany occupied the country.
Hitler took Denmark with the acquiescence of the nation’s official government and monarch. Denmark’s leaders made the decision not to fight beyond initial skirmishing when the Germans crossed their border because the king and his government believed two things.
The first was they believed the Germans were destined to win World War II. Hitler had not yet broken with Josef Stalin’s Soviet government and the attack on Pearl Harbor, which brought the United States into the fighting. Only a battered and beleaguered Great Britain seemed to stand between Hitler and the almost complete domination of Europe.
The second was that they thought the Germans were too powerful to resist. Fighting back would just lead to massive Danish casualties and produce the same result—a German takeover. Capitulating seemed the wisest policy.
Initially, many—perhaps even most—of the Danish people agreed.
And yet … there were Danes who disagreed. They believed that the nation should not have surrendered both its autonomy and its principles without a struggle.
Their determination to resist turned the country into a battlefield.
The museum relates the tale by having five Danes who took part in that bloody conflict recount what they experienced during those anguished years. These were not grand figures who strode the international stage, but ordinary folks who decided to take stands.
Two of them—housewife and mother Musse Hartig and baker Karl Christensen—did so for ideological reasons. Both were communists and Christensen had fought in the Spanish Civil War.
Two—medical student Jorgen Kieler and engineering student Thorkild Lund-Jensen—fought for patriotic reasons. They could not abide the notion that their country would yield without a fight, particularly given that both of Denmark’s national anthems proclaimed defense of their homeland was a sacred duty.
The fifth and last of them, office clerk and Danish Nazi Henning Brondum, fought to subjugate. He saw strength as an end, not a means toward achieving a larger goal. Power was its own justification.
These five serve as the museumgoer’s guides through war in Denmark. They speak to visitors through shadowy reenactments, their voices supplied by actors, but all their words and experiences drawn from their writings, their letters to loved ones or their testimony in court.
The combined story they tell is one of escalating horror. Each of them—except for the Nazi Brondum—finds himself or herself living through moments in which they must do things that make them morally uneasy in the service of preventing a greater wrong.
Hartig at one point must choose between compromising the safety of her young daughter or that of her fellow resistance fighters. Christensen, Kieler and Lund-Jensen start by making arguments against fascism before coming to resist fascism with deadly violence.
And Brondum, if he ever had a soul, sells it quickly so he can serve the Nazi Party.
What the unfolding saga makes clear is that appeasement doesn’t work. The more control the Nazis assumed over Denmark’s government and people, the more it wanted. Every time they drew a line, they crossed it in short order.
That traumatic half-decade in Danish history altered the destiny of all five of our guides. Lund-Jensen was shot dead by the Germans on May 4, 1945, the day they surrendered control of Denmark. Brondum died by firing squad in 1947 after confessing to 38 murders and assorted other offenses.
The other three lived long lives but spent their remaining years dealing with and healing from what they had done in the war and what the war had done to them. They never took safety or liberty for granted again.
They also triggered a national reckoning regarding Denmark’s actions during the Nazi occupation.
They won acknowledgment that the government and the crown had been wrong. Denmark never should have capitulated to tyranny and lawlessness.
They forced their fellow Danes to look at the past.
Because the past makes demands.
