All those who had no idea that Denmark had anything to do with WW2 please raise your hand.

*raises hand*

But it did, and as it turns out, there were some pretty cool stories that come out of the Danish WW2 experience.

The inside of the Museum

 The Danish originally planned to stay neutral during WW2 (effectively preventing the English from invading the Germans from the north) , and even signed a non-aggression treaty with the Germans in 1939, a treaty which was effectively shredded at 4:15am, 9th April 1940 when the Germans launched a sneak attack on Copenhagen and Southern Jutland. Outnumbered and overwhelmed, Denmark surrendered after 2 hours. Quite literally, the Danes just woke up expecting another ordinary day and were told they were under Nazi occupation.

Because of the surrender, however, the Danes were able to negotiate very favourable terms with the Nazis, leaving the country controlled by the parliament and monarchy. The Nazis allowed this because (1) Denmark wasn't a particularly important territory, (2) they wanted to provide a model of what a Nazi-controlled Europe would look like, and (3) practically every Dane was blonde-haired and blue-eyed and therefore was totally trustworthy (I might have made that one up).

These favourable terms meant that the Danes by and large weren't too adversely affected by the war. According to the National Museum, while food shortages were rampant across Europe, the Danes' calorie consumption only dropped by 10% on average at the worst point in the occupation. It also meant that the government was able to mediate against the worst of the Nazi policies. So while the government passed legislation forbidding newspapers from criticising the Nazi regime and arresting all the communists, because of these concessions they were able to resist the raft of anti-Jew laws, implementing the death penalty and allowing German military courts jurisdiction over civilian matters (which later became very important in light of the civilian resistance movement).

Like I said, many Danes just woke up one day and were under Nazi Rule, which they found difficult to accept. To add salt to the wound, much employment in Denmark was shifted towards assisting the Germans with their war effort.

An armband worn by Danish workers in a shipyard in Hamburg.

As often happens in these kinds of situations, an underground resistance movement started to spread throughout Danish society. Attempting to silence the press rarely, if ever, works, and the Danish situation was no different. Once censorship legislation was passed, effectively forbidding criticism of the Nazis, underground press groups emerged and started circulating "alternative" news to the mainstream outlets. The ingenuity of the journalists was incredible - printing presses were knocked up using bicycle parts and other household items, and one of the largest copying machines was hidden in plain sight in a nail-making factory.

This is the printing machine used in Frie Danmark, the largest rebel paper with a circulation of 30,000 papers a month. This is the machine that was made to appear as a nail-manufacture machine. 

"Dear British Friend" - a letter that was published and disseminated during the war.
If you read the entire document, it is strongly pro-German, but if you only read every second line, the meaning completely changes. Sneaky Danes.

Sabotage also became a common hobby for the Danish population, and it was on for young and old. One of the earliest resistance groups was known as the Churchill Club which was made up on a group of teenage boys. They conducted numerous acts of sabotage between late 1941 and mid 1942, when they were captured and imprisoned. However, the boys of the Churchill Club were not going to let imprisonment stop them from menacing the Germans, so at night they broke out of the jail, continued their missions, and then broke back in every morning.

Two commonly used sabotage devices - a pocketwatch which has been hot-wired to work as a detonator and (I think) some kind of Molotov cocktail. 

This guy sounds like a legend.
Also, I would *love* to see how you can convincingly change your appearance using only toothpaste and chewing gum. 

A detonator built by Danish resistance groups.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is a home made torpedo.
Moral of this story, the Danes are both sneaky and oddly good at making heavy weaponry using household items. 

By far, my favourite Danish resistance story is that of Tommy Sneum.

This guy was a total legend. He was pretty unimpressed by the Nazi occupation of Denmark, and decided that he wanted to do something about it. More particularly, he decided that he wanted to assassinate Heinrich Himmler, who was scheduled to pass through Copenhagen in February 1941.

Being something of a womaniser, Sneum struck up a relationship with a woman who had a penthouse apartment conveniently located next door to the main Nazi headquarters in Copenhagen (incidentally he was also sleeping with this woman's mother). Here, after somehow getting both the mother and daughter to vacate the apartment, he lay in wait, with his weapon of choice - a bow and arrow (because it was sneakier than a gun), for the Nazi leader to cross into his line of fire.

And he waited.

And waited.

Unfortunately, Himmler had gotten a wee bit sick and decided to continue straight on to Berlin, rather than to visit the Nazi Headquarters in Copenhagen, so Sneum was never able to implement his plan.

Not one to take defeat lying down, however, Sneum decided that he wanted to assist the allies to fight, particularly by joining the RAF (he was a trained pilot). But getting a flight to England was pretty difficult, so Sneum had to take matters into his own hands.

He had a friend who had an old plane in his barn, so Sneum called him up and politely asked if he could use the plane to avoid the Germans and fly to England.

His friend said no.

So Sneum called again.

And his friend said no.

And so Sneum pretty much stalked this poor guy until he said "Well, you can't have my plane, but I'm going on holiday for a couple of weeks, and I might not notice if it was stolen".

So with that, Tommy set his plan into motion.

He went to the farm and found the plane inside the barn, but there was a problem. The wings weren't attached. So Tommy put the wings back on. Then, all ready to fly to England and freedom, he slowly crept towards the barn doors and promptly discovered why the wings had been taken off the plane.

Luckily, there was a train line nearby, so when the next train went past, Tommy somehow blew up/in some other noisy way managed to get the plane out of the barn. He then proceeded to fly to England (refuelling by walking out onto the wing). When he landed, he reported to the English military. He told them who he was, and that he wanted to help them. He even handed them documents showing locations and information about various German radar detectors around Denmark.

The English locked him up, because they didn't believe that he could possibly have escaped from Denmark, especially by reassembling a old plane.

I'm not sure how long he was locked up for, but eventually the English decided to utilise Tommy and smuggled him back into Denmark to carry out further surveillance.

When his cover was blown, Tommy knew he needed to get out, but unfortunately he was flat out of friends with planes lying around, so he needed to get creative. Clearly, England was too far away, so his best hope was the neutral, next-door-neighbour Sweden.

Luckily, it was a particularly nasty winter that year. So nasty, that the Oresund (the strait between Sweden and Denmark) was frozen over. Tommy capitalised on this, and decided to walk.

Upon reaching Sweden, a pretty impressive feat, when you consider the Oresund is 4km wide at its narrowest point and, being salt water, there was no guarantee that it would be frozen solid, Tommy once again found himself on the wrong side of the authorities. The Swedes thought that Sneum was a double agent and imprisoned him for 67 days, and luckily were able to avoid being sent back to the Nazi authorities in Denmark. He was eventually returned to England, where he remained (I think) until the Germans surrendered.

But I digress, the resistance movement grew and grew as the war progressed and eventually became too powerful for the Germans to ignore.

A map showing the locations of major resistance and sabotage movements in August, 1943. 

On the 29th August 1943, the Germans declared Denmark to be under martial law, and for the first time since the war began, the Danish parliament lost control of the nation. Of course, this meant that the Nazis were able to start prosecuting the Jewish population of Denmark. However someone within the German ranks leaked the intended starting dates for the main operations, and as a result over 7000 Danish Jews were able to escape to safety in Sweden. Ultimately, only 481 Jews, a small fraction of the population, were detained and sent to concentration camps.

With the Gestapo controlling law enforcement in Denmark, torture and terror tactics became the norm as the Germans attempted to regain control of the Danish population, and to avoid falling victim to the regime, some Danes turned informant for the Nazis. Something I found interesting on this point is how the museum placards refer to how the Resistance dealt with these informants. They were "liquidated". Not "murdered" or "assassinated", although these terms were thrown around quite liberally when referring to deaths attributable to the Nazis. "Liquidated". Just an interesting observation on how the Danes view their involvement in the war, and the "collateral damage" that they accrued.

A picture of a bombing site in Copenhagen.
Note that in the background is one of the rides at Tivoli which is still standing today!

When the Nazis surrendered on the 5th May 1945, Denmark returned to the rule of the King and elected parliament.

It took until 2003 for a Danish official to speak out against the Danish cooperation with the Nazi regime. The then Prime Minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, stated that "if everyone in Europe...had thought the same as the Danish lawmakers, then Hitler would have won the war". He called the then-government's cooperation with the Nazis "morally unjustifiable".

A soldiers uniform. Part of the collection of the Museum of Danish Resistance. 

Propaganda poster. 

A letter from Himmler to a member of the Brondum Gang, a counter-sabotage arm of the German forces.
The members of the Gang were executed following the war. 

An SS tattoo.
The man this tattoo belonged to requested doctors remove it following the war.
It has been preserved in plastic. 

This brooch was made from chewed rye bread, and was given to a Dane in the Ravensbruck camp. 

This became a symbol of the Danish resistance.
9 ore, made up from 4 coins is a reference to the date of the German attack on Denmark. 09/04/40.

Not really relevant to anything above, but these were the boots worn by German soldiers to prevent them getting frostbite! They are absolutely massive!

A letter written in one of the Danish labour camps. The writing is absolutely tiny 

An illegal newspaper.