The Boys Who Challenged Hitler: Knud Pedersen and the Churchill Club

“The occupation was on everyone’s mind, but during those weeks our teachers kept telling us not to talk about it. Don’t object. Don’t mouth off. We mustn’t arouse the giant. There were many German sympathizers on our faculty. In Denmark our second language was German, and our books suddenly sprouted all these articles about the happy Hitler Youth who went out in the sunshine and camped and hiked through the forests and played in the mountains and got to visit old castles and all that bloody garbage. It was easy to see it was all crap.”

The Nazi occupation immediately causes tension in Danish society. A rift develops between Danes who oppose the occupation and those who side with Hitler. Knud believes that the German propaganda about Hitler Youth is made up of obvious lies, while his teachers’ reluctance to talk openly about the invasion is cowardly and hypocritical. The complacent, hushed attitude of most Danes at the outset of the war provokes Knud to start his sabotage work.

“As Hitler put it, ‘He alone who gains the youth, owns the future.’”

This quote by Hitler reveals why he thought the Churchill Club in Denmark—a country that he thought would rule alongside Germany once he conquered the world—was particularly concerning to him. Hitler wanted Danish youth to grow into adult Nazis. The Churchill Club stands in opposition to him, threatening his future domination by swaying young people to the Allied side.

“Both Eigil and Helge panicked once we got close. Please turn around, they begged me. Let’s leave the wires for another day. So we did. I could understand—sabotage takes some getting used to. On the way out we pedaled past four German solders flirting with a Danish woman, and Eigil and Helge shouted an insult as they sped by—they called her a “field mattress,” a slur for a woman who sleeps around with soldiers.”

On their first sabotage missions, Eigil and Helge panic despite their earlier enthusiasm. The incident shows the significant fear that the boys must overcome to accomplish their increasingly dangerous resistance work. Embarrassed by their failure to cut the phone wires to the German barracks, Helge and Eigil express their frustration by insulting the woman talking with the soldiers, an example of how insecurity makes people bully others and also of the way the frustration of the occupation made Danes turn against each other.