Lessons from a Resistance family: How Ukraine can win the peace even if Russia wins the war
In 1943, after three years of allowing Danes to run their own affairs under occupation, Germany declared martial law in Denmark. In that…
In 1943, after three years of allowing Danes to run their own affairs under occupation, Germany declared martial law in Denmark. In that year Birgit Andersen, a nursing student, aged 19, moved to Copenhagen.
There, she became connected to a network of friends who were all determined to thwart the Nazi crackdown. She had joined the Danish Resistance.
She wasn’t the only newcomer.
The policy of the resistance was not to talk about it ever, even with family. The less you knew, the less the Nazis could force you to divulge if you got caught. Only after the war did she learn that her little sister Kirsten, 15 at the time, had been an underground news carrier. Her parents meanwhile sheltered, in their home, Jews fleeing the Nazis to neutral Sweden. Everyone knew something was going on, but nobody talked about it. Only 10 year old Ole, her little brother, was uninvolved.
While some resistance fighters blew up trains and interrogated German soldiers at gunpoint, Birgit’s job was to find shelters and supplies for escaping Jews. Swedish doctors taught the resistance fighters how to anesthetize children so that they would be quiet as the dark boats drifted towards freedom across the Baltic sea. They used these same drugs to confuse the German dogs that patrolled the harbors looking for escapees. As a nursing student, Birgit would find the drugs.
Her job was not without risk. One night, as she stayed at a friend’s house, the Gestapo came knocking. They were looking for her friend’s husband, a police officer who had been forced underground. He had eaten dinner with them earlier and left, but she had to stay overnight because of the curfew.
At 5 a.m., while they were all fast asleep, ten SS soldiers broke down the door brandishing machine guns. Two pushed her up against the wall, menacing her with their weapons, she wearing only a nightgown. They demanded to know where her police officer friend was. Others interrogated her friends in separate rooms. The rest ransacked the apartment.
Birgit stared down the SS soldiers. She wasn’t scared. She was angry. But she didn’t know what to say to them. She couldn’t tell him where her friend was hiding.
As they waited for her answer, a voice told her to tell the men that her friend was already in Buchenwald, the notorious concentration camp in Northern Germany. She told them this lie.
Astonished the soldiers asked how she knew. She told them she had sent him care packages. Because her parents had already sent care packages there, she was able to rattle off the address.
Two more hours of interrogation followed, but she stuck to her story, knowing her friends in the other rooms were also being questioned. Surely they were all telling the Gestapo different tales!
By some miracle, without any prior coordination, they had told the same lie. He was at Buchenwald. The SS were stumped.
Nevertheless, as the men filed out, Birgit thought she was going to die. She had heard reports of similar interrogations where the last solider out would spray the inhabitants of the house with bullets, leaving bloodied corpses as a reminder to those who would stand up to Hitler.
She counted them leaving, two, three, four. When the last one was at the door, he turned. She thought, this is it, but, instead of bullets, he only spat out: “we’ll get you,” and left.
The SS thought they had lied, but they needed to check.
She and her friends scrambled into the street. Half an hour later, the SS returned, but they were long gone.
That night, the raid was reported on the BBC, but she couldn’t tell anyone, not even her family, that it had happened to her. Still, everyone suspected.
Birgit undertook these enormous risks both out of national pride and as an act of faith that God wanted her to look after her neighbors, be they Christian, Jew, or otherwise. From this miraculous episode, she truly believed that God could work miracles in those who trusted in Him.
Growing up, I was told stories about what my ancestors had done during the World Wars, mostly on my mother’s side which is British. My great-grandfather Albert had been a cavalryman from Warwick and fought at Verdun in 1916. My other great-grandfather, Wilbur, too young to have fought in the Great War, repaired RAF fighters during the Battle of Britain.
War stories from my Danish side were limited to things like: we saw German planes flying low over the country side or soldiers came begging at our farm. Nobody appeared to have done anything. Not surprising, I thought at the time. After all, Denmark capitulated to the Germans in 1940 without a fight and were only liberated as the Allies closed in on the Third Reich. What could they do?
It turns out: a lot.
Most dark family secrets are negative — stories people are embarrassed of. Nevertheless, the Andersen family involvement in the Danish resistance became a closely guarded secret for decades, kept from all who were not directly involved. Old habits die hard, and those that arose during the war years never seemed to fade. My father was not permitted to ask “Farfar” what he did during the war, and no one would talk about it. When I asked my grandmother if anyone had been in the resistance, the answer was simply “no”.
While Birgit’s role in the resistance was non-violent, Danish freedom fighters destroyed numerous trains carrying supplies to the Wehrmacht (a major reason for the declaration of martial law). Her father Henry just happened to work for the Danish train system as a traffic controller. Whether his role enabled him to assist in the destruction of German supply trains, nobody knows. Sadly, his stories have been lost.
As the Iron Curtain fell in Europe, my family’s iron curtain, however, began to fall as well when, in 1992, a synagogue in California chose to recognize my great-aunt Birgit for her role as a freedom fighter. It wasn’t until 2007, however, that she revealed how involved she and her family had been or what risks they had faced, each alone.
If these stories tell us anything, it is that ordinary people have the power to combat great evil, provided they have the moral conviction to do what is right.
While the fate of Ukraine right now is uncertain, its future depends on, not only military will, but the will of its people to resist.
As the Russian army moves further into Ukraine, its people, hostile to invasion, population 44 million, encircle it like a vast army. While the Russians may take nominal control, their ability to hold the country and “win the peace” has already been eradicated. Without numerous willing collaborators, their army will be at the mercy of the crowds.
Moreover, external actors can do a lot of help resistance fighters succeed, from coordinating sabotage to supplying weapons to providing extraction for vulnerable people. The secretive British Special Operations Executive or SOE was very successful in enabling countless acts of sabotage within the Third Reich. Meanwhile, the BBC provided both information and hope to those on the inside resisting the Nazis. Should Ukraine fall, NATO will have to take on this role.
One wonders what would have happened had the Allies not chosen to invade. What if they had chosen a long game of funding resistance movements within the Third Reich and waited for the political winds to shift? Would the resistance movements have made any difference?
Modern lessons from Vietnam to Afghanistan (1980s as well as 2001) have shown that a determined insurgency can stand up to a determined superpower, particularly when that insurgency has supplies from an external force, but the costs are high.
The resistance movements of World War 2, on the other hand, were not full fledged insurgencies, but covert movements that were helping the Allies while attempting to prevent Nazi atrocities and overcome propaganda. Such a movement may be needed more inside of Russia rather than Ukraine, where dissidents need a leg up. Already, we know that agents within Russia are passing information to Ukraine. These agents may not be dissidents in the classical sense, but they clearly are not in favor of Putin’s war.
True guerilla warfare, ultimately, relies on a determined fighting force or militia that, because of its small size, is able to evade the enemy, yet continue to cause damage until the political motives for the invasion subside and the cost becomes too high to sustain. Think George Washington. Never was a general more skilled at evading battle. Already the Ukrainian army fights this way, using small nimble groups to ambush the Russians’ heavy armored columns.
Yet without French help, there might never have been an American Republic. Again, in the Ukraine war, as things escalate, NATO will have to take on this role whether it wants to or not. Whether Ukraine falls or not, to defeat the much larger foe, it will need all the help it can get.
To read Birgit’s story as well as her speech to the Temple Adat Shalom, look here: https://collections.digitalmaryland.org/digital/collection/saac/id/25006