Occupied: Denmark's Adaptation and Resistance to German Occupation 1940-1945 by Nathaniel Hong (review)

The book Occupied by Nathaniel Hong deals with Denmark's plight during World War II when the country was under German occupation. The narrative describes in considerable detail the inevitable friction between citizens steeped in the ways of democracy and Nazi administrators whose experience was limited to the blunt exercise of power. The choice and presentation of material succeed in glimpses to convey the past events commendably to an audience unfamiliar with the unprecedented conditions that suddenly engulfed Danish society when on 9 April 1940, Hitler's troops descended on the country.

The book is divided into sections by years that show the gradual deterioration of relations between occupier and occupied, when military events under Hitler's brutal mismanagement eclipse German hopes for victory. The resulting change from confidence to desperation on the part of the Germans is met with a stiffening in the Danish tolerance of the occupiers' behavior, thus leading to the beginning of an actual underground movement.

Unfortunately, the book contains an inordinate number of errors in spelling, grammar, and syntax that can lead a reader to suspect that the author was ill at ease in English and that the manuscript was never proofread by a competent English speaker. A still more serious flaw is the overall tenor of this story of the occupation ordeal. At face value, story and pictures portray the Danish scene as being in constant uproar, something like a simmering cauldron that was driving the German occupation authorities—and in the early years, the Danish authorities as well--to exasperation and desperation. This was far from the case and indeed would never have been tolerated by the Germans.

In April 1940, I was one of a very small handful of people starting the uphill fight to ignite the first sparks of Danish resistance to the Germans. It took three years before anything worthy of the epithet Underground came into existence, but at great length, it did. I earned a death sentence in the process but was saved by Folkestrejken, the people's strike, in 1944. But that is another story.