BOOK REVIEW: A LIGHT IN THE NORTHERN SEA: DENMARK’S INCREDIBLE RESCUE OF THEIR JEWISH CITIZENS DURING WWII
By: Tim Brady / Citadel
Reviewed by: Christopher “Kit” Turner
The Reviewer — Christopher “Kit” Turner served for 25 years as an undercover CIA officer in East Asia, South Asia, and Europe. After one risky deployment, he was awarded the Intelligence Star, a rare commendation for valor. Turner is the author of The Children of Outer Darkness (Warpath Press, 2024), an historical espionage novel set during the final year of the Cuban Revolution, and The CASSIA Spy Ring (McFarland & Co., 2017), a nonfiction book about an ill-fated coterie of agents handled by the US Office of Strategic Services, the CIA’s forerunner. Turner previously lived in Copenhagen, where he studied the Danish resistance and led a walking tour of sites associated with the Shell House Raid.
REVIEW — Tim Brady’s A Light in the Northern Sea lives up to its subtitle, evocatively chronicling “Denmark’s incredible rescue of their Jewish citizens during WWII.” The book contextualizes the clandestine sealift with vivid descriptions of Germany’s six-hour occupation of neutral Denmark, the slow-boil circumstances that triggered the rescue, the harrowing work of the country’s organized resistance, and the critical efforts of humanitarian movements as the war lurched to its bloody end.
The rescue, a peerless feat, has been mentioned in other books but, with a few notable exceptions like Harold Flender’s Rescue in Denmark (Simon & Schuster, 1963), the story has typically been given one or two chapters, such as in David Lampe’s excellent overview of the Danish resistance, Hitler’s Savage Canary (Cassell & Co., 1957). In contrast, A Light in the Northern Sea strikes a finer balance: The smuggling of Jews to Sweden is woven into a broader historical tapestry.
In that vein, Brady devotes equal if not more attention to the formation and maturation of the Danish resistance. The underground’s missions were diverse, with some groups focused on sabotage and assassination, others on anti-German propaganda, and still others on intelligence collection. But its personnel were—with some exceptions—more uniform, consisting largely of idealistic young men and women, with a hefty contingent coming from Danish universities.
The book follows these youthful resisters from their first tentative steps, using improvised weapons and basic printing presses hidden in apartments, to their development into lethal operators who used explosives and firearms, air-dropped from Britain. And not only were they blowing up rail lines and collaborating factories; they were also rooting out informers and, in some cases, liquidating them. This was not the work of zealous school children but of brave young men and women who, by necessity, had become cold-blooded professionals. The stakes were high: Many in the underground were caught at their intrigues and killed outright; many others were apprehended, tortured, and executed by firing squad; and the battered survivors were sent to concentration camps to wither from heavy labor and wormy rations.
These parts of A Light in the Northern Sea are well told, but the book suffers from a few lapses, which range from minor glitches to more troublesome inaccuracies. In terms of the former, my softbound “advance uncorrected proof” had numerous typographical errors—missing words and punctuation, misspellings, etc.—that may well have been ironed out before the hardcover was issued. One amusing mistake or mistranslation described a British incendiary as a “termite bomb” instead of as a thermite bomb. (One can see a photograph captioned “Engelsk termitbombe, som anvendtes til brandstiftelse” [English thermite bomb used for arson] in the online collections of Frihedsmuseet, The Museum of Danish Resistance.)
The book also has a few stylistic shortcomings—unclear phrases, solecisms, double negatives, word/phrase repetition, run-on sentences, etc. As an example of the first, the “Jewish émigré scientist and collaborator…Stefan Rozental” would be better described in times of war, when “collaborator” takes on a sinister meaning, as Nobel Prize-winning physicist Niels Bohr’s personal and scientific assistant. Some readers may view such missteps as pedantic, while others will suspect that they reflect a wider inattention to detail.
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Deeper into the editorial weeds, the author’s (or perhaps publisher’s) decision to exclude certain letters of the Danish alphabet was puzzling. Back in the days of traditional typesetting, special characters may have been difficult if not impossible to reproduce, but with modern word-processing, creating such letters is a breeze. The book’s most common swap was “o” for “ø,” as if the latter were a variation of the former, but in fact “ø” is a separate letter. The names of several central characters, to include Jørgen Kieler (1919-2017), whose autobiography Resistance Fighter served as a primary source, was rendered as “Jorgen.” And one of the most admirable heroes of the rescue, Dr. Karl Henrik Køster (1909-1970), a surgeon at Bispegjerg Hospital in Copenhagen, was mentioned only as “Dr. Koster,” excluding not only the correct spelling of his name but also his given names. Dr. Køster and his colleagues saved some 1,500 Jews, housing and feeding them at no cost, moving them around Copenhagen and to the coast in ambulances, and in some cases funding their escapes to Sweden. As an aside, these exploits were featured—on occasion with dramatic license—in a televised movie, Miracle at Midnight (Disney, 1998) that starred Sam Waterston as Køster and Mia Farrow as his wife, Doris. Also noteworthy—and included in the Disney film—was the fact that Dr. Køster’s son, Henrik, was active in the resistance.
On occasion, A Light in the Northern Sea comes up a bit mushy on technical details. In describing Niels Bohr’s transfer from Sweden to Britain, the author described the “Mosquito” airplane as follows: “Aside from the pilot, the plane could hold only one passenger; [Bohr was] strapped in the…bomb bay.” But the twin-engine De Havilland DH.98 Mosquito was crewed by a pilot and a bombardier/navigator in a side-by-side configuration. Bohr’s Mosquito was specially designed to conceal important people or cargo in its bomb bay on high-speed passages through Luftwaffe-infested skies.
Similarly, there are shortcomings in the page and a half that the author allocated to the ill-fated British aerial raid on Copenhagen’s Gestapo Headquarters, also known as the Shell House. The author wrote that “a squadron of RAF Mosquitos” was involved in the attack when, in fact, three squadrons and two types of aircraft were involved. Operation CARTHAGE, as the raid was known, involved 20 Mosquito Mark VI bombers and 28 Mustang Mark III fighters, which provided overwatch for the Mosquitos and strafed targets of opportunity. Four Mosquitos and two Mustangs were lost during the raid. One of these casualties contributed to a heartbreaking blunder. Brady described the tragedy’s origins, writing that “one of [the] planes was flying so low that it actually hit a lamppost.” While that wording suggests that a Mosquito collided with a streetlight, in reality it struck a tall lighting mast in a railway marshalling yard not far from the former Enghave Station. About 1,000 feet later the aircraft clipped the roof of an apartment building, before veering wildly off course and crashing into Frederiksberg Allé, the street fronting the Institut Jeanne d’Arc, a Roman Catholic girl’s school. The cockpit separated from the fuselage and skidded into a garage on a nearby side street. Both crew members were killed. The smoke from the burning Mosquito lured the next wave of bombers into thinking that the school was the target. In tallying the grievous death toll, the author wrote that “123 teachers and children were killed,” when in fact 105 people were killed at the school: 87 schoolgirls, ten nuns, four teachers, two firemen, and the fathers of two schoolgirls. A total of 123 Danish civilians (excluding Danish employees of the Gestapo) were killed at both the school and the Shell House.
Lastly, the book has structural deficiencies: no index, no bibliography, and no elaborative endnotes (beyond citations). An example of the latter involved the death of infamous Gestapo snitch Hedvig Delbo. The author’s account was unequivocal: “[Delbo’s assassin was] an unknown resistance fighter—not from HD 2 [Holger Dansk 2, a resistance group].” But there is some evidence, to include a postwar confession from the man himself, that Holger Dansk leader Gunnar Dyrberg (1921-2012) killed her—a possibility that should’ve been added to the endnotes, if not to the narrative itself. For researchers and some lay readers, the book’s scant end-matter will render it less usable.
Perhaps the greatest value of A Light in the Northern Sea lies not in stringent scholarship but in digestible storytelling and in the stark lessons that leap effortlessly from its pages. Not everyone in Denmark participated in or lent a hand to the rescue or to other resistance efforts. For those who sat on the sidelines, conformity offered rewards: peace, stability, and comfort. Even as the tide of war changed, they chose to wait for Germany’s inexorable defeat and for the victorious Allies to liberate their country. The price was high but paid mostly by others, to include unlucky resistance members and 8,000 Danish citizens who happened to be Jewish. But for those few brave souls who refused to submit, for those who risked their lives to save their fellow citizens and to mount a guerilla campaign against the German juggernaut, Denmark would have a much-sullied reputation for indecision, indifference, and inaction during the war.
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