{"id":25268,"date":"2015-09-10T08:00:52","date_gmt":"2015-09-10T13:00:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs2.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/?p=25268"},"modified":"2015-08-31T14:38:01","modified_gmt":"2015-08-31T19:38:01","slug":"the-boys-who-challenged-hitler-knud-petersen-and-the-churchill-club","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/the-boys-who-challenged-hitler-knud-petersen-and-the-churchill-club\/","title":{"rendered":"The Boys Who Challenged Hitler: Knud Petersen and the Churchill Club"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"boys<\/a>On April 9, 1940, German forces invaded Norway and Denmark.\u00a0 Knud Pedersen and his family raced outside their house and looked at the sky.\u00a0 Above them, German warplanes were flying low and pieces of green paper fluttered to the ground.\u00a0 The German military\u00a0alerted the citizens of Denmark that they arrived and were taking over the country in order to “protect them”.<\/p>\n

King Christian X of Denmark, surrendered almost immediately, convinced that his country’s troops were unable to defeat the Nazi German forces. \u00a0Norway resisted with counterattacks with help from Allied Forces and with an underground resistance movement.<\/p>\n

Knud Pedersen, his older brother Jens and their friends were ashamed of how their government had reacted.\u00a0 Denmark had no army to stand up to the Nazis.\u00a0 “One thing had become very clear: now any resistance in Denmark would have to come from ordinary citizens, not from trained soldiers” -Knud Pedersen.\u00a0 After reading the newspapers and listening to radio reports from the BBC, Knud and his brother Jens decided that if the adults were not going to act, then they would.\u00a0 So in the summer of 1940, the first resistance movement began in Denmark.<\/p>\n

Knud Pedersen, Jens Pedersen and six of their friends made up the Churchill Club.\u00a0 The club operated in Aalborg, Denmark for a little over a year.\u00a0 But during that time, the boys managed to sabotage a lot of German operations.\u00a0 The Churchill Club started small and with each success, their actions grew bolder.\u00a0 They stole German weapons, destroyed train cars full of German artillery and machinery and left their mark wherever they went.\u00a0 More people joined the Churchill Club.\u00a0 Others assisted them as best as they could.\u00a0 Of course the Nazis were angry about the attacks against them and sought to find the persons responsible.\u00a0 The members of the Churchill Club were arrested in May, 1942.<\/p>\n

The courage these young men had to defy the Nazi army amazes me.\u00a0 Knud Pedersen recounts different acts of sabotage that he and his friends committed.\u00a0 At times, the stories are tense and you fear for the boys safety.\u00a0 And the book does not end at their arrest.\u00a0 Pedersen and his friends were still defiant in jail.\u00a0 Some of them were able to escape nightly and create havoc; sneaking into their jail cell early in the morning.\u00a0 The Danish and German governments could not agree on what to do with the boys or how to punish them.\u00a0 But the actions of the Churchill Club inspired more people to rise up and resist the Nazis.<\/p>\n

This books is available in print<\/a><\/strong> and in audiobook<\/a><\/strong>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On April 9, 1940, German forces invaded Norway and Denmark.\u00a0 Knud Pedersen and his family raced outside their house and looked at the sky.\u00a0 Above them, German warplanes were flying low and pieces of green paper fluttered to the ground.\u00a0 The German military\u00a0alerted the citizens of Denmark that they arrived[Read more]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[361,10],"tags":[3130,3131,3129,3128],"class_list":["post-25268","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-audio-books","category-books","tag-churchill-club-resistance","tag-denmark","tag-knud-pedersen","tag-nazi"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pd0CXx-6zy","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25268","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/21"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25268"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25268\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25651,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25268\/revisions\/25651"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25268"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25268"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25268"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}