Details of the characters portrayed
10th
of July 1916 – 20th of November 2004
Hiltgunt
Zassenhaus was born in Hamburg, Germany.
Her father
was a historian and school principal who lost his job when the Nazi
regime came to power in 1933. Already as a young child, she would
openly refuse to take part in the obligatory ”Heil Hitler”
salute, and would instead mumble ”Drei Liter” or another similar
phrase to avoid suspicion.
After
visiting Denmark on a holiday,
she decided to study Scandinavian languages and graduated from the
University of Hamburg in 1939 with degrees in Norwegian and Danish.
In 1940 she started working as a translator at the Gestapo bureau of
censorship, a job which she left again in 1942 to study Medicine.
Later the
same year she was pressured into returning to the Gestapo to work on
translating letters to and from scandinavian political prisoners, and
she began deliberately altering letters and scribbling instructions
to 'send food' or 'we need warm clothing' in the margins of the
letters.
One night
she came dangerously close to being caught by a suspicious Gestapo
officer who searched her on the street, but on that specific night
she had for once forgotten to bring the incriminating letters with
her. Normally she would never leave them at the office for fear of
her desk being searched.
Eventually,
she also started accompagning the Norwegian priest in Hamburg on his
visits to scandinavian prisoners in and around the city. Using her
assumed affiliation with the Gestapo to her advantage, she eluded searches or
inquiries and thus was able to smuggle food, medicine, tobacco,
letters and writing materials to the inmates in her ever-present,
ever-bulging suitcase. The Gestapo method of ruling-by-fear simply
meant no guard dared question her for fear of being prosecuted
themselves.
As she
visited more than 50 prisons this way, she kept a meticulous register
of prisoners' names and locations. When the German troops were forced
to surrender in Norway and Denmark, Zassenhaus learned of the ”Day
X” directive in which all political prisoners were to be executed.
By handing over her precious register to the Red Cross, the swedish
Count Folke Bernadotte and his famous ”White Buses” were able to
locate and extract thousands of scandinavian prisoners, saving them
from the potential devastation of the ”Day X” scenario.
In 1947
Zassenhaus was smuggled into Denmark (Germans were now not allowed to
enter the country) in a fishtruck(!), and by initiative of Tage
Severinsen and other prisoners, the Danish Parliament passed a
special law to legitimize her immigration. She later continued her
medical studies in Bergen, Norway and in 1952 she moved to Baltimore,
USA where she stayed and worked as practising physician until her
death in 2004.
Hiltgunt
Zassenhaus was Awarded the Royal Norwegian Order of Skt. Olav, the
Danish Order of Dannebrog, the Red Cross Medal and the German
Bundesverdienstkreuz.
She was
Nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1974
Tage
Severinsen
22nd
of September 1902 – 5th
of February 1951
Severinsen
was the priest in the small rural town of Finderup, and involved in
the resistance work from within the danish political party ”Dansk
Samling” and speaking openly against the German occupation in his
sermons.
When local
banker Helmer Wöldike asked him if he would help by storing weapon
for the resistance fighters, he agreed and kept weapons and
explosives hidden in the attic above his church. For this he earned the nickname "The Dynamite Priest" or simply "Boom!"
Unfortunately,
through the capture and subsequent torture of a danish paratrooper,
his resistance group was compromised along with several other groups,
and he was arrested on January 13th 1944 and sentenced to
the death penalty.
On the 12h
of June 1944 his sentence was changed to life imprisonment, and he
was imprisoned in Zuchthaus Dreibergen-Bützow near Rostock, Germany.
He
returned after the liberation of Denmark in May 1945, but the stay in
Dreibergen had severely deteriorated his health, and he died in 1951
from intestinal complications, leaving behind his wife Karen and
their four children.
Karen
Severinsen
22nd
of December 1904 – 13 of March, 1994
Wife
of danish priest Tage Severinsen, she was instrumental in converting
the deathsentence put on her husband and the other members of his
group by
personally
pleading the humanitarian case to Dr. Werner Best at a meeting
in
his office in occupied Copenhagen. She never quite regained her
spirit after her husband's death in 1951, and remained a widower for
the rest of her life.
10th
of July 1903 – 23rd of June 1989
German
lawyer, police chief, SS-Obergruppenführer and Nazi Party
leader and
ideologist from Darmstadt, Hesse. Among the chief officers of the
various Nazi security organisations, Best wasat one point considered second only
to Himmler and Heydrich. He served as civilian administrator of
France and later as Plenipotentiary in Denmark while Nazi Germany occupied those countries
during WWII.
He kept
his position in Denmark until the end of the war in May 1945.
Although formally responsible for the events of the night of October
1st 1943 where Gestapo set out to arrest and internate all
Danish jews, he himself leaked the date of the action in advance,
giving many a heads-up chance to organise escape routes and evacuate.
As the
Danish resistance groups grew in number and their sabotage actions
became more frequent, Best was called to a meeting in Berlin where
Hitler ordered him to severely tighten the grip and to ”answer
sabotage with terror”.
The first
victim of the new stricter measures was danish poet/priest Kaj Munk
who was murdered on January 4th 1944 and instantly became
a martyr and icon for the resistance and indeed the danish population
in general.
