The Night of
Great Shared
Happiness
Merete Bonnesen
—4 May 1945—
On the evening of 4th May, the Norwegian writer Johan
Borgen was holed up in the cellar of a house in Gentofte.
That same morning he had been smuggled across the
Sound with instructions to prepare for the establishment
of a Norwegian legation the moment peace was declared.
He had listened to the heavy tread of Gestapo boots on the
hatch over the hold where he had lain concealed during
the crossing.
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Around 8 o’clock, wearied by a hectic day’s work
among his Danish contacts, he had managed to doze off
in his hiding place under the house, falling into a dream-
ridden fitful sleep from which he was awoken after only
half an hour by sudden new noises in the unfamiliar
building which harboured him. From the floors above
came indistinct sounds whose explanation could only be
the muffled cries of fear and confusion betokening a raid,
or the more unusual one—an outburst of joy. In any event,
so peculiar was the noise that he stole up the cellar steps
into the hallway. There he saw a man, presumably his
unknown hospitable host, coming down the stairs from
the first floor and proceeding in a fashion hitherto unre-
corded in the annals of bodily movement. He clasped an
armful of bottles to his chest. The man’s face radiated a
delight which could well have been mistaken for open-
mouthed idiocy, a kind of ecstasy of bliss.
‘So it’s actually happened!’ said Borgen.
At the sound of this Norwegian voice the man with the
bottles gave a start. He stiffened as though he had quite
unexpectedly received a slap in the face. Then he said:
‘You’re Norwegian! Then I must ask you to forgive me.’
And down the stairs rolled the bottles, bumping and
banging.
Just minutes earlier news of Denmark’s liberation had
been broadcast from London. Even so, in this Danish
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home there now happened to be a Norwegian, the official
representative of a Norway which was not part of the peace
agreement, and as the bottles went sailing down the stairs
his Danish host was apologizing for an elation which now
struck him as utterly improper, like laughing in a house of
mourning.
Johan Borgen has often since described this scene for
Norwegians as an expression of a Danish reaction which
was not just supremely tactful, but which, uttered by a
Dane, was also the spontaneous expression of what was
felt by thousands: Norway wasn’t part of it. It should also
be said that in poverty-stricken and exhausted Norway
Borgen’s account was always followed by the more prosaic
question:
‘What about the bottles? Were they all right?’
They were. And once they were emptied Borgen set off,
like the journalist he is, for the office of Politiken, the daily paper. It was a long tramp along suburban roads where the
fruit trees were wrapped in clouds of blossom, and on
through swarming streets which had abruptly burst into
colour with thousands of flags. Around midnight, grey in
the face from lack of sleep, and the excitement and
rejoicing, but also anxiety for the fate of his own country,
he reached the Town Hall Square through a sea of people.
There, in the paper’s dazed and chaotic main office, he
managed to leave his congratulatory article on a desk in
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the compositors’ room. What he had experienced on a
strange staircase in a strange house, the extremes of emo-
tion which that night forged a bond between the lone
individual and the community, was borne out when he
heard the Norwegian national anthem Ja vi elsker dette
landet soar up from the Town Hall Square toward the
light-filled windows, while Gestapo soldiers stood by
their machine guns on the roof of their headquarters in
Dagmarhus. Whether the choice of song was the final
straw for the Germans has never been determined, but
soon after midnight the happiness which like an inrushing
sea had flooded the city was shattered by machine gun fire.
In seconds the square was empty of all but the wounded
lying flung across the pavements.
No one could possibly sum up the many moods of that
night. Leafing through the enormous newspapers of the
time once more confirms the old adage that there isn’t
much of a story in happiness. All they are really saying, in
every column, is a barely suppressed HURRAH.
Yet every single person will have his or her memories
of those intoxicating seconds and hours, unless they have
been erased as happens sometimes with emotional shock,
for no one is capable of absorbing them all, let alone
formulating them. Are there diaries out there, I wonder?
From such jottings it might some day be possible to piece
together that mosaic to which each person brought their
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own small, glittering, precious piece, so that a full picture
could be reconstructed of this day of days, the night of
great shared happiness.
But desperation and anger find an easier outlet on
paper than joy. Its more immediate release found expres-
sion in a way everyone remembers: light. These battered
grey streets, dark chasms of danger where throughout the
years fear had been the only sure companion, were trans-
formed within minutes. It wasn’t just that the stiff
unwieldy blackout curtains were torn to shreds so that
light from the rooms within came streaming out. Nor
was it because the little black cardboard coverings over
the tram light bulbs were ripped away, or that all of a
sudden the Town Hall stood there fresh and radiant with
its facade and tower floodlit, so that even in the middle of
the night you could once more set your watch by the hands
of the Town Hall clock. Neither was it because the elec-
tronic newspaper above the Politiken building again set its
band of text travelling against the black of the sky. No, the
unforgettable thing was that in less than an hour the whole
city was alight.
Without prior agreement, without anyone knowing
where so much light could possibly have come from in a
country where for months everyone had fumbled about in
the gloom of little 5-watt bulbs, all at once along every
windowsill stood little candles which from house to house
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propagated their flickering blaze of joy across the entire
land.
It’s often said that by then all of us knew the end was
&nb
sp; coming. But that is only true in part. The city that awoke
on Friday 4th May was a disappointed city which some-
what sullenly got down to yet another day of occupation,
puzzled as to how much longer it would last. Capitulation
had been expected from one hour to the next ever since
that moment on Monday 30th April when the news of
Hitler’s miserable death was broadcast. When it did not
come, and it had to be faced the country could become a
theatre of war, people, wiser after their experiences of the
days of the general strike, started to prepare for the worst
by filling their bathtubs with water and queuing up outside
chemist’s shops to buy chloramine. Furthermore, the
Hipo* squads of young thugs still stalked the streets even
at this eleventh hour, attacking from their open cars.
Thursday 3rd May, a day in which a certain dejection
could be felt in the air from early on, had drawn to a close
in a mood somewhere between disappointment, fear, and
frustration. For on the radio that evening Reichsminister
Albert Speer had made a speech to his countrymen in
which he described the hopeless situation in such a
* In the last months of the war the Germans formed Danish Nazi sympathi-zers into a Hilfspolizei (‘Hipo’) corps, to replace the disbanded regular Danish police force.
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startlingly frank fashion that all were left waiting to hear
the only logical conclusion to such dismal premises. But
no, right at the end, as we listened with bated breath, he
announced that in the light of all he had said it was plain
that Germany could not surrender.
The atmosphere had been so upbeat, expectations so
whipped up, that immediately after Speer’s speech the
Danish radio service in London delivered an urgent cau-
tion against the flood of rumours:
‘The German defences have not collapsed. The situa-
tion now is no different to 48 hours ago. The fight con-
tinues until unconditional surrender. Very possibly the
Germans would like to leave Denmark, in that case let
them run straight into the arms of the British or the
Russians. As they please! But an arrangement between
the Germans and the Danish authorities does not exist.
They have only two possibilities: surrender to the Allies, or
annihilation by force of arms. There is no third option.’
This was followed by an urgent exhortation from the
Freedom Council to maintain discipline, withhold our
jubilation, and not take any independent action. That
was one of three proclamations issued by the Freedom
Council on the 3rd May. Another was addressed to mem-
bers of the resistance, and a third, composed in German, to
all German soldiers. This impressed on them that the war
was lost, and there was nothing for them to do other than
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remain in their barracks and lay down their arms. The
proclamations were disseminated all over town, passed
from hand to hand, even posted on walls; one hung for a
while in the window of the German Travel Agency on
Strøget. The staff had packed up, all signs had been
removed, the window displays emptied.
Thus, after a night punctured by blasts from fresh acts
of sabotage, Friday 4th broke with brilliant May sunshine,
and utter uncertainty. The beeches had burst into leaf, fruit
trees were in blossom, and Tivoli opened. News spread
through the city that from early morning Montgomery’s
troops had started moving north out of Schleswig. Great
crowds were gathering at the border in expectation of the
British troops’ arrival.
But on their way to work that morning Copenhageners
were again reminded that much was still unchanged. At
9 o’clock, and again at 10, the sirens wailed; and at 4 in the
afternoon, as offices were about to close, there was a full-
scale air-raid warning. People’s only reaction was to stop
in the street and gaze up in the air as though they expected
parachutists to descend from the skies and free them. But
not one plane was sighted. On the other hand, around 6 p.m.
the city echoed to the sound of an explosion from a sabotage
attack on the St. Annæ Palace in Dronningens Tværgade,
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the Germans’ new headquarters,* where a cupboard had just
been carried in with a bomb in a false bottom of one of its
drawers.
The day was waning, and by and large nothing had
occurred. The shops emptied and people went home,
unless they intended to shorten the evening by going to
the theatre, which started at six, or in the case of the Royal
Theatre which was putting on one of Oelenschläger’s plays
as early as five in order to finish at eight-thirty at the latest.
Some went to the cinema to sit through the rather tedious
movies, whose titles just hours later came to sound star-
tlingly symbolic. For on that 4th May there was a choice
between ‘Yesterday and Tomorrow’, ‘A New Day Dawns’,
‘All Hands On Deck’, ‘A Day without Lies’, and ‘This Way
Please For Happiness!’
And then the city settled to a kind of calm, albeit a
peculiarly restless calm, if to all appearances no different to
so many other long days in those years. It was not as
though anyone expected anything to happen just at that
moment. The ministries emptied too; government officials
went home, and presumably like most others during the
half hour between eight and eight-thirty were intent on
* On 21 March 1944 the RAF had bombed Shell House, the Gestapo headquarters, in order to free gaoled Danish Resistance fighters. Among the escapees were Freedom Council members Mogens Fog (see p. 344), a leading doctor and founder of the Socialist People’s Party after the war, and the journalist Aage Schoch (p. 346).
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tuning their radios to receive the BBC as clearly as possi-
ble, trusting it would not be jammed when the Danish
broadcast began.
And then it came. It had started in such an ordinary
way that people were soon only half listening after all the
anticipation. After four minutes of relaying the usual re-
ports from the front came a brief communication, and one
which only a week earlier would have come as a consider-
able shock: ‘In the Deer Park and on the square outside
Gentofte town hall German troops have been engaged in
fighting amongst themselves.’
That was all well and good, but now our hopes were
very different. And at this point the reading stopped.
There was a short pause, with no forewarning, simply
silence. And then we heard:
‘At this very moment we are informed Montgomery has
confirmed that the German forces in Holland, North West
Germany and
in Denmark have surrendered.’
What was the effect? Presumably that is a question of how
fast are each individual’s reactions. But we had help. For
the newsreader, Johannes G. Sørensen, now said:
‘This is London. We repeat: Montgomery has this very
moment reported that the German forces in Holland,
North West Germany and in Denmark have surrendered.’
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The Reuter’s telegram had been received in London at
8.29 p.m. on the BBC’s teleprinter from Montgomery’s
head quarters. It was relayed to all departments over the
building’s internal loudspeaker system, and the young
Flemming Barfoed heard it in the Danish editorial office.
Flying downstairs, three flights above ground, two more
down into the basement, and on through a labyrinth of
corridors, he reached the studio and beat the unsuspecting
Johannes G. Sørensen on the back with clenched fists.
White in the face, out of breath from his dash, he said:
‘Capitulation, North West Germany, Holland and
Denmark. Say it, say it!’
Thus did the most joyous message of the last five years
come to be broadcast, against all the rules of the BBC’s
strict wartime regulations, improvised and without text. It
left two lone Danish journalists in a country where the war
was not yet over, a country which that very day had
despatched fresh troops to an unknown fate on distant
battlefields, a country where life continued to the harsh
rhythm of the daily struggle. In the radio control room the
few Danes sang and danced, while the English looked on
bemused. They shrugged their shoulders in a friendly
manner and said:
‘And the war in the East? That will carry on for at least
another year.’
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So then the Danes went off to the one place that it was
most natural for them to go, to Christmas Møller’s, a home
oppressed by its own dark clouds of war,* where one could
be glad but not rejoice.
But in Denmark there was rejoicing. If we use the term
in its fullest sense to mean a state of being—an all-encom-
passing, all-engrossing exultation which now ran through
the city like a sudden effervescence and manifested itself in
song, in light, in colour. All had happened so bewilderingly
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