Kim Malthe-Bruun
Kim Malthe-Bruun (born July 8, 1923 in Edmonton , Canada , † April 6, 1945 in Copenhagen , Denmark ) was a cabin boy and ordinary seaman and member of the Danish resistance movement against the National Socialists . He left numerous diary entries and letters.
His parents had emigrated to Canada to run a farm in the Edmonton area. Kim first met Denmark on a home vacation with his parents from December 1925 to June 1926. During this time his sister Ruth was born on February 20th. Kim Malthe-Bruun came to Denmark at the age of nine and initially lived with his aunt Anna Ida "Nitte" Bruun in Hellerup . He then lived in the Stenhus boarding school for five years until June 1940 , followed by a short land service. From August 1940 to March 1941 he attended the seaman's school of the Lauritzens shipping company in Svendborg , and a month later he was hired on a three-masted schooner . In August 1942 he began a one-year preparatory course for admission to the Naval Officer School, where he joined a group of the Danish resistance during the Second World War . From August / September 1943 he devoted his entire workforce to the resistance, at the same time as the state of emergency was imposed and the deportation of the Danish Jews began. For example, immediately after the start of the state of emergency, the seamen of the Danish Navy sank 29 of their own ships so that they would not fall into the hands of the Germans. Kim Malthe-Bruun was arrested in December 1944, tortured, and sentenced to death by shooting for arms smuggling and for dragging a customs boat into Sweden. He was executed on April 6 of the last year of the war, four weeks before the end of the war. At the same time Peter Fyhn (1920–1945), Ludvig Alfred Otto Reventlow (1916–1945), and Jörgen Frederik Winther (1917–1945) were murdered by the SS . The lawyers who convicted her were never brought to justice. The remains of Kim Malthe-Bruun were exhumed after the war and buried in the memorial grove in Ryvangen .
Malthe-Bruun's feelings and actions during his time of resistance as well as after the conviction are documented in numerous touching letters to his mother Vibeke Malthe-Bruun, to his aunt »Nitte« and to his girlfriend Hanne and in diary entries, which were written in several languages after 1945 were translated and published in book editions, in 1949 for the first time - with a single edition - also in German by Verlag Ernst Reinhardt in Munich. A licensed edition also appeared in the GDR in 1963 .
literature
- Original title: Kim - Uddrag af Dagbog og Breve skrevet af Kim , published in 1945 by Thaning & Appels in Copenhagen.
- Vibeke Malthe-Bruun (Ed.): Kim: The diary entries and letters of Kim Malthe-Bruun. Published by his mother, Vibeke Malthe-Bruun. Translated from the Danish by Karl Matter. Hanser Verlag, Munich and Vienna 1995. 3-446-18075-3.
- Helmut Gollwitzer u. a. (Ed.): You haunted me at night - farewell letters and records of the resistance 1933 - 1945. Chr. Kaiser Verlag, Munich 1954.
Web links
- Literature by and about Kim Malthe-Bruun in the catalog of the German National Library
Individual evidence
- ↑ Kim Malthe-Bruun: Kim: The diary entries of Kim Malthe-Bruun . Ed .: Vibeke Malthe-Bruun. 5th edition. Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich and Vienna 1999, ISBN 3-446-18075-3 , p. 5-15, 188-191 .
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Malthe-Bruun, Kim |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Danish cabin boy, ordinary seaman and resistance fighter |
| DATE OF BIRTH | July 8, 1923 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Edmonton , Canada |
| DATE OF DEATH | April 6, 1945 |
| Place of death | Copenhagen , Denmark |