Knud Dyby

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Knud Dyby (born in 1915 in Randers , Denmark , died September 2011 in the United States ) was a Danish resistance fighters against the Nazis in World War II , known for his participation in the Danish rescue 7400 Jews as Righteous Among the Nations was honored.

Live and act

Knud Dyby was born in 1915 as the son of a printer in Randers on Jutland . After finishing school, he completed an apprenticeship as a printer and also attended evening school. He was an avid sailor, had his own sailboat and won over twenty Silver Cups at a young age. At the age of 20 he was drafted into the military in Copenhagen. He was selected to serve in the Royal Body Guard regiment , which was responsible for the safety of the king, the royal family and the royal castles. In his service in Amalienborg Palace and Rosenborg Castle he met Christian X know.

Dyby stayed in Copenhagen and went into the police force. During the German occupation of Denmark in 1940 he was active in the resistance movement and participated in sabotage , espionage and the production of underground newspapers . In 1943 he participated in the escape of the Danish Jews . He used his contacts with fishermen, which he had established through sailing, to organize the passage of Jewish Danes to Sweden and even brought groups to Nordhavn , where they were received by seafarers or housed in private houses until the crossing. Since the Danish coast was guarded by the Danish police, he was able to find out in his function as a police officer in which direction the refugee boats had to leave in order not to encounter the German patrol boats. He also helped other people at risk to flee to Sweden. B. were threatened with arrest by the Gestapo due to sabotage or journalistic activity .

Dyba was able to save himself from capture in the course of the Möwe military action on September 19, 1944, during which the Danish police were disbanded and 2,235 police officers were deported to the Neuengamme and Buchenwald concentration camps. While his own police station was also manned, he succeeded in stealing around 400 identity papers, stamps and other material from a second building, which the Gestapo was not aware of, smuggled past the raid with the help of a taxi driver and made them available to the Danish underground . Copies of the identity papers forged with the help of these documents can be found in the National Museum of Denmark . From then on, until the end of the war, he remained in hiding in changing apartments to avoid being arrested by the Gestapo.

After the end of the war, he traveled to the USA on invitation, initially on a tourist visa, to get to know the freer world and to escape economic hardship. A Jewish congressman obtained an immigrant visa for him out of respect for his accomplishments in rescuing Danish Jews. He works as a typographer in New Jersey , married a Danish woman who worked for the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs and moved with her to San Francisco . The couple had a daughter.

Knud Dyby received numerous honors, traveled to Israel , got to know some of those who had been saved and worked as a contemporary witness in schools and at events. He is among the personalities interviewed for the Oral History Collection at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum . His name was included in the Yad Vashem Memorial .

Awards

  • 1999: Awarded by the Simon Wiesenthal Center as Righteous Among the Nations for his humanitarian work in the Second World War.

literature

Martha Loeffler: Boats in the night: Knud Dyby's involvement in the rescue of the Danish Jews and the Danish resistance. Lur Publications, Danish Immigrant Archive, Dana College, 2004. ISBN 978-0-930-69707-5 (English)

Individual evidence

  1. a b Solly Ganor: Knud Dyby: One of the Righteous (English). Retrieved December 8, 2019
  2. a b c d Oral history interview with Knud Dyby at Oral History 1999 (English). Retrieved December 8, 2019
  3. ^ Herbert Pundik: The flight of the Danish Jews to Sweden in 1943. Druck- und Verlagsgesellschaft Husum, Husum 1995. ISBN 3-88042-734-8 .
  4. Knud Dyba Danish Rescuer by Ellen Land-Weber . (English) Retrieved December 8, 2019
  5. Knud Dyby on the table of Yad Vashem.Retrieved December 8, 2019