Vagn Bennike


Vagn Bennike was a Danish army officer and resistance fighter. Following the end of World War II, Bennike became Generalmajor and served as Commander of UNTSO.

Early life

Vagn Bennike was born on 6 January 1888 to Estrid and Lieutenant Colonel H.F. Bennike. His brothers were Helge, Holger and Ove Bennike.

Career

Bennike was from a military family and joined the Danish Army. He became a First Lieutenant in 1912, a Captain in 1922 and was a teacher at the Royal [Danish Military Academy] between 1923 and 1945. He was commander in the Ingeniørkorpset in 1930, Chief of Staff at the Ingeniørtropperne 1932-1937 and Lieutenant Colonel and Commander of the First Pioneer Battalion in 1937.

World War II

During the occupation of Denmark during World War II he worked in the Danish resistance movement in Jutland, attached to the army's illegal tasks unit.
When Resistance leader Flemming Juncker had to leave the country in April 1944, Vagn Bennike and Christian Ulrik Hansen took over the leadership in Jutland but Hansen was caught by the Gestapo and executed in the summer of 1944. Bennike was formally subject to the Danish Freedom Council, but was effectively under the command of Den lille Generalstab, the Danish Army's illegal leadership, which operated under the army chief, General. Bennike organised and streamlined the Jutland resistance, but was often at odds with Jens Toldstrup, who was responsible for the resistance movement in North Jutland. His code name was GOAL, but also worked under a number of aliases and code names including Middelbo, Uncle, Uncle Christian, Engineer Søndergaard, Gustav Olsen, Generalen, Cousin, Goal, Gustav, Hans, Jørgensen.

Post war

On 28 April 1945, with the liberation of Denmark, Bennike was promoted to Major General, and spent the next 8 years as Inspector General of Engineers. He was subsequently appointed in 1953 to succeed William E.Riley as the UN overseer in charge of monitoring the truce lines between Israel and her Arab neighbours, becoming Chief of Staff of UNTSO, the United Nations Truce Supervision Organization, a post in which he served for the period between June 1953 and August 1954. One of his first decisions, in September 1953, was to overrule his predecessor Riley's go-ahead to Israel for work on the proposed hydro-electric project from B'not Yaakov Bridge to Lake Kinneret, which ran through part of the demilitarized zone. Bennike suspended the work until multilateral negotiations could settle the dispute.
After the 1953 Qibya massacre, in which sixty-nine Palestinian civilians were murdered by the Israel Defence Force, he was called to testify before the United Nations Security Council in October 1953.
Bennike wrote a foreword to his colleague Commander E.H. Hutchison's book Violent Truce: The Arab-Israeli conflict 1951-1955.
Bennike died in Hellerup on 30 November 1970, aged 82.

Awards