Vagn Bennike

Who was Vagn Bennike?

Vagn Bennike was an army engineer and demolitions expert. During the occupation of Denmark during World War II he worked in the Danish resistance movement in Jutland, where he was attached to the army's illegal tasks unit. In the summer of 1944 he took charge of resistance operations in Jutland, and was at times criticized by other resistance groups for the priority in operations he gave to his loyalty to the army.

On April 28, 1945, with the liberation of Denmark, he 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. Vagn Bennike suspended the work until multilateral negotiations could settle the dispute.