How Else Marie Pade, a Prisoner in World War II, Became Denmark’s First Female Electronic Composer

How Else Marie Pade, a Prisoner in World War II, Became Denmark’s First Female Electronic Composer Before she became a composer of electronic music, Else Marie Pade was a sick child listening to the radio. Frequent kidney inflammations consigned her to bed for long periods of time, which would constitute neither her last nor her harshest experience of confinement. She was still young when the Nazis occupied her homeland of Denmark during World War II, and perhaps her youth explains her decision to spit on a column of marching German soldiers. She escaped capture that day, running right into the Danish Resistance, for which she distributed underground newspapers and trained in the use of explosives to cut off the enemy’s telephone lines in the event of an Allied invasion. Arrested by the Gestapo in 1944, she never did get to execute that plan, but her real ambitions turned out to be much larger. “I screamed out loud in fear and helplessness in my solitary cell — but no one

Added 25 Sept 2026