Christian X is the hero of one of the most enduring urban legends from World War II. In this story, when the Germans order Danish Jews to wear armbands with the yellow Star of David, such as this picture shows, Christian X asks for one of the first armbands, proclaims, "I'm a Jew," and asks all Danish citizens to wear the armbands to ensure the Danish Jews would not be identified and deported to concentration camps.

Though indicative of the Danish national impulse to protect her Jewish citizens, the story is false. The Germans never ordered Danish Jews to wear armbands, and Christian X never asked Danish citizens to resist the Germans or to protect anyone. Instead, his own daily resistance was viewed as a source of pride and motivation, especially among young Danes, including two of my uncles, Jacob and Oscar. Though the Danish Resistance never took orders from Christian X, they were inspired by him.

Queen Margrethe II has confirmed that her grandfather never wore an armband with the Star of David. She has speculated, in magazine interviews and books, that in response to talk about Danish Jews being forced to wear the identifying armbands, someone suggested King Christian would likely be the first to put on the marker.

I first understood that the story of Christian X and the Star of David armband was an urban legend shortly after Lois Lowry published her novel about occupied Denmark. My brother called to tell me the story our mother had shared with us so often was false and that Leon Uris's retelling of the story in his novel Exodus had helped fuel the tenacity of the urban legend in the minds of many. When my siblings and I first told Mother what we'd discovered, she wouldn't believe us. She had a distinct memory of having worn the Star of David armband to school. After discussing the incident with Danish relatives close to her age, however, she pieced together the origin of her false memory of the Star of David armband, and it was connected to my grandfather's death.

My grandfather, Oscar Andres Schmidt, shared an April 20 birthday with Adolph Hitler, and Mother has often laughed about how my grandfather commented each April 20 for the two years he lived during the Occupation that all of Germany was celebrating his (my grandfather's) birthday. On April 9, 1943, my grandfather died from congestive heart failure, and his six children and my grandmother wore black mourning armbands for a year. Somewhere in the course of her busy life and hearing the stories of Danish resistance during World War II that made my mother so proud as she was raising a family first on different military bases in the South and then in Kannapolis, North Carolina, she apparently conflated the black mourning armband she wore to honor her father, who despised Hitler and the German invaders, with a false memory of wearing a Star of David armband in solidarity with the Jewish citizens of her country.