The Boys Who Challenged Hitler Read online

These communications and the weapons deliveries they enabled were the very lifeblood of Denmark’s resistance to the Nazis. Karl had to send his messages at very high speeds because the Gestapo went around with tracking antennas on their shoulders trying to locate where these messages were being transmitted from. Karl was well-known and hotly pursued by the Gestapo.

  Karl and I became friends, but we could not be confidants. He never said where he was going when he left the house each afternoon, and I never asked. I knew that each day before he left he was visited by a superior—a guy in a trench coat—who handed him the script for his coded radio message to London that day.

  At night Karl and I lay in our beds talking. I hungered to be part of the organized resistance, and I would tell him all my sabotage ideas. One night we discussed the possibilities of throwing a bomb from a railway bridge. I told him the Germans always had Danish prisoners in the first train car, so we’d have to wait until at least the third passed under us. He just smiled.

  All conversation froze whenever we heard a car approaching our windows. The monastery was on a street corner, so every car had to gear down to make the turn. The headlights would sweep around the corner, and the driver would shift. Is it slowing down? Did it stop? Lying there listening to those cars with Karl, I was terrified for the first time. The old Churchill Club actions did not frighten me, but maybe prison had changed me. Every time I heard a smooth-purring private car operating with high-quality gas, I told myself, “That could only be one of two things: the Gestapo or a doctor.” Our ears were attuned to the slightest sound. If the engine stopped totally, we’d have to run for it. So we would lift our heads just a little whenever the headlights passed to try to get a peek. It was so frightening.

  * * *

  Weapons Drops

  In early 1943, a liaison office in Stockholm, Sweden, was set up to link the Danish Resistance and the SOE. The idea was to coordinate the dropping of weapons into Denmark. The first receivers were peasants from Jutland, the very northern part of Denmark. Plans were made through coded radio broadcasts. On target nights, peasants waited on dark, lonely heaths until they heard the drone of an aircraft. They signaled the low-flying planes in with electric torches and ran to gather up the objects that floated down to them on twenty-foot parachutes. Then they spirited the canisters filled with weapons away, hopefully before German soldiers—who could also hear the planes—had time to react.

  * * *

  One night Karl didn’t return to the room. He never came back. A few months later, just after Liberation Day, I learned that he had been chased up a staircase into a loft and surrounded by Gestapo officers. He shot and killed two of them and then put the gun to his own head.

  After liberation his body was found in a grave at the military airport. There was a note to his parents. I was called out to identify him, and it was an awful sight. He had been bound with wires around his legs and arms. We brought him to the chapel. A few days later I was in the car following him to the small village where he’d been born. There were flowers all along the street to his family home and all the Danish flags were at half-mast.

  * * *

  Karl August Algreen Moeller’s Farewell Letter

  Dear Mother and Father,

  I am going to die now and I am quite afraid; but I believe that God will give me strength to die as a Christian and a Dane in the battle for Denmark.

  I pray that He will bless you. I believe I did my utmost and would rather die than be captured. They are outside now and I will confront them.

  I commit my soul to God.

  Karl

  * * *

  I later learned that when Karl found out that the whole Pedersen family was working underground he asked his commander to be moved from the monastery. He did that to spare us.

  * * *

  The Churchill Club boys no longer got together after their release. Each made his own adjustment. In 1943, Helge Milo and Eigil Astrup-Frederiksen enrolled in eleventh grade at Cathedral School and tried to get on with their studies. The faculty was divided as to whether to let them back into school. A classmate remembers that on Helge’s first day in English class, the teacher, a known Nazi sympathizer, addressed the new boy with lofty authority in his voice.

  “I think I see a new face among us … Who are you?”

  “My name is Helge Milo.”

  “And where are you coming from?”

  “Nyborg … Nyborg State Prison.”

  The teacher launched into a rant as if no one else was in the room. Among the things students heard him fuming about were “misguided youth.”

  Mogens Fjellerup—the Professor—also went back to Cathedral School. Before he was admitted, he was required to swear that he would do nothing to harm the school. “Perhaps it was wrong,” he later wrote, but he did swear. There was no reason for a Churchill Club anymore, now that the resistance was professional and effective. “There was no longer any chance for adventuresome groups [of teenagers],” Mogens wrote. But he missed the excitement. “So went the time,” he said, “and it was just as slowly as in prison.”

  Eigil got off to a smooth start in Aalborg. He was greatly relieved that his family had escaped the Nazis during their attempt to round up Denmark’s Jews. Better still, his girlfriend, Birthe, had waited for him. At first, Cathedral School provided a welcome if unexciting routine.

  And then one day a friend asked him if he would be interested in resistance work. Eigil found himself accepting. He was taken into a unit, trained to handle weapons, and assigned to deliver sensitive messages from place to place.

  After several successful deliveries he was asked to deliver documents to Sweden, traveling on a boat with an old man and another boy about his age. The night before departure the documents were delivered to his grandfather’s house. Early the next morning the Gestapo boots came thundering up the stairs. Fists hammered on the door, and shouts ordered them to open. Eigil stuffed the documents in his shoe and climbed through the third-floor window and out onto the roof with Gestapo officers close behind. Soon cornered, Eigil said a prayer and attempted to leap down onto a garden shed. He missed, shattered his leg on the pavement, and soon found himself a captive once again, this time in a German-run hospital.

  * * *

  After the summer break in 1944, Knud also reenrolled at Cathedral School, but his heart was not into studying. Having been imprisoned the longest, Knud was a grade behind the other Churchill Clubbers.

  “He never bothered to take any books to school,” Patricia Bibby recalled later. “He was an artist, a painter. Here was a young man who had translated Milton’s Paradise Lost into Danish while he was in prison. He was too old to go back to high school.”

  Knud’s social network had collapsed. Jens was studying in Copenhagen. Alf and Kaj Houlberg and Knud Hornbo were still in prison, though at least Alf and Kaj had been returned to Danish cells after six months in Germany. Hans Jøergen was a Nazi captive, surely suffering—if he was even still alive.

  Knud hungered to join the SOE-led organized resistance but couldn’t find a way in. He was well-known throughout Aalborg as a Churchill Club leader, but resistance professionals saw him as a security risk.

  These were different days. The new resistance movement was built on discipline. Could Knud Pedersen take orders? Could he hold his temper? Could he function within a command structure?

  Knud tried one door after another. All were closed. His spirits plunged; his confidence bottomed.

  “A couple of times his mother called me,” Patricia Bibby recalls. “He had locked himself inside his bedroom door and would not come out. ‘Would you please see if you can help?’ she asked. I stood outside the door talking, trying to get him to open it. He had torn his paintings and writings. He said they were no good. That they were worthless. That he felt worthless. It was a terrible depression he had. And we would talk.”

  One afternoon Knud went outside for a walk and drifted into a crowd that had formed outside the Gestapo headquarters down
town. As he watched from the fringes his eyes were drawn to the sewer manhole cover in the street outside the building. An idea came to him.

  KNUD PEDERSEN: I remembered that in the movie Oliver Twist, London’s sewers were broad tunnels through which people traveled. I thought surely the tunnels of Aalborg passed under the Gestapo headquarters. I was still thinking about this a bit later when I passed a toy store and stopped to look at the scene in the window, an electric railroad. I got an idea: I bet a toy train with a tender and three or four wagons loaded with PE2 dynamite on rails leading beneath the Gestapo building might work.

  That’s how desperate I was to be a part of the organized resistance. Of course, the rational side of me knew this was a harebrained idea, a hopeless enterprise. But ever since I had come home from the jail I had tried without success to introduce myself to the organized resistance movement built up by the SOE. The answer was always the same: I was supposed to be a “security risk.”

  From the toy store I walked to Aalborg’s city office building. I found the municipality’s technical division and asked the clerk if they had a blueprint of the sewer system in Østeråstreet.

  “For what use?” he asked.

  “Well, I would just like to study the size of the tubes.”

  “Oh, you think it is like Paris where you can walk around, right?”

  By this time all the young engineers in the office were gathering around and laughing, but through an open door I could glimpse the senior engineer in his separate office behind the clerk’s counter. He wasn’t laughing at all.

  Turned out he was the chief of the SOE’s Kings Company (K Company) in Aalborg. He knew all about me. After I left, he turned to one of his colleagues who was also a member of this K Company and said, “It would be better to have Mr. Pedersen on the inside than the outside.”

  The next day a man came to offer me a command in the resistance. I became the leader of K Company, Division B, Group Number 4. Our job was to move ammunition, weapons, and explosives from hiding place to hiding place to avoid German detection. At last I received weapons training, which included taking apart and reassembling machine guns. I learned to use American-made grenades, too, which looked like pineapples. I could now operate the things we had stolen with the Churchill Club.

  * * *

  Gertrud Pedersen, Patricia Bibby, and Inger Vad Hansen: Resistance Fund-raisers

  Patricia Bibby became an effective fund-raiser for the resistance, as did Knud’s sister, Gertrud, and their friend Inger Vad Hansen. The three girls jumped at Knud’s proposal that they raise funds to support the underground newspapers that were countering German propaganda. Together they visited wealthy Aalborg citizens—usually businessmen—and engaged them in conversations that ended in a pitch for funds. The risk was that they never knew for sure the private sympathies of the people they were talking to. When they, or their superiors in the resistance, sensed danger, the girls were ordered to go underground.

  “We would stay with friends,” Patricia recalls. “During such times I would meet my father in the churchyard once a week so he would know I was still alive. We would pass without looking and never spoke.”

  Wealthy donors wondered how they could be assured their money would actually go to the official resistance. The girls offered them a code name, promising that the name would appear on a certain page in the underground paper Frit Danmark. It was a secret receipt. Inger kept the list in her head, never writing it down, and memorized in code.

  The three girls collected many thousands of Danish kroner for the underground movement.

  * * *

  Our first assignment was to move a weapons cache from a church at the other end of Aalborg into the monastery’s chapel. It was dangerous work, for the Germans had taken over a school just across the street from the church that housed the weapons. At all hours young soldiers sat in the windows, smoking, laughing, and peering down on everything that went on—including our repeated bicycle journeys from the church, during which we carried bulky objects wrapped in black paper.

  One afternoon just a few days after my unit was formed, I got word that a member of our group had probably been captured by the Gestapo. They would try to torture information out of him. We had to move the weapons at once. We started wrenching up the floorboards and pulling the weapons out. We were wrapping them in black paper for transport when there was a great hammering at the door! Guns and grenades lay scattered all over the church. The banging continued. One of our people unwrapped a machine gun and took a position with his back against the altar. Another grabbed a weapon and crawled behind the pulpit.

  Heart hammering, I opened the door. There stood a member of the church choir. It was time for practice, he said. He took a look into the church and knew in a flash what was going on. He offered to help us, and we told him he could help most by spreading the word that practice had been canceled. By late afternoon we had moved it all—including rifles for thirty-five men—to the monastery chapel.

  On the evening of May 4, 1945, I was out on the street when I heard a radio blaring through an open window. The announcer said that the Germans had surrendered and that our liberation would take place the following morning. I saw people turning their lights on and off and cheering through their windows and dancing and thronging out of their buildings into the street. Soon our platoon received orders to gather at the monastery. All thirty-five unit members showed up. We were ordered to sit tight at the monastery for now. Early the next morning we would take possession of the Aalborg airport—the Germans’ great prize.

  That night we carried all the weapons from the chapel down into the drawing room. The strong smell of oil from bazookas and rifles wafted through parlors and sitting rooms. When we were done, Mother served coffee and Father distributed hymnals. I ended the war at the monastery chapel just a few meters away from the room in which the Churchill Club was born—singing hymns with the men of my K Company group. I was eighteen.

  * * *

  Liberation!

  At 8:30 p.m. on May 4, 1945, Danish announcer Johannes G. Sørensen paused in his BBC nightly news broadcast to read a telegram he had just been handed. It was but two sentences long:

  FIELD MARSHAL MONTGOMERY ANNOUNCES THAT ALL GERMAN FORCES IN NORTHWEST GERMANY, HOLLAND, AND DENMARK HAVE SURRENDERED. THE SURRENDER BECOMES EFFECTIVE AT 8 O’CLOCK TOMORROW MORNING.

  Five years of occupation by the Germans were over. Danes everywhere took to the streets, laughing and crying, dancing and singing. People stripped the blackout curtains from their windows, burned them in the street, and replaced them with candles of joy.

  Danes shredding and burning the flag of their occupiers

  * * *

  Liberation Day, May 5, 1945

  18

  Our Evening with Mr. Churchill

  After liberation came the task of transitioning Denmark from an occupied nation to a free country. Some German soldiers refused to surrender. Danish Nazis, despised by their countrymen and with nowhere to go, had no choice but to fight to the bitter end. In the weeks after liberation, thousands of German soldiers just hung around Denmark, sometimes still running things, reluctant to return to a Germany that remained at war in many parts of the globe and whose cities, pounded by Allied bombers, had been reduced to smoldering ruins.

  In the end, most Germans marched out of Denmark, laying down their weapons at the border. In the weeks following liberation, 15,000 accused collaborators were arrested and tried in Danish courts. Of these, 13,521 were found guilty and 46 were executed.

  The organized resistance helped manage the swing back to a Danish-run government. As a company group leader, Knud Pedersen was ordered to take his men to a building at Aalborg’s civilian airport to oversee the transition from German to Danish management. He expected the change to be well under way, but when he and his men arrived, they were shocked to find that the airport was still run by Germans.

  Danish citizens were still flashing identity cards to German masters just as t
hey had throughout occupation. Knud and his men moved rapidly to take over.

  KNUD PEDERSEN: I gave the order to confiscate all identification cards and give Germans employed there two hours to gather their belongings and depart. The German commander came out boiling mad, and I told him to leave at once. Within minutes a crowd of motor traffic was closing in on us from all over the airport—English jeeps with British Tommy soldiers and Danish resistance cars spilling over with officers.

  My chief canceled my orders at the airport base and ordered that everyone’s ID cards be given back. I was ordered into a car and driven to our headquarters, where I was lectured.

  I had exceeded my authority, my chief said. I had strayed outside of command. “You will obey orders from this moment on,” he said.

  German troops departing Denmark

  A possible Nazi collaborator under arrest by Danish police

  I refused.

  How could I obey? The scene at the airport was firsthand evidence that elements of the resistance had been corrupted. Now reports were coming in that Danish authorities had already freed German sympathizers from some prisons. Was that what we had fought for?

  I found other group leaders who were just as frustrated as I was. Together we wrote out a list of five demands to govern the transition:

  1. All Germans should be put behind bars.

  2. Danes should stop trading with Germans.

  3. Collaborators should be arrested at once.

  4. Food for German soldiers should be rationed.

  5. The resistance should be cleansed of corruption.

  I took the five points to a printer, who promptly left the room and called the police. My company chief found me, relieved me of my command, and confiscated my weapons and ammunition. Now I was on the street again, with no command and no future in the resistance. I glumly returned to the monastery and mulled my options. None looked good.