The Boys Who Challenged Hitler Read online

  Cathedral School exercise yard, 1943

  KNUD PEDERSEN: One day a German officer walked across our schoolyard during our outdoor time. I went over to confront him and informed him he had no business there. We started shouting at each other as boys and soldiers gathered around. Then our rector came flying down the stairs to push me away, shouting, “You idiot! What are you doing? Get back in your classroom!” Nobody blamed him—as head of the school he had to do it or there would have been much worse trouble.

  Just before Christmas 1941, a single conversation changed everything. We were in Jens’s room at the monastery. It was Jens, me, and four of my fourth-form Middle A classmates: Eigil, Helge, Mogens Thomsen—son of Aalborg’s city manager—and Mogens Fjellerup, a pale, pointy-faced classmate who rarely spoke but who was known as the outstanding physics student in our class. Two of Jens’s classmates were there, too: a boy named Sigurd—ranked number one academically in their class—and Preben Ollendorff, a bit of a loudmouth whose dad owned a tobacco factory.

  We had just gone out shopping for Christmas presents for our teachers. We were in a great holiday mood, all of us tamping our pipes, laughing about girls, having fun. But as always the conversation snapped back to the German occupation of our country. You couldn’t go five minutes back then without returning to the topic on everyone’s mind.

  The talk turned dead serious. We leaned forward and our voices lowered. We angrily discussed the newspaper articles about the execution of Norwegian citizens and slaughter of Norwegian soldiers who resisted the Nazis. Norwegians were our brothers, we reminded each other, our good neighbors who had the courage to stand up. By contrast, our leaders traded with Germany and sought to placate the Nazis.

  Here was the discussion I had longed for! I was thrilled to be with Cathedral students who felt as my brother and I did. These were guys who stayed up like us for the nightly radio broadcasts from England. The more we talked, the angrier we became. It was absurd: if you accidentally bumped into a German on the street, you were expected to strip the hat from your head, lower your eyes, and apologize profusely for disturbing a soldier of the master race. All of us had listened to them braying their idiotic folk songs in the streets.

  All this was outrageous, but would anyone do anything about it? Average Danes hated their occupation and occupiers, but ask them to resist and they would say, “No, it cannot be done … We will have to wait … We are not strong enough yet … It would be useless bloodshed!”

  The air was thick with our tobacco smoke by the time we laid the proposition on the table. It was the same vow Jens and I and the others in the RAF Club had made back in Odense: We will act. We will behave as Norwegians. We will clean the mud off the Danish flag. Jens and I opened up and told our classmates of our sabotage activities with the RAF Club in Odense. We left with a bounty on our heads, we told them.

  The discussion grew heated. The older boys, Sigurd and Preben, wanted nothing of it. “You’re crazy,” they said. “The Germans will wipe you out in a day! There’ll be nothing left of you!” But we younger boys were determined to give ourselves a country we could be proud of.

  Together on that snowy afternoon we Middle A classmates, along with Jens, resolved to form a club to fight the Germans as fiercely as the Norwegians were fighting. We would take the resistance to Aalborg. We would call ourselves the Churchill Club, after the great British leader Winston Churchill. Jens volunteered to research the organization of a resistance cell and give us his recommendations, same time, same place tomorrow. Preben and Sigurd vowed not to leak word of our meeting to anyone. Already transformed from the cheerful holiday shoppers we had been an hour before, the Churchill Club stood adjourned.

  * * *

  The next day after school, Knud and the other boys stomped the snow off their boots and tromped into Jens’s room in the former priest’s wing of the monastery for the first Churchill Club meeting. They draped themselves over a padded sofa and pulled the heavy wooden door shut. Knud took his position on a chair in front of the door to listen for approaching footsteps. And sure enough, they came, followed by a heavy pounding at the door. Knud pulled it open and blinked out at a small blond-headed boy who introduced himself as Børge Ollendorff, Preben’s younger brother. Preben had told him about the meeting, and he wanted in. No, he didn’t go to their school and, yes, he was younger by a year, but he hated the Nazi swine as much as any of them, and he hated Denmark’s official response even more. He stepped past Knud and tossed a bulging tobacco pouch onto Jens’s table. Help yourself, he said. He was willing to bring the club a steady supply from his dad’s tobacco company. That was powerful. Knud closed the door and sat back down. Børge slid onto the couch.

  KNUD PEDERSEN: That afternoon Jens laid out a plan for our club—the model turned out to be very much like professional resistance units later in the war. Even though there were only a few of us to start with, we would divide our work into three departments: propaganda, technical, and sabotage. In time our organization would grow.

  The propaganda department would paint up the city of Aalborg with anti-German messages to show that resistance was alive. Since we had no stencil machine or mimeograph to reproduce flyers, our first weapon would be paint. We chose the color blue. Striking quickly from our bicycles we would smear the damning word vaernemager—which meant “war profiteer”—on the stores and homes and offices of Danes who were known to be Nazi sympathizers and then pedal away like hell. We would expose them.

  We made up our own insignia that day, an imitation of the ridiculous Nazi swastika. Our tilted cross had arrows shooting out of the top of each arm, like thunderbolts. “Here is the symbol of revolution against the Nazis!” our lightning bolts proclaimed. “This flame of rebellion kills Nazis!”

  We would apply our trademark blue messages to the polished black German roadsters that lined the streets. We would add cheerful streaks of blue to the drab German barracks and headquarters buildings. Our insignia was also a death warning to the four chief Nazi war criminals, Hitler and his three top henchmen, Hermann Göring, Heinrich Himmler, and Joseph Goebbels.

  The technical department would produce bombs and other explosives. We vowed to do serious damage to German assets in the city, especially the railcars filled with airplane parts. We would wipe away Nazi smugness and awaken the Danish people.

  In Mogens Fjellerup—nicknamed “the Professor”—we had a unique asset for the technical department. He was so brilliant at physics that the school had given him a key to the physics lab. In the coming weeks and months the Professor would steal heaps of chemical materials to combine into explosives. We nervously took turns helping him mix the ingredients. He spent a lot of time concocting nitroglycerine for bombs. Once he actually spilled the components during a meeting. It was very lucky for us it didn’t explode. But we knew we needed weapons, and until we could steal an arsenal we would have to make some of them ourselves. The Professor was the man.

  Churchill Clubbers and friends in front of the monastery. Back row (left to right): Eigil, Helge, Jens, Knud. Front row (left to right): unknown, Børge, unknown, Mogens F.

  The sabotage department would conduct the on-the-ground field work of the Churchill Club. Of course by being in that room on that day, everyone pledged to commit acts of sabotage—mainly destroying the Germans’ assets and stealing their weapons. I naturally gravitated toward sabotage work. I was inclined toward bold action. Jens was more of a planner, though a very brave one. I wanted to make problems, while he wanted to solve them. There was a fair amount of friction between us; we competed at everything.

  After heated debate during our first meeting, we also decided to form a fourth section, which we named the passive department. This would consist of schoolmates who were not willing or brave enough to attack in the field but who could help us in other ways, such as raising money or developing support. For example, one classmate was the son of a paint manufacturer. In the coming weeks, once we had really gotten going with propaganda work, th
is student mentioned in casual conversation that the police had visited his dad’s factory seeking a match between the blue paint being slapped all over Aalborg and the company’s products. I took a risk and told him about the Churchill Club. I invited him to join. He declined, but he said he’d like to help us. After that he gave us all the blue paint we needed in ten-liter batches. Before long we had ten passive members in all.

  We knew that every time we took in someone new, we would risk exposure. But we felt we had to take calculated chances. We needed people.

  We concluded our first organizational meeting by agreeing to a few general principles:

  • No adults must know of our activities. We would trust only each other.

  • No guns in the school—that is, if we ever got any.

  • Anyone who mentioned the name of the club to an outsider would be immediately banned.

  • And, finally, the most important rule: To be an active member of the Churchill Club one had to commit a serious act of sabotage such as stealing a German weapon.

  The reason for the last rule was simple. One who got caught stealing a German weapon stood a good chance of being executed. Risking this, everyone would have a serious investment in the club’s work. This rule would discourage anyone from telling authorities about the club because that person, too, would be incriminated. From a legal point of view, we would all be guilty together.

  We would continue to meet after school in Jens’s studio. We would begin by taking roll and then go out on patrol. We’d divide the city up into sections, patrol on bicycles, and meet back at the monastery to discuss opportunities—then strike if we had anything. We would become daylight-crime specialists, since most of us had family curfews and couldn’t be out past dark. No problem—everything was guarded more closely at night anyway. The enemy was vulnerable to daytime strikes. And if we needed to work at night, we would tell our parents that we had formed a bridge club. We could say we were going out in the evening to play cards at the home of the only one of us who didn’t have a telephone.

  As darkness gathered outside the monastery walls and the hour grew late, I got up, pulled the chair from the door, and said goodbye to my new mates. Today we were born. Tomorrow we would act.

  The Churchill Club’s insignia, painted everywhere. “This flame of rebellion kills Nazis,” it proclaimed

  4

  Learning to Breathe

  In January 1942, Denmark was in its second year of German occupation. Danish citizens expressed their opposition to Germany not by fighting back, but by making gestures of national pride. Some gathered in public spaces to sing Danish folk songs. Some purchased “King’s Badges,” offered in jewelry shops in silver or gold, as a symbol of solidarity with the government. Some students refused to speak German in language classes.

  Meanwhile, German soldiers settled in. Month by month the occupiers grew ever more comfortable in Denmark, trading freely with merchants and learning to savor the country’s food and culture. Some Danish manufacturers collaborated with their “protectors” by making weapons and parts to facilitate German war plans. Others created temporary housing for the soldiers. One manufacturer, the Riffel Syndicate in Copenhagen, took an order to make five thousand machine guns for the Germans, who paid for it with funds drawn from the Danish National Bank. There was money to be made all around.

  In this atmosphere, the Churchill Club began its activities.

  A King’s Badge

  KNUD PEDERSEN: We started our Churchill Club work with a series of daylight raids on German directional signs in Aalborg, as we had in Odense. Often we worked in pairs. With a shrill whistle one would distract a soldier into leaving his post while the other slipped behind and twisted the sign around so that German troops and wagons would circulate to the wrong places. Sometimes we smashed signs to the ground with hammers. The Germans would put them back up, and we would take them back down again. These exercises weren’t winning the war, but we were getting practice and our actions were noticed by the people in the streets. Someone was not giving in.

  The sign raids also gave us experience working with the threat of arrest hanging over our heads, or the prospect of being shot. You had to get used to it. You had to learn to breathe around armed soldiers. Your body works differently in an atmosphere of danger or excitement. Even the smallest of missions can send your diaphragm into spasms when you have no experience. You start to breathe too fast. Some people laugh uncontrollably. The tongue loosens. Some say things they regret. Ours was a war without fronts, meaning the enemy was 360 degrees around us at all times. Even with our parents, teachers, and classmates, we had to be careful what we said and whom we said it to.

  * * *

  By February, the walls of Aalborg were sticky with blue Churchill Club paint and the German directional signs looked like pretzels. Knud and the other young saboteurs were ready for a bigger target. One candidate was obvious: there was no better-known German collaborator in Aalborg than the Fuchs Construction Company. It built hangars, runways, and office buildings at the Aalborg airport for the German military, receiving handsome profits as it helped the Third Reich make more and more flights to battered Norway. The Fuchs Company was a prime example of everything the Churchill Club hated about the Danish government’s compliant posture.

  At the Aalborg airport, the company’s headquarters was isolated from the terminal and runways. The boys decided to set it ablaze.

  KNUD PEDERSEN: Eigil, Helge, Børge, and I went out to perform the raid on a bitterly cold winter evening. It was Eigil’s initiation night. If he did well and the operation succeeded, he would become a full-fledged Churchill Club member.

  We told our parents we would be playing bridge to gain a few hours more to strike under the cover of darkness. We met outside the monastery and took off two by two toward the most dangerous place in town. The Limfjorden Bridge connects Aalborg with the neighboring town of Noerresundby, spanning a fjord. Because the airport, on the Noerresundby side, was so important to the Germans, they posted armed guards at checkpoints on both sides to examine vehicles. We were waved through both checkpoints without incident and continued north along snow-lined streets out into the countryside.

  A few miles later the hulking shapes of the Aalborg airport hangars came into view. The snow-covered airfield, behind a wire fence, looked like a farm, dotted with livestock. But the animals never moved. They were the Germans’ wooden decoys, made to create the impression from the air that the traveler was passing over pasturelands rather than airfields of military importance. There was a manned guard post at the main entrance to the airport, but the Fuchs office was off to the side in a darkened region of the facility. The wire fence with the NO UNAUTHORIZED PERSONNEL sign was easy to cut through.

  We crept up to the Fuchs headquarters and stood still. There were no lights on inside, and—thankfully—no guard dogs. We stood motionless in the dark for several minutes, listening for a sound of any kind and hesitating, struggling to summon up the courage to do the job and privately reminding ourselves that we could still turn back. Then suddenly Børge grabbed a stick and smashed out three windows. It made a huge noise! When I looked at Eigil I saw a wet stripe running down his trousers.

  We went through the windows and found ourselves inside an office filled with desks and drawing tables, lined up in rows. Architectural drawings were stacked on one of the tables. Bills and receipts were held in place by a paperweight on a second desk. Another supported a pile of business cards that read: “You have been visited by a member of the Nazi party.”

  Overlooking all the desks and chairs was a large framed photo of Adolf Hitler. He glared down coldly at us, as if he knew who we were. We began our own work by liberating the führer from his nail on the wall and smashing him over a desk. Glass flew everywhere. We slammed the portrait onto the floor and took turns dancing on his face. We then gathered all the drawings and receipts and business cards into a single pile, placed what was left of Hitler on top like a cherry on a cake, and
placed a pillow atop the whole stack. Just before we lit it we carried out a typewriter—a very useful machine that was difficult to find and almost impossible to buy. We also carried away what turned out to be a leveling machine. We didn’t know what to do with it, but it looked promising. Then we put a match to the whole traitorous mess and made a run for our bikes. On our way back we looked behind us and saw a glow forming bright against the darkness through a window. It was a beautiful sight!

  At the next day’s Churchill Club meeting the others asked if we had left a calling card taking credit for the attack. No, we said, why would we do that? Well, what would keep the Fuchs stooges from assuming they had been raided by common criminals, not patriots? Hard as it was to swallow, our colleagues were right. We had not made it clear that collaboration central had been visited by Danish patriots who would never give in. So we took a sledgehammer and wrecked the leveling machine we had stolen—we couldn’t figure out what it did anyway—and wrote a message on it: “Get out of our country, you stinking Nazis.” A few nights later we bicycled back out to return the wrecked machine to them, with our autograph. We discovered that the Fuchs office hadn’t burned down—the building was standing. But it was still satisfying to know that we had destroyed their plans, blueprints, and records, which meant that they would have to start over.

  And we had greatly improved Hitler’s looks.

  Crime scene photograph of the damage at the Fuchs Construction Company showing ashes of destroyed design drawings for new airport hangars