The Boys Who Challenged Hitler Read online

  King Christian X riding through the streets of Copenhagen during the occupation

  5

  Flames of Resistance

  Denmark seemed a place right out of a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale in the first months of 1942, especially compared to so many other places in the world where bloody conflict was raging. Every morning in Copenhagen, Danish king Christian X took a horseback ride through the streets, saluted by both the Danish citizens and the German soldiers he passed. The Danish minister of foreign affairs, Nils Svenningsen, took his morning rides with the German high commander, Werner Best.

  While citizens and soldiers were being shot in Norway, Danish business leaders lunched with German officers, negotiating deals over pastry. Unemployed Danish workers were sent to Germany and given the opportunity to work for the Nazis, while uniformed German soldiers strolled through Denmark’s city streets arm in arm with Danish women. In the early months of 1942, it was clear that many Danish officials were expecting a Nazi victory in which Denmark would be a business partner.

  Winston Churchill referred to Denmark on the radio as “Hitler’s tame canary.”

  KNUD PEDERSEN: After the Fuchs strike we turned our attention to German vehicles. To our arsenal of blue paint, hammers, and bicycles we added gasoline and matches. Arson became our game. We took to carrying a small quantity of petrol with us when we went out, stuffing the canister in a school bag. As always we specialized in quick strikes—in and out.

  One day during our bicycle reconnaissance we found three large German transport trucks unguarded in a field. We crept up to each and raised our eyes above the windows to make sure no one was hiding or sleeping inside. All were empty. Quickly one of us slashed the seats, pulled the stuffing out, and doused it with gasoline. Another painted our iconic blue swastika with lightning bolts on each truck. On a signal, a third tossed a lit match into each cabin and we tore out of there as fast as we could. Flames were instant; petrol made all the difference.

  Werner Best (right), the German high commander in Denmark, with Erik Scavenius, the Danish prime minister, 1943

  Another afternoon we came upon an unguarded German tractor near the airfield in Lindholm, a suburb of Aalborg. Again we slashed the seats, painted the symbol, and prepared the stuffing but suddenly realized no one had remembered the petrol. We ordered Børge, the youngest of us, to ride back to the monastery and retrieve it. He objected that we should draw straws. We told him to get going. He ignored us and instead opened up the gas tank and threw a lit match into it, igniting the vehicle.

  Danish police photo of German truck vandalized by the Churchill Club

  That was classic Børge. He looked the innocent type, the kind of innocent who is the most dangerous. With blond curls, twinkling blue eyes, and a sweet smile, he seemed angelic. But he loved action. He was fearless and smart and very quick on his feet. He was hot-tempered and mouthy as well, which sometimes got us in trouble. He was the youngest of us all—still only fourteen—but I liked him. We shared an irreverent sense of humor. He was a lot like Little Knud had been back in Odense. Both were fearless and both were small.

  Børge and I grew close. He lived about fifteen miles to the west of us in a small town named Nibe but went to school in Aalborg. Jens knew his older brother, and that’s how he found us. He was so hungry to join us that he often rode his bicycle fifteen miles through snowy streets back and forth between Nibe and Aalborg to be with us.

  When an operation called for two, Børge and I often worked together. We developed a feel for each other, often one that didn’t call for words. One would distract, the other would strike. For example, one time Eigil, Jens, Børge, and I came upon several German roadsters lined up behind a fence downtown. We could plainly see a pistol resting on the front seat of the nearest car. It set us drooling. We had to have it.

  The Germans had posted a single armed soldier by the fence. Clearly bored, he was absentmindedly watching a few kids play football in the adjacent street. Børge stood still and observed the game intently. When the ball rolled loose in our direction he sprinted after it and kicked it over the fence. The ball came to rest beneath one of the German vehicles. I ran up and asked the guard to please be allowed to fetch it. The soldier stood aside and let me open the gate. Inside, I picked up the ball, and, as Børge occupied the guard with a question, I ran to the car and snatched the gun, stuffing it into my waistband. Then I trotted back out into the street and kicked the ball back to the boys and walked away.

  We got better and better at disabling the German vehicles we found throughout Aalborg, especially near the airport. We learned how to pry off a radiator screen in a flash, and either steal or smash the exposed parts. Always we left our signature in bright blue paint.

  The vehicles we wanted to destroy most were lined up right outside my room at Budolfi Square. We could see them through the curtain at every Churchill Club meeting. They were an eyesore, an affront, an insult. While winter swirled around the monastery’s ancient walls, we gathered in Jens’s room debating various schemes for taking them out, even if it meant killing the guard. More and more, weapons became our obsession. It was all we could talk about. Now that we had a pistol and a collection of iron rods we had discovered in the monastery attic, were we really going to use them?

  One afternoon through a fog of pipe smoke, we considered a plan for a new strike. The goal would be to decommission the cars outside my window, to make them useless. Two of us would work on the cars, removing radiator screens, pulling and smashing engine parts, while others distracted the guard with conversation—“Uh, officer, sir, do you have a light? You don’t understand Danish? I’m so sorry, sir. Oh, what is the word for ‘matches’ in German?”

  German vehicles around Budolfi Square, as seen from Knud’s bedroom window

  If the guard detected the operation, a fourth club member, concealed beneath one of the cars, would slip up behind him and smash him in the head with an iron rod. Or, someone suggested, maybe a blow to the neck would be better. Whatever, we would kill him. Once he was dead, we’d drag him under one of the cars. It was agreed. We drew straws to see who would smash the guard. The winner—or loser—sat down and turned the rod over and over in his hands trying to picture himself using it.

  But we didn’t do it. Two members who were not present during the planning session objected when they heard about it. “Hit a man from behind? That’s not us! That violates our code. It is cowardly, even if the target’s a German!”

  Back when we had started the club, we all vowed that we could, and would, kill. But when the time came we were woefully unprepared. We were middle-class kids—sons of professionals, boys who had never shot a gun or wielded a club or slit a throat. We had no military training—we were too young to enlist in the army, and our army barely existed now anyway. We had no experience with the feelings involved in taking a life. A typical military inductee went through basic training or boot camp, where one’s personality was stripped to the core, desensitized to accept the horror of war as part of the job, and rebuilt as a warrior. For us—young patriots having to invent and train ourselves as we went along—it would take more time and preparation to be ready to kill.

  So the Budolfi car mission was postponed but not scrapped. We would just have to work up to it. Our aborted mission was bitterly disappointing, though, especially when Jens received a coded letter from our cousin Hans Jøergen in Odense. To be safe, Jens and Hans Jøergen had developed a code for trading war bulletins. Marie Antoinette had used the same code pattern, which Jens and Hans Jøergen had modernized so it could be deciphered with the words “Denmark expects every man to do his duty.”

  Hans Jøergen wrote that the RAF Club had just destroyed fifteen German cars in Odense—exactly what we had failed to do at Budolfi Square. Details were sketchy, but it was clear Hans Jøergen had been the leader. The target was a converted riding stable filled with German automobiles and other war materials. They struck on the evening of an all-day Boy Scout assembly. Ha
ns Jøergen—a Boy Scout—had spent the day dressed in his full scouting uniform, eagerly taking part in troop activities so everyone would see him and remember that they saw him there.

  Just after dark Hans Jøergen slipped out of the assembly hall and rode his bike to the stable. The guard usually posted outside the door had been removed by an RAF Club sympathizer, a girl who had flirted him away from his post. Hans Jøergen tiptoed inside and, using some sort of homemade bomb, ignited a quantity of straw. He then anonymously telephoned the fire department to report a fire on the opposite side of Odense. Then, still in his uniform, he beat it back to the scouting forum to rejoin his mates. The fire brigade swallowed the bait and clanged off to the wrong end of town. All those lovely roadsters, reported Hans Jøergen in his message to Jens, had over an hour to burn into charred steel sculptures.

  It was a bold stroke. Hans Jøergen proudly claimed that the RAF Club had pulled ahead of the Churchill Club. We had no argument to offer. All we could do was try to match it.

  German vehicles destroyed by RAF Club action, Odense

  An interior passageway in Holy Ghost Monastery, a sprawling old building perfect for secret meetings

  6

  To Arms

  As winter snows began to melt in the spring of 1942, the Churchill Club expanded into a force with nearly twenty members, active and passive. Though they continued to seek out targets after school, they made more nighttime raids, mainly attacks on German vehicles, conducted while they were supposedly playing bridge. One of the club’s most important new active members was Uffe Darket, whom Eigil had known from another school. When Eigil had transferred to Cathedral School he stayed in touch with Uffe and recommended him to the Churchill group. At first glance, no one would have taken Uffe for a saboteur, for he was always neatly dressed, respectful, and pleasant. His blond good looks and steady manner inspired calm and trust. But like the others, he was brave and dedicated—and angry. He was quickly accepted.

  Knud and Jens Pedersen took great pains to keep the Churchill Club secret from the rest of their family. The brothers knew that if their parents had any idea what was going on they would move to stop it. In some ways, it wasn’t that hard a secret to keep: their parents, Edvard and Margrethe, were absorbed in the countless details of church work. Their younger sister, Gertrud, was no more interested in Jens’s and Knud’s lives than they were in hers. Little brothers Jørgen and Holger were still in elementary school.

  It helped that Jens’s and Knud’s rooms—headquarters of the Churchill Club—were at the top of a staircase, isolated from the rest of the family’s living quarters. During their meetings, the boys were careful to post a guard at Jens’s door to make sure no one came up the stairs. All in all, the Pedersen parents were delighted their sons had made new friends so quickly after their move to Aalborg.

  Likewise, most Cathedral School students had no idea what was going on. “Knud Pedersen would fight,” a classmate later wrote. “Soon he gathered from class a bunch of boys around him. They went mostly around the schoolyard as a closed flock without the rest of us knowing why.” Cathedral School faculty members continued to drill their students in preparation for midterm exams, unaware of the greater drama in which a few of their students were involved.

  Even as the club got more and more proficient at stealing weapons, they continued to try to manufacture their own explosives. The Churchill Club’s “Professor”—Mogens Fjellerup—converted an elevated chamber on the monastery’s second floor into a chemical laboratory. There, he mixed combustible materials smuggled from Cathedral School’s chemistry classroom. In the beginning, they fizzled out again and again. But with each failure, the Professor felt he was getting closer.

  KNUD PEDERSEN: Sometimes the whole second floor was thick with smoke and we had to run gagging to throw open the upstairs windows. The Professor was trying to make small handmade bombs to drop into the motors of parked German cars. For a while they just went ppssssst and we had to pry off the radiator screens and smash the engines with ordinary tools. But the Professor kept at it. He was the silent type who only gave a faint smile when the rest of us were doubling over with laughter.

  We made up our operations as we went along, sometimes taking chances that we shouldn’t have taken, but we had no formal command structure. We were too jealous of each other to name or elect a leader. We belittled each other. The Professor reddened when Eigil insisted his bombs didn’t qualify him for full Churchill Club membership—he had to steal a gun like everyone else. Others piled on.

  “Yeah, your ‘bombs’ never work anyway.”

  “What a mastermind!”

  The sarcasm was as thick as the monastery walls, but we had faith in each other and our mission held us together. We were out to install “Norwegian conditions”—the courage to resist—in our country. Denmark would stand whether the government liked it or not.

  Several times a week we met in Jens’s room, took roll, and then went out on our bikes. We divided the city into quadrants and scouted, sometimes in pairs and sometimes alone. We inspected the parked German vehicles and buzzed by the Wehrmacht offices, searching for German assets to destroy and weapons to steal. Sometimes we came up empty. Usually there was something.

  During one of these routine reconnaissance missions, I drifted past a German barracks and saw something that made my eyes nearly pop out of my head. It was almost too good to be true! I stood up from my bicycle seat and mashed down the pedals, tearing around town, rounding up the others and telling them to get back to the monastery at once. Within minutes we were on Jens’s couch, with Børge’s tobacco glowing in our bowls, a chair wedged against the door and all eyes on me.

  “So what’s the big deal?” came the question.

  “Big deal is, I found a lovely German rifle dangling from a bedpost inside a barracks bedroom. The window is wide open. It’s ours for the taking. Now’s our chance.”

  There was unanimous agreement—we had to have it. “Let’s wait for night,” someone said. But the rest of us knew we had to move now, in broad daylight. The streets would be crowded, providing cover. The building was unguarded, or at least it had been an hour ago. At night there would be a German on that bed. Now there was only a rifle.

  No, we would make a daylight strike. But if we were able to snatch the rifle, we would have to conceal it as we transported it back to the monastery. A Danish boy couldn’t just be seen cheerfully pedaling down a Wehrmacht-filled Aalborg street with a German rifle slung over his shoulder. So we had to make one plan for capturing it and another for moving it.

  Our operation called for three boys and a raincoat. It was about three o’clock when Børge, Mogens Thomsen, and I reached the barracks. We circled the block a couple of times, just to see how traffic was moving and to make sure there were no German guards posted. It was still clear. On the third lap Mogens let himself fall behind a little, while Børge and I advanced, with Børge carrying the coat. Close to the barracks, we ditched the bikes behind a tree. The barracks building was enclosed by a barbed-wire fence, but the strands were widely separated and easy to step through. I held the fence open for Børge, then let myself in and walked slowly toward the window. The rifle was still there, dangling on a belt from the post of an empty bed. But in the next room, his back to us, was a German soldier, busily polishing his windows with a rag! He hadn’t seen us—yet.

  We froze in place and waited for our hearts to calm down. Then we exchanged nods, and I made my move. I slipped to the corner of the building, inched to the window, and reached inside for the rifle. I wrapped my hand around it, snatched it off the bedpost, and passed it out to Børge. The weapon was almost as long as he, but Børge got it bundled inside the coat and began walking away—not running, just an even stride. As I backed away I could hear the German next door, still rattling the room with the fury of his window washing. In a flash we were back over the fence and Mogens had the rifle wrapped in the raincoat on his bike. A postman and two women stood on the street staring
at us as we took off. I met one of the women’s eyes. They told me she had seen the whole thing. She appeared conflicted. Would they start yelling or hold their tongues? We didn’t hang around to plead our case, but we didn’t hear any kind of alarm behind us as we rode away.

  We took narrow streets back to the monastery. Again and again Mogens had to stop to readjust the coat, because both ends of the rifle kept sticking out. When the monastery came in sight, we whistled our arrival, threw the bikes against the gate, and ran the bundle inside. We lowered the coat onto Jens’s bed and unwrapped the prize. It was a beautiful rifle, the stock polished and the barrel clean. Now we had a significant weapon, a long-range killing machine. We had to sort out what it meant but not right now. The three of us were exhausted. We called a meeting for the following afternoon. It would be the most important yet.

  * * *

  The Churchill Club had full attendance the next day. The meeting began with a detailed report of the rifle’s liberation, from the window-washing Nazi to the witnesses. Everyone got to hold the weapon, look down its barrel, feel the balanced weight of the deadly machine, and imagine a Nazi within its sights. All of the boys shared in the satisfaction that at least one good weapon had changed sides of the ledger.

  Then the discussion became more serious.

  Barracks of a Danish volunteer army corps that assisted the German army with guard duty and sabotage prevention

  KNUD PEDERSEN: We had done something different yesterday, more significant than anything we’d done yet. Yes, the pistol we’d stolen from the German car downtown was important, but a pistol offers only a few shots at close range. A rifle would let us snipe, to attack or cover each other from long distance.

  We had reached a crossroads. The question before us was: Should we continue along the same path, defacing and destroying German property, or should the main job of a Churchill Clubber now be to build a cache of weapons and train ourselves to use them against our German occupiers? To choose the latter would not mean that we would cease to burn their cars and buildings. But our new emphasis would be weapons.