The Boys Who Challenged Hitler Read online

  It was a spirited discussion, with everyone joining in except the Professor, who rarely said anything. But in the end we agreed that if our goal was to awaken Denmark, we must get weapons. And as our operations increased in scale and complexity, we would need firepower to cover each other. Finally, if the war turned in our favor and British troops came to liberate us from Germany’s grasp, wouldn’t it be great to have weapons to share with British troops on the day their fighting forces arrived to liberate us? With weapons, we would be able to fight side by side with our allies. In the end we were of one heart: in the words of the French national anthem, “Aux armes, citoyens!” “To arms, citizens!” Weapons! We must get weapons!

  But where to find them? One kid proposed that if we just kept riding around, other weapons would appear. Look what has just happened for Knud, he said. Another countered with a story about a small boy who had found a dead bird. He buried the bird and, proud of himself, made a cemetery for more dead birds. Then he went out to find others. But he couldn’t. Finding the first bird had been a one-time event, a stroke of happenstance and luck. The point of the story was that if we were to develop an arsenal of weapons we couldn’t just rely on luck. We had to think strategically about where German weapons were concentrated, and how to get them.

  We made a list of the most likely German gathering places where weapons might be lifted. There were always German officers in the pastry shops downtown. The train stations were good for ammunition boxes. The waterfront teemed with armed soldiers. And now that the weather was warming and windows were likely to be open, a regular inspection of German barracks would be a must.

  We composed the next day’s patrols and adjourned our meeting to go home and study for our midterm examinations.

  Parading German soldiers

  7

  Whipped Cream and Steel

  By the spring of 1942, Aalborg, with its airport and harbor, had become a way station for many thousands of German soldiers headed to Norway to safeguard shipments of iron ore from Swedish mines to German factories. Hitler also used Aalborg as a place for German soldiers to rest and recover from battling the Soviet Union on the savage eastern front, where fighting had begun the previous summer.

  The eastern front of World War II saw conflict on a colossal scale beginning in June 1941, when Hitler’s army invaded Russia. The campaign pitted European Axis powers—led by Germany—and Finland against the Soviet Union, Poland, Norway, and other Allied forces.

  It was the largest-scale military confrontation in history. There were ferocious battles, marked by wholesale destruction and immense loss of life due to combat, starvation, exposure, disease, and massacres. Of the estimated seventy million deaths attributed to World War II, over thirty million, including civilians, occurred on the eastern front.

  Any German soldier pulled from the eastern front to rest and recover in Aalborg had to count his blessings.

  Day by day, German soldiers streamed in and out of the city. Many were bound for Norway, sleeping for a few nights in makeshift barracks set up in schools and churches until they were ordered onto transport ships. Each soldier was armed, and each weapon was now an object of interest to the Churchill Club. The boys in the club soon found they were just as good at stealing weapons as they were at arson. “Getting guns was no trick at all,” one of the boys later recalled. “We’d accost soldiers after a parade or at a railway station and while a couple of us engaged them in friendly conversation, the others would steal the rifles they’d propped against a wall or bench.”

  KNUD PEDERSEN: Day by day our arsenal of stolen knives, guns, and bayonets grew. We hid them in the monastery basement and went down to check on them all the time. Our parents never caught on. Mother and Father were alarmed by my sliding grades, but they were happy to see me make new friends and probably took it as a good sign that we all spent so much time at the monastery rather than at someone else’s house.

  Germans kept arriving in Aalborg. The rows of their vehicles that lined the streets grew longer and longer. They seized the best hotel in town—the Hotel Phoenix—as their command center.

  At the docks we observed hundreds of German soldiers marching down to Aalborg harbor and lowering themselves into the bottoms of old freight ships bound for Norway. As much as we hated the Germans, it was hard not to have a little feeling for the common soldiers heading off to battle. Many of them didn’t seem much older than us.

  When a ship was fully loaded a net was stretched over the top of the hull so that bodies wouldn’t come to the surface if the vessel was sunk by torpedoes from British submarines lying in wait just beyond the Limfjorden. In fact, it became unpopular to eat hornfish, which were green, because it was said they got their color from drowned German soldiers in green uniforms.

  We spent a lot of time at the docks, straddling our bikes, arms folded on the handlebars, squinting out like hawks for weapons left unguarded by German soldiers boarding their ships. Sometimes soldiers would lay their weapons on the ground within our reach, and we would snatch them like gulls after crumbs. Their naval officers were always waving their arms and shouting at us to scram, but they never shot at us. We would flee full-speed, and come back in due time.

  The focus on weapons simplified our work: we knew what we were after. We became bolder. One day a few of us saw a German officer’s car roll to a stop in the middle of a downtown street. The exasperated driver jumped out of the cabin and stormed around front to crank the engine back into life. As he was cranking, Børge ran to the open car door, grabbed his bayonet dangling from a peg inside, and walked away.

  It wasn’t just small weapons we were after; we had big eyes, too. One evening several of us cycled over the Limfjorden Bridge to Noerresundby with the goal of destroying an antiaircraft cannon—the Germans called it a “flak cannon.” It was boldly positioned on the harbor embankment, its great long barrel always thrust toward the sky for all to see. But for all its self-importance, it wasn’t guarded at night. Our plan was to hoist it out of its boxlike foundation, carry it down to the docks, and heave it into the Limfjorden.

  German planes over the Limfjorden

  We had gotten it up out of its box and had just become comfortable with the weight of it when we heard our guard whistle. We dropped the monster and scattered. The threat turned out to be an ordinary Danish cyclist. Chewing out our guard for alerting us for so little, we returned to the box and lifted the cannon again. Staggering, we got it about halfway down to the dock before we heard another whistle. This time it was a German guard, and we could see the barrel of his rifle sticking out of his pack as he carefully made his rounds. That was it. We dropped the cannon and pranced away toward our bikes, swearing loudly at the Germans and using crowbars and hammers to smash the windows of their buildings as we left. He heard us, of course, and gave chase. He turned out to be in great shape! We ran for our lives, ditching our bikes, with the guard bellowing at us to halt and firing shots in the air. That night we stayed in Noerresundby rather than risk the bridge, and the next morning we sneaked back to retrieve our bikes.

  * * *

  Late in March the boys stole several hundred cartridges for their new rifle from a cargo delivery truck at the train depot, by far the best place to find ammunition. They continued to take pistols and bayonets from loosely attended touring cars and open-windowed barracks.

  KNUD PEDERSEN: Restaurants were the ripest pickings of all. The Germans had free run of downtown Aalborg, and they really took it over. Booted, helmeted, and heavily armed, they shopped for meat, vegetables, wine, and tobacco alongside ordinary Danes. It was hard to be at ease around them in a small shop, or to defend your position in line against armed goons. Merchants who sold to them were reviled by many as traitors. These storekeepers didn’t care; there was money to be made.

  Our occupiers were crazy about the local taverns and restaurants. Danes are famous for their pastries, and German officers soon discovered the konditori (pastry shop) Kristine, regarded as the finest in Aalbo
rg. Kristine was famous throughout the city for light, delicious whipped cream cakes. Men of the Third Reich removed their hats, hung up their coats and weapons in the cloakroom, and settled into red padded sofas until they were called to their tables. The officers then slid into high-backed, upholstered wooden chairs, placed their orders, and smoothed fresh linen napkins over their laps. This surely beat the eastern front.

  Kristine, a konditori (pastry shop) in Aalborg where German officers often gathered

  One night four of us slipped past the receptionist at the front door and found our way into Kristine’s unguarded coatroom at the top of a staircase. Hanging on the racks was a jungle of fine woolen coats, sleeves sticking out. Hats rested on the shelf above. Some commanders had draped their holstered belts over the hooks as well. It was our great hope that some holsters would still contain German pistols, called Lugers. Two of us took one side of the closet, two the other, thrashing through the heavy wool waistcoats as fast as we could. Every now and then someone would find a gun belt with an empty holster, but success was elusive. The others had already gone back outside when my fingers came to rest around a gleaming black pistol: I was turning it over and over in my hands when I felt someone pushing through the coat sleeves in my direction. I slipped the gun into my pocket and backed out past a German officer with a polite smile and a little bow. I was gone before he could react.

  Moments later I was surrounded by the other three Churchill Clubbers out in the street.

  “What happened?”

  “Only this,” I said.

  One by one they thrust their hands into my pocket and felt the grand prize. When we got back to the monastery, I tossed the shiny black Luger and two full magazines onto the table.

  * * *

  The club’s biggest triumph of all came as a matter of good luck and persistence. One afternoon the boys were riding out by the harbor when Knud noticed two Germans standing on an observation platform and looking out at the harbor through binoculars. About fifty meters behind them was a barracks building with a couple of open windows. Knud skirted behind them and pedaled up close to the building. There, through the open windows, was a machine gun in plain view on a cot. The boys had no automatic weapons, so this would be a new dimension. In many ways the job looked like the rifle heist, but there were important differences.

  KNUD PEDERSEN: Even from a distance the machine gun looked way too heavy and bulky to transport on a bike. Also, the two lookout soldiers were dangerously close to the barracks, but at least we could see where they were.

  Børge and I returned to the monastery and got a three-wheeled bicycle with a cart on the back. We pedaled it back to the harbor and ditched it as close to the barracks building as we could. Then I went in through the open window and handed the heavy semiautomatic weapon out to Børge. I was about to climb back out when I noticed two canvas bags in the room, one bigger than the other. I figured the heavy one must contain the ammunition, so I passed it out, too, and we took off. We got down to the bottom of a hill, and then we crashed the three-wheeler, spilling the gun onto the road. We looked up behind us, terrified, but the soldiers were still intently focused on the harbor.

  We took the stuff to a nearby Boy Scout hut and emptied the contents of the bag. The gun was magnificent, and there were many bullets, but there was one problem: there was no magazine, the chamber that holds a supply of cartridges to be fed automatically to the gun. Without a magazine the bullets could not be delivered to the weapon and the bloody thing was useless. At our after-school meeting there were howls of laughter.

  Stolen machine gun

  “Great resistance men you are!”

  “Just what we need! A bullet collection!”

  But it brought to light once again a naked truth: we had no experience with weapons. Most of us didn’t even know what a magazine was. We decided that it was unsafe to go back for the magazine since they’d surely be on the lookout for whoever stole the weapon. We’d have to chalk this up to experience.

  But I couldn’t stand it. I went back the following day and snatched the other canvas bag, which indeed contained the magazines. There was also a coffee cup in the room that hadn’t been there the day before, and a box with the word Krautkasten written on it. I figured Krautkasten meant “gunpowder” or something. I grabbed it, too, and hauled it back to the monastery. When we pried it open, hearts racing, we found dirty underwear. Krautkasten was the name of the soldier who lived in the room.

  * * *

  By mid-April 1942 the club had amassed an arsenal of knives, bayonets, pistols, rifles, and of course the machine gun. With no military training, and with no one to trust, the boys all struggled to learn to shoot.

  KNUD PEDERSEN: Each Sunday morning Jens and I practiced shooting the guns in the gigantic open loft at the top of the monastery during Father’s church services. We would lie on our stomachs, waiting for the organ music to swell, and when it did we’d blast away, firing at targets positioned in the hay on the other side of the loft. The machine gun was a Schmeisser, a weapon that German forces had used to shoot thousands of innocent people during the war. It came with a tripod. A setting allowed you to fire one shot at a time, which was helpful in our circumstance, when a hymn could suddenly subside or end altogether.

  We never tired of handling the weapons. Several times, shots discharged by accident while we were just messing around in someone’s room, nearly ending it all for one or more of us.

  Eigil actually put a bullet through his trousers one afternoon in Jens’s room. Luckily, the bullet missed his leg, and there was no one from the rest of our family home to hear the explosion.

  By the end of April we had about twenty weapons in all, and 432 bullets. We divided up the bullets. I got 112. We always had pistols in our pockets now when we went out on our missions, but these weapons were returned to the monastery at the end of the day. One of our main rules was that no one could take a weapon into the school.

  We knew that if police ever caught us with German weapons it would be over. After a while it seemed insane to keep the entire arsenal in one place. We decided to divide the cache, stashing part of it in the monastery and part someplace far away. Helge Milo, who lived in the nearby suburb of Noerresundby, volunteered to keep some of the weapons in his family’s garden. It was an appealing idea, except that somehow we would have to transport the weapons across the Limfjorden Bridge with its guard checkpoints at both ends—the one we had crossed to do the Fuchs job at the airport a month or so before.

  No one could come up with a better plan. So one evening we packed Helge with weapons from the monastery, taping pistols to his torso and stuffing his clothing with ammunition. When we were done we stood back and looked at him. You could see the outline of a rifle through his trouser leg. The machine gun was under his buttoned jacket, causing him to bend almost double over the handlebars when he got on his bike. The ammunition was concealed in boxes beneath a coat on the luggage rack. It was the best we could do. We posted three Churchill Clubbers on either side of the bridge.

  Nervously, we at the monastery pushed Helge off and watched him weave his way toward the bridge, his first wobbly strokes making him look like a child just learning to ride. From time to time he had to get off the bike and walk a few steps with rifle-stiffened legs. It was clumsy for him to reboard. This didn’t look good. What would happen when he got to the heavily guarded bridge? What if he was asked for an identity card and searched? Somehow, he cleared the first checkpoint. The three Clubbers awaiting him at the Noerresundby side at first mocked his hunched-over posture and stiff leg as he approached, but their laughter died quickly as they, too, realized this was a serious and perhaps decisive matter.

  The Churchill Club trios at both ends of the Limfjorden Bridge held their collective breath as our comrade Helge, packing hard-won assets, tottered up to the second guard station on the far side, paused, and was waved on through. Somehow he had made it!

  Drawing by Knud of art supplies that cluttered his room
at Holy Ghost Monastery

  8

  An Evening Alone

  KNUD PEDERSEN: One night after an especially raucous Churchill Club meeting I sat in my room with the door shut and tried to stop my head from spinning. It was amazing how suddenly the old monastery could go from bedlam to silence when the last member pulled the door shut behind him. I rubbed my hands together to keep warm. There wasn’t enough coal in Denmark to heat this place.

  I looked around my room. My living space was actually more a studio than a room. Canvases were stacked in corners, and sketches were strewn all over the floor. Paintbrushes protruded from cloudy water in jars that occupied nearly every flat space. I painted the way other guys played sports. Landscapes and portraits and abstractions covered my walls, the ceiling, even the window curtains. I had painted half a scene on my desk—now I realized I had never completed it.

  My parents saved money to send Jens—the family golden boy—off to college. And who could blame them? Jens was already respected as the best math student at Cathedral School. But my parents did something special for me as well. When we moved to Aalborg, Father opened up an account in my name at the local art store. I could purchase all the brushes and easels and tubes of paint I wanted. And as a result I could hardly make my way around this little room without putting a shoe through a canvas or knocking over a jar.

  But tonight I didn’t even feel like painting. There was too much to think about. War shadowed everything. I pulled the window curtain back: What were all those cars doing at Budolfi Square? The lines of vehicles kept getting longer and longer. Would they soon be on a transport ship to Norway, and then on another to cross the North Sea? Were the Germans staging to invade England? I glared at the German soldier guarding the post office. He shared a round-the-clock shift with two other soldiers. I could see one of them every time I looked outside.