The Boys Who Challenged Hitler Read online

  My mind drifted: What would my life be like if Germany won? If Hitler had his way we’d be part of an Überreich, held up to the world as a master race, with defeated people forced to work as slaves to satisfy their masters. If the bloody Nazis won, the Churchill Club, or something like us, would have to move even further underground. Someone would have to keep hope alive. We would be forced to continue resisting in an occupied country after the war.

  I wished I had someone to talk with about all this. Sure, Jens was my brother and he shared the danger of our work, but he wasn’t someone I could confide in. We competed over everything. It could get ridiculous. Back in Odense we both fell in love with the American movie star Deanna Durbin. We had one photo of her and we tore it in half so that neither of us could have her to himself. Same thing with our record player, a gramophone. It had a detachable crank arm that you had to use to get it started. I would take the record of Deanna Durbin singing, and Jens would grab the arm. We could only hear her when we were together—the last place we wanted to be.

  Deanna Durbin

  Børge shared my sense of humor, but he was too young and didn’t go to my school. And I was not all that close to the others in the Churchill Club, even though most were in my grade. We shared a common passion to awaken Denmark—that was enough.

  No, I wanted to open my heart to a particular someone special. Grethe Rørbæk was a student in the ninth grade, like me. Tall and blond, she wore no makeup but had a natural beauty and a wonderful smile. Though she was in my grade, I had no classes with her—she was in the advanced classes; I was in the B group. The closest we ever came to exchanging a word was a magical day we crossed paths in the yard between classes. She had a box of small sandwiches and stopped to offer me one. I couldn’t say a word. In fact, I was so flustered I didn’t even return to school that day. I walked home and lay down on the couch in Father’s office. Mother—without asking questions—served me warm tea and stayed with me.

  My shyness didn’t stop me from having heroic fantasies starring the two of us. One was set in Budolfi Square. The Churchill Club had climbed to the top of the church tower and we were hurling mortar shells and bombs onto the square below. Flames erupted from the German vehicles, one car setting the next ablaze in a furious chain of pyrotechnics. In the most glorious moment, I drove into the square in a small, open car. I stood up in the car with one foot on the seat, waving a pistol with my free hand. By now the square was an inferno. Bombs and exploding engines threw sheets of brilliant light, illuminating charred, frightened faces peering out from the shadows. I drove on through a hail of bullets. And suddenly, over the whine of lead, I heard a scream from the top floor of a building on the square. I looked up and there was Grethe, standing, eyes wide, her sweet hands pressed to her mouth, her slender form illuminated by fire. We locked eyes meaningfully, and then I lost sight of her.

  The fantasy usually popped about then, crushed beneath the weight of its own absurdity. The pitiful truth was, I had never had a serious conversation with any girl, not even my sister, Gertrud. When I first got to Cathedral School, I tried to impress girls by getting in fights. That’s the way you had gained status in my old school at Odense. But that had been an all-boys school, where you settled everything with your fists behind the school by the statue of the businessman Carl Frederik Tietgen. Now, I’d knock somebody down and look around and see girls backing away. They seemed horrified, not impressed. Finally, somebody convinced me I’d do better with girls by opening doors for them and inviting them to precede me in line, or figuring out how to help them with their coats. So far, nearly one semester into Cathedral School, that hadn’t worked any better. I was still light-years away from kissing my first girl, with no candidates on the horizon.

  There was just so much to think about. We of the Churchill Club were brave but naïve and undisciplined. Just days before, at a skating rink, Jens had skated up behind a German soldier and kicked him in the leg. The guy howled in pain and took off after Jens, who was chased down and taken to the police station. Now his name was enshrined in a registry of those who opposed the Nazis. Just what we needed.

  And it was only by the greatest good fortune that Helge had made it over the Limfjorden Bridge with our weapons, now buried in his garden. Had we taken too great a risk? There were so many near misses. What if the German soldier washing the windows had turned around to see me making off with the rifle? Would I have had to shoot him? Would I have known how? Was the rifle even loaded? What if the woman on the street had yelled for the police as we pedaled away? What if the German officer at Kristine had moved his body to block my way out of the coat closet?

  But there were even more ominous thoughts crowding my brain for headline space as I tried to relax in my room. Eigil’s older sister was a secretary with the Aalborg police. She was the only outsider who knew about us, and it was good to have a trusted mole embedded with the authorities. However, her news wasn’t good. The German command had issued an ultimatum to Danish police: either you identify and arrest whoever has been damaging our property and stealing our weapons, or we’ll find them ourselves, with drastic results for the criminals. If this continues, they were saying, Germany’s infamous secret state police force, the Gestapo, will take over the policing of Aalborg.

  Eigil’s sister said that two elite professional investigators had been sent up from Copenhagen and were now drawing closer every day. A witness from Café Holle—where we had lifted a German pistol—and two fishermen who had seen us steal weapons at the waterfront were directing investigators toward Cathedral School.

  Stop now, Eigil’s sister pleaded; lie low. She and her brother had a very strong personal interest at stake: theirs was the only Jewish family among the Churchill Club members. Eigil feared that his arrest could lead to capture by the Nazis and death for his entire family. Overnight, Eigil had suddenly gone from pushing us to go out on missions every day to begging us to close down. His nerves were raw and his emotions very turbulent.

  Lying low was the last thing I wanted. Norwegians were still fighting and dying, and Danes were still singing folk songs and buying King’s Badges. We were still occupied. The Germans seemed more at home in Aalborg by the day. If I had to go down, I wanted to go down fighting like the hero of my fantasies.

  Flames flickered from the tiny stove in my room at the monastery. The German guard outside my window kept pacing robotically, back and forth, and finally, many hours after our meeting had concluded, I fell asleep.

  Knud’s diagram of the plan for the Nibe attack

  9

  The Nibe Offensive

  Early in May 1942, Børge decided on his own to try out a new recruit for the Churchill Club. Perhaps he had visions of starting his own club; his motive was never clear to the others. The candidate was a friend from Nibe, the small town outside of Aalborg where Børge lived. He gave this boy, who was only thirteen, a can of blue paint and told him to go paint the club’s insignia—the swastika with arrows proclaiming the rebellion against the Nazis—all over town. But Nibe was a close-knit community in which everybody knew each other. Within minutes the boy was in police custody, getting his ears boxed by an officer who warned him to forget his childish fantasies of revolution. The officer gave the boy a wire brush and a bucket of suds and ordered him to get busy removing the paint from all the walls he had defaced.

  As he scrubbed the boy became angrier and angrier. By the time he was finished he had conceived a plan. He told Børge of a remote German guard post, an armed tower in the sand dunes on the outskirts of town. It had a searchlight that swept back and forth for great distances to give the Germans a view out over the North Sea toward England. The post was manned by three German soldiers who lived together in a nearby barracks.

  The angry boy proposed to use the Churchill Club’s weapons to kill the German soldiers. The Nibe offensive—as he called it—would show the world who was a child and who meant business. Intrigued, Børge went to Aalborg to try the proposal out on the rest of t
he Churchill Club.

  KNUD PEDERSEN: When our anger at Børge for trying out a new recruit without telling us—“What were you thinking!?”—subsided, we coldly considered the proposal to shoot the German guards at Nibe. It wasn’t the first time the club had mulled over a killing. Weeks before, another member had advocated stabbing a German guard in the back, but he was shouted down by others who said such an act would violate our code of fair play: An enemy must have a chance.

  On the one hand, this idea of Børge’s was the same sort of thing—a sneak attack. And it also violated a second key club proposition: Never kill for personal revenge. But on the other hand, the club’s mission included a vow to minimize the Germans who had stolen our country. How could one minimize them more than by erasing them? Besides, now we had weapons. Were we ever going to use them, or did we just intend to let them rust in Helge’s parsley garden and the monastery cellar until the British came to liberate us?

  The motion for the Nibe offensive was raised, and the action was approved by the members. I helped Børge draw up an attack diagram, but I refused to go with him. I did not favor his mission. Besides, we had an action planned in Aalborg at the railway yard for the same evening—a military-style attack that would use our new weapons. I told Børge our strike was much more important than biking out to Nibe to quench some boy’s bloodlust. But Børge had his mind made up. I didn’t waste time trying to dissuade him.

  * * *

  Børge later told Knud that he took off for Nibe with two companions, one the angry boy and the other a Churchill Club regular who volunteered to go. They stopped at Helge’s garden to pick up the machine gun and a pair of pistols, then continued on.

  German anti-aircraft gun position, 1940, with a Danish farmer tilling his field in the foreground

  The boys arrived at Nibe in the early afternoon. They stashed their weapons in a nearby Boy Scout hut and took a reconnaissance walk along the dunes in the late afternoon. They strolled up the hill toward the German barracks. Suddenly the door kicked open from the inside and one of the German soldiers appeared, not in a crisp military uniform, but in shirtsleeves and suspenders, smoking his pipe. He was quickly joined by his mates. The three jolly soldiers saluted the kids, wished them a good afternoon, and waved them to come up. The group stood outside in the sunshine and had a cordial conversation. These guys clearly didn’t get much company way out there, and they were happy to see the boys. They talked about their grandchildren back in Germany. It got harder and harder to view them as part of Hitler’s deadly Wehrmacht. By the time he got back to the hut, Børge was deeply conflicted. Why kill these three grandfathers? Is that really the war he wanted to fight? But they were on a mission to take out these particular German guards. They’d been authorized to do it, and now they were duty-bound. A mission was a mission.

  When darkness fell they carried their weapons to a drainage ditch at the bottom of a grassy hill below the German barracks. They spread out into three columns—Børge front and center with the machine gun, and the other two flanking him with pistols. The plan was to crawl through the grass on their bellies up the hill. When they got close enough, they would pause. Then on a time count they would smash through the door and open fire.

  As they slithered through the wet grass, Børge tried to put himself in the mind-set of a warrior. This was necessary, he reminded himself. This would show the Germans what April 9 was all about. This would wake up the docile Danes. He could see the newspaper headline: “Germans Shot Down with Their Own Weapons by Young Boys!” The light from a single candle inside the barracks danced with every step closer. Thirty meters from the structure, there was still no sound. Børge’s hands were trembling. And then, suddenly, the door opened. One of the old men came out on the porch and looked around. Had he heard something?

  The soldier stood for a while, then closed the door behind him, walked across the dune grass to the guard station, and climbed up the ladder to his listening post. Now the target was spread out—two Germans in one building, one in another. All three were above them. The boys’ chances of mission success had just plummeted. Now it looked more like a suicide mission than a carefully conceived assault.

  Their thoughts swiftly turned from murder to escape. They lay motionless for what felt like hours, pressed down flat in the grass. They were wet, cold, and terrified. The German up in his listening post at the lighthouse surely had a rifle. After a time they began to inch backward down through the grass, bodies cramped with tension. It took nearly a half hour to reach the ditch, and longer to creep back to their hut. Once safely inside, the boys attacked one another verbally, each blaming the others for chickening out.

  Exhausted and humiliated, Børge stormed out of the hut and took off on his bike, leaving the others behind. He dreaded telling the rest of the Churchill Club of the Nibe offensive’s failure—but more than that he hungered to be part of the night’s activities in Aalborg. Børge sped fifteen miles through the dark countryside hoping to reach the Aalborg railway yard in time to take part in what promised to be the Churchill Club’s biggest and most daring action yet.

  Police photo of railroad freight car targeted by the Churchill Club

  10

  Grenades

  Though the Wehrmacht’s hobnailed boots echoed through Aalborg’s streets, though a blue cloud of gasoline and oil from German transport wagons hung over the city, though Eigil’s sister insisted that detectives were but a breath away from the Churchill Club—it was still spring. The air had warmed, and the days were long and bright at last. The oldest Cathedral School students were just a few days from graduation. Helge, Eigil, Knud, and the Professor would be moving into high school at last—if they could pass their finals. The young saboteurs kept up their resistance work even as they crammed for exams. Classmates had no clue what was going on. Instructors constantly reminded students that they were growing in experience and responsibility. The instructors had no idea how right they were—at least for a few of them.

  A bright spot was that the Churchill Club suddenly acquired three important new allies, thanks to Uffe Darket. Every few evenings Uffe rode his bike downtown to attend meetings of a model-airplane-building hobby club. One night as he carved his parts and glued them together, Uffe fell into conversation with another plane builder named Alf Houlberg. Alf, his brother Kaj, and their friend Knud Hornbo were in their early twenties, factory workers from the nearby town of Brønderslev. They all were devoted to model airplanes.

  They kept chatting as they worked, until, after a time, Uffe took a chance and revealed his activities with the Churchill Club to Alf. Far from being shocked, Alf replied that the three of them shared Uffe’s disgust with the Danish authorities in this crisis. In fact, they had just stolen six mortar grenades from the railway station near their factory. Problem was, they couldn’t figure out how to make the bloody things work. Would the Churchill Club be able to use them?

  KNUD PEDERSEN: My brother brought the mortar rounds to the monastery in two heavy cases Uffe had given him. He was carrying them very carefully. The only thing I had ever heard about mortar grenades was that they exploded on contact. I told Jens to set them down on the bed gently. He accidentally nicked the bedpost with one of them, and our hearts about stopped. We lifted the lids. Inside each box were three objects that looked like iron bowling pins with wire caps smeared with fat. As usual, we didn’t know how to operate them. And as always, there was no one to teach us.

  Jens and the Professor immediately started to tinker with them in the Professor’s lab above Jens’s room. Their first idea was to take one of the grenades apart on a table and empty the explosive powder from it. But when they got the parts all spread out, they found that there was no powder inside. It was puzzling: the only thing we could figure was that Alf and his mates must have stolen practice grenades: dummies, not live munitions. The Professor and Jens resumed experimenting with the grenade components, inspecting them, combining them, turning them over and over, trying to make something happ
en. Then at the bottom of the grenade they found something interesting: a thin metal disc of seven or eight centimeters, held in place by a set of screws. Something about that disc just looked flammable.

  A match to the disc lit the Professor’s lab up like seven suns! They were yelling bloody murder, and the rest of us came running in with water. It took at least a minute to extinguish the flames. Through the heavy smoke the two great scientists were grinning like the triumphant fools they were.

  The two kept working. They came to realize that the discs themselves were made of highly flammable magnesium. All they had to do was light one with a match and they had a compact firebomb. I don’t know how we lived through those tests: Jens and the Professor were world champions in near-suicidal experiments with explosives, but this time they figured out how to control the materials. At last the Professor had made a weapon that worked.

  It was a big step, for grenades brought powerful dreams within reach. Now we could stage raids of our own.

  We set aside two grenades for our ultimate mission: destroying the German vehicles that lined the streets of Budolfi Square outside my window. At last we had the force to make it happen—well, maybe not exactly like my fantasy, where I came racing into the square with guns blazing and caught sight of Grethe in the tower, but at least the Nazi-fighting heart of it. Now we had the firepower to mount a serious assault.

  But first a field test.

  When darkness fell on the evening of May 2, 1942, five of us biked to the Aalborg rail yards, a hub of Nazi activity in Aalborg. It was a city of boxcars, lined up in rusted strings. Some containers were filled with ore from Norway and Sweden. Others were loaded with machine parts and components. Still others contained materials for the rapidly expanding Aalborg airport. The yard, lit with floodlights, screeched with the clamor of groaning engines and banging doors and wheels scraping on iron rails. Tonight’s mission was to use our new grenades to ignite boxcars and destroy their contents. We had high hopes.