The Boys Who Challenged Hitler Read online

  A chain-link fence patrolled by two armed guards kept the public away from the rail yard. A footpath ran in front of the fence. One of us would remain on the path as a sentry, chatting with the guards if necessary, clanging an alarm on a metal fence post if something went wrong. The others would cut a hole in the fence and enter the yard. Alf and Uffe would take positions beneath boxcars, each with a pistol trained on a guard. I and one other would go to work on the freight cars with the grenades.

  As we crept toward the fence we met a problem we hadn’t counted on. A pair of lovers had positioned themselves at one end of the path and were furiously making out. How could we flush them out without explaining why we wanted them to leave? We moved up close and stared, eyes wide, mimicking them. With middle fingers raised in farewell, they left for a more private place.

  We cut the fence and took our positions. Uffe slid underneath a boxcar and aimed his pistol at a guard. Another Clubber and I set to work picking out a likely boxcar to ignite. We walked to the middle of a train, figuring it would be harder for Germans to extract a flaming boxcar from the middle than to just uncouple one at the front or back.

  The first rusty old iron door screamed when I pulled it back. My eyes adjusted, and yes! It was full of airplane wings! Better still, there were paper drawings showing how to attach the wings to the fuselage of a plane. It was a jackpot target of tremendous value to the Nazis.

  I bunched up a pile of wing-assembly instructions and gingerly placed a grenade disc atop the pyre. Crouching in the doorway, I lit a match and tossed it backward onto the pile of paper. The flames ignited the disk quicker than I anticipated, and the explosion of fire hit me in midflight as I leaped from the boxcar. Flames were already consuming the paper and wings when I landed on the ground. My partner did the same to the next boxcar, and we ran crouching toward the fence. I whistled that the operation was complete, and we all squirmed back through the hole we’d cut in the fence.

  Just about that time, Børge came huffing in from Nibe on his bicycle, hours after his failed offensive. He was just in time to admire our work. We all backed into the darkness and watched events play out. Sirens began to scream throughout the city. Then German officers rushed past us toward the rail yard. There was a wild arm-waving discussion between the arriving Danish firemen and the German officers. At first the Danes refused to go into the area because they feared some of those boxcars contained live ammunition. The Germans, hands on pistols, insisted.

  Danish firemen started rolling out their hoses, but they moved very slowly, sometimes standing on the hoses once water began to flow. Brandishing their pistols, the Germans shouted at them to move, but it was obvious that the firemen were stalling to let the fire take hold and damage the Third Reich’s treasure. This moment was significant to us: Danish authorities—the firemen—were standing up to German orders. For the first time in a long while we felt a stirring of pride in our countrymen.

  It was our biggest success so far, the destruction of a major German asset. This was the closest we had come yet to a military-style action, one in which we were well armed and had a deployment strategy. It was satisfying to stand there seeing flames lick the night and to witness the discomfort it caused the scrambling Germans. But if we had known what was about to come, we would not have been standing around admiring our work.

  We would already have been in motion.

  A portion of the Churchill Club’s weapons cache, including the six mortar grenades

  11

  No Turning Back

  KNUD PEDERSEN: During the entire first week of May 1942, our nerves were stretched taut. We were elated that we had pulled off the rail yard action, but anxiety mounted as Eigil’s sister warned us that the special security police had identified Cathedral School as the hub of sabotage activity in Aalborg. Now we glanced around anxiously wherever we went. We felt, or imagined, eyes upon us everywhere. We heard footsteps. We lived in an atmosphere of fear.

  All the tension boiled over one afternoon in Jens’s study. Eigil demanded through tears that we cease sabotage activity altogether. He accused us all of risking the lives of his family, since his mother was Jewish. Hitler would stop at nothing to erase the Jewish population. We would feel the same way, he insisted, if we were in his shoes. Jens was moved to support him. Børge and I would hear none of it. We were single-minded. Nothing has changed, we said. Danes are still lapdogs. Germans are still swine. Norwegians still resist. So, therefore, will we. We will never turn back. Enough of this: let us return our attention to the Nazi roadsters lined outside the post office on Budolfi Square.

  While bright birds sang cheerfully and flowers burst into bloom outside our windows, we stayed inside and tore ourselves apart that afternoon. The club was deeply and bitterly divided. Jens and I nearly came to blows and had to be held apart. Finally, I stormed out with Børge beside me, slamming the door behind us. Jens and the others stayed behind.

  * * *

  About five o’clock on the afternoon of May 6, waitress Elsa Ottesen at Café Holle in downtown Aalborg saw two teenage boys enter the restaurant, walking briskly. Heads down, they made a beeline for the coat closet and emerged from it a very short time later. They strode straight out of the restaurant without ordering a thing. Looking through the café’s picture window, Mrs. Ottesen saw them talking on the street.

  A few minutes later a German officer dining at the café discovered that his gun was missing. He had placed his belt and holster—with the pistol inside—on a shelf in the café’s coat closet. After his meal, he went to recover his sidearm and found that the holster was empty. He angrily reported this misfortune to the full restaurant staff, which sparked Mrs. Ottesen’s memory of the two boys who entered the coat closet.

  Mrs. Ottesen gave a detailed statement to police. Yes, she’d seen these boys before. They had been in the restaurant a few times, always preoccupied with the coat closet, never ordering. Several times she’d seen them clustered around their bicycles out in front of the café, talking. At least twice she’d seen them peering through their framed fingers into the café window. One of them—very tall—combed his thick hair with a dramatic upsweep. She thought she could recognize him if she saw him again.

  KNUD PEDERSEN: School let out at three on Friday, May 8. Another week down, just a few days left till summer break. I was walking out through the school gate with Helge, jabbering about something when I caught sight of a sharply dressed gentleman across the street with a lady at his side. Both seemed to be staring straight at us. I had never seen them before, but their eyes never left us. To create a distraction while I got a better look at them, I pulled my long black comb from my pocket and swept it up through my hair. It was the kiss of death. “It’s him,” Mrs. Elsa Ottesen no doubt said to her companion. “The tall one.”

  I said to Helge, “See that guy in a suit we just passed? He’s following us. Don’t look back. Let’s stop for a minute.” We stopped. They stopped, too, the man staring intently through a grocery store window as though turnips were all that mattered in the world. We sprinted around a corner and stopped again. Moments later, the man came skidding around the same corner and nearly crashed into us. “Security Police!” the man barked. “May I see your identification cards?” It was an order, not a request.

  Hours later, the front doorbell rang at the monastery. When our maid opened it a crack, police shouldered through and bulled straight into Jens’s room, shouting that he was under arrest. Jens had a fully loaded pistol in his desk drawer but wisely kept his hands away from it.

  “Where are the weapons?” the officers demanded. Jens stood up and led them straight to the cellar to our secret weapons cache.

  By midnight they had us all. Eleven were arrested, six from Cathedral School, plus Børge and Uffe from other schools. Børge was soon separated from us because, at fourteen, he was too young to be imprisoned under Danish law. They also nabbed Alf and Kaj Houlberg and Knud Hornbo, the three older factory workers from Brønderslev who had given us t
he mortar grenades. Police separated us and interviewed us one at a time at the Aalborg police station. Soon every room was chattering with the sound of Remington typewriters taking down the testimony of boys lying through their teeth. The police got ever angrier as they tore paper from the rolls, wadded it up, and threatened the suspects with harsher punishment if they continued to lie.

  Two cops—the two detectives from Copenhagen—led me into an office, pointed to a chair, and shut the door. The subject on their mind was grenades. Where did we get them?

  “Well,” I said, “I met a fellow during intermission at the movies. He happened to mention that he had some grenades, and I asked if we could use them.”

  “What was his name?”

  “He didn’t mention his name.”

  One of them came across the room, took me up by my shoulders and slammed me into a wall. “Your father is a priest!” he shouted, his beet-red face no more than two inches from mine. “He tells you it is a sin to lie! And you are lying to me! Now, you tell me, boy … what is the name of the person who gave you the grenades?”

  I insisted I didn’t know.

  “Well, then, what did he look like?”

  I told them—brown curly hair and brown eyes. And that’s all I gave them about Alf, one tiny little fact. When we were finished I was feeling pretty good about myself—I had held my tongue under fierce questioning. Of course the investigators went to the next captive and asked, “What is the name of the guy with the brown curly hair who gave you grenades?”

  “Alf,” said someone.

  And so on. Soon, working one boy against another, interviewing them alone, they had Alf and Kaj’s last name, and Knud Hornbo’s as well. We were interviewed so professionally that we gave them information even as we thought we were cleverly concealing it. Also, our stories kept crossing and it was impossible to keep lying.

  * * *

  The boys’ parents began to arrive in the early evening. Some had been home when police burst in and hauled their boys brusquely away. Others were just now finding out and racing, panic-stricken and confused, to the station. They were received by the police commissioner, an elderly white-haired man named C. L. Bach. Tears of sympathy filled his eyes as he escorted each set of parents to his office and did his best to explain.

  KNUD PEDERSEN: Our parents were mute, speechless, shocked. None of them knew a thing about the Churchill Club and our activities. Their eyes widened as the commissioner told them what their supposedly bridge-playing sons had really been doing over the past six months. And the parents did not know each other, which only added to the strangeness of the atmosphere. Some of them—factory owners, doctors, lawyers, the most prominent figures of the city—had never been in a police station before.

  My parents bustled into the station formally dressed from a wedding, Mother with her pearls and Father in his tuxedo. They had been summoned to a phone at the wedding and, when informed that their sons had been arrested, had made it to the police station within five minutes. Though Jens and I were proud of what we had done—standing up for our country—it was hard to look our parents in the eyes that night. Some parents repeated again and again, “How could you?” But not ours. They cared first and foremost that we were safe and that we had not been treated roughly in the arrest. Jens and I didn’t expect that our parents would reprove or punish us for what we had done. They were activists, public people, community leaders who viewed this family misfortune as just one more example of the unhappiness that war brings. As the saying goes, “In peacetime, the children bury their parents. In wartime, the parents bury their children.” Surely they were proud of us.

  Police questioned us all through the night. It was amazing how much information the offer of a single cigarette could produce at midnight when you had been smokeless all day long. At two in the morning, the police were finally satisfied. There were some actions that we managed to keep hidden, but they got most of it out of us. Each boy had to sign a written statement. Still cocky, though we could barely hold our heads up, some of us signed with artistic flourishes that swept up over our names.

  Finally just before dawn we were herded into a police van with armed guards and transported to the King Hans Gades Jail—Aalborg’s city jail—where we turned in our belongings and were locked into cells. We were given prison gowns and told to place our clothes on a chair outside the cell. My cellmate was Jens. As soon as the guard went away we went to the window and tried the bars. Thick, square, and solidly rooted they were. I lay down on a mattress and my eyes soon closed. It would be a long time before I slept as a free man again.

  Photograph posed for Hitler in the yard of King Hans Gades Jail: Knud (1), Jens (2), Mogens F. (3), Eigil (4), Helge (5), Uffe (6), Mogens T. (7), Børge (no number); man at right unknown

  12

  King Hans Gades Jail

  KNUD PEDERSEN: A very few hours later I was jolted awake by the voice of a guard. “Put on your clothes. You are going to court! Now.”

  I rubbed my eyes and looked around. Jens had grabbed the only bed; I had fallen asleep on a floor mattress. Pale light filtered in through a barred window high in one of the four walls. At the other end of our small, oblong cell was a solid door with no handle and a peephole covered on the outside—so that the guards could check on us but we couldn’t see out. A table and a stool were bolted to the linoleum floor. That was it. Home.

  We were transported to court by bus with Danish uniformed police guards, one guard for each of us. Outside the bus window the streets were filled with people bustling to work and school as usual, except, of course, that under German occupation they were no freer than we were.

  The courtroom was a solemn square chamber with high windows and a polished linoleum floor. It took only a few minutes for the judge, barely looking up from his papers, to extend our confinement by four weeks and send us back to our cells.

  * * *

  As Knud and the others were being transported to and from court, Rector Kjeld Galster, the Cathedral School principal, stood before the students at morning assembly and informed them that six of their classmates had been arrested overnight and charged with sabotage against the German Army. He read their names out: Knud Pedersen. Jens Pedersen. Eigil Astrup-Frederiksen. Helge Milo. Mogens Fjellerup. Mogens Thomsen. Your classmates, he said, are now behind bars at King Hans Gades Jail.

  Cathedral School principal, Rector Kjeld Galster

  Some students rose from their seats and ran out of the building. Teachers stood aside. Students massed outside the jail chanting and cheering for their classmates.

  The boys, in court, did not hear them.

  Other students remained at school, deeply shaken. One later wrote, “The announcement was completely shocking to us. These six guys who, as late as the day before yesterday had walked among us at school, learned their lessons with us, and played with us on the school grounds, had in their nonschool time made sabotage against the Germans … The rector urged us to go to our classes and resume our work. But it was hard … We developed a gruesome picture of the fate our companions would share. We sat and looked across the empty benches where our arrested comrades used to sit. One of our teachers sat for an hour with his head buried in his hands and did not say a word to us.”

  Another Cathedral teacher found something constructive to do with the powerful feelings that seized him when he heard the news. It was Knud’s shop teacher. He knew that Knud hated shop class and had no interest in woodworking. For almost a semester now he had yelled at Knud, berating him as lazy, calling him inept in front of the other students. Regret overwhelmed him. Out of deep admiration for what the boy had been doing, he set to work on finishing Knud’s class project. And when he was finished, he delivered a finely crafted table to the monastery and left it as a gift for the Pedersen family.

  * * *

  Word of the sabotage cell and the boys’ arrest swept quickly through the city of Aalborg.

  Gossip raged in shops, offices, schools, and factories.

/>   Behind the scenes, German and Danish officials were already engaged in tense negotiations. These were the first sabotage arrests in Denmark during the war—all eyes would be on this case. The big question was: Who would conduct the trial, Denmark or Germany? If the boys were convicted, under which system of justice would they be punished? If German authorities issued the sentences, the boys could wind up in pitiless work camps at best. At worst, should Hitler decide to treat them as public examples of what happened to people who dared to resist, they could be executed. If the Churchill Club was tried in Danish court, the Danes’ German masters would surely insist on quick convictions and harsh sentences to show the world that the Third Reich meant business.

  And there was something else at stake: the deal between Germany and Denmark. Many Danes were content with the occupation. Money was being made; their homes were still standing. For their part, German soldiers and officers were well fed, had the run of Denmark’s cities, and barely had to lift a finger to preserve the status quo. No troops were needed to police the Danes; the mere threat of German military might kept them in line. For many on both sides it was a sweet arrangement. But these boys had stirred things up, and how they were handled was important. On the one hand, the Germans did not want to arouse public anger by crushing these Danish youths, but on the other hand, they couldn’t appear to be weak either. It was a very delicate situation.