The Boys Who Challenged Hitler Read online

  Three days after the boys were arrested, the Aalborg City Council delivered a contrite letter to German authorities apologizing for the Churchill Club’s behavior. Signed by the mayor, it said:

  Aalborg City Council has unfortunately received word that a number of young people who are pupils at the Cathedral School … have undertaken varying and extremely serious harassment of the German Army … On behalf of the people of the city, the City Council expresses deep regret … concerning these actions. This has given rise to sorrow and dismay in many homes, which—the council has been assured—had no idea of the illegal actions which have taken place. The City Council furthermore expresses their hope that what has taken place will not lead to serious consequences for the continuation of the good relationship between the German Army and the Danish State and Council Authorities.

  In the end, Germany allowed Denmark to conduct the trial, but with conditions. First, the Germans insisted that Rector Galster be removed as head of Cathedral School and banished from Aalborg. Second, the occupiers made it clear that during the trial a German observer would be in the courtroom at all times, watching carefully and reporting to Berlin. A judge and a prosecutor were summoned to Aalborg from the nation’s capital, Copenhagen, to conduct the trial of the Churchill Club.

  KNUD PEDERSEN: In jail we were treated differently from other prisoners. For one thing we were different from other prisoners—a pack of teenage boys from a private school. The police were used to drunks and thieves. Beyond that, we were behind bars for actions that some of our jailers deeply admired. We were star prisoners, receiving the best treatment our jailers could give us. Kristine, the pastry shop from which we had stolen three pistols, sent coffee over to us. Even Holle’s, the café whose waitress had ratted us out, started sending over cream cakes for us. And, even though we were in deep trouble, we had the cheer and energy of teens everywhere. We made the best of our situation. And we were deeply, to the core, irreverent.

  From time to time we were taken to see a doctor assigned to assess our mental health. It would have been convenient for Danish officials to report that tests indicated that insanity had driven us to sabotage. Our doctor looked deep into our eyes and asked such questions as “If I gave you ten thousand kroner, how would you spend it?” Alf told me he answered by saying, “Thank you, but that’s too much money. I’d feel better with five thousand.”

  The doctor gave us written exams to test our general knowledge:

  “Why do the seasons change between summer and winter?”

  “When did Queen Elizabeth reign?”

  “What is the capital of Portugal?”

  “What is gratitude?”

  Now that last question was interesting. One of us answered with “If I get ten years and stand up and say ‘Thank you,’ that will be gratitude.”

  We were permitted an hour outside in the prison yard every day. We would be in our cells reading and writing, or building model airplanes, or trying to sleep, when keys would rattle in the door and a jailer would shout, “Recreation time!” We were led into one of two cement dungeons with walls about ten feet high and mesh netting over the top. Some of us played chess, others played ball games. Once when we heard German soldiers tromping outside the walls, bleating one of their stupid farm ballads, we quickly countered with “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary,” the marching song made famous by British soldiers during the First World War. The Germans complained to the prison authorities.

  We wrote a letter to the police commissioner, seeking permission to smoke during outdoor time. “We ask you, dear commissioner, to let us smoke a single cigarette,” we wrote. “We promise to stub it out and promise not to take it into the cell. We guarantee you this promise will be kept.” We all signed it. And it worked!

  Every day we made up plays and skits that mocked the authorities. We played trial scenes over and over in the jail yard, imitating the court officials we were coming to know. The plays always ended with the death penalty to all of us—we put a white hanky over our hearts when we died—and, no doubt about it, we were deeply worried about being executed. We spent a lot of time discussing how they would do it. Shoot us? If so, all at once in a row or one by one? Would it hurt? For how long? Someone had seen a movie where Nazi-like thugs had executed a bunch of prisoners. The goons used the same shirt, which had a hole in the heart, and put it on each new prisoner to be shot so they wouldn’t have to dirty a new shirt each time. At King Hans Gades Jail we had one cell containing an older prisoner, a guy who said he had murdered his wife when he found out she was a Nazi. This guy pretended he knew everything about everything. He said he had heard that the suffering from execution could last for a half hour.

  Letter to the Aalborg police commissioner seeking permission to smoke a cigarette during outdoor time

  Each of us handled confinement differently. I was all nervous energy. I made a clutter of everything, strewing drawings all over the cell, while Jens was tidy by nature. This had been okay when we lived in separate rooms in the monastery, but now we were thrown together twenty-three hours a day in a tiny cell. For a while he blocked me out as best he could, trying to concentrate on reading The Brothers Karamazov. But one day he scowled over the book and told me to shut up. Soon we were nose to nose, voices rising as we blamed each other for doing things that got us all arrested.

  Jens: Why did you tell the police about the three guys from Brønderslev who gave us the grenades? You didn’t have to. We could have saved them!

  Me: I had to explain the grenades because you led police straight to our stash in the cellar.

  Jens: I didn’t show them the cellar. You told them about it.

  Me: All I told them was that you were my brother. And why did it even come up? Because you had the brains to trip a German skater on an ice rink and get yourself on an anti-Nazi watch list. What an idiot you are!

  Jens: Bloody Nazi!

  Me: Bloody Communist!

  Then we were swinging, two brothers who loved each other but who had been in a pressure cooker for more than half a year. All the Churchill Club meetings were at our home. All roads led to us. It just got to be too much, and it all came pouring out that afternoon.

  Everyone in the prison started yelling, and guards rushed in to separate us. They put Jens in the cell next door, locked in with Alf. There were sore feelings as we went to bed that evening, but in the end this arrangement allowed us to combine our talents productively.

  One day the guards summoned us to the prison yard for a photograph. We were surprised to see Børge again, the first time since the night of our arrest. He had been arrested like all of us, but was too young to be charged as an adult. He said he was spending his time in a youth correctional facility. We were each given a number to hold up in front of us and told to spread out side by side. We started to make fun of the whole thing as usual, but a guard brought us up short: “You’d better look as serious and sad as you can,” he said, “because these photos are going straight to Berlin. Hitler himself may see them. You would be very wise to wipe those smiles off your faces.” And we did. And suddenly Børge’s appearance made sense. As the youngest and most innocent-looking of us, he helped make the impression, one that Danish officials desperately sought to convey, that we were just innocent schoolkids who had been caught on a lark.

  * * *

  Knud and his fellow club members remained behind bars as spring turned to summer, and word of the Churchill Club’s arrest continued to spread throughout Denmark. Despite heavy German censorship, there was no keeping the Aalborg student saboteurs out of newspapers and radio broadcasts. Whatever their age, these Churchill Club boys were organized Danish resisters, the first flesh-and-blood evidence that Danes could stand up to the German occupation. Years later a Cathedral classmate wrote, “[Their arrest] came as a bombshell to us. Today it is difficult to imagine what an enormous impact the unveiling of the Churchill Club meant to the Danish population … The spiritual shock effect was tremendous and lasting.”


  In the privacy of their homes, people talked about these boys from Aalborg. Some Danes were embarrassed that it took young students to stand up to the Nazis. Some feared that the boys had made things worse for everyone by arousing the giant. One Aalborg newspaper columnist lashed the boys for “foolish acts against foreign troops … They are not heroes, but fools and rascals who, through their irresponsible and unconscionable behavior, are guilty of crimes that put our city and our country in further danger … They should be whipped until they learn to realize this.”

  In contrast, many were inspired. A leaflet circulated through Aalborg’s streets and shops urging citizens: “View the arrested young people and parents with sympathy! Show that you do not hate them for their actions, but rather consider them to be good Danish patriots who deserve the respect of all Danes. Create a supportive atmosphere, so the Germans will think twice about dragging them abroad or shooting them.”

  Kaj Munk, Denmark’s most famous poet and playwright, wrote a sympathetic letter to the Pedersens’ parents. The contents were published in an underground flyer that moved secretly throughout Denmark. Munk wrote: “Of course what [the boys] have done is wrong; but it is not nearly so wrong as when the government gave the country away to the invading enemy … Now it is time that good people in our Lord Jesus’s name must do something wrong … I pray to God to give them cheerfulness, endurance, and constancy in the good cause.”

  Letter from Kaj Munk to Edvard Pedersen

  * * *

  Kaj Munk

  Kaj Harald Leininger Munk, commonly called Kaj Munk (1898–1944), was a Danish playwright, poet, Lutheran priest, and activist.

  Munk’s plays were mostly written in the 1920s and performed during the 1930s. He wrote about deep subjects such as religion, Marxism, and Darwin’s view of evolution.

  Munk at first expressed admiration for Hitler’s success in getting Germans back to work during the Great Depression, but his attitude soured as he observed Hitler’s persecution of German Jews.

  His plays Han Sidder ved Smeltediglen (He Sits by the Melting Pot) and Niels Ebbesen were direct, powerful attacks on Nazism that aroused Hitler’s ire. The author was arrested and subsequently assassinated by the Gestapo on January 4, 1944.

  Kaj Munk

  Kaj Munk is a Danish national hero. He is commemorated each year as a martyr in the Calendar of Saints of the Lutheran Church on August 14.

  * * *

  * * *

  The Churchill Club boys gave testimony individually and in small groups for a period of about ten days throughout the early summer of 1942. The presiding judge was Arthur Andersen, an experienced jurist who had been specially called to Aalborg from the Copenhagen court. He was accompanied by his secretary, a man named Silkowitz, there to produce a written record of the trial. The Churchill Clubbers remember that throughout the trial the secretary constantly interrupted the judge, asking “Is this to be written down?” or “Am I to omit this part?”

  The German consul sat stiffly and in full uniform at a small writing table, carefully listening to testimony and jotting down notes. When his hand moved, eyes followed. There were no parents, journalists, or friends in the courtroom. The atmosphere was businesslike.

  KNUD PEDERSEN: We had two defenders. One was Lunøes from Copenhagen. We didn’t like him because he portrayed us as unruly children. Our local defender—from Aalborg—was a fat, jovial character named Knud Grunwald. He was always shouting and threatening us and warning us not to say anything against the Germans. Grunwald repeatedly came to see us in the jail, trying to prepare us for the trial. He would pace back and forth shouting, “Now you regret what you did, don’t you! Answer me! Do you regret it?” He would answer himself before we had a chance to make a sound. “You sure as hell do! You better remember that the German consul in Aalborg will report straight to Berlin. Hitler will hear about this! Remember that when you are in court!”

  Judge Andersen took a kinder, softer approach. One day he said to me, “Today, Knud, you’re going to tell about your activities in Odense. You can tell me everything because you were only fourteen years old at the time and cannot be punished for juvenile activities.” Of course I didn’t mention the names of the RAF Club members, which was what he wanted.

  The key to it all was the weapons; that’s what they cared about. Why had we stolen them? What were we going to do with them? Our defender, and surely our government, wanted us to testify that we collected them to keep as toys or souvenirs, to show off for our friends, or just to see if we could get away with it. We were just kids looking for adventure—that’s what they wanted us to say.

  During one of the sessions, Judge Andersen summoned four of us to stand before him and asked us one by one why we stole the weapons. When my turn came I told the court that the weapons were not playthings to us. We planned to use them to support the British when they came to liberate us. Grunwald leaped up and asked the judge for a recess until the next day. It was granted, and court was adjourned.

  That night Grunwald rushed into the jail and filled the building with his angriest speech yet. “You had almost made it!” he sputtered. “The judge could have ruled that you had no intention to use the guns! And then this idiot here—he pointed at me—testifies that your brilliant idea was to shoot the Germans with their own guns! You fool! Now I’m going to try to get you one more chance, and you’d better not mess up!”

  The next day, Grunwald asked the judge to repeat the questions from the day before. I saw the German representative stop his hand and look up when it came my time to answer.

  And of course I repeated exactly what I had said the day before.

  Alf Houlberg’s drawing of King Hans Gades Jail, showing the two exercise yards that were covered with netting

  13

  Walls and Windows

  KNUD PEDERSEN: Escape was on our minds from the very start. We were not helping our country resist the German occupation by remaining in confinement. Naturally, we tested every bar and brick and lock in that old jail. Even though we were supposed to surrender our clothing to the guards each night so we wouldn’t escape, we started hoarding and hiding shirts and trousers, so certain were we that somehow we’d find a way out of there.

  The top of the outdoor jail yard looked like the best bet. Though the yard was enclosed by thick, high stone walls, the top was capped only by a thin wire net. If you could reach it, you could cut it. We were left unguarded during our two daily thirty-minute outdoor sessions, so we had time to work. One morning I—the tallest—cupped my hands and boosted Uffe up onto my shoulders. He scrambled to a standing position and then, steadying himself against the

  wall, fumbled in his pocket for the kitchen knife we had smuggled into the yard. In a minute he had ripped a nice opening.

  The idea was that one of us would pull himself out through the hole, inch along the top of the wall, and jump down into the prison commissioner’s garden and scoot on out. He would make contacts on the outside and find us a place to hide. Unfortunately, the very next day one of the jailers walking across the yard glanced up and noticed the hole in the netting.

  That was the end of unguarded yard time. On to Plan B.

  Our ultimate goal was Sweden. The Nazis had for some reason allowed Sweden to be officially neutral. That meant that if you could get there, you were safe, at least until the Nazis changed their minds. In some parts of Denmark, near Copenhagen, you could easily see Sweden from our shore—it was a very short boat ride away. It would, however, be much harder to get there from Aalborg, where we would first have to clear the heavily guarded fjord and then proceed another six or eight hours to Swedish waters. In either case the challenge would be to find a captain who would risk going over. That would take underground contacts and probably money, of which we had neither at the moment.

  * * *

  Neutral Sweden

  At night, while Danes and Norwegians covered their windows with black sheets and lit their streets with blue lights that couldn’t be seen fr
om the air, nearby Sweden appeared to be a carnival of light. Swedes took an officially neutral position in the war—meaning they didn’t take sides. Sweden played on both teams. On the one hand, the whole German military effort depended on weapons made from millions of tons of iron ore, which Sweden exported to Germany through Norwegian harbors and the Gulf of Bothnia.

  On the other hand, Sweden defied Germany by taking in war refugees, most notably the great majority of Denmark’s Jews in October 1943, hours before a planned German roundup. It was logical that Sweden was the planned escape destination for the Churchill Club.

  * * *

  Our plan was to hide out in the legendary Thingbaek limestone cavern about twenty miles south of Aalborg. It had been purchased by a businessman who mined chalk out of a portion of it, but there were still plenty of corners to tuck ourselves away in for a few days. Our only neighbors would be the countless bats that hung from the ceilings by day and poured from the cave in chattering clouds at dusk. Like the bats, at least we would be free.

  To arrange help on the outside, my sister, Gertrud, smuggled our messages to Børge’s older brother, Preben. He was a classmate of Jens’s at school, a well-dressed, big-talking kind of guy who repeatedly tried to convince Jens to make us stop our sabotage activities. Preben had been present at the first Churchill Club meeting, but he had never returned. He seemed horrified that his little brother had fallen in with Jens and me—as if we had corrupted poor innocent Børge. Still, he had helped us in the past and we thought we could trust him.

  One visitation day we gave Gertrud a letter for Preben describing our escape plan. We asked Preben to deliver an enclosed letter Jens had written to the mine owner, seeking permission for us to stay in his mine until we could work something else out. Our final words to Preben were “Burn this letter.” Preben was supposed to relay the owner’s reply back to us through Gertrud. Instead he took our request straight to his parents. They were outraged. Gertrud soon brought us a letter from Preben that said, basically, “You guys are out of your minds. I’ll have nothing to do with this idiocy. If you persist in this inept escape fantasy, I myself will turn you over to the police to save your lives. I’ll think of something when the time is right. Sit tight.”