FREDERIKSBERG is a separate city adjacent to Copenhagen, but the business sections of the two intermingle. The Forum on Rosenørns Allé in Frederiksberg is the largest exhibition hall in Scandinavia, and on 25th August, 1943, it was to have become a German Army barracks.
The day before, shortly after the workmen converting the building had cycled away for lunch, a delivery boy pedalled up to the back entrance, a case apparently containing Tuborg beer on the underslung carrier of what Danes call a Long John bicycle. Two more men, dressed as labourers, cycled to the kerb and waited as another pair of men stepped from a taxi and entered the building. In the back seat of the taxi a sixth man gripped a sub-machine gun. When the Danish foreman and watchman had been routed from the Forum at pistol point, the delivery boy took his Tuborg crate inside the hall. Under the empty bottles were more than a hundred pounds of marzipan-smelling P-3 explosive. The leader of the men, a commercial artist named Tom Søndergaard, went back into the building to make sure no one was still inside, and a few minutes later, believing the building to be empty, the young cyclist lit the two-minute fuze on his bomb and fled from the Forum on his bicycle. Just as the second of the saboteurs, Jens Lillelund, was about to hurry away on his bicycle he noticed that Søndergaard had not come out. Lanky, bald Lillelund was within ten feet of the doorway when his whole world filled with a jarring, shattering blast. The Forum’s cement-block walls pulverized like sugar, leaving only a splintering, cobweb steel skeleton, and slivers of glass tied in the dusty rubble. Søndergaard, covered with blood, staggered from the doorway and was taken to a nearby flat, and a doctor was called. Lillelund mingled with the thousands who quickly gathered to watch fireman stare stupidly at the mess. Nothing was burning, of course, and the damage done to the Forum not only kept it from becoming a barracks but also made it unusable for the next twelve years. Lillelund heard someone say, ‘Saboteurs, all right—at least twenty of them. They drove right into the Forum in a hay lorry with the bomb.’
Lillelund smiled when someone else added, ‘Must have been a hell of a bomb—there’s no sign of the lorry anywhere.’
The Germans had to allow the legal newspapers to report the Forum attack briefly. The explosion was not, as the saboteurs had hoped, picked up by the sensitive broadcasting microphones in the Danish State Radio studios across Rosenørns Allé, but it nevertheless resounded all over Denmark. A few days later the citizens of Esbjerg, Aalborg, and Odense, spurred by the obvious growth of the Resistance and angered by the brutal rules the Germans had been gradually imposing, confidently went on strike against the occupation forces, and on 28th August the Germans issued an ultimatum to the Danish Government that stipulated, among other things, ‘Sabotage and any incitement thereto, attacks on units of the Wehrmacht or on single members thereof, possession of firearms or explosives after 1st September, 1943, shall be immediately punishable by death.’
Refusing to accept these conditions, the Danish Government resigned, and the Freedom Council stepped forward and soon established secret diplomatic links with Washington, London, and Moscow. Sabotage actions had finally frayed away the Germans’ thin patience, and Danes no longer would feel obliged to apologize to the West for a Government too limp to refuse serving the Germans.
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Late in 1941 Copenhagen’s first sabotage operations took place when a small group of men filled a cigar box with a mixture of calcium chlorate and sugar, covered with wax paper. A few drops of acid, eating through the paper, detonated the powder. More cautious saboteurs later used two layers of wax paper. Unless all Copenhagen businesses that aided the Germans were sabotaged, the Danish Resistance had decided, the Allies would have to be asked to bomb the city, and the Danes wanted to prevent this. Therefore the daily thudding of explosions in Copenhagen did much for the morale of loyal Danes, although during the first days of the occupation many less anti-Nazi people there were opposed to such violent forms of resistance. Copenhagen had two major sabotage groups, BOPA and Holger Danske, working independently of one another but with the same end in view. One of the few times Holger Danske and BOPA ever took part in a joint action was when the Resistance decided to strike at the more than twenty German Army petrol dumps in Copenhagen. Dividing the dumps between the two sabotage groups, all were blown up almost at the same moment.
BOPA was formed by half-a-dozen Danish Communists, veterans of the International Brigade in Spain, who considered sabotage to be the only practical partisan warfare for flat, densely populated Denmark. A devastatingly efficient cadre, most of the original BOPA leaders were nevertheless eventually caught by the Germans. At first the group was named KOPA (‘Communist Partisans’), but later when many non-Com munists increased the group’s membership to about 150 men, its name became BOPA (‘Borgerlige Partisaner’—roughly, ‘Middle-Class Partisans’). Because nearly all BOPA’s men were either in their early twenties or younger, the group usually managed to move about unnoticed. Mostly working-class youngsters, they considered no job too difficult, and they even undertook creating a liquidation section which had the unpleasant task of destroying informers.
BOPA specialized in large-scale industrial sabotage but was not permitted to receive air-dropped explosives from Britain until late in 1944, so the group systematically looted Danish military and Wehrmacht stores for arms and explosives. Getting these materials became more and more difficult as German vigilance increased, and BOPA members decided to buy explosives through legal channels. This also proved difficult, however, because no industrial explosives were allowed to be produced in Denmark during the occupation. The men of BOPA then wrote letters to the occupation authorities claiming to need explosives for industrial demolition work in Denmark. Their letters were so convincing that the requisitions were approved by the Germans in Denmark and sent to the Reich. Once, using this scheme and claiming that material was needed to blow up a ship submerged in a channel in the Kattegat, BOPA bought 5,000 kilograms of dynamite from Germany on a single application.
Sabotage raids could not be made by unarmed men, and both Holger Danske and BOPA used weapons stolen from the German Army as well as from the Danish military, but only Holger Danske at first received the weapons dropped into Denmark by the Royal Air Force. So in 1944 BOPA chose a peculiar solution to its weapon problem. Quite a few Sten guns were then in Denmark, and Stig Jensen lent one of these to the leaders of BOPA. The gun was taken to a garage on Lyngbyvej, a main road on the northern outskirts of Copenhagen, where a blacksmith studied the weapon carefully and from it was able to produce a set of dies. Soon a clandestine production line was in operation, despite the fact that Copenhagen was patrolled thoroughly by German troops. BOPA guns were identical with Sten guns, but the sabotage group could not manufacture barrels for their weapons, so BOPA men stole rifle barrels from a Danish Army dump, and more than four hundred guns were made successfully. Later Holger Danske also produced such weapons.
BOPA then decided to try to produce naval torpedoes to launch against German shipping in Danish ports. One of the first prototypes was tested, not in Copenhagen but in the channel leading into the Funnen port of Odense, where several Resistance men sneaked to the water’s edge at dusk and launched the four-foot-long, welded, boat-shaped missile. It cruised just below the surface of the water directly toward a German Navy ship. But something was wrong with the torpedo and it veered round the bows of the ship and then behind the vessel. Why did it refuse to go off? At any moment the saboteur group expected a gigantic explosion, but they heard no sound except the lap-lap of the water. Then the nose of their torpedo appeared round the stern of the German boat; and the saboteurs watched in fascination—proud of their lethal toy but puzzled by its odd behaviour.
Then: ‘Run for it!’
A concussion like a sharp gust of wind reached them as the torpedo nudged the shore—at the point from which it had been launched. The men were barely out of range of the falling shrapnel.
The Holger Danske is a white stone statue of a Danish saga hero in the crypt of Elsinore castle; according to legend, he will rise in troubled times to protect Denmark. Eight politically nationalistic Danes created the first Holger Danske sabotage group, but it had to be dispersed after the Forum action. A second group with the same name was formed by Jens Lillelund and grew to about 450 men of every Danish political persuasion. Some of its men first did sabotage work for BOPA and then switched to Holger Danske because they did not like BOPA’s politics. Unlike BOPA, Holger Danske was almost always able to operate in small groups, and men in each of the cells knew only their fellow workers, and then only by cover names. This reduced the chance of a security leak if any of the men were captured by the Germans. Like BOPA, this group also had a small liquidation cell; it took care of more than two hundred informers.
Most Holger Danske raids were so well planned that they seemed uninteresting, but every action meant new problems in keeping innocent people from being hurt, in escaping before the police or Germans came, and in working with limited materials. Typical was a raid on a small factory near Copenhagen’s harbour, which made fuselages and wings for German training aircraft.
Ten Holger Danske men boldly stopped traffic at either end of the factory’s street while three saboteurs carried bombs into the building. Holger Danske was at the time desperately short of safety fuze, and the longest delay on any of the three charges was to be only forty seconds. Jørgen Brandt, whose Bornholm accent made Copenhagen a risky centre of activities for him, carried a twenty-pound charge alone into a first-floor room, placed it on a machine, and then stacked eight one-gallon tins of inflammable paint thinner around it.
When he heard the other two saboteurs call that they were ready, Jørgen lit a fuse and rushed toward the workshop door. But the cylinder lock had closed, and the door could only be opened from the other side. Frantic, Jørgen rushed toward the window—but he did not have to jump out, for his bomb detonated and he was blown to the ground. Unwounded but smoke-blackened, his clothing tattered, Jørgen ran toward a gate. He was almost caught again when a second charge detonated and a wall collapsed just behind him.
The other saboteurs had fled, and Jørgen was alone in the blazing factory’s yard. Dashing through a gate, he saw a group of Danes pushing a stalled motor-car. He began helping them, hoping the Germans he now saw coming toward the factory would not notice him.
Then, over his shoulder, Jørgen noticed one German police-constable staring hard at him. The saboteur ran, scrambled over several high walls, and finally into another factory where workers helped him wash, lent him a bicycle and fresh clothes, and hid him until he could flee.
After the first wave of sabotage in Copenhagen the German occupation authorities told the Danish police that extra vigilance was needed. How could they block the saboteurs, the police asked, without more knowledge of the places likely to be attacked? The Germans were persuaded to provide the Danish police with lists of every Danish factory likely to be sabotaged. Then the Germans were asked to give the police complete drawings showing the dispositions of guards and watchmen, and the vulnerable points in these places. Although some Danish police co-operated willingly with the Germans, from the beginning others saw to it that all Nazi security information was available to both BOPA and Holger Danske. Fire brigade, harbour, and municipal engineering offices also helped the saboteurs, so no raids were haphazard. Thus, before the Forum was attacked, Søndergaard and Lillelund went to the Frederiksberg Town Hall for complete drawings of the exhibition building.
Most sabotage raids had to be daytime operations in order to take the Germans by surprise, and because of the curfew in force after 1943. The time of the Forum raid was selected to make it heard by the greatest number of people and also to avoid hurting innocent Danes who, at any other time of the day, might have been in or near the building. Holger Danske men often disguised themselves as policemen or used forged Nazi credentials, and BOPA men frequently appeared either as members of boys’ clubs or labourers.
None of the saboteurs was, in the beginning, experienced in handling explosives, and until late in the war only Holger Danske men were coached by parachutists dropped by the British. The groups could find no place in Denmark sufficiently isolated to experiment with explosives, and new techniques always had to be tried in action. To equip the underground army that was to rise and fight during the liberation the Danes Secretly produced rockets and launchers similar to the American bazooka, but these weapons were never tried by the saboteurs. Børge Thing, leader of BOPA at the time of Denmark’s liberation, did obtain a genuine American bazooka which he decided could be made to destroy German petrol tanks. Thing took the weapon out to a field next to a storage tank, put a rocket in the rear of the tube, connected its wires, then fired the projectile. But he was short of the target. He fired several more rockets but had to leave hurriedly, pursued by German guards, without scoring a direct hit.
Very late in the war, when BOPA had access to British explosives, they were given some limpet mines. One evening in March 1945 a diver in a frogman suit stolen from the Danish Navy entered Copenhagen harbour and managed to attach more than 400 pounds of mines to one German ship. These mines, however, failed to explode, and it was not until just before the end of the war that BOPA did manage to use these limpets successfully, when they penned up in Copenhagen harbour a number of large Danish ships which were to have been used to evacuate German civilians to Denmark as the Russians moved westward.
BOPA had no monopoly on unusual weapons. Many Holger Danske actions were timed so closely that the saboteurs had to retreat under gunfire. To lessen their danger they built several armoured cars, sandwiching armour plating between the doors of normal Ford V-8 saloons. In particularly dangerous operations bullet-proofing could be pulled over the rear windows, and steel curtains lowered to protect the cars’ tyres.
One Holger Danske operation—although not sabotage—was so incredible that the Freedom Council envoy in Moscow received a request from Molotov for a detailed report of the action, and the Russian amused other members of the Yalta Conference during a lull with this document. The Freedom Council, suspecting that the Germans would destroy Den mark’s largest, most modern ferryboat, Storebælt, at the end of the war, asked Holger Danske to do something about it. Storebælt ran between Funnen and Sealand, and in November 1944 she was to be taken around the north coast of Sealand to Copenhagen for a routine overhaul. Storebælt’s pilot smuggled four young Holger Danske men to a cabin in the hold. They carried 1880-model Danish service revolvers they could afford to lose, and armfuls of hand grenades they hoped they would also be able to discard. Because the voyage should have taken no more than ten hours, they carried no food.
A slow-moving German patrol boat was assigned as escort, and Storebælt’s crew, unaware of their four passengers, headed north. The passage up the Great Belt and into the Kattegat was rough, and that night they ran into a storm. The captain decided they must pull into Isefjord, a deep inlet in North Sealand. The saboteurs began sneaking all over the ferry, avoiding the crew, to seek food. Unable to locate the mess, they dozed in their hiding place until nearly twenty-four hours later when the pilot came to them. ‘We’re nearing the mouth of the Sound, just north of Elsinore.’
One of the young men ran into the engine-room, pointing his pistol down the hatch to warn: ‘If the engines stop, I’m going to heave these grenades down on you!’
Another saboteur gathered the deck crew together and ordered them to do nothing.
The other two Holger Danske men went to the bridge. From there they could see the German escort ship, still quite near, and unaware anything unusual was happening on the ferry. In the distance, on a routine sweep of their waters, Swedish sailors cruised in a patrol boat. ‘Full steam, hard a port! one of the saboteurs ordered Storebælt’s captain.
As the message was telegraphed to the engine-room the saboteur there menacingly juggled his grenades, and the frightened Danish engineers made the ship run as quickly as they dared.
On the deck of the German patrol boat there was confusion. The Swedish patrol boat was too near the ferry for the Germans to dare shoot, and as Storebælt crossed into neutral waters, the Swedish ship passed between her and the Germans, finally blocking any pursuit. Not many minutes later the ferry was impounded by the Swedes, and the Holger Danske men gladly gave up their ancient weapons.
BOPA took a major rôle in preventing the total destruction of London by flying-bombs. The Globus factory outside Copenhagen was one of the four largest Danish factories producing for the Germans. For a year BOPA had wanted to destroy this radio factory, but it was as heavily guarded as a fortress, and there seemed to be no feasible way for the saboteurs to get into it. When intelligence reports showed that as well as aeroplane components Globus was making units that would be vital in a new rocket weapon, the V-2, that the Germans were planning to launch against London, BOPA began to move. The actual raid and the preparations for it took three months and, unlike commando raids on a similar scale, it could not be rehearsed but had to be executed after being planned only on paper.
Many days before the raid, teams of BOPA men dressed themselves as road workers and took tools out to the main highway that led from the Globus factory into Copenhagen. These men, working in full view of passers-by and in the daytime, set up signs indicating that the road was under repair. Neither the Danish police nor the Germans questioned the action. Then the saboteurs began tearing up the highway and digging trenches across the road-bed—in which they buried electrically wired explosive charges. Again without being bothered, they covered up the mines.
From the police, BOPA received plans of the Globus buildings and were able to draw maps showing the disposition of the German guards around the factory, which was set back several hundred yards from the main road. Late in the afternoon of 6th June, 1944, more than a hundred BOPA men assembled on the outskirts of Copenhagen with knapsacks and bicycles. They could have been a boys’ camping club, but in their packs were guns, ammunition, and grenades.
The men crept into the gardens of houses near the factory and trained their weapons on any of the residents curious enough to ask what was happening. In full daylight at precisely seven o’clock in the evening they rushed forward toward the barbed-wire, firing sub-machine guns and lobbing grenades at the guards. Blasting their way through the factory gates the young saboteurs raced to the positions where they had planned to set up their mines. Having placed the explosive charges, they worked through the factory yard to the rear where, according to plan, two buses sent from Copenhagen waited.
Before the first explosives destroyed the factory the buses were lurching along the main highway. The saboteurs got clean away, and did not have to blow up the roads behind them to impede pursuers. Passing another German-controlled factory on the way toward the centre of Copenhagen the men heard the sound of gunfire. The drivers hit their accelerator pedals harder. Bullets ripped through the buses, and a young doctor driving the first one slumped over the steering-wheel. He was eased to the floor and someone else climbed behind the wheel. Both buses reached Copenhagen where the group dis persed, with the doctor, whose wounds proved fatal, as the only casualty of the expedition. This, the first really big daylight sabotage attack in Denmark, so successfully impeded V-2 production that it earned a radioed message of congratulations from General Eisenhower’s SHAEF headquarters.
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In the following months BOPA attacked all the other Copenhagen factories producing V-2 components, and every raid was a success. One of these factories was on a peninsula south of Copenhagen, and it was impossible to surround it, so BOPA decided on a frontal attack. In two lorries they sent men to the factory with a pair of 20-mm. field guns stolen from a Danish Army depot. At the factory entrance the guns were wheeled from their lorries and began to fire rapidly, demolishing the guard posts. Firing sub-machine guns from the hip, the raiders charged into the factory. Both the Danish and German guards answered the gunfire, and fighting continued while the saboteurs lugged their explosives into position and lit the fuses. In a fighting retreat the saboteurs had to leave their artillery behind, but the action was a success; the factory was razed as completely as it would have been if it had been hit by bombers.
Between 1942 and 1945 BOPA and Holger Danske each staged more than a thousand separate actions, thus sparing wholesale Allied bombardment of Copenhagen.