THE pistols’ barrels were about an inch and a quarter in diameter and just under a foot long; their triggers were bent metal tubing, and their entire handgrips unclipped and were magazines for 7.65-mm. bullets. A knurled wheel attached to their bolts had to be half-twisted, pulled back, then forced home before each shot—often jamming cartridges behind the chambers and making the pistols misfire. These pistols’ only virtue was that they made no more noise than a slap on the wrist. Although mass-produced in Britain during World War II, none of these silent weapons has been displayed in armament museums, for they were created specifically for the unmen tionable assassination of traitors. Altogether about 150 reached Denmark during the occupation.
‘Well, where do you suppose we can sleep tonight?’ Jens Lillelund asked. He and the man called John, returning from a sabotage job on the evening of 8th December, 1943, had been warned to keep away from their homes that night.
‘I know a Norwegian lady, a dressmaker,’ John said. ‘Some of the men have been hiding in her flat on and off for six months.’
‘Can she be trusted?’ Lillelund asked.
‘Absolutely.’
The two men cycled out to a grubby back street a few blocks behind the Trianglen traffic intersection; no trees, only dark, old-fashioned blocks of flats lined each side of Faksegade. Locking their bicycles, the pair entered the drab brown hallway of number 4, and rang a bell on the ground floor. A moment later a blonde woman drew back the glass-panelled door a few inches.
‘Mrs. Delbo,’ John asked, ‘can you put us up for the night?’
‘Of course. I always have beds for loyal Danes.’
Smiling, she led them into the flat, down a narrow hallway, and into a room cluttered with pieces of cloth, packets of pins, spools of thread, a sewing machine, and women’s clothes basted together. ‘Excuse the mess,’ the tall, handsome woman apologized to John, ‘but do sit down and introduce me to your friend.’
‘Hedwig Delbo, Mr. Finsen,’ John said, using Lillelund’s cover name of the moment.
Lillelund guessed Mrs. Delbo was about thirty-five. ‘Finsen? The leader of Holger Danske ?’ she asked in astonishment.
Frowning, Lillelund nodded, then shot a questioning glance at John.
John smiled; he trusted Mrs. Delbo.
The Norwegian woman fed the two men, gave them a place to sleep, then promised to awaken them in the morning.
The saboteurs were dressed and ready to leave before eight o’clock. ‘Oh, but don’t rush away,’ Mrs. Delbo protested. ‘Let me go out and get some milk, and we can have breakfast.’
‘Thanks, but we’d better move along,’ answered Lillelund.
‘I’ll only be gone a minute. I can get milk just across the street.’ Mrs. Delbo, already tugging on her coat, was going toward the door.
A few minutes later, when she did not come back, Lillelund said, ‘Come on, let’s go. No use wasting time here. This sort of thing can be dangerous.’
Outside the men unlocked their bicycles, and cycled to the right, toward the corner. Turning left into Odensegade, they noticed a large black saloon pointed toward Trianglen and parked in front of a newspaper shop. Lillelund and John looked at each other. It was a petrol-driven motor-car, and petrol was reserved for the Germans and the police alone.
As they cycled over the smooth cobblestones in Odensegade they heard from behind them the whine of a starter motor, then the car easing after them. Lillelund glanced over his shoulder, look at John, and asked: ‘Gestapo?’
‘Yes!’
‘Don’t look back,’ Lillelund ordered, ‘and don’t try to race away from them. When we get to the corner, veer right, go around the traffic island, then sharp left down Østerbrogade.’
People cycling to work filled the wide boulevard, but the traffic lights favoured the two men, and they skimmed around the traffic island without having to stop. The large black saloon turned left at the same time as the saboteurs but began heading down past Trianglen and away from them. Then it came to a stop, backed up, turned around, and was again just behind the two men as they cycled down Østerbrogade.
‘What do you think?’ John asked.
‘They’re following us,’ Lillelund said.
John was pedalling faster now. ‘Let’s cut down here,’ he said, turning right at the next corner.
Lillelund was just behind. ‘This is a bad street, John! There aren’t any turnings off it for quite a distance.’
The black saloon was following them closely.
‘Draw up just ahead,’ Lillelund ordered, ‘and we’ll try to double back past them.’
Both men wheeled their cycles around excitedly and raced back the way they had come, past the car. It stopped, roared and turned around. ‘Quickly!’ Lillelund called.
The two pedalled side-by-side toward Østerbrogade. Perhaps they could lose themselves in the heavy bicycle traffic.
Suddenly Lillelund heard shots and shouting from the car, then, glancing to his right, saw John reach under his jacket.
‘Don’t waste time!’ Lillelund shouted. ‘You can’t shoot a pistol from a bicycle! Hurry! Let’s try to get away !’
But John—not trying to draw a pistol—held his hand under his jacket.
At the corner of Østerbrogade John swerved toward the right, but Lillelund steered straight through the traffic, across the wide boulevard, and up Rosenvængets Allé, the street on the other side. After passing the police station, he noticed another black car parked just before the corner of Faksegade. Shooting past, Lillelund heard it start and swerve around. He knew it was following him.
No time to stop. Lillelund pumped the pedals as hard as he could and the bicycle jittered over the cobbles—past blocks of flats, then large houses that had once been suburban villas when Copenhagen was smaller. The saloon followed, the men in it leaning out the windows and yelling. Jens Lillelund remembered that at the end of Rosenvængets Allé there was a short path, wide enough for a cycle but not a car. He turned abruptly down this path and, hidden by the tall buildings from the sight of his pursuers, finally succeeded in giving them the slip.
Within an hour Lillelund had gathered together some Holger Danske men who told him that after he pedalled away toward his escape across Østerbrogade, John rounded the corner and toppled from his bicycle, a bullet through his chest, another through his leg. As the Gestapo car came up behind him, John began firing his pistol toward its windscreen, killing one of the Germans, wounding the other. A number of their bullets hit him and he fainted.
The second Gestapo car, having lost Lillelund at the top of Rosenvængets Allé, sped back to Østerbrogade. One of the Germans got out, picked up John’s pistol from the cycle path, and hammered the badly wounded saboteur on the head, then picked him up and threw him over the bonnet of the black saloon as a hunter might a deer. John, bleeding badly, possibly already dead, was taken to prison.
‘There had to be an informer in this,’ Lillelund said firmly.
‘Any idea who?’ one of the saboteurs asked.
‘Nobody knew where John and I were going except us. What about this Mrs. Delbo?’ Lillelund asked.
‘But a Norwegian—’ one of the others said. ‘After all—’
‘We have to find out,’ Lillelund said, ‘before we can decide what to do next. We must be absolutely sure.
Quickly the men formulated a plan that would either clear or. condemn the Norwegian dressmaker. It began with a telephone call that same morning.
‘Hello. Mrs. Delbo? This is Mr. Finsen. I suppose you know John was taken this morning.’
‘Oh, no! That’s terrible! Are you all right? What are you going to do now?’ Mrs. Delbo’s voice was tight and tearful.
‘I’m all right, but I’ve got to get to Sweden tonight. Staying in Denmark would be suicidal for me. I’d like to see you before I go.
‘Where are you now?’ Did he hear an expectant note in her voice? Lillelund did not want to have an opinion.
‘I’ll be at your flat at three o’clock this afternoon.’
A pair of young lovers strolled into Faksegade shortly before three o’clock that afternoon, moving slowly, stopping for long minutes in the few doorways along the street. They seemed barely to notice two black, petrol-driven saloons, one at either end of the block—and in front of number 4, a hand cart covered with Christmas trees. A man in a black leather trench-coat strode from one of the cars to the handcart, to speak with the tree-seller. The young lovers strolled close enough to the cart to see, under the Christmas trees, a sub-machine gun.
The girl, an eighteen-year-old university student, knew Mrs. Delbo by sight, Like the young man with her, she worked for Holger Danske.
When some Resistance men met later that evening to listen to the young man and woman, they decided Mrs. Delbo must be liquidated. Denmark has long been out of the habit of executing people for crimes and, had it been possible, the Resistance would have imprisoned informers, but organized resistance would have collapsed if such people were not destroyed—to silence them, and to warn other weak Danes not to sell information to the Germans. Who would kill Mrs. Delbo?
One of the men blew his nose—he had a bad cold—and spoke up: ‘There’ve been nights when I’ve stayed at her flat, too, and what happened to John could have happened to any of us. I’ll do it.’
‘Don’t be crazy!’ one of the others said. ‘What if you miss and she recognizes you? Let somebody else do it!’
‘No,’ the man said, ‘it’s my job. Get me a silent pistol.’
Two afternoons later a newsvendor looked out of his shop window on the Odensegade corner of Faksegade. On grey winter afternoons Faksegade is usually deserted, but now about twenty young men loitered in the doorways as far as Rosenvængets Allé, and just before four o’clock a man arrived, blow ing his nose. Whatever was happening, the newsvendor did not like it—so he telephoned for help.
The man with the silent pistol saw Danish police rush into Faksegade from Rosenvængets Allé. Turning to run the other way, he saw more police enter the street from Odensegade. He ran into a block of flats opposite Mrs. Delbo’s. An old woman answered his tap at a ground-floor doorway, and he shoved past her, slamming the door shut behind him. On a table was a telephone, and with a knife he cut its line, then apologized to the old woman and her husband, tossed them money to have their telephone repaired, and went to the front window. Police in the street were arresting some of his guards, and across from his window, shuffling about in her living-room, he could see Hedwig Delbo, unaware of the commotion.
When the police had gone the saboteur sneaked away, crossed Copenhagen, and met some of his comrades. ‘We have to try again in a hurry,’ he said, ‘before she has a chance to find out we’re after her. No guards this time.’
. . . . .
While the man with a cold drove back toward Faksegade with two other saboteurs in a stolen Gestapo car, other members of the group telephoned the Rosenvængets Allé police station, explained that the six or seven youths who had been arrested were mostly naval cadets, not criminals but Resistance men. They were permitted to escape through the police station’s back door.
‘Your cold must be killing you. Your eyes are watering terribly,’ one of the men driving the car told the man with the silent pistol. ‘Are you sure you’re well enough to do the job?’
‘Perfectly sure,’ He was bothered not, by his cold but by the picture of Hedwig Delbo placidly sewing dresses, unaware someone was on the way to shoot her. Sabotage is one thing, but liquidation....
Parking the car some distance away, the three men walked toward Mrs. Delbo’s flat. All blackout curtains had been drawn for the night, and Faksegade was deserted. The man with the cold blew his nose a final time, pocketed his handkerchief, and pulled out the silent pistol. He half turned the knurled wheel, drew back the bolt, felt a bullet slide home. Then he left his friends and rapped at Mrs. Delbo’s door.
The Norwegian woman’s face broke into an embarrassed smile. ‘W-w-w-why, hello! Do come in.
Turning, she preceded him down the corridor, but the man, standing still, raised the pistol. Fifteen feet away Hedwig Delbo opened the living-room door and turned. Her mouth opened in a gasp, and she pushed the back of a clenched fist to her teeth. Her scream covered the pistol’s slap, and she crumpled forward. The man tried to ready the pistol for another shot, but the bullet jammed, and Mrs. Delbo looked very dead, any way, so he turned and ran, his temples throbbing. His cold was turning into flu.
The Resistance later telephoned the Rosenvængets Allé police station to look for Mrs. Delbo, and at nine that evening the man with a cold went to see a friend in the central police station.
‘Idiot!’ the policeman yelled at the saboteur. ‘That woman you think you killed is in the next room screaming your name and demanding to see the Gestapo. Get out of here—quickly!’
The next morning his police friends contacted the saboteur; hundreds of copies of his photograph, they warned him, were being circulated. He went into hiding until he was able to get to Sweden a few weeks later.
Mrs. Delbo also hid, and although all Resistance people in the city looked for her, she seemed to have vanished. Then, early in January, a man in the Copenhagen office of Thomas Cook’s, the travel agents, telephoned a Resistance contact. Hedwig Delbo was leaving Cook’s office at six o’clock that evening for a Lufthansa aeroplane to Norway.
Killing the woman inside the travel agency would have compromised the Resistance contact there, but Cook’s agreed to let the assassin run back into their office, around the old-fashioned counters, and out through a back door that led into Tivoli. The pleasure garden’s manager would have one of Tivoli’s rear exits unlocked. The young man who was to kill Mrs. Delbo decided to go to the travel agency in a car which he would also be able to use for his getaway.
Driving into the centre of Copenhagen toward Cook’s office, he had a flat tyre, and by the time he changed the wheel, it was past six o’clock. Ditty and sweating, he rushed into Cook’s.
‘She left five minutes ago,’ the contact told him. ‘We had no way to detain her.’
Three tries on her life, and now Mrs. Delbo was out of Denmark. The Special Operations Executive in London was notified of the failure, and in Bergen Norwegian Resistance men shot at Hedwig Delbo, but her life seemed charmed, for they too failed to kill her.
Near death, John lay in a Copenhagen prison cell, his eight bullet wounds festering badly. The bullet that had torn through his thigh had shattered the bone completely, and the Nazis not only failed to set the break, but they jarred and bent the man’s leg to try to torture him into giving the names of other Holger Danske men. Because he refused to talk, the Germans would not let John leave his cell, and his mattress became a clotted mass of fetid contamination. A Danish doctor named Jørgen Kieler who was a prisoner in the same cell did his best to nurse the Resistance man, washing the wound with the only liquid available, dirty potato soup.
The Norwegian Resistance sent word to Denmark that Hedwig Delbo, now afraid to stay in her native land, was returning to Copenhagen. Every Resistance man in the city began looking for her, but for a few months the woman managed to stay hidden. Then Mogens Staffeldt received a telephone call from another Copenhagen bookseller. ‘I think I’ve seen her. A Norwegian-speaking woman came into my shop for a book from our lending library. Looked like Mrs. Delbo.’
‘What name did she use? Where does she live?’ Staffeldt asked.
‘That’s just it. When I told her the book was out, I asked if I could send it to her, but she got nervous and said she’d call again.
‘When she comes back,’ Staffeldt said, ‘try to get her name and address.’
Several days later the bookseller telephoned Staffeldt a second time. ‘The Norwegian woman was here again. I told her we expect the book soon. She said her name is “Mrs. Dam”,’ and he quoted the woman’s telephone number.
Was this Mrs. Dam really Hedwig Delbo? The Resistance tried to check the telephone number, but it was unlisted. Nevertheless, loyal Danes in Copenhagen’s telephone service traced the number to an address in Sankelmarksgade, a small street in south Copenhagen. In the building the Resistance men were surprised to learn that a saboteur from another group rented a room on the same staircase, but above the dressmaker.
The saboteur was even more surprised. ‘Here I’ve been looking for that damned woman everywhere, and she lives in the same house as I do!’ he said. He agreed to keep a watch on Mrs. Dam.
But was this Mrs. Delbo? The Resistance group had to be quite sure before they could take action, so Staffeldt called his colleague. ‘Telephone Mrs. Dam that you have her book now. Let me know when she’s coming for it.’
The Resistance sent two men who knew Mrs. Delbo to park in a car in front of the bookshop, sitting there for hours on the day Mrs. Dam was to collect her book. Several times policemen stopped and stared at their car, and the two saboteurs became nervous.
The woman did not show up, and after a while a pair of policemen walked by, saw the car, turned, and walked directly toward it.
‘We’d better go,’ the driver said, and started the engine.
They had missed their quarry, for she came to the shop shortly after they drove away. The policemen, they learnt afterwards, had been curious about the car because it had no petrol ration stamp on its windscreen, and they wondered if the men in it were criminals, saboteurs, or Gestapo men.
Without revealing their hand, the Resistance had to find out if Mrs. Dam was the woman they wanted, and only one person could learn this without arousing suspicion. The young girl who had posed as a lover in Faksegade offered: ‘I’ll go to her and order a dress.’
The woman might have German bodyguards, the saboteurs warned the girl, but she said simply, ‘I’ll be all right.’
On returning to Staffeldt’s bookshop she explained, ‘This Mrs. Dam is living with another woman who answered the door. When she saw I was alone she let me in and I asked Mrs. Dam to measure me for a dress. It’ll be ready on the ninth of March—and Mrs. Dam is Mrs. Delbo.’
The two men who went with the girl decided not to bother with a silent pistol; both carried automatics that would not jam. In Sankelmarksgade the men entered the building first and climbed to the landing above Mrs. Delbo’s flat. At the door of the flat the girl pushed the bell several times, sounding a special combination of rings Hedwig Delbo told her to use. The door opened.
‘I’m back for my dress, Mrs. Dam,’ the girl said.
At the same moment the two men leaped down the stairs, pushed the young girl aside, and began shooting. The girl was already going down the stairs when the men closed the flat’s door behind them, having made quite certain Hedwig Delbo was dead.
The police the Resistance telephoned to fetch Hedwig Delbo found 30,000 kroner in notes in her flat—much more than a dressmaker could amass. News of the liquidation was smuggled into the prison to John. No nearer recovery than he had been earlier, this was little consolation to him. He never told the Germans his comrades’ names, and he never walked again. A month later he was dragged out into the prison yard and shot.