EACH Midsummer Night Danes kindle bonfires, burn effigies of witches, have parties and enjoy firework demonstrations; but German blackouts cancelled the holiday during the occupation. At dusk one evening a week after Midsummer Night, 1944, sudden loud whooshes from Copenhagen’s Tivoli amusement park, from the Town Hall Square, and from another square split the city’s silence. Rockets flashed skyward, then with a jarring bang showered down a confetti of light over the centre of the city. Crowds in the Town Hall Square watched a firework demonstration as splendid as anything they had seen before the war. When the rockets illuminated Dagmar House, the Nazi headquarters building in a corner of the square, the growing mob applauded, and it roared with laughter when ‘Tipperary’ and other Allied songs were played over the public address system in the Town Hall’s tower. Handbills distributed to the crowd explained that the fireworks were a greeting from fighting Denmark.
The Germans were furious and began retribution in the morning; Dr. Best ordered an eight o’clock curfew. Then, on 26th June, Danish hooligans from the Nazi-led Schalburg Corps visited Tivoli for some of their own special brand of fun. Shortly before two o’clock in the morning Tivoli’s con cert hall, arena, fun fair, dance pavilion, and Glass Hall were ‘Schalburgtaged’ (this name, given to such actions which were meant to discredit underground saboteurs, became part of occupied Denmark’s vocabulary). Shock waves from the explosions shattered the Hall of Mirrors, trees were uprooted, debris-filled craters replaced buildings, and the Big Dipper was now as unsafe as such conveyances only appear to be. Informatíon reported: ‘At dawn Tivoli looked as if the Germans had been there.’ For good measure, a Schalburg Corps group the same night destroyed many thousands of kroner worth of rare porcelain figures by blowing up a part of the Royal Copenhagen Porcelain Factory.
Copenhagen people were incensed; the curfew had already reduced the time they could spend outdoors enjoying that exceptionally fine summer, and now they had been deprived of their favourite amusement park. Their feeling asserted itself openly in the morning when workers at Burmeister og Wain, Denmark’s largest shipyard, held a mass meeting and voted to say in a letter to Dr. Best that, because the curfew denied them evening hours needed to tend vegetable gardens, they would have to finish work each day at noon. To neglect the gardens, the letter claimed, meant starvation.
That evening the centre of Copenhagen was hushed at eight o’clock, but in the suburbs people ignored the curfew to take evening strolls and to visit friends. This was the beginning; the entire city of Copenhagen was going to go on strike against the Germans.
Danish police, following German instructions, rushed around arresting people, taking in about sixty who claimed to have been walking in their sleep. To clear all the streets the police would have had to arrest at least a hundred thousand somnambulists. People ordered to return to their homes told the police: ‘You are very nice, but this has nothing to do with you.’ In Frederiksberg, to reinforce the Danish police, Wehrmacht patrols rode bicycles through the crowds, firing light machine guns. Townspeople made a sport of lingering on corners as long as they dared before fleeing from the gunfire. To harass the Germans in some streets they built bonfires between tram tracks, burning old newspapers, mattresses, and other rubbish. Barricades of handcarts and bicycles were thrown up to keep the troops out of other streets, and paintings, waste baskets and chamber pots were dumped down on the patrols. The Germans, panicking quickly, began shooting through windows, trying to terrify people into returning to their homes, but, of course, the shooting only worsened matters. On many street corners people talked of a general strike. Six were killed and about fifty were wounded, some seriously, that night.
Resistance sabotage groups in the city took advantage of the chaos to experiment with explosives; they had long wanted to know the smallest quantities of plastic explosive that would split a railway track in two. In Holte, north of Copenhagen, a Nazi ammunition train was derailed. ‘Schalburgtage’ people were also busy that night, and the watchman in a Conservative Voters’ Association headquarters awoke in the morning to find that his bedroom was now an open balcony; the building had been blown up around him.
The dock workers at Burmeister og Wain lived up to their threat and went home the next day at noon. Workers in many smaller businesses commandeered by the Germans also left for home. Department store employees talked of going on strike, and now suddenly every Copenhagener wanted to be sure of eight free hours before curfew time. At night Copenhagen was again quiet in the city centre, and oblivious of the curfew in the suburbs. Bonfires were again kindled, and again where they could the Danish police maintained order, although the Germans did most policing—with patrol cars full of trigger-happy Gestapo men. In some streets German soldiers shot into crowds, and the evening’s twelve dead included several women and an eighty-three-year-old retired policeman. An artist and his wife were shot in the doorway of their flat, and in another street a burst of German machine-gun fire tore a man nearly in half. Late at night the Schalburg Corps again struck, this time demolishing a sports pavilion.
. . . . .
The next day’s legal newspapers stated that the curfew would be tightened that night. Nervous German officials were asking the Danish Foreign Ministry if a three-hour pushing back of the curfew would get three extra working hours from the people. The Foreign Ministry, aware that the Germans already had been deprived of hundreds of thousands of vital Danish man-hours, said they did not know, that the go-slow move ment had no official connections. So far the only inconvenience the action had cost most Danes was the absence of rye bread from their tables, for Copenhagen’s largest bakery was on strike. But every important business in the city had by now almost reached a halt, either because workers walked out or because Resistance men or Communists telephoned and sug gested that shutting down might be a good idea.
At curfew time, to keep German patrols from their streets, townspeople began erecting strong barricades; in front of each barricade was a bonfire, easily a thousand bonfires altogether, flames licking fifteen feet skyward. Wherever the fire brigade extinguished fires, new ones were lit. Swastikas and giant portraits of Hitler burned, and in one place the Führer was hanged, then burned, in effigy. Fuel oil was flooded on to some tram tracks and lit, and snakes of flame trailed down streets. In one street doors were heaped on the fires. Anything inflammable— even the Germans’ road markers—burned. The Germans took eight fire engines from the main fire brigade station, but the vehicles’ petrol tanks were dry. Blacked-out Copenhagen was clearly visible across the Sound in Malmø. The crowds’ shadows dancing witch-like on buildings were a nightmare for the Germans. In all, at least twenty-four people were shot that evening, and two died of their wounds.
Many tramcar motormen and conductors failed to report for work the following day, and when the Germans threatened to take over telephone exchanges, all the operators went home, and the lines went dead. None of the legal newspapers could publish, and because all postal workers had come out on strike by evening, Informatíon warned its subscribers that some of them might miss copies of the bulletin, ‘for we cannot send bicycle couriers all the way to North Jutland’. More seriously, Informatíon cautioned labour union officials that the time had come for them to go underground. Almost every shop and factory in Copenhagen had closed, and at some factories fighting between Danish workers and German guards was serious. A Danish sabotage group had completely demolished a large aluminium factory early in the morning, and the smoke could be seen all over Copenhagen.
Worried that his boss, von Ribbentrop, might visit Den mark on his way home from a tour of inspection in Norway, Dr. Best raged to his staff that he would break Copenhagen, and the doctor paid little attention to the military’s suggestion that the Germans might themselves behave less ruthlessly. Even Dr. Best’s second-in-command wanted to see the situa tion handled differently, and all day excited communications were radioed between Copenhagen and Berlin.
The only things that could be purchased easily in the city were bread and milk, for which people formed queues at the back doors of shops since loitering too long in open streets might be suicidal. A few closed food stores were looted, and civilians mobbed a clothing store owned by German sympathizers, smashed its show windows, scattered the merchandise in the streets and burned the building. One of the few tram-cars still running was derailed when a sack of cement was hurled under its wheels, blocking several of the last tram routes still in operation.
Near the central railway station a Danish civilian suddenly took a pistol from his pocket, aimed at a street corner crowd, and squeezed the trigger. The crowd surged toward him, snatched away his pistol, and shouted ‘Kill him! Kill him!’ He was about to be hanged on a telephone pole when police arrived. Searching the man, the Danes found no identification papers but a lot of ammunition and a large number of food ration coupons. He was, they concluded, one of the terrorists the Gestapo released on Copenhagen from time to time—men who fended for themselves and who would rarely be assisted by the Germans. A carload of steel-helmeted German soldiers finally dispersed the crowd around the man.
Cars full of armed men fanned out from Dagmar House, and at least one of these roamed the city to shoot with abandon into the crowds, sometimes catching motorized patrols of Danish police in the crossfire. At the steps of the central station two men alighted from one of the cars, and as the vehicle roared away the pair shot at anybody in sight.
Setting up two field-guns at a major traffic roundabout, the Germans fired into the crowds, then began throwing hand grenades. But Copenhagen’s mobs would not be broken, even when Schalburg men, wearing either Danish police uniforms or other disguises, fired at close range.
At ten o’clock that evening, as the city still throbbed with action, the last suburban trains moved outside Copenhagen and were abandoned by their drivers. All public transport had now stopped. Dr. Best ordered all gas, water, and electricity supplies cut off; and the State Radio closed down. The growing barricades made even bicycling a nuisance as people tore up paving to fence off their streets. A general strike in Odense a year earlier had never been as bad as this—and Copenhagen’s worst had not yet begun, although on that day 227 people were wounded, and sixteen died.
By the next day, 1st July, German military police units from all over Sealand moved toward Copenhagen. Only one member of the Freedom Council was in the city, but he got together with the woman editor of Frit Danmark, an illegal newspaper, Arne Sejr, and Børge Outze to issue an ultimatum to the Germans stating, among other things, that the strike would stop if the curfew were lifted and the Schalburg Corps were moved out of Copenhagen. The ultimatum gave the strike its first strong purpose. And in case anyone did not know of it, the Resistance began passing out handbills announcing that Copenhagen was striking against the Germans. The underground army ignored German taunts to bring forth weapons for an open battle, for the Resistance was still too poorly equipped. Strangely, Copenhagen’s mood was a holiday one, and on a main street someone erected a mock tombstone inscribed, ‘Sweet, Sweet Little Adolf.’ All the breweries in the city somehow managed to continue production, and beer was plentiful.
Across Rosenørns Allé from the Forum that day Børge Outze saw a small boy thumb his nose at a German sniper. The German raised his rifle, but the youngster had ducked behind a wall before the bullet cracked toward him. Again the boy leaned out, thumbed his nose—and was shot at and missed. After the soldier had almost emptied his rifle, a German officer ordered the shooting to stop, and the little boy, thumbing his nose a final time, ran away.
The bloodiest hours of the strike came on this day when German patrols, blocked by a barricade on Amager Island, flew into a rage and aimed their weapons at houses. At another Amager barricade the Germans extinguished a bonfire, but it was lit again, put out, and re-lit—four times altogether. After midnight the Germans had to call Kastrup Aerodrome for a Luftwaffe fighter to strafe Amager’s streets. Amager’s hospital admitted sixty-seven bullet-wounded patients in an hour.
All over Copenhagen Germans shot unarmed people— drunks who could not move quickly enough, women and children. Only the very centre of the city was deserted and ghost-like. Where wounded people lay in the streets they were often passed unnoticed; the entire situation was too unreal. Danish Red Cross ambulances cruised back and forth on continual lookout for casualties, for no means existed to report the wounded to a central headquarters. German patrol cars, ignoring the red crosses, fired on the ambulances.
More and more pre-German shops were looted, and a few non-Nazi tobacconists also suffered. A butcher and his assistant who had sold all their meat to the inhabitants of their district were shot by members of the Schalburg Corps and S.S. men, who had come to pick up stores and found the freezers empty. In one street Danes mobbed a German Army warehouse and hung its stores of uniforms on lamp posts or burned them.
Droves of people carried all sorts of containers to the reservoirs for water, and in the State Hospital coffins were being used as storage containers for vegetables because the hospital authorities anticipated a long siege. Red Cross lorries delivered milk to the hospitals for redistribution to parents who produced the baptismal certificates of their small children.
Stark red posters all over Copenhagen the next morning announced that ‘martial law had been declared in the city and the immediate suburbs’. Dr. Best said he would bring Copenhagen to its knees and it would never be able to rise again, and although direct control had been taken out of his hands, the Wehrmacht was following his plan to starve out the 700,000 people estimated to be in the city. Until then, all roads leading from Copenhagen had been crowded by people fleeing on foot and in every sort of conveyance—like the roads out of Paris in 1940—but now all traffic in and out of the city had been stopped. Panzer divisions—some sent down from Norway, some brought up from the Reich—ringed the entire city. Danes who approached the blockade, either from within or from outside, were to be shot. Nevertheless, thousands escaped that day—many through sewers. That day Informatíon pub lished three issues which were duplicated outside the military zone. Some of the copy was smuggled through the German barricade by the Swedish Ambassador, who had to pay a visit to King Christian, a prisoner in his summer palace at Sorgenfri, north-west of Copenhagen. Much of the copy was telephoned out on a secret line Informatíon had somehow managed to keep in operation. The stories quickly reached England and were soon picked up again in Copenhagen by whoever had their battery-operated wireless receivers tuned in on the B.B.C. Danish Service.
Later in the day the Germans began allowing people to enter the city. Then, hoping rail traffic through North Sealand might be resumed, the Germans tried to make Glostrup station, west of Copenhagen, the main rail point, but few trains ran.
From their perimeter blockade the Germans threatened to fire on Copenhagen with 75-mm. guns, hoping to maintain order that way. Copenhagen was in chaos without its gas, water, electricity, telephones, radio, legal newspapers, or public transport. Men of the Schalburg Corps and German troops roamed the streets, in confiscated brewery vans and other lorries, and although the Danish civil police had no authority, they tried feebly to help maintain order.
The Germans began looking for a way to start the flow of electricity again, for the absence of it hurt them as much as the Danes. They also announced that they would try to run the trams again the next day, hoping workers might thus be induced to return to the factories. Dr. Best said that if labour organizations would promise a cancellation of the strike, electricity would flow again at 7 p.m. Shown a list of demands made by Danish union officials, Best was furious, for the message contained a strong criticism of German military conduct in Copenhagen.
Rye bread sold for high black market prices, but most food was still offered at the back doors of shops, and people who could not afford it were allowed unlimited credit. Greengrocers gave away fruit and vegetables, and bakers worked overtime in the smaller bakeries to produce bread which they then distributed free. In courtyards behind blocks of flats large fires for communal meals were built, and people in the flats pooled whatever they had. Thirty-one lorry-loads of meat spoiled that day because no electricity was available to keep refrigeration plants working, and the weather remained hot. A butcher gave away pork, then built a fire behind his shop where his friends roasted their free meat. The war had fright ened many Danes into hoarding tinned food, so the fear of immediate starvation was not great. Copenhagen was in no mood to worry about the future.
All schools had now been closed by the strike, and children made a game of going up to the Panzer troops in the Town Hall Square to ask, ‘Where can we buy raffle tickets to win these tanks?’
The plundering of Nazi-co-operating shops continued, and the illegal Press reported sympathy strikes in Odense and in many North Jutland towns, none serious enough to be broken by troops. By the day’s end the Germans had switched on the electricity again, and the State Radio could broadcast. All night bonfires lit street battles, and German horse-drawn artillery rumbled through the city until dawn.
At half-hourly intervals in the morning the State Radio insisted that the strike was over, but this was not true. The Gestapo armed cars, now nicknamed ‘death cars’, cruised everywhere, and Schalburg men continued to fire into the crowds. Resistance workers passed out more handbills urging firmness until the Germans met the Freedom Council’s demands. Posters all over the city now ordered the people to be peaceful, but in several places Schalburg Corps members shot into groups of townspeople who had stopped to read the notices. A police van with a loudspeaker cruised down a main street ordering the people to be peaceful and to return to work, but one of the ‘death cars’ trailed the van and shot at people leaning from open windows of houses.
Throughout Copenhagen German soldiers had set up low rings of sandbags at street corners, but when the Wehrmacht soldiers sprawled with rifles in their little fortresses, a wall of hundreds of curious Copenhageners would close in around them. Embarrassed, the infantrymen would quit their positions.
When telephone operators called in at their exchanges to see what was happening, German soldiers ordered the women to their switchboards, and the telephones began working again. By noon, the Germans insisted, the trams would again be running, and the Danish police offered to protect them, but how could anybody find the conductors and motormen? Thousands of people that day were able to sneak past the city’s barricades into the countryside, and more reinforcements for the Germans were landed at Kastrup Airport.
Although the Danish Government had resigned nearly a year earlier, the country’s non-political ministers had remained at their desks, and one of them, H. H. Koch, the Minister of Labour and Social Welfare, felt the strike must stop before the Germans did something really drastic. Using his brother as courier, Koch got in touch with the Freedom Council, and through him, negotiations were begun with the Germans. This was the first time that Danish officialdom had recognized the existence of the underground Government. In the garden of the Royal Library in Copenhagen several Freedom Council members carefully drafted a statement to the citizens of the city, asking them to return to work.
That night the radio continued saying the strike was already over, but the ‘death cars’ continued to shoot at innocent people, and after midnight Luftwaffe aircraft droned low over Copenhagen, destroying the city’s sleep.
And the next day, 4th July, the city did go peacefully back to work. Some tram routes could not be operated again until their tracks were reset and their overhead wires repaired, and the barricades had to be pulled away. The Freedom Council took credit for the return to work, claiming that their ultimatum had caused the Schalburg Corps to be moved outside the city, the shooting of innocent people to cease, and the curfew to be lifted—but these were things that probably would have happened anyway. The Germans said their last-minute threat to bomb Frederiksberg and Istedgade, one of the most troublesome slum streets where, for several days, banners had taunted the Germans, ‘ISTEDGADE NEVER GIVES UP’, had finally broken Copenhagen. But since few of the city’s people knew of the threat or believed it, the Nazi claim was equally weak.
For the first and last time during the occupation Copenhagen had been sufficiently unified to show the canary’s spirit. The strike was a phenomenon that grew out of a mood, and nobody except the masses of Copenhagen deserve credit for its beginning and its ending. Some nights as many as five thousand bonfires had burned, many of them lit by old ladies.
As normal life resumed, people tipped their hats as they passed wreaths lain on the street which bore such inscriptions as one in the middle of a busy traffic roundabout: ‘To the memory of three Danes who fell here’. Informatíon was able to note without exaggeration: ‘Score—one for Copenhagen, none for the Germans.’