WERNER GYBERG, a Copenhagen radio dealer, spent the first days of the occupation searching all over Denmark for organized underground contacts, only
to find one of the most useful right in his own place of business. Guessing that the charwoman there might know Resistance people, Gyberg whistled verboten patriotic melodies or muttered anti-Nazi jokes whenever his sales rooms were being mopped. He had no idea that this would indirectly result in his leading one of the best, smallest, and most unconventional cells in the Danish Resistance. Swedish public servants would jeopardize both their jobs and their country’s precarious neutrality to assist the group. Its Danish members, mostly seamen, would usually work either disguised as Swedes or in Wehrmacht uniforms.
The charwoman’s husband, a seaman on the Lubeck–Copenhagen–Gothenburg–Oslo Danish freighter, introduced Gyberg to his captain, Østrup Olsen. In 1941 Olsen permitted his vessel to become a Resistance postal carrier.
Gyberg’s other underground activity led to his arrest in 1942, but Captain Olsen continued hauling Resistance mail up the Sound, across the Kattegat to Gothenburg.
Friendly police soon arranged Gyberg’s escape from Copenhagen’s Vester Prison so that he could live and work under ground in the capital, but when the Danish Government dissolved itself on 29th August, 1943, those policemen sought out the radio dealer. ‘From now on,’ they warned, ‘if you get caught, we won’t be able to help you. And all the Germans are looking for you.’ They showed him a leaflet ordering his arrest. ‘If you take our advice, Werner, you’ll go to Sweden.’
‘That’s a good idea,’ Gyberg replied, ‘but how?’
‘We’ve already arranged everything,’ one of the policemen said.
On 4th September, in a leaky rowing-boat, Gyberg and six other refugees crossed the Sound. In Sweden the first Dane he visited was Ebbe Munck.
‘Werner,’ Munck said, ‘as of now, consider yourself a diplomat. You’re assigned to our Gothenburg consulate, and we’re getting you a harbour pass. You’ve had something to do with Resistance shipping, and we want you to find con tacts on all the Danish trawlers and coasters in the port. Cap tains, cooks, seamen, anybody—get them to work for us.’
Although at first Gyberg found few helpers, after the October evacuation of the Jews more of the Danish fishermen arriving in Gothenburg agreed to work for the Resistance. Mainly they smuggled bales of British propaganda material across the Sound—a very passive job. Gyberg’s own tight little group was yet to be formed.
Toward the end of 1943 Munck raised 4,000 Swedish kroner with which Gyberg bought a small, forty-year-old Swedish Kattegat trawler he re-named Dronningen (The Queen). Several Danish refugee saboteurs would crew her, Gyberg decided, and just one sailor would be able to operate the ship.
Unfurling Swedish colours, Dronningen lurched westward from Gothenburg, her fish holds packed with propaganda leaflets. By chance she met Danish trawlermen on the fishing banks south of Læsø Island, east of Jutland, and they agreed to get the contraband into Denmark. All the saboteurs were retchingly seasick throughout the twelve-hour voyage, but luckily they encountered no German patrol boats to engage in battle.
Getting across the stormy Kattegat was never easy, especially with an inexperienced crew, and what if they met a Danish trawler with a German spy aboard? Gyberg was far from happy with the arrangements until the day a Jutland fishing boat pulled into Gothenburg. In addition to a full refugee load, she carried Albert Sabroe, a Resistance leader from Frederiks havn in Jutland. Sabroe spoke enthusiastically with Gyberg. ‘I’ll see to it that the trawlers you meet off Læsø are safe, and you can run regular sailings.’
‘I don’t know,’ Gyberg replied sceptically. ‘I’m supposed to be a diplomat, and you know how things are in Sweden these days....’
But Dronningen began sailing to a timetable and officials in the Swedish port either saw—or pretended to see—nothing. Scandinavians know Gothenburg as ‘Sweden’s conscience’.
In April 1944, Gyberg received money to buy another old 150-ton trawler, Marianna; she needed a three-man crew. Later, he bought the new, 225-ton Mercur, a ship so speedy that her five seamen sometimes risked running up the Danne brog when near Jutland. The three vessels’ hefty, one-cylinder diesel engines never faltered despite scant maintenance and the Kattegat’s buffeting. The saboteur crewmen, however, never became the best of sailors, and Gyberg finally replaced them with Danish fishermen. This was the Gothenburg Group.
Their problems seemed endless. British aircraft flew Denmark’s guns, explosives, propaganda and other material to Stockholm, and carefully disguised, these reached Gothenburg quite easily. But how to sneak the crates into the closely guarded harbour? Making cautious inquiries, Gyberg found an easy way. The mild-mannered police officer in charge of Gothenburg’s port security, Pehr Synnerman, and his assistant, Gustav Lind, lent a hand. Soon their office began to resemble a warehouse, and when things had to be moved quickly, Gothenburg’s police cars were used. ‘I’d hate to think what would happen if you were caught,’ Gyberg said.
‘I suppose,’ Synnerman replied, ‘we’d be at war.’
Awaiting Jutland trawlers, the Gothenburg boats fished, and their catch went to the Jutland vessels to thwart suspicious German guards in the Danish ports. When fish ran particularly well, the surplus was brought back to Gothenburg, sold, and the money went into Resistance funds.
One of the most difficult problems in bridging the Kattegat was communication, for rendezvous points had to be picked at the last minute, and the small boats in Denmark had to know the type and size of cargo they would receive. Yet German radio vigilance in Denmark was great. Two ingenious codes solved the problem—again with Swedish help.
Throughout the war the Swedish radio presented Danish-language news bulletins, and the Radio Stockholm newsreader received telephone calls from Gothenburg whenever one of the Resistance trawlers neared Denmark. A few people’s names would be mentioned in the conversation—and the broadcaster knew what they meant. Reading his next bulletin he would then prefix a section with a few words—perhaps, ‘The war’— spoken sharply. Hearing this, the Jutland trawler-men would be alert for their signal—perfectly concealed.
Danish broadcasters have countless ways to sign off; and the closing of the Stockholm summary was the signal to the fishermen. Thus, ‘Good-bye, good-bye; we’ll be together again’, meant that Dronningen was to be at a certain place on a certain day with a heavy load of weapons. Not only did the Germans not break the code; they never realized it was being used.
One moonless night early in 1944 one of the trawlers had eased out of Gothenburg harbour, its illegal cargo stacked high in fish crates on the decks. The sailors did not know that a Swede who spied for the Germans had managed to send a message to the Nazi patrol vessels that the unarmed trawler was coming across the Kattegat, and the German boat located and approached the trawler. Fortunately, her accumulators were low, and the trawler’s lights barely showed. Gyberg, standing watch on deck, heard a voice in German call out across the water: ‘Halt !’
But the Danish boat kept chugging on its course, and again a German voice shouted: ‘Halt!’
‘What should we do?’ one of the seamen whispered to Gyberg.
‘Keep going. What else can we do?’
‘Halt!’ the German shouted again, his boat now so close to the trawler that the two vessels nearly touched.
The Danes were silent.
Then one of the Germans screamed impatiently, ‘All you damned Swedes think you own the whole world! But you’re wrong! We’re Germans—do you understand?’
Still the Danes said nothing. They were outside Swedish territorial waters now, and most of their contraband was in unsealed crates on deck.
‘Halt, I said!’ a German again shouted.
‘You know what you can do with your orders!’ one of the Danes taunted. At the same time Gyberg switched off the dim navigation lights, and in the thick night they began pulling away from the Germans. Across the water a German yelled like a small boy, ‘All you damned Swedes can go to hell!’
The thick mist that draped low over the Kattegat muffled the trawler engine’s tunk-tunk-tunk. And the more violent the Germans’ curses became, the more lustily the Danes swore back. The Germans dared not shoot because they could not see the Danish ship, and in the darkness they could not be certain that this was a Resistance boat. Eventually the back-and-forth swearing stopped, and the trawlermen found that the patrol vessel either had left them or lost them in the darkness.
On the next westward voyage a German patrol craft again was waiting, pretending to be a Danish patrol ship and flying the Dannebrog. When this vessel challenged the trawler the Resistance seamen again kept silent, lined the rails on deck, and squinted out into the black night. The bow of the German ship nosed to within a yard of them, but the Danes remained silent. In a fight, their lack of arms would have cost them at least their boat, and probably their lives. Again the moonless night enabled them to slip away.
Another tense moment came at a time when one of the trawlers should have been already fishing out of sight of land off the Jutland coast, awaiting boats from shore to offload cargo. Gyberg was on the trawler, having left another man behind to look after the Gothenburg office, and that man was visited by one of their contact men from Frederikshavn. ‘I’ve just had a message from the other side,’ the man said. ‘The Germans have found out from a Swedish Nazi where the ren dezvous is going to be. You’ve got to call back the boat or there’ll be trouble.’
‘It’s too late,’ the other Dane replied, ‘but you don’t know the size of the trouble. The boat’s overloaded, and there are some passengers aboard, and one is a Dane from Britain, a sabotage leader who’s supposed to go down through Jutland into Germany.’
There was not time to wait for Radio Stockholm’s next broadcast, and the Gothenburg Group’s trawler would not be listening for such a message, anyway. ‘Maybe,’ the Frederikshavn man suggested, ‘your Swedish friends might help.’
The Gothenburg Group man rushed frantically to Pehr Synnerman to explain the situation. Perhaps, the policeman said, a Swedish coastal patrol aeroplane could fly out and drop a message to the trawler.
The Gothenburg Swedes dispatched an aircraft, and during the next hours the two Danes waited tensely for news. But when the aircraft returned, its pilot apologized: ‘We couldn’t find them anywhere.’
Had the Germans sunk his boat, the Gothenburg Group man wondered. Or had she been taken into a Danish harbour and interned? Either way, this seemed to be the group’s first major catastrophe.
No word came for three days, neither by radio from Denmark nor through the Swedish police. But four nights after the boat had left, the Gothenburg Group agent on his quay heard the steady tunk-tunk of a trawler’s diesel. Through the mist he saw the outline of his ship, her decks lined by men, ease to the dock. Somehow the rendezvous had been made, and the trawler was returning unharmed with a full load of Danish refugees, all very seasick, but all very happy to see the lights of Sweden. What had happened?
Gyberg, on a hunch, altered their sailing plan, and they had returned on a southern route—much slower, but perfectly safe. He was horrified when he learned how close they had come to being caught.
All sorts of people were taken out of Denmark on the trawlers, but because it was difficult to smuggle passengers ashore in German-patrolled harbours in Jutland, only special people could be carried westward. And when Gyberg received passengers in Sweden he often had the chore of feeding and clothing them, for many of these people had fled too quickly to have time to bring along their things. When the trawlers brought Allied fliers to Gothenburg, such men had to be taken quickly to Stockholm before they were noticed, for there was always the risk that they might be interned.
No passenger fares were ever charged, of course, but when Danish banks were able to provide money for the Resistance and this money was taken to Sweden on the Gothenburg trawlers, the group was entitled to withhold ten per cent of the funds to help cover their operating expenses. Always there was a problem of book-keeping, for the group had to show where it spent every last øre. The group also brought clandestine mail out of Denmark. Among the letters carried in the other direction were arrival notices to families of people brought successfully to Sweden. All letters sent westward except military dispatches had to be censored before being forwarded; some refugees foolishly wrote thank-you notes to the Resistance people in Denmark who had helped them to freedom.
After the Royal Air Force bombed the Nazi headquarters in the Aarhus University, a Jutland Resistance group prepared a plaster-of-paris relief map of Jutland ten feet long, and Gyherg’s seamen had to haul this unwieldly object across the Kattegat to be flown from Stockholm to England as a gift to the R.A.F.
Inward cargoes were even more varied. If a resistance leader in Denmark needed a typewriter urgently, Gyberg had to get it. Often he had to make purchases through Swedish black-marketeers, especially of such things as bicycle tyres for the Jutland people; scarce in Sweden, the tyres were unobtain able in Denmark. He bought food and clothing, chocolate and cigarettes—and even guns. Many of the automatics used by Denmark’s Resistance men were bought secretly in Sweden by the Gothenberg Group, packed in fish crates, and shipped west in the trawlers.
Altogether, the trawlers carried between two and three tons of high explosives, but their tonnage of other cargo was greater. Although much of this material was either bought in Sweden or flown in from England by the British, in the winter of 1944 it came on the Moonshine ships. These were four high-speed British cargo boats designed along the lines of motor-torpedo boats, raced by Norwegian and British crews directly from Britain to Lysekil, a Swedish port near Gothenburg. Although intended primarily to get vital Swedish ball-bearings to England through the German blockade, the Moonshine ships brought heavy loads of explosives and arms for the Danish and Norwegian Resistance organizations. During the dark winter these boats each visited Lysekil several times a month. Only one of them was sunk, although all of them had many narrow escapes.
If shipping had been the only task of the Gothenburg Group, its men would have been busy enough—the entire cell comprised only about twenty men—but early in 1945 the group took on other duties. The Germans, losing heavily on every front, were tense and nervous, and Gyberg’s men decided to rattle them more, so the Gothenburg Group began a psychological warfare campaign.
‘Five minutes to twelve! Hitler’s time has almost run out,’ Allied radio propaganda broadcasters had been hammering at the Germans. Soon the German Consulate in Gothenburg began getting strange telephone calls. ‘What time is it?’ a voice would ask in German.
The consulate’s telephone operator would glance at her watch and give the time.
‘Oh, no” the voice would reply, ‘it’s five minutes to twelve— Hitler’s time.’ Then there would be a click and the telephone line would go dead. In a few weeks the Germans received several thousand such telephone calls, none of which could be traced.
Flats and houses were impossible to find in Gothenburg, but one of the local newspapers early in 1945 carried a large advertisement for a flat at a very favourable price. Hundreds of people tried to rent it. The address and telephone number of the flat were those of the German Consulate.
In the war’s last days the group went into direct battle against the Germans. The Russians were pressing westward, and the Nazis planned to evacuate nearly half a million East Germans to Denmark. Since the Germans could spare none of their own boats, they decided to use Danish vessels for the move. The Danes felt that they must prevent their country from being flooded with enemy civilians, and in Copenhagen sabotage groups successfully blocked many Danish freighters in the harbour. Gyberg’s men were asked to join in the action in their part of the sea.
While Tula, a Danish freighter on the Stettin run, was in Gothenburg, some strange cargo was gently lowered on to her deck. A large, quite ordinary looking case, it was unusual because it could be opened from inside.
Tula cleared the harbour and was beyond the shoals that protect the mouth of the Gothenburg inlet, when one of her lookouts picked out a lifeboat. Through glasses the Tula’s captain studied the four men in the boat and decided they must have been in the water for some time; all of them appeared to be exhausted. As Tula swung back her engines, the small boat rowed near, and the crew on the freighter began helping the ship wrecked men aboard. Indeed they were very sick, and the first of the men, Werner Gyberg, was shivering noticeably.
Gyberg looked nervously behind him, and as the last of his three men mounted Tula’s deck, drew an automatic from under his oilskins. The deck crew raised their hands, and Gyberg told his men to help Østrup Olsen and the other seaman out of the crate that had been put on Tula’s deck. From the bridge a message was signalled on the ship’s horn to Gothenburg.
‘Send a pilot out for the Tula?’ a Swede in the harbour master’s office replied. ‘But we’ve only just cleared her.’
The reply took some time to decipher. ‘Come out, anyway. Tula’s now under a new proprietor.’
The Danish freighter was interned in the Swedish port. Her log had an entry in Gyberg’s hand explaining that the ship was the property of free Denmark.
A few days later Gyberg asked his police friend, Pehr Synnerman, for a strange favour. Several Wehrmacht soldiers, down from Norway, were being held in the Gothenburg prison, and, at Gyberg’s request, Synnerman took from these men their uniforms and a large Nazi flag. Aboard the trawler Mercur, well out on the Kattegat, a special crew of Danish saboteurs donned the uniforms, lowered their Swedish ensign and raised the swastika.
Eventually Mercur’s crew, all seasick, saw a large Danish freighter, the Lynaes, approach. ‘Signal them to heave to!’
Then the Danes in the trawler watched the familiar, ridiculous scurrying. From almost every one of the freighter’s portholes papers dropped into the sea—illegal pamphlets, news- papers and other matter the Nazis would not want to find aboard a Danish ship.
The Lynaes’ passengers and crew were startled when they were told to head back to Gothenburg, dumbfounded when they heard these Germans speak impeccable Danish. But one more freighter was kept from being used to dump unwanted Germans on Denmark.
The Gothenburg Group operated like a pirate band. Although before the end of the war more than 18,000 Danish refugee civilians and 5,000 members of the Danish Brigade were in Sweden, security rules made Gyberg’s men avoid their com patriots. Werner Gyberg went on only about five of the crossings himself on the trawlers, and the trawlers altogether made about one hundred and fifty voyages. Never armed, braving the worst of seas, they got more than a thousand people safely out of Denmark without losing a passenger until the very end of the war. Then a new Danish ship the group had just bought and was using to make direct runs, changing from the Dannebrog to Swedish colours to land in harbours on both sides of the Kattegat, was taken by the Germans and her crew and passengers sent to a concentration camp in Denmark. But the end of the war was at hand, and within a few months they were again free men.