TOWARD the end of the occupation, Jens Lillelund was in Jutland, where he trained saboteurs and organized attacks against German troop trains. Although the Jutland Re sistance radio kept receiving orders for his return to Sweden, Lillelund pretended not to hear. He was too busy. Finally, early in 1945, he went to Stockholm; and he was flown at once by Mosquito bomber to London. ‘Why,’ Lillelund asked S.O.E., ‘did you send for me?’
‘We’re going to train you as a saboteur, and then parachute you into Denmark to organize sabotage actions.’
Lillelund stared incredulously. ‘But I was in Denmark, and I was organizing sabotage actions!’
The S.O.E. officers then explained that British troops might have to fight their way into Denmark. Lieutenant Lillelund— like many Danish Resistance leaders sent to Britain, he was commissioned in the Buffs—was to organize special cooperative action. Lillelund trained and waited.
In Denmark red, white, and blue arm-bands were being prepared for issue to the underground fighters who would emerge on a signal from the West. Now no sabotage action was staged unless the cost of repairing its damage was offset by military necessity. Informers and collaborators were, when possible, abducted to Sweden to be interned. Others were kept under close watch. Resistance groups systematically looted German records, for everything the occupying force had done must be catalogued. The same Danish thoroughness that had controlled the Resistance now groped for the post-war reins.
In February 1945 Ebbe Munck asked Leif Hendil for an unusual favour. Arranging details of the operation on the Copenhagen side of the Sound, Hendil found, was not so difficult, but when he told Richard Hansen, the Danish-born chief of police in Malmø, what was to be done, Hansen protested, ‘Not through my port! Suppose the Germans found out?’
‘They won’t,’ Hendil assured him.
What Hendil was to do was to try to smuggle an Englishman into Copenhagen—and out again. Hansen objected because this Englishman, as far as Hendil knew, spoke no Danish. How could he move about in Copenhagen undetected? What if he were caught and said he had come over from Malmø?
‘Suppose,’ Hendil suggested, ‘I make this Englishman into a Dane?’
‘I don’t think you can do it,’ Hansen replied, ‘but there’s no harm in trying.’
On the morning of 4th March, Frank Pinnock arrived in Malmø and reported to Hendil. The journalist later described the tall, thin, slightly balding, forty-two-year-old temporary civil servant as ‘the best type of international Englishman’.
‘Ebbe Munck told me to put myself completely in your hands, Mr. Hendil. He said you’d arrange everything.’
‘Well, we’ve a lot to do,’ Hendil answered. He led Pinnock into a bedroom. ‘Now, sir, would you please be so kind as to get undressed?’
Pinnock stared quizzically.
Hendil smiled. ‘This has to do with making you into a Dane.’
All the labels in Pinnock’s English clothing were replaced by Danish ones. His shoes, unmistakably British, were taken from him, and he was lent a pair of Hendil’s. Pinnock’s pockets were emptied, and he was given Danish stamps, coins, a tram ticket, and even membership cards for various clubs in Copenhagen. Identity photographs of him had been taken in Stockholm, and now Hendil had to put these and a false name and address on an identity card.
The first few names Hendil suggested were impossible—because Pinnock could not pronounce them. An address was a worse problem. Finally both were found, and Pinnock’s credentials were forged. He must pretend to be a deaf-mute, and although he probably thought this melodramatic, he agreed to do so. Before the war he had had business interests in Copenhagen, and in fact he spoke quite a bit of Danish.
At ten o’clock that night, after booking a hotel in Malmø for two nights hence, Pinnock was led to the harbour, and boarded a small grey boat. His crossing was cold but uneventful, and his boat docked next to the German fortress beside the dump at Amager. ‘You’ll have to be silent,’ Hendil had cautioned, explaining that Pinnock would be taken right past a German sentry post.
Pinnock was met by four young Danes, members of a Resistance group known as ‘1944’. All four walked stiffly because they carried Sten guns under their coats. That night, carefully guarded, Pinnock slept in a flat in the same part of Copenhagen from which Niels Bohr had escaped.
Unknown to the Englishman or his guards, another group of Danes already had Pinnock under observation, and word of his presence was relayed to intelligence contacts outside Den mark within hours of his supposedly secret arrival.
In the morning, the Englishman and his four young friends bicycled right through the centre of Copenhagen, amid thousands of people silently but briskly cycling to work. One armed guard rode twenty yards ahead, and another twenty yards behind. If they encountered a German surprise road block, one of these Resistance men would create a disturbance to give Pinnock time to get away. The other group of Danes also followed the Englishman.
Remembering how to operate the back-pedal on his tall, black Danish bicycle, remembering to keep to the right, Pinnock followed his escort out Strandvej, a main boulevard, to Blidah Park, a group of modern four-storey flats in Hellerup. There he would remain until he finished his work. Should he have to flee, his friends told him, there were two other flats in the neighbourhood where he could take refuge. Dozens of Resistance men, well armed, were alert and on guard near by. Food would be brought to Pinnock to avoid his having to venture outside.
And so it was that, during the next day, the British Ministry of Food had a branch office operating in German-occupied Copenhagen. All Denmark’s leading food experts visited Blidah Park for talks with Pinnock, himself an expert in food exports and imports. Had the problems he solved waited until after the liberation, shipments of Danish foodstuffs vital to Britain would have been delayed for months.
The morning Pinnock went to Blidah Park, a Danish intelligence man called at the British Embassy in Stockholm. Did they know anything of a man who called himself Frank Pinnock? Yes. Where was he? Skiing in northern Sweden, an embassy secretary told the Dane.
An excited radio message reached London later in the day. It stated that a German agent, passing himself as Frank Pinnock, had entered Denmark on a Resistance boat. The man was described, and the message asked if he should be liquidated.
Now Pinnock was in double jeopardy, for the second group of Danes who had located him in Copenhagen were Resistance intelligence men whose liaison with England did not include contact with Ebbe Munck’s Stockholm office. Luckily for Pinnock, the intelligence message was seen by the Englishman’s colleagues in London. ‘Good Lord!’ one of them said, ‘Pinnock’s in Copenhagen!’
But this did not entirely satisfy military intelligence. What if the Germans really had slipped an agent into the hands of the Danish Resistance—an agent disguised as Frank Pinnock?
Word was sent to the Resistance intelligence men in Copenhagen that, if the man who called himself Pinnock attempted in any way to contact the Germans, he would be liquidated.
After he finished all of his business with the food exporters, Pinnock’s guards asked him what he wanted to do until it was time for him to return to Sweden. Would it be all right if he visited friends, Pinnock asked.
That night, in a private home in Copenhagen, a party was given in the Englishman’s honour, and after it, well guarded and still followed by a group of liquidation men, Pinnock was returned to Blidah Park for his last night’s sleep in occupied Copenhagen. Before he retired, he was told what escape route he should follow if there was trouble during the night.
Pinnock slept soundly. In the morning his guards asked him if he had been disturbed. No, he had not. ‘Well,’ one of the young Danes said, ‘we thought that you might at least have heard the air-raid sirens. They kept us up all night.’
That evening, after dark, the four young Resistance men took the Englishman back toward the Amager dump, and there they waited at the foot of the German fortress. Pinnock’s trip to Sweden was speedy; the wind was behind his boat all the way, and he arrived thirty-five minutes earlier than Hendil had promised. Only after the war did Pinnock learn what would have happened if he had, just for the fun of it, stopped to speak to a German.
A week later, after making four unsuccessful orbits to try to find the building, Embry’s Mosquito bombers, again led by Group Captain Bateson, hit the last of Denmark’s Gestapo headquarters, the one in the Odense agricultural college. The building, which the Germans thought they had perfectly hidden under camouflage nets, was demolished completely.
Informatíon’s post-war stand-by power station was now ready. The British were moving up through south Schleswig, and Jens Lillelund, still in London, knew he would never have to parachute into Denmark. In Sweden, advance units of the Danish Brigade had been moved to the coast opposite Sealand. One of Leif Hendil’s last shipping missions was to get a group of Allied correspondents to Amager where, on 4th May, they set foot on a corner of nominally-occupied Danish soil to file the sort of news stories that detail anticlimactic events. That same day one of the last Danish harbour pilots to quit his job, in Mariagerfjord, in North Jutland, was taken out and sum marily executed by the Gestapo.
When British military units.were greeted in Copenhagen on 5th May by excited crowds, and by Ole Lippmann on behalf of the underground, German officers in Dagmarhus put down half-empty beer glasses to go out and surrender. Red, white, and blue arm-bands were everywhere. Traitors were rushed to the prisons, and patriots were released. German soldiers, uncertain what to do, dragged about the streets. Motor-cars and lorries labelled ‘BOPA’ and ‘Holger Danske’ cruised the streets. The little boats, now proudly flying the Dannebrog, deposited Resistance men in Denmark, and the Røsnæs arrived with the first units of the Danish Brigade.
The salvage tugs went to work to clear the harbours, and the lights were re-lit on the Sound buoys. The Freedom Council came out of hiding to take part in the first post-war Government. They re-enacted a death penalty, and the most vicious of the traitors were executed. Other collaborators received prison sentences.
It seemed a long time since Danes had thought of their country as ‘Hitler’s canary’, but many of them wondered how much they had done in the war. Of four million Danes, 30,000 were members of organized Resistance groups, al though had they stumbled into the right connections, doubtless thousands more would have joined. Three thousand Resist ance men and women had been killed. Denmark was officially credited with helping to win Europe’s freedom.
Four days after the city had been officially liberated, 40,000 German soldiers, many still armed, waited in Copen hagen. Only five hundred British troops were in the city, and VE day not withstanding, there could have been fighting that would have written a bloody finish to Denmark’s war. The busy occupation forces had little time for sleep.
‘Major Lund’—Ole Lippmann—reported to the British commander that there was a gun battle in progress between Danes and Germans outside a barracks in the centre of Copenhagen.
‘Go down and stop it,’ General Dewing, the British officer, ordered.
‘Yes, sir,’ Lippmann answered, saluting smartly.
As the Dane in the tight black civilian overcoat reached the door, Dewing called, ‘Wait a minute, Major. Do you know what to do?’
‘No, sir, but I’ll try.’
Riding in an army lorry toward the barracks, Lippmann saw Danish Brigade soldiers sprawled in the street, sniping at the German camp. Several bullets hit his lorry.
Lippmann identified himself to the Danish commander. ‘You must stop this shooting at once!’
‘But, sir, those are Germans in there! They’re shooting at us!’
Turning, Lippmann walked into the German camp and was saluted by the commander. ‘The war is over,’ Lippmann ordered. ‘Tell your men to put down their guns.’
‘But those Danes—’
‘Yes, I know all about that,’ Lippmann interrupted. ‘As long as you stay in Copenhagen, there’s going to be trouble. I’ll give you two hours to get out of the city.’
‘Where do we go, sir?” the German officer asked meekly. ‘Start marching your men toward Korsør.’ As the German saluted, Lippmann reminded him, ‘Remember, two hours.’
Reporting back to General Dewing, Lippmann explained that he had personally told the Germans to quit Copenhagen.
‘That’s all very well, Major, but what happens to them when they get to Korsør?’
Lippmann, his face taut after several trying days, smiled. ‘I don’t know, sir. But at least we’ll get a good night’s sleep.’