The Boys Who Challenged Hitler

At secret locations, British planes dropped weapons containers for Danish partisans

The next afternoon Knud and Jens Pedersen hopped down from the Odense passenger car, took the family luggage off the train, and helped their parents step onto the pavement. As the train pulled away the quartet began to walk through the cavernous station, finally pushing through the arched doorway and out into the sunlit streets of Aalborg.

It was May 1944. Familiar streets told of a Denmark that had changed radically while the brothers were behind bars. Shop owners who had sold goods to German soldiers in the old days now stared through the windows of empty stores. Others stood out front and swept the sidewalks, looking left and right for a German customer. They were stigmatized as traitors now.

Exactly two years earlier, when the Churchill Club members had been arrested, the boys were among the very few who had stood up to the German oppressors. They had been caught, but not before they had set the ball in motion. Now a resistance was in full swing.

There were eight times as many acts of sabotage in 1943 as there had been in 1942. By 1944, so many acts of violence had been committed against German property that Germany had declared Denmark “enemy territory.”

Aalborg had become a hotbed of resistance. Residential gardens bulged with buried guns, smuggled from abroad, tooled at home, or stolen from the Germans. Underground newspapers, at last telling the truth about the war, flew from small, mobile, concealed presses. Massive labor strikes challenged German authority.

Night after night British planes parachuted tubes of weapons at prearranged spots throughout Denmark. Back in 1942, when the Churchill Club members were captured and jailed, shocking the nation, Germany had seemed invincible. Now, two years later, with Norwegian conditions achieved at last, Goliath was teetering.

The Pedersens walked on to the monastery. They dropped their bags and banged on the front door. A voice rang out, received an answer, and the door opened a crack. Then it flew all the way open and there were open arms and broad smiles of welcome for Knud and Jens.

The boys soon discovered that no place in Aalborg had changed more than their own home. Never a restful place, the monastery had become a full-blown resistance cell. Couriers were constantly depositing or picking up coded messages. Saboteurs hid inside the monastery, using it as a safe house.

Edvard Pedersen proudly conducted his sons through the new emergency escape route, out through the back door, up the stairs to the loft—where a fully loaded rifle rested at the ready—and on to the coil of rope at the rear of the chapel building that could be used to drop down onto a back street.

KNUD PEDERSEN: My mother had become the master of the house. It was she who opened the door when the knock sounded and you didn’t know who was on the other side. Father allowed the monastery to become a safe house for resisters, but every week he put us all in danger. He damned the bloody Germans in his Sunday sermons, almost taunting them. The Sunday after a failed attempt on Hitler’s life, Father observed from the pulpit, “Well, the devil looks after his own, doesn’t he?” His parishioners warned him to back off. They said a full church on Sunday was a perfect site for a “clearing murder,” the revenge mass execution the Germans typically carried out when a single Nazi informer was shot by the resistance.

Father ignored them. He brandished the big Colt revolver given to him by the resistance to protect himself. He showed it off to friends who came to the monastery. Once when he was messing around it went off, sending a bullet tearing into our bookshelves. It lodged in volume three of the five-volume History of the Danish People. That bullet passed only a few centimeters from Mother’s head.

Action sizzled throughout Denmark. On June 6, just two weeks after Knud and Jens were released from Nyborg, resistance fighters bombed the Globus factory on the outskirts of Copenhagen, halting production of the V-2 rockets that had been hammering London.

Days later, saboteurs from the Danish resistance group Borgerlige Partisaner (BOPA) blew up the Riffel Syndicate factory, makers of machine guns for the Germans.

Jens had his mind fixed on college, but Knud wanted to jump back into the thick of the resistance. His parents worried. To them, Knud needed rest, not action. The family scraped up enough money to rent a summer house in a small seaside village. Long summer days and evenings with family, walks in the sunshine—that’s what the boys needed to heal, they thought.

KNUD PEDERSEN: I was totally lost at first. I didn’t know what to do. I was as lonely as ever for a soul mate, maybe even more so because just after I got back I met Grethe again and I instantly realized I wasn’t in love anymore. She was riding down the street on her bicycle and stopped to greet me. I had spent more than two years totally obsessed with this person and now, strangely, all the feelings had vanished. Where did that leave me?

That was what I was puzzling over when, in the seaside town of Hurup, I met a young girl vacationing alone with her father. The old man was sitting on his porch in an armchair with a glass of whiskey, singing. Next to him was his daughter, Patricia Bibby, seventeen, dark haired, and beautiful.

We started talking. It turned out she lived in Aalborg and went to Cathedral School. They were British and had been trapped in Denmark by the German invasion. After a day or two I went back and invited her to the beach. We spent the whole day walking among the dunes and sunbathing and talking. We lay side by side, and at times there was less than an inch between our fingertips. I couldn’t work up the nerve to span that inch for fear of ruining the whole thing.

But we talked. That is, I talked and she listened. She was the greatest listener. I could tell her anything, about prison, about my actions against the Germans, about my dreams. She laughed with a great laugh and encouraged me to hold nothing back. She made me feel like a soldier, even though I had spent much of the war behind bars, too young to enlist and with no army to enlist in anyway. I would have told her anything.

Patricia Bibby had wanted to meet Knud Pedersen. “Everyone at school knew who he was. I admired the stance he took, and he was very good-looking. I made a point to get to know his sister, Gertrud. I invited her to my house, and found out that the Pedersens were going to Hurup for the summer. I maneuvered my father to going there instead of where we were planning to go. It’s true that Knud and I met by chance, but I was there on purpose. I loved listening to him and being with him. I found him exciting. Alive and fun. Did I feel anything for him? Oh, yes, I did. He was tall and slender and funny, and he had an idea every two minutes. When we were lying on the beach he said, ‘I don’t know why we can’t have suitcases with four little wheels.’ Then it was ‘Why can’t we get toothpaste to pop out of a bottle?’”

According to Patricia, Knud also talked about his resistance experiences, about his obsession with a girl while he was in prison, about taking the guns from the German soldiers and going out at night to do sabotage. “I was not mature enough at seventeen to sense that he was in trouble, that prison had left him deeply shaken. He talked about jail through amusing stories, like the one about the guard who told him to polish his latrine until it shone ‘like your mother’s best vase.’ I laughed, but I couldn’t feel his pain. Not yet.”

KNUD PEDERSEN: After the summer holidays Pat became a daily guest in the afternoon in the monastery, visiting Gertrud. I did my best to win her heart. We visited in my room a lot. I showed her my paintings and produced a couple of romantic paintings especially for her.

One night in the winter between 1944 and ’45, Patricia’s father died, leaving her alone in the world. My mother immediately invited her to move into the monastery, which she did.

Living with us changed the whole chemistry. Now she became a sort of half-sister to me, though I was still in love with her. Jens came home from university in Copenhagen, and of course he fell instantly in love with Pat. That was a given: anything I wanted, Jens would try to get. One night Pat came and showed me a gift she had gotten from Jens—a ring inset with a big green stone. I was unable to speak. My only hope was that she was not in love with him, but I was not going to ask. That would break our code: the way we were, if she had something to tell me, Pat would do so.

One winter night about ten o’clock, the family heard a banging at the monastery’s front door. Mrs. Pedersen nervously cracked it open upon a snow-covered young man on skis. He was panting hard, sending plumes of vapor into the cold air. He introduced himself as Karl August Algreen Moeller, a polytechnical student from Copenhagen University. He had just skied thirty-five miles from the village of Randers, pursued by the Gestapo. He had been given the monastery’s address as a safe house. Please, he asked. Could they shelter him?

The Special Operations Executive (SOE), a British covert group, worked with all European resistance movements. Danish resistance activists received British training to carry out sabotage acts. The SOE was extremely disciplined, with a very firm command structure. The British insisted on control. British Royal Air Force planes dropped thousands of containers of weapons onto Danish soil in 1944 and 1945. Danes who were caught collecting weapons were shot on the spot or sent to German concentration camps. When the Churchill Club members were arrested in 1942, many Danish police were trusted German collaborators. But by the time the Pedersens were released in 1944, many Danish police refused German orders and were helping the resistance. It was another sign of how greatly things had changed while the boys were locked up.

A container with weapons dropped by the British SOE over Denmark to support the resistance, 1945

KNUD PEDERSEN: Karl was the resistance saboteur I longed to be. His work began each evening in my father’s office when the news service from BBC to Denmark came on the radio. Karl telegraphed radio messages to the British group Special Operations Executive (SOE) every day from different addresses in Aalborg—though, curiously, never from the monastery. The British commanders sent coded messages through the radio broadcasts, like “Your grandmother wants a cup of tea” or “There is no more air in the front wheel on your bike.” Each message signaled the movement of resistance forces. “Your grandmother wants a cup of tea” could mean “Be at a certain farmer’s field at 9:00 p.m., when RAF airplanes will drop weapons containers.”

These communications and the weapons deliveries they enabled were the very lifeblood of Denmark’s resistance to the Nazis. Karl had to send his messages at very high speeds because the Gestapo went around with tracking antennas on their shoulders trying to locate where these messages were being transmitted from. Karl was well-known and hotly pursued by the Gestapo.

Karl and I became friends, but we could not be confidants. He never said where he was going when he left the house each afternoon, and I never asked. I knew that each day before he left he was visited by a superior—a guy in a trench coat—who handed him the script for his coded radio message to London that day.

At night Karl and I lay in our beds talking. I hungered to be part of the organized resistance, and I would tell him all my sabotage ideas. One night we discussed the possibilities of throwing a bomb from a railway bridge. I told him the Germans always had Danish prisoners in the first train car, so we’d have to wait until at least the third passed under us. He just smiled.

All conversation froze whenever we heard a car approaching our windows. The monastery was on a street corner, so every car had to gear down to make the turn. The headlights would sweep around the corner, and the driver would shift. Is it slowing down? Did it stop? Lying there listening to those cars with Karl, I was terrified for the first time. The old Churchill Club actions did not frighten me, but maybe prison had changed me. Every time I heard a smooth-purring private car operating with high-quality gas, I told myself, “That could only be one of two things: the Gestapo or a doctor.” Our ears were attuned to the slightest sound. If the engine stopped totally, we’d have to run for it. So we would lift our heads just a little whenever the headlights passed to try to get a peek. It was so frightening.

In early 1943, a liaison office in Stockholm, Sweden, was set up to link the Danish Resistance and the SOE. The idea was to coordinate the dropping of weapons into Denmark. The first receivers were peasants from Jutland, the very northern part of Denmark. Plans were made through coded radio broadcasts. On target nights, peasants waited on dark, lonely heaths until they heard the drone of an aircraft. They signaled the low-flying planes in with electric torches and ran to gather up the objects that floated down to them on twenty-foot parachutes. Then they spirited the canisters filled with weapons away, hopefully before German soldiers—who could also hear the planes—had time to react.

One night Karl didn’t return to the room. He never came back. A few months later, just after Liberation Day, I learned that he had been chased up a staircase into a loft and surrounded by Gestapo officers. He shot and killed two of them and then put the gun to his own head.

After liberation his body was found in a grave at the military airport. There was a note to his parents. I was called out to identify him, and it was an awful sight. He had been bound with wires around his legs and arms. We brought him to the chapel. A few days later I was in the car following him to the small village where he’d been born. There were flowers all along the street to his family home and all the Danish flags were at half-mast.

I am going to die now and I am quite afraid; but I believe that God will give me strength to die as a Christian and a Dane in the battle for Denmark.

I pray that He will bless you. I believe I did my utmost and would rather die than be captured. They are outside now and I will confront them.

I later learned that when Karl found out that the whole Pedersen family was working underground he asked his commander to be moved from the monastery. He did that to spare us.

The Churchill Club boys no longer got together after their release. Each made his own adjustment. In 1943, Helge Milo and Eigil Astrup-Frederiksen enrolled in eleventh grade at Cathedral School and tried to get on with their studies. The faculty was divided as to whether to let them back into school. A classmate remembers that on Helge’s first day in English class, the teacher, a known Nazi sympathizer, addressed the new boy with lofty authority in his voice.

The teacher launched into a rant as if no one else was in the room. Among the things students heard him fuming about were “misguided youth.”

Mogens Fjellerup—the Professor—also went back to Cathedral School. Before he was admitted, he was required to swear that he would do nothing to harm the school. “Perhaps it was wrong,” he later wrote, but he did swear. There was no reason for a Churchill Club anymore, now that the resistance was professional and effective. “There was no longer any chance for adventuresome groups [of teenagers],” Mogens wrote. But he missed the excitement. “So went the time,” he said, “and it was just as slowly as in prison.”

Eigil got off to a smooth start in Aalborg. He was greatly relieved that his family had escaped the Nazis during their attempt to round up Denmark’s Jews. Better still, his girlfriend, Birthe, had waited for him. At first, Cathedral School provided a welcome if unexciting routine.

And then one day a friend asked him if he would be interested in resistance work. Eigil found himself accepting. He was taken into a unit, trained to handle weapons, and assigned to deliver sensitive messages from place to place.

After several successful deliveries he was asked to deliver documents to Sweden, traveling on a boat with an old man and another boy about his age. The night before departure the documents were delivered to his grandfather’s house. Early the next morning the Gestapo boots came thundering up the stairs. Fists hammered on the door, and shouts ordered them to open. Eigil stuffed the documents in his shoe and climbed through the third-floor window and out onto the roof with Gestapo officers close behind. Soon cornered, Eigil said a prayer and attempted to leap down onto a garden shed. He missed, shattered his leg on the pavement, and soon found himself a captive once again, this time in a German-run hospital.

After the summer break in 1944, Knud also reenrolled at Cathedral School, but his heart was not into studying. Having been imprisoned the longest, Knud was a grade behind the other Churchill Clubbers.

“He never bothered to take any books to school,” Patricia Bibby recalled later. “He was an artist, a painter. Here was a young man who had translated Milton’s Paradise Lost into Danish while he was in prison. He was too old to go back to high school.”

Knud’s social network had collapsed. Jens was studying in Copenhagen. Alf and Kaj Houlberg and Knud Hornbo were still in prison, though at least Alf and Kaj had been returned to Danish cells after six months in Germany. Hans Jøergen was a Nazi captive, surely suffering—if he was even still alive.

Knud hungered to join the SOE-led organized resistance but couldn’t find a way in. He was well-known throughout Aalborg as a Churchill Club leader, but resistance professionals saw him as a security risk.

These were different days. The new resistance movement was built on discipline. Could Knud Pedersen take orders? Could he hold his temper? Could he function within a command structure?

Knud tried one door after another. All were closed. His spirits plunged; his confidence bottomed.

“A couple of times his mother called me,” Patricia Bibby recalls. “He had locked himself inside his bedroom door and would not come out. ‘Would you please see if you can help?’ she asked. I stood outside the door talking, trying to get him to open it. He had torn his paintings and writings. He said they were no good. That they were worthless. That he felt worthless. It was a terrible depression he had. And we would talk.”

One afternoon Knud went outside for a walk and drifted into a crowd that had formed outside the Gestapo headquarters downtown. As he watched from the fringes his eyes were drawn to the sewer manhole cover in the street outside the building. An idea came to him.

KNUD PEDERSEN: I remembered that in the movie Oliver Twist, London’s sewers were broad tunnels through which people traveled. I thought surely the tunnels of Aalborg passed under the Gestapo headquarters. I was still thinking about this a bit later when I passed a toy store and stopped to look at the scene in the window, an electric railroad. I got an idea: I bet a toy train with a tender and three or four wagons loaded with PE2 dynamite on rails leading beneath the Gestapo building might work.

That’s how desperate I was to be a part of the organized resistance. Of course, the rational side of me knew this was a harebrained idea, a hopeless enterprise. But ever since I had come home from the jail I had tried without success to introduce myself to the organized resistance movement built up by the SOE. The answer was always the same: I was supposed to be a “security risk.”

From the toy store I walked to Aalborg’s city office building. I found the municipality’s technical division and asked the clerk if they had a blueprint of the sewer system in Østeråstreet.

By this time all the young engineers in the office were gathering around and laughing, but through an open door I could glimpse the senior engineer in his separate office behind the clerk’s counter. He wasn’t laughing at all.

Turned out he was the chief of the SOE’s Kings Company (K Company) in Aalborg. He knew all about me. After I left, he turned to one of his colleagues who was also a member of this K Company and said, “It would be better to have Mr. Pedersen on the inside than the outside.”

The next day a man came to offer me a command in the resistance. I became the leader of K Company, Division B, Group Number 4. Our job was to move ammunition, weapons, and explosives from hiding place to hiding place to avoid German detection. At last I received weapons training, which included taking apart and reassembling machine guns. I learned to use American-made grenades, too, which looked like pineapples. I could now operate the things we had stolen with the Churchill Club.

Patricia Bibby became an effective fund-raiser for the resistance, as did Knud’s sister, Gertrud, and their friend Inger Vad Hansen. The three girls jumped at Knud’s proposal that they raise funds to support the underground newspapers that were countering German propaganda. Together they visited wealthy Aalborg citizens—usually businessmen—and engaged them in conversations that ended in a pitch for funds. The risk was that they never knew for sure the private sympathies of the people they were talking to. When they, or their superiors in the resistance, sensed danger, the girls were ordered to go underground.

“We would stay with friends,” Patricia recalls. “During such times I would meet my father in the churchyard once a week so he would know I was still alive. We would pass without looking and never spoke.”

Wealthy donors wondered how they could be assured their money would actually go to the official resistance. The girls offered them a code name, promising that the name would appear on a certain page in the underground paper Frit Danmark. It was a secret receipt. Inger kept the list in her head, never writing it down, and memorized in code.

The three girls collected many thousands of Danish kroner for the underground movement.

Our first assignment was to move a weapons cache from a church at the other end of Aalborg into the monastery’s chapel. It was dangerous work, for the Germans had taken over a school just across the street from the church that housed the weapons. At all hours young soldiers sat in the windows, smoking, laughing, and peering down on everything that went on—including our repeated bicycle journeys from the church, during which we carried bulky objects wrapped in black paper.

One afternoon just a few days after my unit was formed, I got word that a member of our group had probably been captured by the Gestapo. They would try to torture information out of him. We had to move the weapons at once. We started wrenching up the floorboards and pulling the weapons out. We were wrapping them in black paper for transport when there was a great hammering at the door! Guns and grenades lay scattered all over the church. The banging continued. One of our people unwrapped a machine gun and took a position with his back against the altar. Another grabbed a weapon and crawled behind the pulpit.

Heart hammering, I opened the door. There stood a member of the church choir. It was time for practice, he said. He took a look into the church and knew in a flash what was going on. He offered to help us, and we told him he could help most by spreading the word that practice had been canceled. By late afternoon we had moved it all—including rifles for thirty-five men—to the monastery chapel.

On the evening of May 4, 1945, I was out on the street when I heard a radio blaring through an open window. The announcer said that the Germans had surrendered and that our liberation would take place the following morning. I saw people turning their lights on and off and cheering through their windows and dancing and thronging out of their buildings into the street. Soon our platoon received orders to gather at the monastery. All thirty-five unit members showed up. We were ordered to sit tight at the monastery for now. Early the next morning we would take possession of the Aalborg airport—the Germans’ great prize.

That night we carried all the weapons from the chapel down into the drawing room. The strong smell of oil from bazookas and rifles wafted through parlors and sitting rooms. When we were done, Mother served coffee and Father distributed hymnals. I ended the war at the monastery chapel just a few meters away from the room in which the Churchill Club was born—singing hymns with the men of my K Company group. I was eighteen.

At 8:30 p.m. on May 4, 1945, Danish announcer Johannes G. Sørensen paused in his BBC nightly news broadcast to read a telegram he had just been handed. It was but two sentences long:

FIELD MARSHAL MONTGOMERY ANNOUNCES THAT ALL GERMAN FORCES IN NORTHWEST GERMANY, HOLLAND, AND DENMARK HAVE SURRENDERED. THE SURRENDER BECOMES EFFECTIVE AT 8 O’CLOCK TOMORROW MORNING.

Five years of occupation by the Germans were over. Danes everywhere took to the streets, laughing and crying, dancing and singing. People stripped the blackout curtains from their windows, burned them in the street, and replaced them with candles of joy.

Danes shredding and burning the flag of their occupiers