An interior passageway in Holy Ghost Monastery, a sprawling old building perfect for secret meetings
As winter snows began to melt in the spring of 1942, the Churchill Club expanded into a force with nearly twenty members, active and passive. Though they continued to seek out targets after school, they made more nighttime raids, mainly attacks on German vehicles, conducted while they were supposedly playing bridge. One of the club’s most important new active members was Uffe Darket, whom Eigil had known from another school. When Eigil had transferred to Cathedral School he stayed in touch with Uffe and recommended him to the Churchill group. At first glance, no one would have taken Uffe for a saboteur, for he was always neatly dressed, respectful, and pleasant. His blond good looks and steady manner inspired calm and trust. But like the others, he was brave and dedicated—and angry. He was quickly accepted.
Knud and Jens Pedersen took great pains to keep the Churchill Club secret from the rest of their family. The brothers knew that if their parents had any idea what was going on they would move to stop it. In some ways, it wasn’t that hard a secret to keep: their parents, Edvard and Margrethe, were absorbed in the countless details of church work. Their younger sister, Gertrud, was no more interested in Jens’s and Knud’s lives than they were in hers. Little brothers Jørgen and Holger were still in elementary school.
It helped that Jens’s and Knud’s rooms—headquarters of the Churchill Club—were at the top of a staircase, isolated from the rest of the family’s living quarters. During their meetings, the boys were careful to post a guard at Jens’s door to make sure no one came up the stairs. All in all, the Pedersen parents were delighted their sons had made new friends so quickly after their move to Aalborg.
Likewise, most Cathedral School students had no idea what was going on. “Knud Pedersen would fight,” a classmate later wrote. “Soon he gathered from class a bunch of boys around him. They went mostly around the schoolyard as a closed flock without the rest of us knowing why.” Cathedral School faculty members continued to drill their students in preparation for midterm exams, unaware of the greater drama in which a few of their students were involved.
Even as the club got more and more proficient at stealing weapons, they continued to try to manufacture their own explosives. The Churchill Club’s “Professor”—Mogens Fjellerup—converted an elevated chamber on the monastery’s second floor into a chemical laboratory. There, he mixed combustible materials smuggled from Cathedral School’s chemistry classroom. In the beginning, they fizzled out again and again. But with each failure, the Professor felt he was getting closer.
KNUD PEDERSEN: Sometimes the whole second floor was thick with smoke and we had to run gagging to throw open the upstairs windows. The Professor was trying to make small handmade bombs to drop into the motors of parked German cars. For a while they just went ppssssst and we had to pry off the radiator screens and smash the engines with ordinary tools. But the Professor kept at it. He was the silent type who only gave a faint smile when the rest of us were doubling over with laughter.
We made up our operations as we went along, sometimes taking chances that we shouldn’t have taken, but we had no formal command structure. We were too jealous of each other to name or elect a leader. We belittled each other. The Professor reddened when Eigil insisted his bombs didn’t qualify him for full Churchill Club membership—he had to steal a gun like everyone else. Others piled on.
“Yeah, your ‘bombs’ never work anyway.”
“What a mastermind!”
The sarcasm was as thick as the monastery walls, but we had faith in each other and our mission held us together. We were out to install “Norwegian conditions”—the courage to resist—in our country. Denmark would stand whether the government liked it or not.
Several times a week we met in Jens’s room, took roll, and then went out on our bikes. We divided the city into quadrants and scouted, sometimes in pairs and sometimes alone. We inspected the parked German vehicles and buzzed by the Wehrmacht offices, searching for German assets to destroy and weapons to steal. Sometimes we came up empty. Usually there was something.
During one of these routine reconnaissance missions, I drifted past a German barracks and saw something that made my eyes nearly pop out of my head. It was almost too good to be true! I stood up from my bicycle seat and mashed down the pedals, tearing around town, rounding up the others and telling them to get back to the monastery at once. Within minutes we were on Jens’s couch, with Børge’s tobacco glowing in our bowls, a chair wedged against the door and all eyes on me.
“So what’s the big deal?” came the question.
“Big deal is, I found a lovely German rifle dangling from a bedpost inside a barracks bedroom. The window is wide open. It’s ours for the taking. Now’s our chance.”
There was unanimous agreement—we had to have it. “Let’s wait for night,” someone said. But the rest of us knew we had to move now, in broad daylight. The streets would be crowded, providing cover. The building was unguarded, or at least it had been an hour ago. At night there would be a German on that bed. Now there was only a rifle.
No, we would make a daylight strike. But if we were able to snatch the rifle, we would have to conceal it as we transported it back to the monastery. A Danish boy couldn’t just be seen cheerfully pedaling down a Wehrmacht-filled Aalborg street with a German rifle slung over his shoulder. So we had to make one plan for capturing it and another for moving it.
Our operation called for three boys and a raincoat. It was about three o’clock when Børge, Mogens Thomsen, and I reached the barracks. We circled the block a couple of times, just to see how traffic was moving and to make sure there were no German guards posted. It was still clear. On the third lap Mogens let himself fall behind a little, while Børge and I advanced, with Børge carrying the coat. Close to the barracks, we ditched the bikes behind a tree. The barracks building was enclosed by a barbed-wire fence, but the strands were widely separated and easy to step through. I held the fence open for Børge, then let myself in and walked slowly toward the window. The rifle was still there, dangling on a belt from the post of an empty bed. But in the next room, his back to us, was a German soldier, busily polishing his windows with a rag! He hadn’t seen us—yet.
We froze in place and waited for our hearts to calm down. Then we exchanged nods, and I made my move. I slipped to the corner of the building, inched to the window, and reached inside for the rifle. I wrapped my hand around it, snatched it off the bedpost, and passed it out to Børge. The weapon was almost as long as he, but Børge got it bundled inside the coat and began walking away—not running, just an even stride. As I backed away I could hear the German next door, still rattling the room with the fury of his window washing. In a flash we were back over the fence and Mogens had the rifle wrapped in the raincoat on his bike. A postman and two women stood on the street staring at us as we took off. I met one of the women’s eyes. They told me she had seen the whole thing. She appeared conflicted. Would they start yelling or hold their tongues? We didn’t hang around to plead our case, but we didn’t hear any kind of alarm behind us as we rode away.
We took narrow streets back to the monastery. Again and again Mogens had to stop to readjust the coat, because both ends of the rifle kept sticking out. When the monastery came in sight, we whistled our arrival, threw the bikes against the gate, and ran the bundle inside. We lowered the coat onto Jens’s bed and unwrapped the prize. It was a beautiful rifle, the stock polished and the barrel clean. Now we had a significant weapon, a long-range killing machine. We had to sort out what it meant but not right now. The three of us were exhausted. We called a meeting for the following afternoon. It would be the most important yet.
* * *
The Churchill Club had full attendance the next day. The meeting began with a detailed report of the rifle’s liberation, from the window-washing Nazi to the witnesses. Everyone got to hold the weapon, look down its barrel, feel the balanced weight of the deadly machine, and imagine a Nazi within its sights. All of the boys shared in the satisfaction that at least one good weapon had changed sides of the ledger.
Then the discussion became more serious.
Barracks of a Danish volunteer army corps that assisted the German army with guard duty and sabotage prevention
KNUD PEDERSEN: We had done something different yesterday, more significant than anything we’d done yet. Yes, the pistol we’d stolen from the German car downtown was important, but a pistol offers only a few shots at close range. A rifle would let us snipe, to attack or cover each other from long distance.
We had reached a crossroads. The question before us was: Should we continue along the same path, defacing and destroying German property, or should the main job of a Churchill Clubber now be to build a cache of weapons and train ourselves to use them against our German occupiers? To choose the latter would not mean that we would cease to burn their cars and buildings. But our new emphasis would be weapons.
It was a spirited discussion, with everyone joining in except the Professor, who rarely said anything. But in the end we agreed that if our goal was to awaken Denmark, we must get weapons. And as our operations increased in scale and complexity, we would need firepower to cover each other. Finally, if the war turned in our favor and British troops came to liberate us from Germany’s grasp, wouldn’t it be great to have weapons to share with British troops on the day their fighting forces arrived to liberate us? With weapons, we would be able to fight side by side with our allies. In the end we were of one heart: in the words of the French national anthem, “Aux armes, citoyens!” “To arms, citizens!” Weapons! We must get weapons!
But where to find them? One kid proposed that if we just kept riding around, other weapons would appear. Look what has just happened for Knud, he said. Another countered with a story about a small boy who had found a dead bird. He buried the bird and, proud of himself, made a cemetery for more dead birds. Then he went out to find others. But he couldn’t. Finding the first bird had been a one-time event, a stroke of happenstance and luck. The point of the story was that if we were to develop an arsenal of weapons we couldn’t just rely on luck. We had to think strategically about where German weapons were concentrated, and how to get them.
We made a list of the most likely German gathering places where weapons might be lifted. There were always German officers in the pastry shops downtown. The train stations were good for ammunition boxes. The waterfront teemed with armed soldiers. And now that the weather was warming and windows were likely to be open, a regular inspection of German barracks would be a must.
We composed the next day’s patrols and adjourned our meeting to go home and study for our midterm examinations.