The Boys Who Challenged Hitler

Just before Christmas 1941, a single conversation changed everything. We were in Jens's room at the monastery. It was Jens, me, four of my fourth-form Middle A classmates-Eigil, Helge, Mogens Thomsen-son of Aalborg's City Manager-and Mogens Fjellerup, a pale, pointy-faced classmate who rarely spoke but who was known as the outstanding physics student in our class. Two of Jens's classmates were there too: a boy named Sigurd-ranked number one academically in their class-and Preben Ollendorff, a bit of a loudmouth whose dad owned a tobacco factory.

We had just gone out shopping for Christmas presents for our teachers. We were in a great holiday mood . . . laughing about girls, having fun. But as always the conversation snapped back to the German occupation of our country. You couldn't go five minutes back then without returning to the topic on everyone's mind.

The talk turned dead serious. We leaned forward and our voices lowered. We angrily discussed the newspaper articles about the execution of Norwegian citizens and slaughter of Norwegian soldiers who resisted the Nazis. Norwegians were our brothers, we reminded each other, our good neighbors who had the courage to stand up. By contrast our leaders traded with Germany and sought to placate the Nazis.

Here was the discussion I had longed for! I was thrilled to be with Cathedral students who felt as my brother and I did. These were guys who stayed up like us for the nightly radio broadcasts from England. The more we talked the angrier we became. It was absurd: if you accidentally bumped into a German on the street, you were expected to strip the hat from your head, lower your eyes, and apologize profusely for disturbing a soldier of the master race. All of us had listened to them braying their idiotic folk songs in the streets.
All this was outrageous, but would anyone do anything about it? The average Danes hated their occupation and occupiers, but ask them to resist and they would say, "No, it cannot be done . . . We will have to wait . . . We are not strong enough yet . . . It would be useless bloodshed!"

The air was thick with our tobacco smoke by the time we laid the proposition on the table. It was the same vow Jens and I and the others in the RAF Club had made back in Odense: We will act. We will behave as Norwegians. We will clean the mud off the Danish flag. Jens and I opened up and told our classmates of our sabotage activities with the RAF Club in Odense. We left with a bounty on our heads, we told them.

The discussion grew heated. The older boys, Sigurd and Preben, wanted nothing of it. "You're crazy," they said. "The Germans will wipe you out in a day! There'll be nothing left of you!" But we younger boys were determined to give ourselves a country we can be proud of.

Together on that snowy afternoon we Middle A classmates, along with Jens, resolved to form a club to fight the Germans as fiercely as the Norwegians were fighting. We would take the resistance to Aalborg. We would call ourselves the Churchill Club, after the great British leader Winston Churchill. Jens volunteered to research the organization of a resistance cell and give us his recommendations, same time, same place tomorrow. Preben and Sigurd vowed not to leak word of our meeting to anyone. Already transformed from the cheerful holiday shoppers we had been an hour before, the Churchill Club stood adjourned.