The Hornet's Sting_ The Amazing Untold Story of World War II Spy Thomas Sneum - Mark Ryan [13]
In early 1941, however, Tommy Sneum became obsessed with a novel plan which, if executed successfully, would allow him to write his name in history.
Chapter 3
HIMMLER AND THE LONGBOW
THE FOCAL POINT for Tommy’s new assault on the Nazis was no longer the daunting installation on Fanoe but a swanky hotel in the center of the Danish capital. And his ambitious—some would say crazy—assassination plot was linked to his enduring love for a woman who fascinated him like no other. Talking about the origins of his plan, he explained:
I had an ex-girlfriend called Oda Pasborg, a beautiful blonde who had starred in a film called En Fuldendt Gentleman—The Complete Gentleman. Her father had given her a penthouse apartment on one of the approaches to the Hotel d’Angleterre, where all the top German officers used to stay. I was still close to Oda and I had keys for the apartment. It started me thinking.
One day in 1940, I had been visiting Oda when I found myself down on the street just a few meters from a German staff car. Inside was an officer and I felt the urge to shoot him, but I wasn’t carrying a pistol, because I had been to see Oda and she didn’t like anything to do with the war. Afterwards I realized that I could, in theory at least, have killed the German officer from Oda’s apartment window, as he went past.
But why aim only for a lowly army officer? Tommy began to dream of assassinating a top Nazi official. If he was in the right place at the right time, and given sufficient warning of such a visit to central Copenhagen, it certainly seemed feasible. He said later:
I wanted to kill Heinrich Himmler more than any of the others because I knew I was never going to get to Adolf Hitler. Not many people knew who Himmler was at the time, but I did. He was Reichsfuhrer of the SS, and even a lot of German officers didn’t like him. But I was prepared to kill any of the top Nazis if I got the chance, even the Luftwaffe chief, Hermann Goering, a man I had met personally and found to be very charming. Now it was different: they had invaded Denmark and I wanted revenge.
The challenge was to think of a way to avoid capture after making the attempt, since such a fate would mean a terrible death for Sneum and any associates who could be linked to the hit. ‘The problem was that if you used a pistol or rifle, the Germans would soon see where the shot had come from, and I wasn’t prepared to risk getting Oda into such serious trouble. She would have been tortured, and I couldn’t have that. Oda was one of the very few girls that I ever really loved. I probably loved her more than she ever realized.’
It seems that Tommy’s desperation to impress Oda may have gone hand in hand with his desire to play a more active part in the war, a potentially explosive combination in a man who hated rejection or defeat of any kind. He revealed later:
We had known each other since long before I married Else, and Oda was much classier. We met on a boat while sailing back from Harwich in England to Esbjerg, a journey which took about thirty hours in those days. It was the mid-1930s; I was seventeen or eighteen and she was a couple of years older. She was beautiful, tall, blonde, charming and intelligent. I saw her and thought, This is the woman I’m going to make my wife one day.
What was so special about her? Just to be near her made you happy. I felt so relaxed on that boat that I could talk about anything with her. We went out on deck and it was cold, and we held each other tight. We kissed and it was the most extraordinary, lovely experience. We didn’t do much more than that on the voyage, but we both knew we were already very much in love. She went on to Copenhagen at the end of