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In early February Bertelsen called to say that a top Nazi was about to leave Kastrup for Copenhagen, though his identity was unknown. Tommy called Oda’s apartment and for once was delighted to hear no reply. Wherever she was, she had unwittingly taken herself out of the firing line. Tommy used his set of keys to let himself in, assembled his longbow and waited for his prey. Then Oda’s phone rang. Tommy took a chance and picked up the receiver. ‘It was Bertelsen. There had been a change of plan: the leading Nazi had felt unwell and decided to fly directly to Germany. It soon became clear that the man I had been waiting for was Heinrich Himmler. In the end, they had just landed at Kastrup, refuelled and flown away.’

History shows that on 6 February 1941 Himmler did indeed land at Copenhagen’s Kastrup Airport on his way back from visiting SS recruits in Norway. He had no idea how close he had come to being the target of an assassination attempt. It is impossible to say whether that attempt would have succeeded, particularly given Sneum’s unusual choice of weaponry. However, it is conceivable that the course of history, and especially the fate of millions of Jews, might have been different had Himmler stuck to his schedule. The very Nazi that Tommy had most wanted to kill had nearly flown into his trap, only to escape thanks to a headache.

In 2007 Tommy’s son, Christian, asserted:

I am absolutely sure Himmler was the target. We still had that steel longbow in the family house near Zurich when I was a boy. I used to try, without success, to pull back its string. My father always told me that he had almost assassinated Himmler with that longbow. I believed him at the time and I still believe it today. I don’t think he wanted to make any more of it later in his life, because he didn’t actually get round to killing Himmler. And there was so much that he did manage to do that there wasn’t much point in going on about what he might have done.

To some extent, Tommy himself was relieved that he failed to carry out the hit:

There is a desire in every man for revenge at some level or other, and Adolf Hitler, the uneducated little bastard, had invaded my country. I became obsessed with getting revenge for that, because I was so proud to be a Danish officer. If you have a rotten society like Nazi Germany, it is no good killing low-level members of that society. You have to kill the leaders. But I was so enthusiastic about my ideas that I only realized the possible consequences when my sister Margit challenged me around that time. She said: ‘What about the family? What about Father and Mother? You can’t do it.’ They would probably have shot my family if I’d killed a top Nazi, so I’m lucky that it didn’t happen in the end. Sometimes I felt ashamed that I didn’t consider the consequences for my family while I was laying those plans.

Also, if you killed Himmler, you immediately spoiled the whole intelligence-gathering game for ever, because there would have been so much more security. So there was an advantage attached to not killing him. As for Oda, I never told her what I had been planning to do from the window of her flat. And I still loved her for many years after the war. But we never got back together.

Although he later found positives in the fact that the assassination attempt had to be aborted, at the time it was deeply frustrating for Tommy. In early 1941 he felt he had lost both the girl and the chance to make a telling impact on the course of the war. But soon enough many more opportunities would arise in both spheres, and Thomas Sneum would be ready to seize them.

Chapter 4

A TASTE OF FREEDOM

AS HIMMLER FLEW AWAY to safety in that first week of February 1941, Tommy was left in Denmark, still feeling trapped. Yet he remained as determined as ever to break through the wall of ice that enveloped the Danish coast. Instead of looking west to Britain for an escape route, he turned his attentions eastwards, to neutral Sweden.