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By Root 516 0

he could still be observed from the windows of the hotel. Across the road, the tall masts of sailing ships towered majestically above beer-drinkers in quayside bars, just as they had done for nearly three hundred years. Nyhavn (Newhaven) had once been home to Hans Christian Andersen, and now it almost seemed to be stretching the imagination too far that a city occupied by Nazis could still have a tourist district. Sneum sat and waited for Duus Hansen, rehearsing what he would say. He remembered: ‘It was a sunny winter’s day and Duus Hansen had been told exactly which bench I was sitting on, because it is a bloody big square. He came down from his office, just a couple of hundred meters away, and when I caught sight of him I got a good feeling.’ A smartlooking forty-year-old approached Sneum’s bench, and his honest-looking face convinced Tommy to trust him. There was something reassuring about Duus Hansen from the start, an unspoken integrity.

The pair walked and chatted, telling each other a little about what they had done since the Nazis had invaded. Sneum was surprised by his own reaction to a man he hardly knew. ‘We got on from the moment we met,’ he recalled. ‘I had complete confidence in Duus and spoke openly to him, and he spoke openly to me, and already we were friends.’

Then, just when all appeared to be well, Duus Hansen dropped a bombshell: ‘Another man, called Christophersen, has been to see me in the last few days. He claims he is the brother of one of the workers at Gyberg and Jensen. He wanted me to help him too; he seemed desperate. He had crystals but no radio.’

Sneum smiled. ‘I have the radio. I didn’t trust him.’

Later Duus Hansen revealed what he had been told by each spy sent from Britain:

The first with whom I came into contact was Christophersen, who told me that he and a comrade had been dropped into the country to gather information and build an organization. From England he had brought some quartz crystals together with an incomplete connecting and signal plan. He did not have a transmitter, he explained, because he had thrown it overboard while on a ferry to Fyn, thinking he was being followed. But he had saved the crystals, he claimed, which was the most important thing. So I started to construct a transmitter which suited the given crystals.

Even before the transmitter was ready, however, I was contacted by Werner Gyberg, a business associate, to say that he had been visited by another agent who had been parachuted in, a Lieutenant Sneum. He told both Gyberg and I that we shouldn’t deal with Christophersen, whom Sneum said was highly unreliable as an organizer and did not possess the personal courage needed to fulfil the obligations he had been given.

Since the conversation had turned to matters of personal courage, Duus Hansen decided to be disarmingly honest with Tommy, who explained: ‘This man would go on to become one of the biggest figures in the resistance, if not the biggest. But the important thing was that even at the start of his involvement, when we met, he knew his value and he knew his limits. He said that he had heard about the torture methods the Germans used, and that he didn’t know how he would react, but that he would do his best.’

Tommy felt this admission was a world away from Christophersen’s casual confession, after being recruited by the British, that he would cooperate freely with the Germans if he felt in any real danger. Duus Hansen was simply expressing every man’s fear—that he might break down under torture. He was aware of his responsibility, as a potential new recruit, to air such concerns at the outset. Making clear that he would try to hold out when subjected to excruciating pain, but didn’t know how long his bravery would allow him to do so, showed commendable honesty.

‘We all have our limits,’ said Sneum supportively. ‘We all have those feelings.’

The Germans knew it only too well. Vestre Prison in Copenhagen would become the scene of some horrendous torture later in the war. Even at this stage, in other occupied territories the Nazis were already