The Hornet's Sting (35 page)

It took him minutes rather than the anticipated seconds to reach it, and by then the fishermen were adamant there was no way through to Kaj and Thorbjoern. Oxlund attempted to crawl towards them on his hands and knees, but he was becoming stuck to the ice and didn’t seem able to get any further. Meanwhile, Thorbjoern was now out of sight, even further away, and still on the thin ice.

The emotions experienced by all three Danes, as the fishermen rowed away with only one on board, can scarcely be imagined. The Swedish police report, later compiled with Sigfred Christophersen’s help, told only the bare facts:

The emergency services were alerted as soon as the fishing boat reached the shore. A gyroplane, forerunner to the modern-day helicopter, was immediately dispatched with life-saving supplies. Oxlund would surely have heard the faint drone as the gyroplane neared the scene of the tragedy. But by the time it arrived overhead his military long-coat, already weighing down his weakened body, had become one with the ice.

There was evidence of further horrors as Oxlund refused to give up the struggle for life. He must have fallen forward at some point, probably through sheer exhaustion. In seconds his hands fused with the ice floe. When he pulled them free, the flesh from his palms and the tips of his fingers was torn away. The pieces of skin remained stuck to the freezing surface, gruesome handprints on the ice. Every time he waved towards the aircraft, what remained of his hands spattered the area around him with more blood. He knew he had been spotted, and he must have believed that his rescue was now imminent, but he still couldn’t free his knees or the lower fringes of his coat from the clutches of the ice. No matter how he hacked away, he remained trapped, glued in a position of helpless prayer.

From above, the pilot of the gyroplane, Rolf von Bahr, photographed a man who was still conscious, his head swathed in scarves in an attempt to retain the last of his body heat. Although his lower half was stuck to the ice, his arms were outstretched. Von Bahr noticed the blood smeared all over the ice, and watched in horror as the red patches increased with every frantic wave. Sadly, the Swedish pilot realized the ice was too thin to take the weight of his aircraft. But he knew he could still play a part in the stranded man’s salvation.

Tommy explained: ‘You could take the speed of those gyroplanes down to about thirty miles per hour, so there was a reasonably good chance of dropping a parcel near to Oxlund, so that he could almost touch it.’

Von Bahr did indeed drop emergency supplies with remarkable accuracy. Hot drinks, some rope, food and dry clothes landed in neat bundles agonizingly close to Oxlund. Tommy recalled:

Kaj fought hard to free his legs and coat from the grip of the ice but he was still frozen fast. He flailed and lunged at the packages, knowing they were potential life-savers, but his increasingly frantic efforts proved futile. All he succeeded in doing was smearing more blood around himself.

By then, two little rowing boats had arrived, and they appeared to be less than a hundred meters away. But their bows were unable to cut through the ice, and already one vessel was in trouble, stuck after trying to carve a path through the massive slab to which Kaj was attached. When the other boat got near enough, someone threw a rope towards the stricken vessel; and once the first boat had been extricated by the second, they both rowed away while they still could.

It was almost the final nail in Kaj Oxlund’s coffin. First the Nazi occupation of Denmark, and his decision to resist it, had cost him his marriage. Now it was about to cost him his life. But he was not quite finished yet. Through sheer willpower and a mighty sideways lunge, he used his weight to free one leg. The momentum ripped his coat clear of the ice, and the other leg followed as his body rolled and collapsed in a heap. Almost as soon as he was free, though, he was glued fast again, this time horizontally. If he had been able to look ahead, he would have noticed that he’d moved a little closer to one of the bundles dropped by Rolf von Bahr. But he had no energy left to reach it. He knew the pilot was still watching him from above. He died knowing.

W
HEN TOMMY SNEUM looked back on his friend’s death as an old man, he did so with powerful and sometimes conflicting emotions. He didn’t feel guilty about sending Kaj Oxlund to his death. ‘It was war,’ he maintained, ‘and Christophersen had to go. Kaj agreed to it all. But I should have killed Christophersen when I first planned it.’ And, at his most bitter, he still felt anger towards the sole survivor: ‘Two died but that coward Christophersen left them to die. He as good as killed Kaj.’ At other times, though, Sneum suggested that all three men bore some responsibility for what happened to them on that awful march:

Feeling more generous one day, Tommy said of Sigfred:

And, despite his hatred for Christophersen, Tommy did occasionally acknowledge his fellow agent’s achievement in surviving the trek: ‘I don’t think he was a courageous man in general, but I suppose he had tried to do more than the average Dane, and he did show enough courage to walk over the ice from Denmark to Sweden.’

Historical records related to this extraordinary march over the sea include Christophersen’s subsequent police interviews, von Bahr’s aerial photographs, and police reports written after Oxlund’s body was recovered. Only Sigfred knew the full story, though; including whether he made a conscious decision to leave behind Kaj and Thorbjoern. Since confusion is a common symptom of hypothermia, and Sigfred’s survival instinct was all he had to counteract his exhaustion and the intense cold, any condemnation of his conduct seems harsh. Yet it is easy to understand Tommy’s anguish: from his point of view, that bid for freedom couldn’t have gone worse. He lost a good friend, and the last person he wanted to survive was Sigfred, a man he had plotted to kill on several occasions.

Amazingly, Christophersen sustained no permanent physical damage from his battle with the elements. He had covered twenty-five kilometers on ice, on top of a gruelling five-kilometer snow-trek to reach the Danish coast in the first place, while pulling a heavily laden sledge. But his achievement would not have given him any satisfaction.

The ice floe containing Thorbjoern’s body had melted before a recovery team could reach it, and his corpse was swept away by the Oeresund currents. It was discovered further down the coast many weeks later. The Danish authorities arrived in an ice-breaker to retrieve Kaj’s body at 8.23 a.m. on 7 March. Even though he had managed to cross the border into Sweden, the Danes argued that his body was their property because he had left their shores illegally. Poor Kaj had marched from Nazi-occupied Europe to the brink of freedom, only to be dragged lifeless back to Denmark by Hitler’s puppets. Still nestling snugly in his coat pocket was a pen inscribed ‘K. OXLUND.’ The fact that he had taken it along was an oversight which now threatened to have devastating consequences for Thomas Sneum.

Tommy’s brother-in-law Niels-Richard Bertelsen told him of Oxlund’s death. ‘I had a drink and thought of him and said, “Byebye, old boy,”’ Sneum recalled. Sadness and anger flowed through him in equal measure. With another swig of beer, he quietly cursed Sigfred Christophersen, and his stubborn ability to survive. ‘I should have killed him,’ he told himself, time and time again. Then he wondered what Christophersen might already have told the Swedes about their mission.

Considering the trauma he had suffered, Sigfred Christophersen was actually holding out rather well in Malmo. On 7 March 1942, he was interviewed by Kriminal-Kommissarie Runerheim, one of the names Sneum had memorized from Aage Park’s notebook. Runerheim had to begin by confirming what Sigfred already suspected—that his two accomplices were dead. While hiding his grief must have been hard, Sigfred strenuously denied that he was in any way related to Thorbjoern. Instead, he insisted that his name was Erik Moeller, and he gave a false address. A suspicious Runerheim warned that there was no point in lying, since they could check everything with the Danish People’s Register. Christophersen stuck to his story. Then he insisted that the third man was Kaj Andersen, a thirty-three-year-old lieutenant in the military. Runerheim immediately suspected the name to be a fabrication. He knew about the incriminating pen found in the dead man’s coat poket, which strongly suggested that a Kaj Oxlund, not Kaj Andersen, had died on the ice. Still, he decided to check out every aspect of the stubborn survivor’s story, if only to dismantle it.

That same day in Denmark, the police endeavoured to trace the relations of a Kaj Oxlund, who was confirmed to have lived in Noekkerosevej. Oxlund’s parents, it emerged, were already dead; his wife, Tulle, was recovering from a bowel operation in hospital. The Danish police needed someone to identify the body, but decided that Tulle would be in no condition to perform the gruesome task. That left Kaj’s sister, Gerda, as their best hope for a quick, positive identification. Her address was duly found and she was told the grim news by a pair of policemen. In a state of shock, she refused to accompany them to the morgue until her husband had returned from work. After an hour or two, Svend arrived home and together the couple travelled with the policemen to the hospital.

The sight of her brother’s frozen body laid out on a slab in such cold and impersonal surroundings was too much for Gerda. She broke down completely, and for some time she was unable to utter a comprehensible word. But to the policemen present, it was obvious that the body did indeed belong to Kaj Egon Emil Oxlund. Nor did it come as any great surprise when it emerged that no Erik Moeller had ever lived at the Copenhagen address specified by the survivor across the Oeresund. The mystery man in the Malmo hospital clearly had some explaining to do. As soon as he was well enough, they would transfer him to a police cell, so that he could be subjected to a more thorough interrogation.

Over the next few days, the Danish police focused on Oxlund’s neighbors, in the hope that they might be able to shed some light upon this strange and tragic story. It was during these house-tohouse enquiries that Hans Soetje first revealed the strange goings-on at 1 Noekkerosevej.

The Copenhagen force, led by Politikommissaer Odmar, now realized they might be on to something big. If they handled the investigations carefully, they would be able to distinguish themselves before their German masters. Eivind Larsen, head of the Ministry of Justice, would be kept informed of all developments from this point onwards, and Odmar would have known that his superior was in direct contact with Fregatten-Kapitan Albert Howoldt, the head of the Abwehr in Denmark. Most worryingly for Tommy Sneum, Odmar now ordered one of his best detectives, Overbejtent Thomas Noerreheden, to liaise closely with the Germans.