Monica Wichfeld

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Danish Resistance during the Second World War

After the outbreak of the Second World War, Wichfeld's family was forced to leave the Kingdom of Italy when Mussolini ordered British citizens to leave the country in 1941. She returned to Engestofte in Denmark, and began to actively seek out supporters of the Danish resistance. In the summer of 1942 she rented a cottage at Engestofte to journalist Hilmar Wulff and his new wife, teacher Karen Inga Petersen along with dissident poet Halfdan Rasmussen. All three were members of the Danish Communist Party and Wulff was the editor of two underground newspapers Free Denmark (Frit Denmark) and Land and People (Land og Folk). Wichfeld began to drum up funds to feed the production and distribution of the papers, and to fund the underground activities of the Communist Party. Later that year, in a new partnership with Erik Kiersgaard, a member of the resistance who had organized a sabotage unit, Wichfeld began to store firearms, ammunition and explosives at Engestofte to support their cause.

Through Count Carl-Adam "Bobby" Moltke, the son of a former Danish Foreign Affairs minister and deeply connected member of the political underground of Copenhagen, Wichfeld met Flemming Muus, a man that had trained under Winston Churchill's Special Operations Executive (SOE), and would eventually become her son-in-law. Wichfeld made her estate available to Muus to house the top-secret SOE agent Jens Jacob Jensen, codenamed "Jacob" and shelter him. Eventually she and Jacob grew to lead the Lolland resistance and Engestofte became central to the recruitment, training, arming, planning, direction and organization of the actions of the resistance (such as the bombing of the Naskov shipyard), as well as being a receiving ground for British paratroopers and weapons drops. When the resistance gained momentum and the Nazis sent in forces to quell it, Wichfeld was instrumental in facilitating the escape of Danish patriots fleeing the country, including Himar Wulff and his wife. During this time, she also challenged the Danish resistance, who was reticent to facilitate safe passage for Jewish families, and personally began to harbour a Jewish family being sought by the Gestapo.

Arrest, imprisonment and death

In late 1942 telephone transmissions between Jacob and other resistance members were intercepted by Gestapo wiretaps and led to the arrest of Jacob in Århus. Under interrogation and torture, Jacob gave away the names of forty-four resistance fighters and a hundred Danish families working with them. Wichfeld was one of them. Despite having received rumours that the Gestapo had evidence against her and would be coming to arrest her, Wichfield refused to leave Engestofte saying "I have joined the struggle for Denmark. I am willing to pay the price." In January 1944, she was arrested at Engestofte and imprisoned in Copenhagen's Vestre Fængsel prison where she was subjected to daily interrogation for four months. The resistance did mount a rescue plan that involved bribing a Gestapo agent to help facilitate her escape with a staged ambush, but the agent bungled the plan by getting drunk and having himself revealed. The Gestapo staged the transfer of an agent disguised as Wichfeld to try and capture the resistance ambush team that included her daughter Varinka and Flemming Muus, but the team recognized the agent as a decoy and did not attack.

In May 1944, Wichfeld stood trial with ten other defendants in the resistance. Together with Georg Quistgaard and two others, she was sentenced to death but was told she could beg clemency to have it commuted to a life sentence. She asked the court if the same offer extended to the other defendants, and when it was not, turned it down flatly, and then sat down and casually powdered her nose.

There was outrage across the country at her sentence, as capital punishment for women had long since been considered barbaric in Denmark. The sentence was later converted into a life sentence, and because there was no penal servitude for women in Denmark, she was transferred with other women captured as part of the resistance Hvidsten group to Cottbus POW camp in Germany, and eventually transferred to Waldheim Prison. She died there of pneumonia on 27 February 1945 after a long bout of tuberculosis, one month before the end of the Second World War.

Monica Wichfeld

Monica Wichfeld

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