Qualla: Hvidsten Inn

Hvidsten Inn: Introduction

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit No machine-readable author provided. Thue assumed (based on copyright claims)., Public domain. A miller. A veterinarian. A radio dealer. A coachbuilder. A mechanic. An innkeeper, his son, and his son-in-law. That is the roll call of the eight men shot by firing squad at Ryvangen in Copenhagen on 29 June 1944, and it is also, more or less, a list of the working trades of one short stretch of Jutland road. The Hvidsten Group was not a professional network trained for war. It was a handful of neighbours who knew each other because everybody in Hvidsten knew each other, and its headquarters was the thatched coaching inn at the crossroads, where the Fiil family kept the beds, the stable, and the kitchen.

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Image: No machine-readable author provided. Thue assumed (based on copyright claims). | Public domain

Hvidsten Inn: The Stable from 1790

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Hubertus45, CC BY-SA 3.0. Hvidsten Kro sits between Randers and Mariager, five buildings under thatch, listed as a national heritage site. The oldest of them is the travellers' stable, put up in 1790, back when the place did what coaching inns did: rest the horses, feed the passengers, and send them on no...

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Image: Hubertus45 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Hvidsten Inn: Greetings to Elias

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Alf van Beem, CC0. Denmark had been under German occupation since April 1940. In 1943 the inn became the centre of what would come to be called the Hvidsten Group, drawn into the resistance network by the landowner Flemming Juncker; the first contact with Britain's Special Operations Executive came...

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Image: Alf van Beem | CC0

Hvidsten Inn: The Morning of 11 March

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CoSy103, CC BY-SA 3.0. No neighbour betrayed them. On 13 December 1943 the Gestapo captured Jacob Jensen, a parachutist working for the SOE, in Aarhus, and interrogated him under torture until he gave up what he knew. Hvidsten came out of that room. Rather than raid the inn at once, the Gestapo watched...

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Image: CoSy103 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Hvidsten Inn: Ryvangen, 29 June 1944

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Hans Jørn Storgaard Andersen, CC BY-SA 3.0. A German court martial passed sentence in June. Eight men were condemned to death and shot at Ryvangen on 29 June 1944. They deserve their names and their trades. Marius Pedersen Fiil, fifty-one, innkeeper, and the group's leader. His son Niels Fiil, twenty-four. His son-in-law P...

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Image: Hans Jørn Storgaard Andersen | CC BY-SA 3.0

Hvidsten Inn: What Gudrun Kept

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kåre Thor Olsen, CC BY-SA 3.0. In the space of four months Gudrun Fiil lost her husband, her son, and her son-in-law, and watched two daughters taken to prisons in Germany. She took over the inn. In April 1945 Kirstine was among the Scandinavian prisoners rescued from German custody by the White Buses, the Swe...

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Image: Kåre Thor Olsen | CC BY-SA 3.0