Death of Otto Bulow

Elsinore Shipyards

 In 1942, the resistance was completely in motion and extremely well organized. Intellectuals and professionals as well as blue collar workers joined the movement. Anyone who could be trusted would secretly join.

In the town of Elsinore, where Aksel and I lived, was a big shipyard which employed between 3-4,000 men all supporting families. This story is about a worker at the shipyard. I only recall his nickname which was “The Vienna boy.” He was a Austrian orphan from World War I. He got adopted by a Danish couple and thus acquired Danish citizenship. He was under suspicion for working closely and fraternizing with the Nazis. In order to confirm this someone from the resistance broke into his locker at the shipyard and found a list with 30-40 names, all freedom fighters, living in Elsinore. His intention must have been to turn his list over to the Nazis supposedly for a sum of money. The freedom fighters on the list would then have been transported to a concentration camp, tortured and executed. The list was destroyed before this could happen.

Every day of the week precisely at eleven o’clock the whistle blew at the shipyard. The workers either bicycled or walked home for their hour long lunch break, returning to work at twelve o’clock when the whistle blew again. “The Vienna boy” was among the workers returning to work. It had been observed that exactly ten minutes before twelve he would be passing by Svingelport on the main street as he rode his bicycle to the shipyard.

One day shortly after the list of names was found and destroyed, a couple of freedom fighters shot and killed this traitor. They were hiding in a doorway across the street from Svingelport where they knew he passed every day. The war came closer, two weeks later retaliation took place. The Nazis killed a very close friend of ours, Otto Bulow, a painter and sculptor.

Otto Bulow was a person known and loved by everybody in Elsinore. He was a great human being. He was not involved in the resistance at all. He was working on a wooden sculpture in his studio when two S.S. men walked in, shot and killed him with a machine gun.

Otto Bulow was funeral service was at the Maria church on August 2, 1942. The large church, as well as the church yard, was packed with mourners. Along the one mile route to the cemetery, the sidewalks were crowded with people who wished to show their respect to a wonderful person. The day was unusually warm but even so everybody was dressed in black. The casket was carried all the way from the church to the cemetery. It became a demonstration rather than just a funeral. The town of Elsinore showed the Nazis that it could bond together in death as well as in life.

The grave of Otto Bulow was later marked with a heavy wooden cross carved from the same block that he had been working on the day he was killed.