Flame & Citron

Over the weekend I watched the Danish film Flame & Citron, which is about a real pair of resistance fighters operating in Copenhagen during WWII. Flame was the alias of Bent Faurschou Hviid, a gunman with red hair. A minor theme of the film involves other members of his resistance cell repeatedly telling him to wear a hat to conceal his bright giveaway locks. Citron—or “lemon” in Danish—was Jørgen Haagen Schmith, Flame’s getaway driver, who had earned his nickname by leading a raid on a Citroën garage storing German armored vehicles. They worked together to execute about twenty Danish collaborators and a handful of Germans, mostly by going up to them in the street and shooting them.

I mentioned in my posts about The Historians that I was interested in the specific contours of Swedish neutrality. The resistance in different countries also took various idiosyncratic forms. Denmark and Norway had declared neutrality at the beginning of WWII, just like Sweden, but both lost that status when Germany invaded in April 1940. In Norway, the king and the government fled to England, leading the resistance from there. In Denmark, Germany established a “protectorate,” allowing the democratically elected government to remain in place.

The Norwegian army was small compared to the German invading force, and generally unprepared. Yet they fought back against the invasion, gaining a temporary victory alongside Allied troops in Narvik, before Germans took back the strategic port and made occupation complete. With Allied support, the Norwegian army held out for about two months. By contrast, when the Germans invaded Denmark, the Danish surrendered after about six hours. Their army was small and unprepared as well, lacking the Allied support Norway had—and defending an entirely different terrain. Denmark is notably flat. The Danish army had no mountains to retreat to, unlike the Norwegians. The landscape strikes me as a reasonable explanation for the Danish performance or lack thereof. Part of the betrayal of Czechoslovakia at Munich was robbing it of its mountain defenses, so that Hitler was able to waltz right into the rest of the country a few months later. Danish soldiers did at least bury large caches of weapons, rather than handing them over, which came in handy once the resistance did get going.

Flame and Citron belonged to the resistance group known as Holger Danske, which originally formed around a nucleus of veterans from the Winter War in Finland. I found that detail interesting, because the Finns were fighting off a Russian invasion with German help. So the Danish brigade that forged these resistance members would have been allied with Germany in that fight.

Flame & Citron dramatizes what Jean Moulin called “le refus”—the immediate, visceral objection to occupation. Citron turns around and throws up when he first sees Germans marching through Copenhagen. However, it takes him a while to find like-minded comrades, and even then most of the resistance is non-violent, connected to underground newspapers rather than active sabotage. As in many countries in Europe, the resistance really only accelerates when the communists join the fight, after the invasion of Russia.

Although at first Denmark has a relatively easy time of it—as occupations go—by 1943 relations between the Germans and their Danish subjects deteriorated. For one thing, the Danish resistance got tipped off that most of the Jewish population of the country would be rounded up and sent to concentration camps, and organized a rescue of almost 95% of Danish Jews by carrying them across the Øresund to Sweden in a fleet of small boats. When the Germans knocked on doors to cart people away, they found no one at home. The Danish government and police force had been allowed to function more or less normally since 1940, but this meant that they had access to German plans—information that had evidently started to leak.

By 1943, Flame and Citron’s group, Holger Danske, had connections to London and the SOE. They had started to conduct sabotage operations. They also engaged in summary executions of Danish collaborators, in part to protect their own network. Flame emerged as one of their most reliable assassins.

The film excels at showing how hard it is to kill someone at close range, even when you believe that person to be a traitor. Flame can keep a cool head, and has the determination and sheer nerve to enter highly volatile situations and carry out his orders. But even he blanches at the idea of killing women. When Citron tries to carry out that particular order instead, his face dissolves in sweat and you can almost hear the gun rattling in his hand. Unsurprisingly, he ends up flubbing it, and Flame has to go in and clean up after his friend.

The pressure of the these wildly stressful street actions highlights just how uncertain their underlying information is. You want to be a hundred percent certain that the person you are walking up to and shooting in the head is in fact a collaborator. Their efforts to shore up that certainty eventually backfire, adding to the already crazy levels of doubt any resistance fighter has to put up with.

A major French film about the Resistance, Jean-Pierre Melville’s Army of Shadows—which was based on interviews with the fighters themselves—consists almost entirely of scenes of resistance members being rounded up or interrogating other resistance members about rounded-up colleagues. The world of the film is so interior and paranoid that it included no actual acts of sabotage or strategic intelligence-gathering. It’s all fears of being betrayed all the way down. Flame & Citron, similarly, is all about the fog of war and the particular challenge of nailing down exactly who you are working for and what their intentions are.

Flame tries to control all this uncertainty by repeatedly demanding permission to shoot an obviously evil target, such as the head of the Gestapo in Denmark. In this way, he only seals the pair’s doom. In attempting to strike at the very seat of the occupying power, they will bring down the entire force of it on their own heads. Still, the logic of the move makes perfect sense. They are driven to redeem the questionable nature of their prior actions, and are willing to pay the costs of certainty. The same force of will that propelled them into the fight drives them forward beyond all doubt.

In an amazing scene—truly one of the most breathtaking things I’ve ever witnessed onscreen—one of the pair makes up for the lackluster performance of the Danish army all by himself.