Clodagh Finn: The Irishwoman who led Danish resistance to the Nazis
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When Monica de Wichfeld (of Derrylin in Co Fermanagh, among many other places) was condemned to death on May 13, 1944, for her role in the Danish resistance, there was an audible gasp in the room. A woman had not been handed down such a sentence for several decades.
Monica, however, showed no emotion. She took out her enamelled Tiffany compact so that she could see her son Viggo who was sitting behind her. She smiled at him, and slowly began to powder her nose. Then she looked towards the three judges dressed in SS uniform at the Gestapo headquarters in Copenhagen and asked: “Anything else, gentlemen?”
The counsel for the prosecution told her that she had the right to appeal. She enquired if her three fellow condemned (male) resisters had the same right, but was told they did not. “Then it is of no interest,” she said.
She reached back to hold her son’s hand and waited for him to be sentenced. He too had been charged with aiding the resistance but was released on the grounds of his youth and lack of evidence. As she was led away to her cell, Monica said to another prisoner: “Cheer up, this surely is a unique experience — you can only go through it once. We are lucky.”
It sounds like the derring-do dialogue from a wartime film, but the events — and the colourful exchanges — were related by Monica’s son Viggo to her biographer Christine Sutherland. To quote one reviewer, the first chapters of her book, , “read like a romance, the last like a spy novel”.
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Both the earliest and latest chapters of Monica de Wichfeld’s life are back in the news because Ulster History Circle has just honoured her resistance work by unveiling a blue plaque at Kinawley Parish Church in Derrylin, Co Fermanagh.
She is remembered with great affection in Denmark where she sheltered RAF airmen and refugees, without her husband knowing let alone the occupying force. At first, at least.
Her biographer Sutherland mentions the stone tablet that commemorates her on a 13th-century church on the island of Lolland in Denmark: “Lolland is an inclement and remote part of the world, but on most days fresh flowers somehow find their way to the tablet,” she wrote in 1990.
Closer to her childhood home, Monica de Wichfeld’s name is included in the World War ll Role of Honour at Derrylin church and now, since November 11, she has a blue plaque.
Like many who spent a lot of time outside the country, she is probably better known abroad than she is here. Let’s recap, then, on the life of an extraordinary woman who wintered in the Mediterranean, dressed in haute couture, ran a costume-jewellery company, and rubbed shoulders with the likes of Clementine Churchill (Winston’s wife) and playwright Noel Coward before she risked her life to oppose the Nazis.
She was born in London on July 12, 1894, the eldest of Alice and George Massy-Beresford’s four children. She was raised at St Hubert’s, an estate with gardens and extensive parkland that swept down to Lough Erne in Co Fermanagh. Her brother, Brigadier Tim Massy-Beresford recalled a magic and remote paradise where Monica, the oldest child and only girl, was the “undisputed leader”.
“She had all the ideas and saw to it that we carried them out. More often than not, these were things strictly forbidden, often dangerous, like bathing on some remote rocky shore … or jumping from a particularly high trampoline in the barn. She knew no fear,” he wrote in his own memoir.
That was the perfect characteristic for a resistance member, but her fearlessness came in useful on several occasions before then, not least when she accompanied her father, a leader of the Ulster Volunteers in Fermanagh, on a car journey to Larne to pick up guns and ammunition in April 1914.
She would draw on her courage again and again in a life dominated by war and turbulence. Educated at home and in France and Germany, she moved to London in 1916 where she met and married a Danish aristocrat and diplomat, Jorgen de Wichfeld. It sounds idyllic, but she was working in a soldiers’ canteen and was worried about her two brothers fighting in World War l in France. One of them, John Clarina, was killed in action in 1916.
When her husband inherited Engestofte, a vast estate in Lolland, Denmark, they moved there and began a family. Monica had a son in 1919 and two other children followed. There was a lover too whom her husband tolerated, but that’s a story for another day. The estate had financial difficulties which came to a head after the Wall Street crash of 1929. It was the final blow. The family decamped to Italy and moved in with Monica’s mother.
Ever resourceful, Monica de Wichfeld soon made a name for herself — and much-needed money — selling tortoiseshell bracelets with inset gold watches and enamel necklaces which became the dernier cri, or all the rage, as one of her friends, the Paris decorator and hostess Elsie de Wolfe, declared.
Her income, though relatively modest, kept the family going and Monica continued to mix with Europe’s elite. By 1941, though, the family had to leave fascist Italy and return to Denmark where the next extraordinary phase of Monica’s life unfolded.
She was introduced to the resistance by a tenant on their estate, the Danish writer Hilmar Wulff. She began to raise money for an underground resistance newspaper (Frit Danmark).
Without the knowledge of her husband, she allowed the Lolland estate to be used for parachute drops in 1943. She had a turn for clandestine work. She suggested that marked supplies be dropped by parachute into the nearby Maribo Lake and later retrieved. Special Operations Executive agent Flemming B Muus thought her idea ingenious.
“I was amazed,” he wrote later, “for I happened to know that something very similar was being planned in England at that very moment by some of our most brilliant RAF brains. This was one example of Mrs Wichfeld’s talent of instinctively putting her finger on a vital point.” (She is sometimes referred to as Mrs Wichfeld without the aristocratic ‘de’.)
That instinct meant Monica was put in charge of building a resistance network in Lolland where she helped shot down Allied airmen to escape and hid Danish Jews in her own home. She passed them off as staff and sheltered them in the servants’ quarters.
At one point, she commented to her son that she felt she had been too lucky; that something bad was going to happen. That kind of premonition of impending danger was common among resisters who developed a kind of sixth sense. Monica was not wrong. Three resistance members were arrested in December 1943. Under torture, they revealed a number of names, including that of Monica de Wichfeld.
She was arrested and sentenced to death. Following an outcry, her sentence was commuted and she was sent, first, to Cottbus prison in east Germany and then transported by cattle wagon to Waldheim concentration camp where she died of viral pneumonia in February 1945.
A pastor at the camp wrote to tell her family that he had buried her remains in a graveyard but when a special Danish commission tried to expatriate them, they found the grave was empty. Her body has never been found.