132 • DANISH SECTION
DANISH SECTION.The Danish Section ofSpecial Operations Ex-
ecutive(SOE), designated SD and headed by Ralph Hollingworth,
did not succeed in getting an agent intoDenmarkuntil December
1941 when Mogens Hammer and Dr. Carl Buhn were dropped near
Haslev. It was an inauspicious start, as the newly qualified medical
doctor’s parachute failed to open properly and he was killed. He had
been carrying the team’s radio, so Hammer was left for four months
with no means of contacting London. Eventually the journalist Ebbe
Munck was able to smuggle a replacement to him via Stockholm and
he resumed contact in April 1942. Hammer was to become a key
SOE organizer, and on 17 April 1942 he welcomed three newcomers:
Christian Rottball and a pair of former ships’ radiomen, Paul Johanne-
sen and Max Mikkelsen. In August three more SOE agents—Knud
Petersen, Hans Hansen, and Peter Nielsen—joined them, but the net-
work was broken up the following month after German radio direc-
tion-finders located Johannesen, and he committed suicide to avoid
arrest. Rottboll also died, this time in a shootout with police, and the
remainder of the group went underground, with Hammer escaping to
London. Hammer returned to Denmark in October 1942 and linked
up with Nielsen, who had stayed on, to find the other remaining
agents, Petersen, Hansen, and Mikkelsen. However, when the three
men were assembled and tried to get to Sweden by boat, they were
captured by the police and handed over to the Germans. On this occa-
sion a promise was extracted that they would not be executed, and
they survived the war in concentration camps.
DANSEY, SIR CLAUDE.Born in October 1876, Claude Dansey was
educated at Wellington and in Belgium and spent the next 18 years
overseas, mainly in Africa, with the British South African Police. He
then joined the British North Borneo Constabulary and later trans-
ferred to British Somaliland before being appointed, apparently in
poor health, secretary of the Sleepy Hollow Country Club in New
York. During World War I, Dansey served withMI5and in April
1917 participated in an official delegation to the United States to
brief senior American intelligence officers on the principles of secret
service organization. By July 1917 Dansey was back in London, as-
signed the task of reorganizing the British Intelligence structure in
Holland. This involved his transfer to theSecret Intelligence Ser-