BETWEEN 500 and 550 Danes went as volunteers to fight in the Spanish civil war from 1936 and 1939 on the side of the Republic.

At the beginning they went individually, but from November 1936 Denmark’s Communist Party (DKP) recruited people and organised travel routes etc. You can find information about date and travel route to Spain for 219 volunteers.

Most of them went in the winter of 1936-37; that was before the government made it illegal to volunteer in the Spanish civil war.

Ninety-five per cent of Danish volunteers were workers. Half of them were unskilled workers or sailors. Close to half of them were members of the Communist Party (DKP) or the Young Communists (DKU).

In 1936 Danish minister of justice Karl Kristian Steincke, considered that it was not contrary to the law if young Danes volunteered to fight in the Spanish civil war.

But the international committee overseeing the fulfilment of the agreement of non-interference in the conflict in Spain contacted the Danish government, and in 1937 the Danish parliament adopted a law which made it illegal to travel to Spain.

Different sources mention different numbers of casualties. Between 135 and 170 Danes fell on the battlefield. Additionally some 70 died of illnesses. Most returned to Denmark in 1938. They were not convicted, but the authorities registered them.

This became fatal for a number of them, when between 1940 and 1945 they joined the resistance movement against the nazi occupation of Denmark, because the Danish police handed these registrations to the Germans.

There was no official welcome ceremony of the returned volunteers, but many Danes considered them heroes. There are reports that a group of volunteers was received in Copenhagen by a cheering crowd of some 25-30,000 people.

The battle of Santa Quiteria Chapel

The baptism by fire of four of the first volunteers from Denmark, October 1 1936

In the early morning hours, on one of the last days of September 1936, the inhabitants of Barcelona woke up to the sound of a strict march and the Internationale sung in many languages.

The newly established Centuria Thaelmann (a centuria being a 100-strong unit, as in the Roman legions) set out from the Carlos Marx barracks. What started out as amazement and bewilderment over this strange sight was soon replaced with cheers and chanting.

In an interview with Villy Fuglsang, a Danish volunteer in the Spanish civil war, Fuglsang proclaimed “a number of governments had failed Spain, but we were a living proof that ordinary people had not forgotten about the Spanish. And morally, this meant a great deal to them.”

Three brothers and a friend

Among the centuria, which was one of the first military groups consisting of foreign volunteers, marched three Danish brothers, Harald, Kai and Aage Nielsen and their friend Hans Petersen.

Months prior to the events in Barcelona, Kai and Hans had read about the outbreak of civil war in a Danish communist paper during a break in the factory in which they worked.

Moved by the horror of the fascist military coup, they both agreed that it would be more meaningful to go to Spain in order to assist the Popular Front than carrying on in the factory.

Kai’s two brothers joined the plan at once, and with only one week’s wage in their pockets, they were ready to go. Their plan was not well received by their mother who threatened to call the police.

However their father, an old syndicalist himself, managed to calm her down and told her: “Let them go. They won’t get far, and then they’ll be back again.”

Early the next morning, August 22 1936, the Nielsen brothers and Hans Petersen left on bike from a little working-class district in Copenhagen.

First international volunteers

On their travel through Europe, the three brothers diligently wrote to their families and their correspondence is characterised by a slightly naive tone about their encounter with the spectre of European fascism.

This collection of letters is almost perfectly preserved and through this, one gains an intriguing insight into the role of three ordinary boys in an extraordinary situation.

After much trouble and a chance ride on Spanish anarchist Buenaventura Durruti’s train, the three brothers arrive in the outskirts of Barcelona early in September 1936.

Here they soon make contact with Hans Beimler and the first German volunteers. At the Carlos Marx barracks they receive basic military training, where they practice with old hand grenades from the first world war.

“They were so dangerous that they might detonate as soon as we pulled the pin,” writes Petersen.

This happened to one of their Austrian comrades who they called Sneweiss. The explosion would cost him his forearm, and as a reaction to this the rest of the volunteers refused to continue their training with the hand grenades. 

To the battlefield

After a couple of weeks of military training, the German-speaking and the Scandinavian volunteers in Centuria Thaelmann were ready for their first trip to the front line.

The four Danes were dressed in the mono: a blue overall together with a red silk scarf. The brothers and Petersen were placed in a machine-gun squad, which consisted of nine men under the command of a German World War I veteran named Philip.

The squad shared a single French Hotchkiss machine gun as the more modern Soviet weapons still hadn’t reached the front.

The machine gun is heavy and frequently stutters when firing. Harald became good in dismantling and repairing the gun whenever it stopped functioning.

They also received home-made hand grenades made by Asturian mineworkers. These consisted of a dynamite charge with a string and a plummet in the end, which had to be ripped off for the dynamite to discharge.

These dynamite charges were used during the mineworkers’ rebellion in 1934 and were called “artilleria de la revolucion.” It might happen that the string loosened during transport: “They didn’t have shit to do with real hand grenades ... they were highly dangerous, but effective. Where we threw them, they worked,” Harald relates.

Baptism by fire

On October 1 Centuria Thaelmann left for the front in Aragon. The volunteers were used as shock troops to open a way for the Spanish militias, who were to enter as soon as the fascist troops had been repulsed.

Centuria Thaelmann’s first position was taking part in the siege of the city of Huesca, which was controlled by the rebels.

After two weeks the unit was moved 45 miles south to the city of Zaragoza and after that to Tardienta, a little south of Huesca. Here it was their job to recapture the Santa Quiteria Chapel, which was in the hills facing west with good vision over the nearby landscape.

Franco’s Moroccan mercenaries defended the chapel. The main assault was brought to action at night on October 20. The Moroccan forces had dug themselves into the hills, and Harald explains how they, during the assault, managed to drive the mercenaries out from their subterranean positions by throwing grenades down the holes.

“Both arms and legs came flying up from down there until they in the end came storming up with their arms raised.” It was a bloody baptism by fire, and the actions last from early evening till daybreak.

Heavy losses

Harald served his conscription in a Danish machine-gun company, and by being the only one with any military experience he was made first gunner in the attack.

The Hotchkiss gun was placed on a tripod, but the tripod stands up in the air, which puts the shooter in a rather exposed position. The leader of their squad, Philip, started operating the machine gun. Briefly after taking the gun he got hit by an Italian-made explosive bullet. Harald clearly remembers this violent experience: “There was a tiny hole in his stomach, but nearly his whole back was gone.”

Harald took over Philip’s position, but the gun chattered so he tipped the gun off to repair it. Another explosive bullet hit the gun, but almost miraculously the bullet glanced off so only splinters from the gun hit Harald’s hand. Kai quickly fixed the gun and continued shooting.

The next morning as the Spanish militias arrived to take over and Centuria Thaelmann pulled back, the great Centuria had been reduced from 120 to 65 men. The rest were either dead or critically injured.

La Bandera del Sangre

The efforts in the hills near Tardienta attracted attention from the Catalan local government, and Centuria Thaelmann was rewarded with a flag of honour, La Bandera del Sangre — The Flag of Blood.

The brothers attracted attention and at a ceremony on October 27 the youngest brother, Aage, was chosen to receive the flag. Here they were all honoured for “having shown the greatest bravery during the assault and the defence of the chapel on the hill till the last minute with their machine guns, and for having brought the precious weapons safely home.”

The ceremony was followed closely by journalists and people in the film industry, and a few months later Aage could be seen in the Danish cinema’s news journals with the Flag of Blood.

• Albert Scherfig is a historian and editor at the Danish co-operative Nemo Publishing (Forlaget Nemo). In 2014 he wrote the book Brothers Nielsen: Letters from the Spanish Civil War (Brødrene Nielsen: Breve fra Den Spanske Borgerkrig) about the struggle of three brothers during the Spanish civil war (1936- 1939) and under the nazi occupation of Denmark (1940-45).