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several years without coming to a final end. I didn’t try to force things, which would have been the worst possible way, but I used to go up to her penthouse near the Hotel d’Angleterre so that we could talk intimately. She was single, and she trusted me enough to give me my own set of keys to her apartment. From a war perspective, the location was too good to be true, and I was convinced there had to be another way to use this opportunity without damaging Oda.
    It didn’t take me long to come up with the answer. I bought a steel longbow from a hunting shop in Copenhagen. It was perfect because it came in two pieces, which you could quickly assemble or fold away as you liked. It didn’t take up too much room and I had used a longbow as a child to hunt birds and rabbits. But to draw back this bow required a force equivalent to lifting a twelve-stone man; and it weighed about seventy-five pounds. The power it unleashed meant that the arrows, wooden with duck-feather flights, were lethal.
    The beauty of the longbow is that it can be a silent killer, and I felt confident that I could escape the scene before the Germans pinpointed the source of the arrow. With luck, I would be able to carry out the perfect assassination. So I went into Copenhagen’s Tivoli Gardens, and put targets up on trees. After a while, I could hit playing cards from fifty meters. Then I went back to Fanoe and practiced against moving targets. The seagulls gliding along had no chance against my steel longbow. I knew it would be a much harder challenge to hit a moving German while aiming downwards from an apartment window, but I believed that from fifty meters I could not only hit a man but strike whatever part of his body I was aiming for.
    As part of my preparations, I even wrote ‘9 April 1940’—the day of the invasion—on my arrows. Now I only needed a tip-off that a top German was coming to the d’Angleterre. As long as Oda was well away from the apartment on that day, I would have time to do the job.
     
    By now it was early 1941, and Tommy had spent many days at the central Copenhagen home of a resistance sympathizer called Jens Dahl, waiting for the phone call from one of Dahl’s contacts that might give his plan the green light. At Kastrup Airport, Arne Helvard, an old colleague from Fleet Air Arm, was monitoring the movements of top Nazis. Another ally was Tommy’s brother-in-law, Niels-Richard Bertelsen, who as a Copenhagen detective was sometimes given prior warning when senior Nazi figures were heading into the Danish capital.
    In early February Bertelsen called to say that a top Nazi was about to leave Kastrup for Copenhagen, though his identity was unknown. Tommy called Oda’s apartment and for once was delighted to hear no reply. Wherever she was, she had unwittingly taken herself out of the firing line. Tommy used his set of keys to let himself in, assembled his longbow and waited for his prey. Then Oda’s phone rang. Tommy took a chance and picked up the receiver. ‘It was Bertelsen. There had been a change of plan: the leading Nazi had felt unwell and decided to fly directly to Germany. It soon became clear that the man I had been waiting for was Heinrich Himmler. In the end, they had just landed at Kastrup, refuelled and flown away.’
    History shows that on 6 February 1941 Himmler did indeed land at Copenhagen’s Kastrup Airport on his way back from visiting SS recruits in Norway. He had no idea how close he had come to being the target of an assassination attempt. It is impossible to say whether that attempt would have succeeded, particularly given Sneum’s unusual choice of weaponry. However, it his onceivable that the course of history, and especially the fate of millions of Jews, might have been different had Himmler stuck to his schedule. The very Nazi that Tommy had most wanted to kill had nearly flown into his trap, only to escape thanks to a headache.
    In 2007 Tommy’s son, Christian, asserted:
    I am absolutely