"71 Frederrick-Sandersworth Street, near the Ulteslovo wetlands."

Sitting in an old French-made Wochen car, Dina eagerly and apprehensively reported the detailed address of the middle-aged man who drove to meet her.

The "nephew of Aunt Manli", a former SS security officer embedded in Copenhagen, nodded unhurriedly. He should not be unfamiliar with this address, because not long ago, Lynn had already entrusted Andriy to assign subordinate intelligence officers to investigate the situation. Unfortunately, during the German occupation, more than half of the houses on that street were cleared for military use, and after 1945 it was used to house German people who had been evacuated from the Eastern Front, and the situation was quite complicated. After the war, only a small number of the original residents moved back to their old sites, and they did not know exactly where their former neighbors lived.

Lynn had told Dinah the truth about these situations before, but she still hoped that Lynn would take her back to Copenhagen, because she believed that as long as her family was still alive, she would return to Copenhagen sooner or later, and even if she changed her address, she would have a chance to reunite.

More than half a year after the end of the European war, order is in order in the city of Copenhagen. Since there has been no ground fighting, most of the streets and buildings have remained as they were, but a small number of houses damaged by bombs, fires or other conditions stand quietly around a corner, a reminder that the city was not a paradise during the brutal war.

It took more than 20 minutes to reach the street that Dinah was talking about, and the buildings here were quite old compared to the downtown area, and the flagpoles draped in the Danish flag had probably been used to fly the German flag for the past few years.

When the car finally stopped at No. 71, a two-story spire house, the occupants collectively chose to remain silent. Like the two surrounding buildings, it is in an abandoned state, with no door panels on the door frames, no glass on the windows, and the walls of the room are empty when you look in from the outside.

Back in her native land, Dinah's outfit is understated and deep. A fashionable brown bucket hat bought in Paris, with the edge pulled down to eyebrow height, and half of the face is slightly lowered; The double-breasted light brown trench coat is very long, and the hem only exposes the calf to the ankle no more than 10 cm; The reddish-brown fleece shoes have a simple and retro style, with a pair of unpretentious black wool socks, and the whole person does not look obvious bright color.

She pushed the door and got out of the car alone, looking up at the former residence on the side of the street, which was not a rich area, but not a slum, slightly renovated and repainted, a well-off residence belonging to the middle class in the Danish capital, but the happiness and warmth of the past were completely lost in this brilliant sunshine.

Lynn got out of the car and looked at her surroundings with a look that looked calm and natural. Most of the pedestrians on the street walked on their own, occasionally casting a glance, and their faces were all indifferent for the rest of their lives. Nearby, two elderly women sat against the wall basking in the sun, looking curiously at Lynn and Dinah, muttering to each other.

Dinah did not enter the empty house after all, and when she saw the two old women, she turned and walked over. At this time, they also recognized the girl next door in the past, and their eyes widened and they looked very surprised.

Walking up to the old woman, Dinah bent down and spoke to them in Danish, which Lynn did not understand, and one of them reached out and took Dinah's fair and delicate hand, and shook his head and sighed and said something. Looking at this scene, Lynn felt infinite emotion: war can be an opportunity for soldiers to show their talents and cross the battlefield, but for civilians, it means suffering, parting, suffering and fear. If the re-emergence of the empire required another war, he already felt unbearable, perhaps because of this popular will, the two camps of the East and the West, which were ideologically opposed, were saved from a new war after the end of World War II.

Seeing that Dinah was still talking to the old woman, Lynn took out the cigarettes she bought in the Netherlands from her pocket, and just turned on the lighter, when she suddenly heard a thunderbolt in the clear sky, although there was no tremor on the ground, and the eardrum was not strongly stimulated, but Lynn's experience clearly told him that this was the explosion of conventional explosives!

Lynn raised his head in surprise, the sky was clear at this time, and there was no trace of the smoke and clouds of war, and he turned his head to look around, but saw that the pedestrians did not look panicked, and "Aunt Manley's nephew", the driver of the car, got out of the car and whispered in Lynn's ear: "It's a demining operation around the northern beaches." ”

It dawned on Lynn. Although the Allies did not directly attack Denmark later in the war, the German [***] troops stationed in Denmark planted 1.5 million mines throughout Denmark as a conventional means of defense. This is a small number compared to the landmines planted by the Germans in France, Poland or the mainland during World War II, but in Denmark, which covers an area of only 43,000 square kilometers, such a number of mines is terrifying enough to think about.

Finally saying something to the two old women, Dinah got up and walked to Lynn's side, like a child who couldn't find her way home, her expression anxious and lost.

After getting in the car, Lynn asked her, "Where to go now?" ”

Dinah shook her head, it seemed that the two old women had failed to provide her with useful information.

This situation was expected by Lynn, and he said to the driver, "Let's go to the place you arranged to rest first!" ”

"Aunt Manly's nephew" started the car without saying a word. At the height of the Third Reich, the SS had more than 100,000 intelligence officers and secret police in Europe, and less than 3 percent are still holding out today, and the remaining branches in Denmark nominally numbered more than 200 people, but only a dozen or so were actually contacted and mobilized by Andri. Without the sympathy and support of the local population, their situation is even worse than that of the former underground resistance groups, and their limited funding and equipment make them hibernate or close to hibernation most of the time. This time, Andriy helped Lynn and them arrange their itinerary, and it took a lot of time and energy just to contact and confirm, and it was really difficult to expand the scope to help Dinah search for her family.

The car drove some distance northeast to a single-family house on the edge of the city, where two young men came out, and they were kind but not wording enough to help Lynn carry their meagre luggage into the house. The guests' rooms were located on the second floor, and the windows of Lynn and Dinah's rooms were facing the sea, and standing in front of the windows, Lynn could see the soldiers busy on the beach. There were about forty or fifty of them, mostly in German uniforms and steel helmets with large ear brims, and what looked like Tank No. 3 was parked next to them. Until then, it was hard for Lynn to imagine herself seeing such a scene in Europe in 1946, especially outside of Germany proper. On closer inspection, the soldiers were unarmed, and several of them were wearing British uniforms.

Just as "Aunt Manley's nephew" brought a pot of hot tea, Lynn learned that as soon as the war ended, the Allies had formed a mine-sweeping unit composed of surrendered German soldiers and engineers, named the Danish Mine-Sweeping Task Force. It was the last formed unit of the Third Reich in Europe, which included the engineering units of the army, navy and even the air force, as well as former combatants, and all Nazi symbols were removed from their uniforms, and white armbands representing surrender were added. The unit was commanded by Danish officers, who usually wore British uniforms and were distinguished by red armbands. According to rumors, the "Danish Mine-Clearance Task Force" absorbed thousands of German officers and soldiers, and in most cases they had to rely on manual demining, with only a few modified mine-clearing tanks and half-tracked armored vehicles being heavy mine-clearing equipment. The few vehicles were from the surrendering troops and were prominently painted with the "Minesweeper" logo.

In order to clear the mines, the Danish side, with the assistance of the British and American forces, searched for all the German [***] officers who had survived the war and were involved in the mine-laying program, so as to mark on the map the locations where the mines had been laid during the war. Fortunately, even at the end of the war, the rigorous Germans recorded in the war archives the exact location of almost every mine. In most of the German minefields, the way of laying mines was very regular, which facilitated the post-war mine clearance operations, but in a few field areas, the way of laying mines was very complicated, especially in coastal areas, because the mines drifted with the sea and sand, it was very difficult to clear them.

When the locations of the German mines laid during the war were roughly marked on the map, the mine-clearing work began in full swing. The Germans first marked the place where the mines were planted with conspicuous signs, and then determined the type and method of laying the mines one by one. According to the experience of the German army, mines planted under open ground were relatively easy to remove, but it was very difficult to remove mines buried under sand or vegetation drifting on the coast. Since most of the mines are made of non-metallic materials such as wood, plastic or glass, the mine detectors are basically ineffective, so the German deminers can only use the most primitive methods to find and clear these mines, that is, crawling slowly on the ground and using bayonets to find the mines one by one.

In Denmark, the German demining procedure was usually to clear the sand next to the mine, then try to remove it, and if it came across a mine that could not be removed, it was immediately detonated on the spot. When a minefield was reported to have been cleared, the Danes would have the Germans drive a limited number of tanks across the minefield in tow a steel splinter to check for missing mines, and a large number of German deminers were injured and killed by the missed mines due to the limitations of demining technology.

(To be continued)