By a tragic mistake, 86 children and 18 adults died on March 21, 1945, when Allied bombers threw their deadly cargo of bombs over the French School in Copenhagen.
A mistake, because the target was not the school at all but the Shell House in Copenhagen, where the secret German police, the Gestapo, were based.
In the Shell House, the Germans had gathered valuable knowledge about the Danish resistance movement, and that knowledge the British wanted to destroy.
Therefore, the 18 Mosquito bombers, guarded by 31 Mustang fighters, had gone on the wings to set out in daylight on the dangerous journey across the North Sea and large parts of Denmark.
In the Shell House, the Germans feared an attack and for the same reason had installed 26 captured Danish resistance fighters on the top floor.
However, the Allies had estimated that if they dropped the bombs obliquely so that they hit the lower floors, the trapped resistance fighters further up the building would have a chance of surviving.
On the way into Copenhagen, one of the 18 bombers came too close to a high light mast that stood on DSB’s freight railway terrain at Enghave Station. The machine dropped its bombs on Sønder Boulevard and subsequently crashed into a garage, which was located right next to the French School.
The plane caught fire and sent large clouds of smoke up, which made the pilots on the subsequent bombers believe that the school was the Shell House, and they therefore also had to drop their bombs.
When the bombs fell, there were 482 students, 34 Catholic sisters and eight other teachers in the school buildings.
Bombs from the crashed plane fell on a property on Sønder Boulevard and killed 12 people.
18 out of the 26 Danish prisoners in Shellhuset escaped alive.
Source: The Nordic Page