Upon the capitulation of the German forces in the Netherlands, Denmark and North-Western Germany on May 5, 1945, the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler tried to escape recognition by shaving of his moustache, covering his right eye with a black patch and changing to the uniform of a sergeant in the Geheime Feldpolizei.

This eye-patch was donated to The Museum of Danish Resistance in 1982 by a former employee with the Danish Military Intelligence.

It has been established that the eye-patch had come to the Intelligence Section after the death in 1965 of colonel Volmer Gyth. His papers and personal belongings had then been checked by general Winkler, then head of the historical section of the General Staff. The eye-patch was found in its present framing and handed over to the then head of Military Intelligence, who kept a small museum in his office.

Mr. Gyth, then an intelligence officer with the rank of captain, had fled to Britain in the autumn of 1943. From the autumn of 1944 until May 1945 he was attached to SHAEF Mission to Denmark as head of its intelligence section.

According to Peter Padfield’s biography Himmler. Reichsführer-SS (1990), Danish intelligence was helpful in tipping off the British about Himmler’s whereabouts in northern Germany upon the German capitulation (p. 609). Upon Himmler’s suicide on May 23, the eye-patch was kept as a souvenir by Niall MacDermot, a British counter-intelligence officer. After some years he did not want to keep it any longer and presented it to “the chief of Danish intelligence” to thank for his assistance in the capture (p. 611-612).