Shell House before the bombing. At the time of the bombing, it was painted in camouflage colours
Operation Carthage, on 21 March 1945, was a British air raid on Copenhagen, Denmark during the Second World War which caused significant collateral damage. The target of the raid was the Shellhus, used as Gestapo headquarters in the city centre. It was used for the storage of dossiers and the torture of Danish citizens during interrogations. The Danish Resistance had long asked the British to conduct a raid against the site. The building was destroyed, 18 prisoners were freed and anti-resistance Nazi activities were disrupted.
Shell House burning after the bombing raid
The Gestapo headquarters in the Shellhus, Copenhagen, in March 1945 during Operation Carthage. A Mosquito pulling away from its bombing run is visible on the extreme left, centre.
All of the above information on this page including text, photographs and photo captions are from a Wikipedia article *Operation Carthage. At the time of the raid, Shell was under the control of Nazi administrators, some of whom continued as executives in Shell’s German subsidiary Rhenania-Ossag after WW2 ended.
The raid occurred years after the death of Royal Dutch Shell’s diehard Nazi leader Sir Henri Deterding who financed Hitler and the Nazis in the years leading up to WW2.
*Operation Carthage Wikipedia article – pdf version as of 4 Jan 2019
