Hvidsten Kro sits between Randers and Mariager, five buildings under thatch, listed as a national heritage site. The oldest of them is the travellers' stable, put up in 1790, back when the place did what coaching inns did: rest the horses, feed the passengers, and send them on north or south along the road. Marius Pedersen Fiil was born in the inn on 21 June 1893, the son of its owner, Niels Pedersen. He took over the running of it in 1925. For most of two decades he was nothing more or less than the innkeeper - a man with a wife named Gudrun, grown children working alongside him, and a livelihood that depended entirely on people choosing to stop.

Denmark had been under German occupation since April 1940. In 1943 the inn became the centre of what would come to be called the Hvidsten Group, drawn into the resistance network by the landowner Flemming Juncker; the first contact with Britain's Special Operations Executive came on 12 March 1943. Their job was reception. The BBC's Danish bulletins closed with personal greetings, and one particular phrase - a greeting to Elias, and an instruction to listen again - told Hvidsten that a Halifax would be over the heath that night. The first drop, onto Trinderup Hede, brought twelve to fourteen containers of explosives and weapons. The group got them off the drop zone in the dark, moved them to a cache they called Mustard Point, and fed them onward to sabotage groups across Jutland. This is unglamorous, back-breaking, terrifying work: hauling crates through a field at two in the morning, then opening the inn at seven and serving breakfast.

No neighbour betrayed them. On 13 December 1943 the Gestapo captured Jacob Jensen, a parachutist working for the SOE, in Aarhus, and interrogated him under torture until he gave up what he knew. Hvidsten came out of that room. Rather than raid the inn at once, the Gestapo watched it, and in the early morning of 11 March 1944 they surrounded the buildings and took most of the group in a single sweep. Marius Fiil was arrested. So was his son Niels, twenty-three. So was his son-in-law Peder Bergenhammer Sørensen, married to Marius's daughter Kirstine, and so were Kirstine and her sister Gerda. In one morning, an entire family went out of the inn under guard.

A German court martial passed sentence in June. Eight men were condemned to death and shot at Ryvangen on 29 June 1944. They deserve their names and their trades. Marius Pedersen Fiil, fifty-one, innkeeper, and the group's leader. His son Niels Fiil, twenty-four. His son-in-law Peder Bergenhammer Sørensen, twenty-five, married five years. Johan Kjær Hansen, thirty-seven, a mechanic. Niels Nielsen Kjær, forty-one, who sold radios. Søren Peter Kristensen, fifty-six, a coachbuilder and the oldest of them. Henning Andersen, twenty-six, a miller. Albert Carlo Iversen, forty-seven, a veterinarian. The sentences handed to the rest of the group ran nearly as long. Kirstine Fiil was sentenced to life imprisonment, to be served in Germany. Her sister Gerda was given two years in a youth prison. Jens Stenz, a farmer, and Barner Hyldegaard Andersen, a driver, both received life. Anders Venning Steensgaard and Knud Peter Buchhorn Christensen were given four years each; Steensgaard was later moved to a concentration camp and survived it. Andreas Stenz got out to Sweden.

In the space of four months Gudrun Fiil lost her husband, her son, and her son-in-law, and watched two daughters taken to prisons in Germany. She took over the inn. In April 1945 Kirstine was among the Scandinavian prisoners rescued from German custody by the White Buses, the Swedish Red Cross evacuation organized by Count Folke Bernadotte; she reached Sweden and returned to Denmark after Germany's capitulation in May 1945. Kirstine remarried in 1946 and lived until 1983. A memorial stone to the executed men was raised near the inn in 1945. In 1984 the Danish postal service put Hvidsten Kro on a stamp, designed by Arne Kühlmann, and in 2012 the Danish film Hvidsten Gruppen, released internationally as This Life, was set and shot in and around the buildings. The inn is still an inn. The 1790 stable still stands, the thatch is still maintained, and the tables are still laid for travellers on the Randers-Mariager road. That continuity is not a curiosity. It is the thing the family held onto: they were innkeepers first, they joined the resistance as innkeepers, and the inn is what came through.