I just happened to find this photograph of my childhood hero on the Web today. It's Børge Outze who founded the underground news agency Information in Nazi-occupied Denmark. When I was about 10 years old, I read about him in a book called "The Savage Canary: The Story of Resistance in Denmark" by David Lampe [Cassell & Company Ltd., London]. The following is an extract from the book:
On 29th August, 1943, Dr. Werner Best, the chief Nazi administrator in Denmark, told a meeting of Danish Press representatives in Copenhagen: ‘Every editor will be answerable with his life for further attempts to poison the popular mind...’ In the same month Børge Outze, a crime reporter on a large Copenhagen newspaper, began carrying a gun. Outze had covered many first-rate stories the Germans would not allow to be printed, and he was tired of telling stories in innuendo. The illegal press seemed the only medium left, but it was badly co-ordinated. Outze decided that the Resistance needed a central news agency, so he created Information, the only underground Press service in any Nazi-occupied country.
Outze began issuing a daily news letter and photographs from Copenhagen which he sent at first to a list of eighteen illegal newspapers all over Denmark. He also wanted Information’s dispatches to be published abroad, so Information established a Stockholm bureau. Some of Information’s stories were too secret even for the underground press, but they kept Resistance editors informed in the same way that secret press conferences helped editors in the free countries keep in touch with military operations. An elaborate code system was arranged so that the daily bulletin’s bare, uncoloured stories would be understood by their recipients. At least six Resistance papers daily reprinted the entire bulletin. Others merely printed excerpts from it.
Information became a vast news pool. It relayed stories which were first printed in the more remote illegal newspapers, received news from official Danish sources, was a news outlet for the Freedom Council, and sometimes was given the chance actually to see spot news being made. A liquidation group chief might invite Outze a week in advance to come and see an informer shot, or a sabotage group would telephone an invitation to watch an explosion. As Information grew it was asked to watch more such things than its staff could hope to cover. At times Børge Outze, calling his local police contacts to verify stories, would find that the crime he was trying to investigate had not yet occurred or had not yet been reported. Then Outze would have to explain his ‘misunderstanding’ as gracefully as possible.
The Germans knew Information existed and often saw it. They tried constantly to destroy it, and four of Information’s staff were executed by them during the years of occupation. When the service’s staff increased to about ten people it had to have editorial conferences in the most outlandish places. One summer day the staff gathered in Tovoli, the pleasure garden in the centre of Copenhagen. An informer had warned the Nazis of the meeting, and a police cordon captured all of the staff except Outze. He worked his way through the crowd and escaped through one of Tivoli’s many side entrances.
Outze went to see Stig Jensen, a portly Danish journalist and one of the early underground operators, a man who took part in nearly every sort of Resistance activity from the beginning to the end of the occupation.
‘We’ve got to have a paper out this evening.’ Outze explained. Information always had to be produced to a definite schedule to be put on the trains, boats, and aeroplanes that took it to its subscribers. Jensen suggested they should visit an old lady who duplicated theatrical scripts for Copenhagen’s dramatic companies. The old woman, told that Outze was a textile merchant who wanted to circularize the Danish Parliament the next day to try to get a private bill passed to benefit his business, allowed the two journalists to use her duplicator.
While they were at work a well-known Danish journalist who knew Jensen but not Outze came to visit the old lady. He watched Outze feverishly typing the daily news bulletin directly on a stencil and asked Jensen what was happening. Jensen repeated the textile story.
‘Tell your friend to leave the textile branch and become a journalist,’ the newspaper man advised.
The agency occupied twenty-seven different offices during the war, and its members had to remain constantly on the alert. Whenever Outze dined in a Copenhagen restaurant he had to caution the head waiter to allow no one to leave the dining-room or to use the telephone until he departed. Often he had to get up from unfinished meals because a suspicious-looking person entered the room. He never wore his pistol openly, of course, and he is not a frightening looking man, but Danes sensed that he was from the underground, and in restaurants they always moved as far as they could from his table to be out of the line of fire in case of trouble.
Outze began issuing a daily news letter and photographs from Copenhagen which he sent at first to a list of eighteen illegal newspapers all over Denmark. He also wanted Information’s dispatches to be published abroad, so Information established a Stockholm bureau. Some of Information’s stories were too secret even for the underground press, but they kept Resistance editors informed in the same way that secret press conferences helped editors in the free countries keep in touch with military operations. An elaborate code system was arranged so that the daily bulletin’s bare, uncoloured stories would be understood by their recipients. At least six Resistance papers daily reprinted the entire bulletin. Others merely printed excerpts from it.
Information became a vast news pool. It relayed stories which were first printed in the more remote illegal newspapers, received news from official Danish sources, was a news outlet for the Freedom Council, and sometimes was given the chance actually to see spot news being made. A liquidation group chief might invite Outze a week in advance to come and see an informer shot, or a sabotage group would telephone an invitation to watch an explosion. As Information grew it was asked to watch more such things than its staff could hope to cover. At times Børge Outze, calling his local police contacts to verify stories, would find that the crime he was trying to investigate had not yet occurred or had not yet been reported. Then Outze would have to explain his ‘misunderstanding’ as gracefully as possible.
The Germans knew Information existed and often saw it. They tried constantly to destroy it, and four of Information’s staff were executed by them during the years of occupation. When the service’s staff increased to about ten people it had to have editorial conferences in the most outlandish places. One summer day the staff gathered in Tovoli, the pleasure garden in the centre of Copenhagen. An informer had warned the Nazis of the meeting, and a police cordon captured all of the staff except Outze. He worked his way through the crowd and escaped through one of Tivoli’s many side entrances.
Outze went to see Stig Jensen, a portly Danish journalist and one of the early underground operators, a man who took part in nearly every sort of Resistance activity from the beginning to the end of the occupation.
‘We’ve got to have a paper out this evening.’ Outze explained. Information always had to be produced to a definite schedule to be put on the trains, boats, and aeroplanes that took it to its subscribers. Jensen suggested they should visit an old lady who duplicated theatrical scripts for Copenhagen’s dramatic companies. The old woman, told that Outze was a textile merchant who wanted to circularize the Danish Parliament the next day to try to get a private bill passed to benefit his business, allowed the two journalists to use her duplicator.
While they were at work a well-known Danish journalist who knew Jensen but not Outze came to visit the old lady. He watched Outze feverishly typing the daily news bulletin directly on a stencil and asked Jensen what was happening. Jensen repeated the textile story.
‘Tell your friend to leave the textile branch and become a journalist,’ the newspaper man advised.
The agency occupied twenty-seven different offices during the war, and its members had to remain constantly on the alert. Whenever Outze dined in a Copenhagen restaurant he had to caution the head waiter to allow no one to leave the dining-room or to use the telephone until he departed. Often he had to get up from unfinished meals because a suspicious-looking person entered the room. He never wore his pistol openly, of course, and he is not a frightening looking man, but Danes sensed that he was from the underground, and in restaurants they always moved as far as they could from his table to be out of the line of fire in case of trouble.
The Savage Canary; The Story Of Resistance In Denmark
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