Fight for Freedom

[Jim]

On April 9, 1940, the day German forces occupied the Danish town of Slagelse, a 17-year-old schoolboy named Arne Sejr composed and typed up 25 copies of what he called "Ten Commandments for the Danes," and slipped them into neighbourhood mailboxes the following night. The recipients were urged to:

Do worthless work for the Germans,
Work slowly for the Germans,
Destroy everything useful to the Germans;
join the fight for Denmark's freedom!

Young Arne Sejr's crude but passionate broadside marked the beginning of the underground press, the earliest form of organized resistance in each of the countries of the occupied West. Everywhere, small groups of like-minded friends joined up to plan, write and distribute subversive literature. Most of their early efforts were typewritten or mimeographed, although some were hand-copied.
The publications differed widely. Many focused on local affairs-German injustices and Resistance successes. Others were the voices of political parties, which used them to recruit and educate resistant’s. (One Norwegian publication was devoted entirely to do write ups on “how-to” instructions for saboteurs.) Still others, slower to develop, were the work of professional reporters and editors-illustrated magazines and daily newspapers with circulations of up to 100,000. By 1944 the underground press in many areas was more widely read than lawful publications, and fully 1,200 Resistance periodicals were being put out in both Holland and France.
As the underground press grew, so did German efforts to suppress it. Some 3,000 journalists were arrested in Norway alone; more than 200 were executed. In Holland 120 people who worked on a single paper, Loyalty lost their lives. To minimize the danger, the writers, photographers and printers on a given publication habitually worked in separate offices and frequently were unknown to one another. Yet some photographers took grave risks to record Resistance activities (Below) as a national heritage.

A sampling of the numerous and aggressive underground publications in the Netherlands includes the Calvinist Trouw (Loyalty), the Communist De Waarheid (The Truth) and the Royalist le Maintiendrai (I Will Stand Fast).