Thread: Collecting the News

The underground press was more than a means of promoting the Resistance. Many papers were full-scale news-gathering operations that supplied readers with uncensored domestic and foreign news. Facts for the stories came from secret contacts in government agencies and police departments, from tapped official telephone and teletype lines, from the editorial staffs of legal newspapers who leaked news they dared not publish, and from foreign radio broadcasts. Eventually, some underground journalists pooled their resources and set up clandestine news organizations to distribute daily or weekly bulletins to subscribing papers. The illegal Danish news service Information was especially efficient issuing as many as four confidential bulletins a day to a group of 254 papers.

An underground journalist edits a story in a temporary Amsterdam Office. Editorial staffs of clandestine papers moved often to make sure they were one step ahead of the Gestapo.

Illicitly monitoring a BBC broadcast, a Norwegian woman compiles the war news for an Oslo paper.

An Oslo typist transfers a reporters draft to a mimeograph stencil. Typewriters, scarce and subject to seizure, were carefully hidden away when not in use.

Once the news had been collected and written up, another set of dangers came into play: The news had to be mimeographed or printed, which required bulky equipment and materials that might easily attract unfriendly attention. Small operations tucked their incriminating mimeograph machines and stocks of paper into secret compartments in attics, cellars and private apartments. One Dutch publisher set up his printing shop in a hollowed-out haystack.

An armed guard takes a rest on a stack of paper while printers run off copies of The Free Danes.

And Copenhagen's Information news service operated its mimeograph machine in a room at the government's medical research institute, behind a door rigged with a flashing red light that warned: "Dangerous Experiment in Progress." Several large underground papers were run off at night on presses used for legal publications by day. One underground group brazenly employed the same presses that were used for a Nazi-hacked newspaper. Workers in the plant knew of the forbidden operation, but said nothing: resistant’s had promised them a nasty "professional accident" with "busy presses and molten lead" if they turned informer.


Women collate a Norwegian underground paper in the basement of an Oslo apartment building.

The trickiest part of any clandestine news operation was distributing copies of papers and journals to subscribers under the Germans' noses. During the early years of the Occupation many simple newssheets were sent out by mail in envelopes with bogus return addresses.

A woman messenger for a Dutch underground newspaper gathers mimeographed copies to distribute to subscribers in Amsterdam.

But it was expensive and dangerous to mail publications with conspicuously large circulations. Most of the major papers were therefore delivered by messengers directly to the readers, sometimes by milkmen or mailmen who were resistant’s, but more often by women couriers who concealed copies in handbags, shopping bags, false-bottomed suitcases or in the clothing of their children.
In order to increase circulation, the papers advised readers to pass along their copies to someone else after they had finished with them. One Dutch paper urged readers who had a collector's instinct to resist the temptation to hoard newspaper copies; if they had to collect, it said, they might try German revolvers.

Another courier bicycles away from the printer's office with papers hidden in the bundles that are hanging from her handle bars.

Pedestrians in Amsterdam read a copy of the Communist paper The Truth on a sidewalk kiosk. fhough only a few thousand copies of The Truth were printed weekly, the actual readership was much larger, because of ouldoor postings and distribution in factories, universities and well-populated areas where copies readily passed from hand to hand.