Troels Solgaard Andersen has an article forthcoming:

The Social Individualist: Recruitment and Assessment of Danish SOE Agents in Britain during the Second World War

The article investigates the recruitment and assessment of the Danish SOE agents during their training in Britain during the Second World War. Drawing on recently declassified personal files, the study offers the first systematic analysis of how British officers evaluated the performance of the 53 Danish agents parachuted into Denmark. Unlike earlier Danish historiography, which has focused on operational activities inside Denmark, the study centers on the agent’s training period in Britian and the criteria applied by the British SOE staff. The article demonstrates that British officers heavily emphasised the importance of mental stability and, most importantly, the ability to collaborate effectively in groups. Prior military and maritime experience could be useful, but it also created overconfidence and poor group cohesion. The ideal agent was therefore not defined by technical expertise, rank or political and national sentiments, but by intelligence and sociability in combination with sound judgement and self-awareness. The article shows that British evaluations in some cases diverge from later Danish postwar perceptions of the agents, most notably the first chief organiser, Carl Johan Bruhn, thereby offering new empirical insights into the formation of the Danish SOE agents.

The article can be read in Historisk Tidsskrift (June 2026).