The Danish journalist and former Vietnam correspondent Henning Becker have died at the age of 78.
Henning Becker was in Vietnam during the Vietnam war and will particularly be remembered for rescuing 204 children out of Saigon shortly before the city collapsed in 1975.
TV2 writes that Henning Becker brought the children to Denmark as some of the first Vietnamese from the war-torn country at the end of the war after South Vietnam’s ally, the United States, had to acknowledge its defeat to the North Vietnamese regime and had withdrawn its military troops from the country. He arrived in Denmark with the children on the same day the US-backed government in Saigon collapsed.
Following their arrival, Henning Becker spent years fighting with Danish authorities because he insisted the children should have a future in Denmark. The children were called the “Becker children” and were for a while accommodated at a former mental institution and they lived, amongst other things, on private donations.
Throughout his life, Henning Becker maintained close contact with the children, whom he considered his family.
During a reunion in 2015, one of the children Phuc Van Tran said to Berlingske, “Henning Becker was not just a father to us. He tied it all together, and if we lost him, then we lost it all.”
Henning Becker passed away peacefully on 30 December 2021 at the hospital in Slagelse, Denmark.
Thank you for bringing this to our attention.
Henning Becker did not rescue Vietnamese children. He transported them out of Vietnam, stopped over in Honolulu and went onto take a group of Vietnamese refugee boys to an island off the coast of Denmark.
He tattooed each of them with numbers, molested many of them, kept them in prison on this island. My adopted brother was one of those held captive by him for two years on the island of Livo.
My mother worked with the American Red Cross for many years in Hawaii. She met my adopted brother when he came through Honolulu from Vietnam to be processed as part of Henning Becker’s group of boys that was then going on to Denmark.
He was able to sneak out a letter to my mother begging for help and with the help of Vietnamese Americans in high positions in government and intelligence, they were able, after two years of fighting, to get him out of there and heading Becker ended up going to prison. Many heads in the danish government were found guilty of negligence for allowing this sick man, this pedophile, to abuse and molest these innocent young victims. So let’s not praise him as a hero. He was a very sick man and we know firsthand what he did