collaborators
Historical term for Danes who cooperated with the German occupation 1940–1945
A collaborator is a person who, during a hostile occupation, cooperates with the occupying power in a way that harms the interests or population of the occupied country. In connection with the German occupation of Denmark 1940–1945, the term is used in particular about Danes who actively supported the Germans — including informers who denounced resistance members, Jews and others to the Gestapo or the German police, as well as fellow travellers who in various ways advanced the aims of the occupying power.
In articles about killings from the occupation period, including the so-called informer liquidations, the designation collaborator appears as an overarching category for the victims and actors whom the resistance movement regarded as having offended against the Danish community through this cooperation. The killing of informers as a phenomenon was to a large extent a direct reaction to the activities of collaborators, as resistance members liquidated persons considered to pose a concrete threat to the resistance work.
Under Danish criminal law, punishable cooperation with a hostile occupying power is not regulated under one single concept, but through a series of specific provisions. The Danish Penal Code (straffeloven) §§ 101, 102, 104 and 105 deal respectively with assistance to the enemy, cooperation with a hostile belligerent or occupying power, and corresponding acts that harm the defence capability or interests of the state. The legal reckoning after the liberation was conducted under the supplement to the Penal Code of 1 June 1945, which made cooperation with the occupying power punishable with retroactive effect.
The term 'collaborator' is thus primarily a historical and descriptive word used in ordinary language and in historical writing. It has no independent definition in a single statutory provision, but the acts it describes are covered by the Penal Code's provisions on treason and assistance to the enemy. In the legal reckoning after the occupation, a number of Danes were convicted under these provisions, while others never reached the courts — among other reasons because they had been liquidated during the occupation itself.
