Danish police’s first action against the communists on June 22nd 1941. Police officers are standing outside the building in Copenhagen that housed the offices of the Communist Party of Denmark and their newspaper Arbejderbladet. Photo: The Museum of Danish Resistance.

On April 9th 1940 Germany invaded Denmark. The poorly equipped and trained Danish military was no match for the Nazi war machine and after a few hours of resistance the Danish government decided to surrender. Mass destruction was avoided and a so-called “peacetime occupation” followed in which the Germans allowed the institutions of the Danish state to continue relatively undisturbed. In return Germany secured access to Danish agricultural exports, they were able to secure their northern flank with a minimal troop commitment and they gained a launchpad for their ongoing invasion of Norway.

Parliament and political parties were allowed to continue operating as well, including DKP, the Communist Party of Denmark. This changed on June 20th 1941 when the Nazis launched their attack on the Soviet Union. That same morning, Danish police arrested hundreds of leading communists and put them in so-called “protective custody”. Two months later parliament passed the infamous “Communist Law”, banning all communist activities and retroactively legalizing the arrests.

Some of the detainees were eventually released but eventually a couple of hundred of them were interned in the Horserød Camp, run by the Danish state. On August 29th 1943 the official Danish collaborationist policy broke down and the government resigned. The night before, the Germans had disarmed the Danish military during “Operation Safari”.

As part of the operation the Germans raided the Horserød Camp. While 93 of the detained communists managed to scale the fence and escape into the surrounding forests under the cover of night and pouring rain, 150 were less lucky. They were captured by the Germans and deported to the Stutthof concentration camp where 22 of them would eventually be murdered.

In 2001, on the 60th anniversary of the passing of the Communist Law, Leif Larsen, a son of the communist Eigil Larsen who escaped from Horserød by digging a tunnel and went on to become became a legendary railway saboteur, wrote an article that was printed in the newspaper Information (original text). The article details the history behind the passing of the law by the so-called “democratic” parties and debunks the common myth that the ban on communist organisations was passed as a result of German pressure. This myth was widely popularised after the war, especially by Social Democrats.

Below is my translation of Leif Larsen’s article.

It Was High Treason

One of the most shameful Danish laws was processed and debated in complete secrecy. Within minutes and three rushed readings, a unanimous parliament could send Law No. 349, called the Communist Law, to the King for signature on August 20, 1941. This happened on August 22, 1941.

Thereby, the politicians believed they had legalized the arrests made over the preceding two months of 339 men and women, in full accordance with the Constitution. Subsequently, nearly 300 more were interned under the provisions of the law.

With only three short sections, the law was not particularly wordy.

It stipulated:

• that “all Communist Associations and Organizations shall forthwith be dissolved”
• that “Persons whose conduct has furnished reasonable grounds to suspect their participation in Communist Activity or Agitation... shall be taken into custody”
• that “Assets belonging to Communist Associations... shall be taken into custody”

The lead-up to the law took place in the Cooperation Committee, commonly called the Nine-Member Committee. It was established on July 2, 1940, and consisted of two representatives from each of the four old parties: the Social Democrats, the Liberal Party, the Conservative Party, and the Social Liberal Party. The Justice Party (Georgists) had a single representative.

These nine politicians held a total of 314 meetings. Its most important task consisted of maintaining cooperation with the German occupiers. When this collaborationist policy failed on August 29, 1943, the committee ceased to exist.

In the reports of the Parliamentary Commission, minutes from all meetings, written by the committee's secretary, the Justice Party member Oluf Pedersen, can be found. They are reproduced verbatim in Volume IV (pp. 505-823) of one of the commission's many reports. Here, a committee meeting on August 6, 1940, is referenced, where Minister of Justice Thune Jacobsen first presented a draft bill on the "Prohibition against the Communists."

The Minister cunningly adds that “It was strongly recommended by the President of the Supreme Court, Troels G. Jørgensen, and was in accordance with the Constitution and approved by the Ministry of Justice”.

Even for the “shut up and fall in line” mentality of the time, it was alarming that the President of the Supreme Court interfered in legislation and even claimed that a law banning a legal political party was not in violation of the Constitution.

In the following days, the committee convenes to find out whether members of parliament can accept the issuing of arrest warrants against three members of the lower house and an unknown number of people who either are, or are suspected to be, communists.

The committee meeting of August 7th 1941 was a grand day of craven remorse.

Some committee members wanted to postpone the law until the Germans themselves got the idea to directly demand a ban against the communists. Others were afraid that the law could be used on other parties as the text of the law did not indicate clearly enough that it was the communists who were the intended target.

A peculiar question was raised during the meeting on August 12th by Liberal Party member Elgaard. He said:

Have the communists signed a declaration of loyalty to the Constitution, like the rest of us?

“I know nothing about that,” came the astonishing reply from Knud Kristensen (Liberal Party).

None of the eight aging men seemed to know article 48 of the Constitution, which clearly stipulated:

On approval of his election, each new member shall make a solemn declaration of loyalty to the Constitution.

Although all of them had been elected multiple times to either the lower or the upper house, a gap had suddenly appeared in the memory, for had they recalled Article 48 of the Constitution it would mean that also the communist members of parliament had made a “solemn declaration of loyalty to the Constitution”.

So here sits a group of men with an average age of 62, convincing each other that the communist MPs probably hadn't promised to be loyal to the Constitution, and therefore they damn well deserve their comeuppance, and must accept being hunted by the police and put in prison or handed over to the Germans.

One of the three, the editor of [the DKP newspaper] Arbejderbladet Martin Nielsen, had already been locked up for two months. Now the task was to hunt down Aksel Larsen and Alfred Jensen, and to do it with a clear conscience.

On August 19th the nine-member committee held its last meeting on the Communist Law before it was on the next day with three readings in the lower house and three readings in the upper house.

Even though parliament’s rules of procedure stated that at least two days must pass between the first and second reading, and at least two further days before the third reading of a bill could take place.

At this last meeting it is agreed upon to ignore constitutional stipulations on time intervals beween the readings of bills. It is also agreed that nothing must leak out before the Minister of Justice has made his speech introducing the Communist Law and judging from the very wordy minutes nobody gave a thought about Article 38 of the Constitution (currently Article 34), which at the time read:

Parliament shall be inviolable. Whoever attacks its security or freedom, issues or obeys any command aimed thereat, shall be deemed guilty of high treason.

There was absolutely no doubt. It was a clear case of high treason when three members of parliament, who had done nothing illegal, who merely had a different view of the social order, and who had solemnly promised loyalty to the Constitution, were hunted down across the country.

Despite all of the lukewarm reservations, the 137 members of the lower house and the 70 members of the upper house enter into this legal standing on August 20th 1941. There is no wavering in the ranks. They all vote in favour of a treasonous and clearly unconstitutional law.

It must have been sickening to witness this performance on a Wednesday in August 1941. But the Ministry of Justice had secured itself against disturbances by summoning a troop of plainclothes policemen who filled all spectator seats during the few hours the law was being processed.

In the upper house, not a single person wished to speak. The three readings were over in minutes.

Minister of Justice Eigil Thune Jacobsen, who had led the police's work in creating an archive of communists and sympathizers since 1925, delivered a fiery speech about the years of depredations by communist terror groups in Denmark. The latest example was cases of ship sabotage, which had led to prison sentences a month earlier ranging from two to sixteen years. The minister conveniently omitted to inform that none of those convicted were still members of the party now to be banned. He said: “From members of the Communist Party everywhere, help can be expected to advance communist activities without asking first what these activities are or whether they are legal or whether it concerns crimes against the laws of the land.”

The lower house took a little more time. The Justice Party used 16 words, and the Social Liberals 23 words, to endorse the bill. The Social Democrats and the Liberal Party promised to support the bill. Only one member fired his full anti-communist arsenal in a very combative speech. That was the Conservative Ole Bjørn Kraft, who delivered this parting kick to the DKP:

There can no longer be any doubt about the position and character of the Communist Party in this country; in reality it has been clear ever since we had the fundamental debate here in this chamber in 1933. A party who like the Communist lets its principles and opinions be determined, not out of consideration of its own people and its own country, but by what a single country’s interests demand, places itself in a very specific way in the perception of its compatriots and consequently it will also only seem pitiful when such a party, confronting adversity, suddenly seeks shelter behind the law of comradeship, which it itself so clearly has disregarded through its stance.”

Forgotten are the Conservative leader's concerns in the nine-member committee about constitutional violations, illegal persecution of members of parliament, and attempts to avoid legislation and "settle for a royal decree."

A few minutes were spent launching a law that today, 60 years later, stands as a pillar of shame over the parties, who always call themselves democratic and defenders of human rights.

One might think that a major reckoning with a law that was endorsed by the president of the Supreme Court, even with the claim that the law was not unconstitutional, would have followed the end of the German occupation on May 5th 1945 but there was no reckoning. The only person to suffer serious damage because of the Communist Law was Thune Jacobsen. A few days after being appointed Minister of Justice he introduced a bill that was passed unanimously by both chambers of parliament. A few days after the end of the occupation on May 5th 1945 the law was called “disgraceful” in [the legal journal] Ugeskrift for Retsvæsen-

Thune Jacobsen took this label upon him in his book På en Uriaspost (On an Uriah Post) released in 1946. On page 83 he writes: “For my sake, one may well designate it as 'disgraceful', provided it is understood that the disgrace is on the German side.”

But, crucially, there had been no demand from the occupiers to ban the communists by law. As with other decisions to be made by the collaborationist politicians, during the first years of the occupation German wishes were fulfilled before they were even stated.

This applies, for instance, to the plans for a Monetary Union, or the majority of the 127,000 Danish workers whom the Danish government forced to go to war-torn Germany as forced laborers by denying benefits to the unemployed.

Thune Jacobsen died aged 68, only three years after having published his book. Thus passed the sole individual to face political turbulence after the end of the occupation. Since then, astonishingly little has been said or written about the law that I laid out by calling “a scandalous law”.

In his novel Frydenholm, Hans Scherfig vividly describes the day the Communist Law was presented in parliament on August 20, 1941. The spectator seats are filled with employees from Police Headquarters, so none of the women whose husbands were locked up in the Vestre Prison could attend the debate. Scherfig adds:

Under these circumstances, the Minister of Jsutice took the floor to present the law on the prohibition of communist associations and against communist activity. With curly hair and a Bohemian cravat, he stood at the chamber's rostrum and smiled affably at the sombre assembly. While reading the bill, he tilted his head and moved his hands like an after-dinner speaker saying pleasant things to the ladies.

With biting irony, he goes through the bill and the debate, concluding with a quote from Jyllands-Posten's editorial the day after the law's adoption:

There has always been a basis in Danish law for banning a party like the communist one. The only regrettable thing is that it didn't happen sooner.

• Leif Larsen