Capitalism in Decay

As we consider the fate of Denmark’s economic élite after World War II, it is important to note how, in other Western European countries, [Fascist] occupation policies—with a handful of important exceptions when it came to “Aryanization,” transference of ownership, and replacements of managers and board members—to a large extent had allowed business firms to continue their daily operations without any direct intervention.

This in turn meant that after the war, business leaders in those economies were in great numbers [temporarily] held accountable for the collaboration that had taken place with the occupying power.^53^ In Denmark, on the other hand, companies shared the responsibility of collaboration with a national government that had been allowed to stay in place.

[…]

The postwar governments of May and October 1945, to a large degree, consisted of politicians who had been responsible for the policy of cooperation in 1940–1943 and were in no hurry to carry through a comprehensive legal settlement with the country’s political and economic élite. […] Expectations of a legal settlement with the business community was widespread, too, but because economic collaboration had been sanctioned by the government, lawmakers in the summer of 1945 were cautious about giving laws against it with retroactive effect with all the repercussions this might entail for the political establishment.

Eventually, therefore, only business leaders who were found guilty of breaking retroactive laws against “undue initiative” or “expansion of production facilities in order to meet German orders” were actually convicted, amounting to fewer than 1,500 individuals. The legal reckoning with economic collaborators became notoriously known for hitting small fry, whereas bigger game was acquitted.

Local contractors and haulage at Organisation Todt building sites, canteen, restaurant and hotel management, and deliveries for the Wehrmacht would receive prison sentences of several months, while a big building contractor such as Wright, Thomsen & Kier, which played a major rôle in the construction of the [Axis] fortifications on the Danish North Sea coast, was acquitted because of prior government approval of the contracts.

The case against Gunnar Larsen, owner–director of the F.L. Smidth & Co. corporation and minister of public works 1940–1945, was dismissed because his motives for collaborating were found to be political, not economic.^58^

(As if they were entirely separate matters!)

If hardly any legal responsibility could be placed, perhaps it would be possible to at least place a moral and symbolic one? It was now up to civil society to decide whether to instigate proceedings to weed out people from their midst who had behaved in an illegitimate, that is, inappropriate, unnecessary, or unwanted way (however defined), applying not legal but moral criteria for potential exclusions.

[…]

Others had, by passing away, evaded the humiliation of being deleted from The Blue Book: These included the director of the Danish Red Cross, who was suspected of treason, and a big landowner, who had acted as a [Fascist] agitator. A number of Blue Book individuals who had been publicly denounced for [Axis] sympathies or collaboration cleared their names by suing for defamation.

Others were acquitted after being charged in court. A few had been deleted according to their own wishes; others had been excluded because of ordinary court convictions for tax evasion, fraud—or illegal profits on selling whisky.

Apart from all of this, 95 individuals—still alive—were missing, or approximately 1.7 percent of the 1943 entries.^76^ The notes in the 1943 working edition reveal what had taken place.

[…]

Several leading business organizations carried out their own investigations, among them the Association of Building Contractors (Entreprenørforeningen) and the Association of Engineers (Ingeniørforeningen). The latter set up a commission in 1945 to look into cases of collaboration and by autumn 1947, forty‐nine cases had been investigated, which had led to ten exclusions and sixteen statements of disapproval with forty cases still pending.

The engineers’ attempts came to a standstill in 1950, when proceedings were cancelled after a verdict from the Danish Supreme Court had ruled the association’s processes unlawful.

I emphasized that part because self‐investigations rarely lead to satisfactory results.

The reconstruction of political and economic structures after war and occupation was supported by the élite’s ability to mend its legitimate position in society after five years of extreme uncertainty and staggering between national sentiments and economic necessities. One could argue that, in the end, the successful reconstruction of the élite’s legitimacy meant that no profound changes had to be made or forced through in the composition of the political and economic élite.

(Emphasis added in all cases.)

These sober observations don’t mesh very well with the optimistic tone in this study’s first few pages; a handful of modest penalties and ostracizations are, at best, bittersweet compensations for the Danish bourgeoisie’s Axis collaboration.

In any case, this remains a useful summary on Denmark’s failure to thoroughly prosecute Axis collaborators, and we socialists know why: a serious and systematic purging of Denmark’s Axis collaborators could not have been executed without compromising Denmark’s capitalist economy.

This situation may remind some feminists of rape culture. Under a neopatriarchy, most of the people who commit carnal abuse escape apprehension, and the few who don’t typically receive light penalties anyway.