WHEN Nazi troops invaded Denmark on April 9 1940, the Danish communists found themselves in a peculiar situation.

Despite the extreme anti-communism of the Nazi regime, Germany had signed a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union and in addition the Danish government had willingly accepted the occupation and co-operated actively with Germany. Because of this the Nazis took no immediate action against the Danish Communist Party (DKP).

In the DKP it was understood that the party would sooner or later be forced underground. They worked legally for as long as possible, including in the parliament, the Rigsdagen, but after the German assault on the Soviet Union on June 22 1941, illegality was an inevitability.

The police and Ministry of Justice got an early warning by the German authorities, who handed over a list of 66 leading communists whose arrest the regime would demand.

For many years the Danish police had been preparing an action against the DKP and responded to the German demands by arresting nearly 300 communists, including several members of the Rigsdagen.

In August the Rigsdagen, minus its DKP representatives, followed up at the illegal incarcerations by unanimously voting to abolish communist organisations and activities by law. In total the government violated six sections of the Danish constitution in its actions against DKP.

In the following months the now illegal DKP was reorganised and focused on developing the armed resistance in the population and on the biggest workplaces. Soon however groups of communists began conducting sabotage in earnest, targeting the occupation forces and the Danish companies who supplied them. A new party structure was built based on semi-autonomous five-man groups, which made the organisation less vulnerable.

Early in 1942 a unified communist resistance movement was founded under the name Kopa (Communist Partisans), which was renamed Bopa (Bourgeois Partisans) to underline the fact that the organisation accepted members from a broad political spectrum.

It quickly grew to be the biggest and best organised of the Danish resistance groups and conducted more than 1,000 acts of sabotage during the last three years of the war, including most of the biggest actions.

The Danish communists conducted a large number of other underground activities, including the publication of illegal pamphlets and books. The party’s illegal newspaper Land og Folk (People and Country) and the pamphlet Frit Danmark (Free Denmark) became the most widespread illegal publications of the war.

When the popular opinion definitively began to turn against the occupation in 1943, the communists were the driving force behind the general strikes which on August 29 forced the Danish government to abandon its collaboration with the German occupation.

At that point the government chose to surrender many Danish communists, who were interned in a camp near Horserod and who were turned over to the Germans, who sent 150 of them to the Stutthof concentration camp.

As it became clear that Germany was losing the war, anti-communist elements within the resistance movement actively began restricting arms shipments to the communist resistance groups. They were determined to prevent the communists from becoming too powerful if a revolutionary situation should emerge from the downfall of fascism. The goal was to ensure that Denmark was not part of the socialist camp, but became a close ally of the US and Britain.

When the German forces in Denmark finally capitulated on May 4 1945, the established parties that had been behind the treasonous collaboration with Germany’s Nazi government moved quick to secure their grip on power.

After the war the DKP had influence and respect among the Danish working class because of its role in the anti-fascist struggle. Despite a great election result for the DPK in the first elections after the war, the goverment managed to limit the party’s influence. The hope for a development towards socialism was instead replaced by the course of the powerful towards Nato and the EU.

As a consequence of this, Denmark never conducted an actual legal showdown with big capital and the political forces behind the collaboration policy, both of whom violated the constitution and sold Denmark to fascism.

• Martin Hedlund Fink has an MA in history from Roskilde University and frequently contributes to Denmark’s Marxist daily paper Arbejderen.