Pictured: Various photographs of the Fascist invasion of Denmark.

Quoting Joachim Lund in Industrial Collaboration in Nazi‐Occupied Europe: Norway in Context, pages 187–190:

There were no [Fascist] plans for the economic exploitation of Denmark when the Wehrmacht attacked its defenseless neighbour on 9 April 1940. Denmark was occupied for purely military reasons, and the Danish government accepted the [Third Reich’s] offer to stay in power if it could guarantee the safety of the Wehrmacht. Although the Wehrmacht’s economic department had pointed to a few Danish industrial plants that might be of military interest, Berlin’s expectations of Denmark’s industrial capacity were limited.

The situation economic changed as the Wehrwirtschaftsstab Dänemark (the Danish office of the economic branch of the Wehrmacht) began to disclose the potentials, and in summer 1941, [Reich] authorities and the Danish government reached an agreement on the “Extraordinary Industrial Deliveries,” according to which Danish industrial enterprises were to supply [the Reich] with a wide range of manufactured products.

Yet in the plans of the Auswärtiges Amt (Foreign Ministry) and the Four‐Year Plan which followed the Blitzkrieg victories of 1940, Denmark was primarily to be regarded as a producer and exporter of agricultural goods.

During the five years of occupation, Denmark fulfilled and expanded this rôle, covering relatively large parts of the German (especially Wehrmacht) consumption of mainly meat, pork, butter and fish. In order to finance industrial and agricultural deliveries, the occupying power made use of the existing clearing account in Denmark’s National Bank, which would cover the growing [Fascist] deficit on the trade account.

Moreover, a newly established Wehrmacht account financed military construction works in the country, mainly in the shape of the Atlantic Wall on the west coast of Jutland. This chapter establishes the varying [Fascist] demands in the Danish economy and explains how Denmark’s industry was kept going because of [the Reich’s] orders (Auftragsverlagerung).

The Danish government tightened already existing monetary, production and distribution regulations and chose to cooperate with the occupation authorities, and deliberately used Denmark’s increasing food exports as a means to soften up growing political demands from Berlin.

The Institutional Framework

The Danish experience during World War II offers a case that is very different from the general picture of [Fascist] presence and domination in Western Europe. In Denmark, a lenient [Fascist] occupation policy prevailed, the reasons for which should be found in [Fascist] efforts to win over the Danish population and to preserve peace and quiet and a steady flow of Danish manufactured goods to the Wehrmacht and the German population.

On 9 April 1940, [Fascist] armed forces moved against Denmark and Norway, violating the German–Danish non‐aggression agreement of 1939, and putting an end to the “Phoney War” that had lasted since the occupation of Poland the previous fall. While the coastal defense at Oslo would fire away at the [Reich’s] vessels, sinking the Blücher and slowing down the [Fascist] attack, the Danish cannon at the entrance of Copenhagen Harbor jammed, and [Fascist] troop transports could berth unhindered.

It added to the irony that as a tug boat forming part of a [Fascist] flotilla bound for Korsør on the west coast of Zealand started to sink, its crew was picked up by a Danish naval vessel, which then carried them safely ashore, only to realize they had just performed a modern revival of the Trojan horse.¹ [Fascist] forces also crossed the border in the south of Jutland, and parachuted into strategic strongpoints. After a couple of hours of fighting, sufficient to demonstrate that Danish neutrality had been breached, Denmark surrendered.

Before the war, the only challenges to a peaceful relationship with the unpredictable [Fascist] régime to the south were the border issue—Northern Schleswig along with its German minority population having been ceded to Denmark in 1920—and a widespread, harsh and often publicly articulated criticism of [the Fascist] government in both left and right wing newspapers, as well as left wing material support for German political refugees arriving in Copenhagen.

Berlin, however, never raised the border question (not even during occupation), and critical voices in the press were mostly subdued by the Danish Foreign Ministry. A staunch refusal on the part of the Danish social democrat and social liberal coalition government to give in to conservative demands for a stronger defense, served to assure Berlin that Denmark had no intentions of becoming a military tool for [the Reich’s] enemies.

The Danish government had hoped in this way to be able to keep their neutral country out of the war, just like during the Great War, and to most people the invasion came as a surprise. But this time the situation was different: The [Reich’s] naval command had learned from the war of 1914–18 that in order to avoid an Allied blockade, it would need submarine facilities on the Atlantic, and so Norway entered their plans.

In order to extend the range of Luftwaffe aircraft, it was decided to occupy the airport of Aalborg in Northern Jutland, but the decision to occupy the whole of Denmark was not made until the beginning of March. Pragmatics would characterize the [Fascist] policy towards Denmark for the next five years.

Denmark’s almost immediate surrender paved the way for a unique occupation régime based on a fiction that the country, albeit “under protection of the Wehrmacht”, would be treated as a neutral, independent state and that [the Reich] would not interfere with the way the Danes ran their society, as long as the security of the Wehrmacht forces was not jeopardized. In questions regarding political and economic cooperation, the foreign ministries of the two countries would therefore be in the driver’s seat.

The Danish Foreign Ministry centralized and coordinated most contacts and negotiations with the [Reich], although military, judicial and transport issues would be handled by the ministries of War, Law, and Transport respectively. The arrangement of April 1940, which the Danish government accepted under protest, was soon to be put under pressure in questions regarding jurisdiction, censorship, [Fascist] acquisitions of Danish military equipment, and the government set‐up.

But it still allowed the Danes to retain their monarchy and democratic institutions, unions and political parties (before 22 June 1941 even the Communist Party), as well as courts, police (until September 1944), and a clipped defense (until August 1943). No other occupied country was allowed to have parliamentary elections like the one that took place in Denmark in March 1943.

(Emphasis added.)

Compare this with the Fascist colonization of Poland, which was noticeably more brutal. With some exceptions (e.g. antisemitism, antiziganism, antisocialism), Fascist occupation policies were not uniform all across the continent. Rather, the Fascists employed different strategies for different regions, and in Scandinavia the overall strategy was one of (relative) restraint, possibly because of the general population’s ‘Nordic’ heritage. This restraint made it easier for the occupiers to find willing collaborators: at least one thousand Danish capitalists happily assisted the Reich.

Do not misunderstand me: I have no interest in ‘praising’ this degree of moderation. All that I am adding is that Fascist policies were complex; variable. Scandinavia is just a case in point, and I’ll touch on Fascist atrocities in Scandinavia in the previsible future.