In the autumn of 1941 the Danish foreign minister, Erik Scavenius, and the minister of transportation, Gunnar Larsen, secretly established the so-called Eastern Territory Committee, a measure that embodied the activist character of the Danish government's collaboration with the German occupational authorities. This took place a month before an interministerial conference in Berlin, where - against the background of failed attempts to economically exploit the newly conquered Eastern Territory of the German Reich - it was decided to try to draw other European countries into the effort. 

Like so many others at the time, the Danes who initiated this effort were convinced that Denmark had to accustom itself to the notion of a New European Order under German leadership. Their idea was to use the Eastern Territory Committee as a means of implementing economic cooperation - »Denmark's participation in the economic reconstruction of the occupied eastern territories« - thereby also creating good will in Berlin. Economic opportunism may have played some part in the motives for adjusting the Danish economy to the future German Grossraumwirtschaft, this was in any case true of the businessmen who joined the committee. Originally semiprivate, the committee included a senior official from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and representatives from various branches of the business community, all of these with economic interests in the occupied eastern countries and all of them with staunch conservative views. The chairman, moreover, was a member of the DNSAP, the Danish Nazi party. 

lt has generally been argued that the committee never seriously contemplated actual projects and that it was dilatory from the start. The present analysis rejects this view and attributes it to the uncritical acceptance of the explanations given by the politicians who were responsible at the time. The study shows, on the contrary, that the committee - with the energetic backing of the minister of transportation, Gunnar Larsen, whose private economic interests were also involved - did seriously endeavour to reestablish Danish business operations, especially in the Baltic countries, and that it continued its efforts long after the originators of the scheme had abandoned it. 

Because of its actively collaborative character, the Eastern Territory Committee was kept secret from the other members of the government during the first half year of its existence. By the same token it avoided negotiating through normal channels with the German Foreign Office and instead worked closely with the ministry in charge of the occupied eastern countries, an arrangement that was backed by the German armaments minister, Fritz Todt, who in turn was a personal acquaintance of Gunnar Larsen. Alfred Rosenberg, who was minister for the Eastern Territory, was an example par excellence of that peculiar Nazi fascination with the »Nordic common destiny«, and he saw in the Danish connection the potential both for strengthening his position in forming occupation policy in the Eastern Territory and for snatching a piece of occupational jurisdiction in Denmark at the expense of the Foreign Office. 

As it turned out, the Eastern Territory Committee found its way to the agenda of the Foreign Office just the same, though only long enough to spoil the attempt to invade its jurisdiction in Denmark. It gained control of the process as the result of a quarrel with Rosenberg's ministry in connection with Gunnar Larsen's visit to the Baltic Countries in April 1942 and then, the following month, the committee's official establishment under the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Once the Foreign Office had things in hand, it lost interest in the project. 

On the one hand, the committee's new German negotiating partner had more important war concerns to think about than promoting the expansion of Danish business interests in the eastern countries; on the other hand, the Danish government had only reluctantly acquiesced in giving the committee official status. Consequently, its originators in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Transportation had to abandon the committee to its own devices, leaving it lame and isolated. It spent the rest of 1942 attempting to reestablish communication with Rosenberg's ministry, but the latter, having recognized defeat, turned to sabotaging the whole enterprise, fully in accord with a decision made the previous February that it would not accept any interference from the Foreign Office. In December 1942 it definitively broke off cooperation with the committee. It was now clear to the committee that its chances were exhausted, although it was not dissolved until the general breakdown of collaboration policy in August 1943. 

The meagre accomplishments of the Danish »eastern endeavours« included the reconstruction of two previously owned Danish enterprises (a cement factory and a vegetable oil plant) and a few compensatory agreements. 

The history of the Eastern Territory Committee illustrates how far the activist elements in the Danish government and the state bureaucracy were willing to carry collaboration with the occupation power. But in no lesser degree, it is also the story of the Nazi bureaucracy's inability to define and coordinate a clear and consistent policy for its occupational objectives and means. 

Translated by Michael Wolfe