With the shock of invasion and the destabilization of Danish political structures and institutions came a fundamental reconfiguration of the military and intelligence officers’ role. This research project maps the presence, activities and networks of the large group of leading Danish military and intelligence personnel that relocated from Copenhagen to Stockholm during the war. We want to know what they considered legitimate actions under these circumstances, which sources of legitimacy they drew on and what they deemed acceptable and unacceptable political, social and emotional responses to this radically altered situation.
Most research on the military and intelligence community in exile presents a highly idealized picture of its motives and activities, stressing how it played a key part in the Danish resistance movement and was the loyal and highly respected partner of the British military and intelligence services. While the Danish officers did indeed provide the British with valuable information through networks of people in Stockholm and London, they also had a fundamentally anti-communist disposition, which made them highly ambivalent towards the British-backed Danish resistance fight in which Danish Communists were pioneers.
For the Stockholm military milieu, maintaining close contacts with Danish mainstream politicians and ensuring the re-establishment of the pre-war regime were therefore key goals. This research project explores how the Stockholm officers produced and maintained this intricate and difficult position and how they built a professional community around it. It does so by analysing the everyday practices of intelligence work and military capacity building and by exploring the values, feeling rules and accepted modes of expression that defined them as a community.
Postdoctoral researcher, PhD Jacob Vrist Nielsen. Vrist Nielsen holds a PhD degree in history from the University of Copenhagen and is an expert on the history of modern surveillance, the Danish intelligence services, the German occupation of Denmark and military homing pigeons. He earned his PhD degree in 2021 on the dissertation: "The Threat against Democracy: Tele-surveillance in Denmark, 1916-1945".
