Content note: This post discusses wartime collaboration, informing on acquaintances and family members, and tragic outcomes. Purpose: historical education and remembrance.
From Aarhus to the Gestapo files: Grethe Bartram – Denmark’s most notorious wartime informer
Grethe Bartram (born Jensen) was born on 23 February 1924 in Aarhus, into a poor family with communist leanings. Her childhood was marked by hardship and insecurity. When Nazi Germany occupied Denmark on 9 April 1940, Grethe was only 16.
In a time when many Danes chose quiet opposition or joined organized resistance networks, Grethe took a different path: collaboration with the occupying power.
In 1942, at the age of 18, she began supplying information to the Danish police and soon shifted to direct contact with the Gestapo. Over the next three years, Grethe informed on more than 53 people, including neighbors, friends, resistance members, and even her own relatives:
- Her brother, Niels Jensen
- Her fiancé/husband, Frode Thomsen
- Numerous people she had once known through a communist youth group
Her reports led to arrests, harsh interrogations, and the deportation of many to German camps. At least eight of those she denounced never returned; most died in Neuengamme, Stutthof, or other camps.
In 1944, the Danish resistance sentenced her to death in absentia and attempted to assassinate her. The explosion wounded her, but she survived—and continued informing.
After Denmark’s liberation in May 1945, Grethe Bartram was arrested. Her trial in 1946–1947 became one of the most widely publicized legal cases in postwar Danish history.
The court found her guilty of aiding the enemy and contributing to the deaths of Danish citizens. She was initially sentenced to death—one of the very few women in modern Denmark to receive that penalty. In 1948, the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, later reduced. She was released in 1956.
Upon her release, Grethe was expelled from Denmark and resettled in Sweden under a new identity. She lived quietly in the Malmö area until her death on 26 January 2017 at the age of 92, and no widely documented public statement of remorse is associated with her.
In Denmark’s wartime memory, Grethe Bartram is often cited as a symbol of betrayal from within one’s own community—an enduring reminder that moral choices made under occupation can echo long after the fighting ends.
Sources
- Danish National Archives – Grethe Bartram trial records
- Henrik Skov Kristensen, Straffesagen mod Grethe Bartram (2007)
- Resistance Museum Denmark – Collaborators section