HIPO Corps

The HIPO Corps (Danish: HIPO-korpset) was a Danish auxiliary police corps, established in 1944 by the German Gestapo when the Danish police was disbanded and most of the regular policemen on September 19, 1944 were arrested and deported to Nazi concentration camps in Germany. Most members were recruited among Danish collaborators. The word HIPO is an abbreviation of the German word Hilfspolizei.

The purpose of HIPO was to help the Gestapo as an auxiliary police unit. HIPO was organized under, and quite similar to, the Gestapo. Some men were uniformed to be visible and some dressed as civilians and workied in secrecy. The uniformed men wore a black uniform with the Danish police insignia. HIPO, as well as the Gestapo, had their own informers. The major difference was that most of the Gestapo were Germans working in an occupied country, while the HIPO Corps consisted entirely of Danes working for the German occupiers.

During the last winter of the war HIPO members killed, tortured, blew up houses, factories and even Tivoli in Copenhagen ordered by Adolf Hitler personally and the Nazi occupation forces.

The Lorenzen group, also known as section 9c, was an armed paramilitary group of Danes subordinate to the HIPO Corps.

After the war, service in the HIPO corps was one of those crimes of collaborationism that retroactively became capital offenses. Some 2-300 HIPO members were prosecuted under these laws, of which about a dozen were executed. A somewhat larger number received death sentences that were later reduced to long prison terms or paroled.