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Collaborationism, as a pejorative term, can describe the treason of cooperating with enemy forces occupying one's country. As such it implies criminal deeds in the service of the occupying power, including complicity with the occupying power in murder, persecutions, pillage, and economic exploitation as well as participation in a puppet government. The term "collaboration" is also used in mainstream music recording in which another artist is featured on another artists track or CD.

The use of "collaboration" to mean "traitorous cooperation with the enemy," dates from 1940, originally in reference to the Vichy Regime in France, and other French people who helped Nazi Germany. Since then, the words collaboration and collaborateur possibly have this very pejorative meaning in French (the shortened form collabo only has this pejorative meaning).

21 suspected Baltic Nazi war criminals were admitted to Sweden toward the end of World War II and have been living there ever since. Among them were several people such as Oskar Angelus, who established the Estonian Security Police and served as director of internal affairs in the collaborationist Estonian administration - Eesti Omavalitsus, and Karlis Lobe, who founded the Latvian Security Police battalions and headed the Latvian Police in Ventspils.

In Greece, General Tsolakoglou, who did not represent the Greek government in exile, signed the surrender of Greece in April 1941. Tsolakoglou was awarded for this contribution the leadership of the first Nazi-held puppet government in Athens. Tsolakoglou was followed by Logothetopoulos, who wished to create a Greek division for the Waffen-SS. Although he failed to, he helped some thousand die-hard fascists and national-socialist (some from the previous quasi-fascist regime of Ioannis Metaxas of 1936-1941), anti-communist and anti-semite Greeks to volunteer and enroll in the German Army. The third Greek collaborationist regime was headed by Ioannis Rallis.

The term in this negative meaning is also used for German individuals and institutions cooperating with the Nazi regime, though in their case it was not a foreign occupation, and later to people cooperating with or helping other dictatorial regimes in their own countries, even when foreign occupation was not involved.

Main article: List of alleged collaborators

• David Littlejohn, 1972. The Patriotic Traitors: A History of Collaboration in German-Occupied Europe, 1940-45, William Heinemann Ltd. (Mayfair, London), 391-page hardcover (ISBN 0-434-42725-X).

• Anti-fascism
• Collaboration during World War II
• Dhimmi (pejorative sense)
• Puppet government
• Pursuit of Nazi collaborators
• Quisling
• Resistance during World War II
• Treason
• Hanjian