Sweden and the Holocaust

The German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 marked an intensification in Nazi persecution of Jews. Mass killings soon began within occupied territories in the Soviet Union. The decision to begin the rounding up and deportation of Jews from other parts of German-occupied Europe for extermination had been taken by January 1942. In Sweden, the Ministry for Foreign Affairs received news about the policy of extermination. In a chance discussion in a train, the Swedish diplomat Göran von Otter was told of the extermination of Jews at Belzec extermination camp by an SS officer in August 1942. He reported the information to the Ministry in the hope that it would publicly condemn the atrocities, although no action was taken.[12] Even so, Paul A. Levine writes that "Swedish officials, and in fact much of the newspaper-reading public, had as much or more information about many details of the 'Final Solution' than their counterparts in other neutral or Allied countries".[8]

Although Swedish newspapers had reported on Nazi concentration camps since 1933, their coverage on the escalating persecution of Jews was uneven. Provincial conservative newspapers, in particular, published little on the subject until the Allied liberation of the camps in 1945. In spite of this, the Swedish press began to publish detailed accounts of the extermination of Jews in German-occupied Europe as early as the autumn of 1942 and Jewish newspapers such as Judisk Krönika and Judisk Tidskrif published regular reports on the subject.[13]

The authorities in German-occupied Norway began a series of operations in October 1942 to round up the country's small Jewish population, estimated at around 2,000. The news was reported in the Swedish press[14] but the Ministry for Foreign Affairs was "rather slow to realise what was going on".[3] Most Norwegian Jews were detained in the first operations but the Norwegian resistance did succeed in smuggling some Jewish refugees across the border into Sweden in the so-called Carl Fredriksens Transport. In this way, it is thought that up to 1,100 may have been saved.[3]

Although Sweden became increasingly conscious of the Holocaust and involved in officially-sanctioned rescue attempts in the later years of the war, Paul A. Levine notes that "Sweden's government and people responded with a distressing lack of generosity towards those few Jews who needed help and were in a situation where Swedish help - both in the 1930s and early 1940s - might have made a difference".[8] However, he noted that "some Swedish officials, in contrast to their counterparts in other liberal democracies, chose increasingly often to engage in direct efforts to save Jews. Where they had earlier stood indifferent to the plight of some few Jews, they came to understand that their previous response had been inadequate. Crucially, these mostly mid-level officials were supported by their political superiors."[15]

In total, 10 Swedes have been recognised as Righteous Among the Nations by the Israeli institute Yad Vashem.

It was widely seen as inevitable that the Allies would win the war by early 1945. Folke Bernadotte, Count of Wisborg, used his position as a diplomat and vice-president of the Swedish Red Cross to negotiate an agreement with the Germans under which concentration camp inmates in areas still under Nazi control would be collected and transported to Sweden. The initiative originated with the Norwegian diplomat Niels Christian Ditleff and was initially aimed at the rescue solely of inmates of Danish and Norwegian origin. 15,000 civilians, predominately Norwegian and Danish political prisoners, were evacuated by the Swedish Red Cross before May 1945. However, several hundred Danish Jews interned in the Theresienstadt Ghetto were also among those evacuated.

In the post-war years, the Swedish government placed emphasis on its humanitarian actions to save Jews as a means of deflecting criticism of its economic and political relations with Nazi Germany. Historian Ingrid Lomfors states that this "sowed the seed of the image of Sweden as a 'humanitarian superpower'" in post-war Europe and its prominent involvement in the United Nations.[12] In its portrayal of the policy of neutrality and wartime humanitarian assistance, Levine argued that, in the post-war years:

Swedish students have been taught that rather than assist "one side" or the other in pursuing their sordid nationalistic goals (and in fact the vast majority of Swedes wished for an Allied victory), their leaders 'fought' for peace - higher, more noble ideals than the ones motivating the belligerents. As a result of this interpretation, Swedish memory of the war is suffused with a sometimes rather smug sense of moral superiority, yet crucially, one shadowed by a lingering sense of guilt at not having participated in the struggle against Nazism.[20]

Holocaust Studies remained marginal in academia in Sweden. It was reported in 1999 that only two studies had ever been published on the theme of Sweden and the Holocaust.[20] It has been argued that this reflected the pervasive Folkhemmet ideology associated with Swedish Social Democracy which saw the past only as a source of moral instruction to a forward-looking national project based on social improvement.[21] Levine, an American historian teaching at Uppsala University for much of his career, authored a number of influential studies on the subject and played an important role in the emergence of Holocaust education in Sweden.

Since the 1990s, the issue of praise or blame to attach to the country's response to the Holocaust has become a contentious political subject in Sweden.[22] Substantial public discussion about the degree of Swedish awareness of the Holocaust took place in the aftermath of the publication of the novel Not Wanting To See (Att inte vilja se, 2014) by the author Jan Guillou which argued that few Swedes had been aware of the Holocaust before the Swedish press published accounts of the Allied liberation of Nazi concentration camps in 1945.[4]

Göran Persson, a former Swedish Prime Minister, founded the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance in 1998. In 2018, the Swedish government announced its intention to build a Holocaust museum intended to "focus on surviving Swedes and collect items, interviews and documents about their experiences". It also announced its intention to establish a "centre" devoted to Wallenberg.[23] Although delayed, it was decided that the Swedish Holocaust Museum would be located in Stockholm rather than Malmö in which a high number of antisemitic incidents had recently been reported. It is intended to open in 2022.[24]

• International response to the Holocaust
• Spain and the Holocaust
• Turkey and the Holocaust

• Heuman, Johannes; Rudberg, Pontus, eds. (2021). Early Holocaust Memory in Sweden: Archives, Testimonies and Reflections. Cham: Palgrave-Macmillan. ISBN 9783030555313.
• Kvist, Karin (2002). "A Study of Antisemitic Attitudes within Sweden's Wartime Utlänningsbyrån". In Cesarani, David; Levine, Paul A. (eds.). Bystanders to the Holocaust: A Re-Evaluation. London: Frank Cass. pp. 199–211. ISBN 978-0714682433.
• Levine, Paul A. (1996). From Indifference to Activism: Swedish Diplomacy and the Holocaust, 1938-1944. Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis. ISBN 978-9155437992.
• Nordlund, Sven (2002). "'The War is Over - Now You Can Go Home!' Jewish Refugees and the Swedish Labour Market in the Shadow of the Holocaust". In Cesarani, David; Levine, Paul A. (eds.). Bystanders to the Holocaust : a re-evaluation. London: Frank Cass. pp. 171–198. ISBN 978-0714682433.
• Rudberg, Pontus (2019). The Swedish Jews and the Holocaust. London: Routledge. ISBN 9780367348748.
• Wallerman, Anna (2018). "A Day in the Life: Aryanization Before the Swedish Supreme Court 1941–42". Law and History Review. 36 (3): 593–617. doi:10.1017/S0738248018000184.