Sweden and the Holocaust
Nonetheless, the Swedish government maintained important economic links with Nazi Germany and there was widespread awareness within the country of its policy of persecution and, from 1942, mass extermination of Jews.
In the final years of the war, it provided official support for attempts to rescue Jews in German-occupied Denmark and Hungary which served to consolidate the self-image of Sweden as a "humanitarian superpower" in post-war Europe.
[4] However, the official refusal to accept larger numbers of refugees was criticized by a minority of Swedes notably including the newspaper Göteborgs Handels- och Sjöfartstidning and the humanitarian activist Natanael Beskow.
After the outbreak of World War II in 1939, it attempted to cultivate economic relations with both Nazi Germany and the United Kingdom with the particular aim of securing its own food supplies.
German forces invaded and occupied Norway and Denmark in April 1940 while Finland entered into a de facto alliance with Nazi Germany from 1941.
[7] Controversially, the Swedish government also allowed German soldiers on leave to travel through its territory from German-occupied Norway before the practice was finally stopped in August 1943.
"[10] In order to maintain its neutrality, national newspapers was censored and the government "really tried to suppress information on Nazi German brutality in general and on persecution of Jews and the Holocaust".
[13] 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".
[9] 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.
Denmark had been invaded by Germany in April 1940 but had subsequently been able to retain a higher degree of internal autonomy than many other parts of German-occupied Europe until a political crisis in August 1943.
At the request of the recently established War Refugee Board (WRB), the United States government had issued a request to neutral powers to expand their diplomatic legations in Hungary in May 1944 in the hope that a large number of foreign observers might encourage the new regime to moderate its policy ahead of the advance of Soviet forces on the Eastern Front.
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.
[citation needed] 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.
[23] 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.
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".
[25] 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.
