mats deland
ceifo, Stockholm university
How Swedish authorities handled World War Two war criminals
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The allied powers were well informed about the
crimes committed by German forces and their allies, both those units that were
connected to the Nazi party and police forces and regular army, during the Second
World War.(1) It was early on a war aim to
bring the perpetrators before justice. Representatives of nine occupied countries
in 1942 made a joint declaration stating
that those who collaborated with the occupants would be punished. After a British
and American initiative the same year a Commission on War Crimes was appointed.
Its name was United Nations War Crimes Commission, UNWCC (The Soviet Union at
this point refrained from participating). At 30 October 1943 the so-called Moscow
Declaration was made:
Wer immer als Mittäter oder Anstifter an Kriegsverbrechen, Massenmord oder
Hinrichtung schuldig ist, mag er Offizier, Soldat oder Mitglied der NSDAP sein,
die drei alliierten Mächte werden jeden Schuldigen bis in den letzten Winkel
der Erde verfolgen und vor seinen Ankläger bringen, auf dass Gerechtigkeit
geschehe.(2)
In accordance with the London Treaty of 8 August 1945, an international military
court was created with the aim of judging the principally responsible. The Nürnberg
Trials 1945-46 were followed by additionally twelve subsequent trials 1946-47.
At the same time a large number of local trials took place, dealing with personnel
of concentration camps and executions of POWs and non-military hostages. Until
the re-constructed German justice administration took over the responsibility
for the bringing before justice of perpetrators of national socialist terror
and war crimes, 5,025 persons were sentenced in the three West-Allied occupation
zones (of which 806 were sentenced to death). Those that were sentenced to prison
were soon released, most of them before 1958. Among the more than nine thousand
German POWs that were released from Soviet custody in 1955, a minor group consisting
mainly of concentration camp guards were released on the condition that they
should remain in West German prisons.(3)
An additional 5,358 Germans were convicted in
Poland, and a further unknown number in Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. In the
rest of the occupied countries, the
number of convicted Germans was rather small (240 in the Netherlands, 75 in Belgium,
85 in Denmark, 87 in Luxembourg, 81 in Norway. I Austria 13,607 persons were
convicted of which 43 were sentenced to death (of which 30 executed).(4) In
those countries the main problem was the collaborators and the traitors, as well
as
those from the local population who had been accomplices in German crimes.
For Sweden’s part, this process was mainly
looked on from the perspective of the spectator. Although almost 150,000 persons
had arrived to Sweden in the
last months of the Second World War, there are no signs of any organised co-operation
with the international machinery of justice. As the historian Heléne Lööw
concluded in the single systematic study that has been done on university level
on this issue, only one person has ever been deported as a war criminal from
Sweden (to Norway, 1948).(5)
The investigation will address two questions. On the one hand it is important
to find out how many persons with a history as war criminals that arrived to
Sweden, and how they got there. On the other hand, it is also important to find
out how Sweden treated these persons as they arrived. These two questions may,
combined, be the foundation for a balanced view of how the Swedish government
and Swedish authorities responded to the question. The investigation will only
deal with Second World War criminals, but the treatment of them, and of foreign
requests for their extradition, will be followed into present times.
The investigation will use sources in German archives,
as well as in Israel and California, which are searchable on personal names.
There are similar sources
in the Baltic countries. Furthermore, there is a voluminous literature. Requests
will be made to all these archives, for information on people registered in the
archives of the Swedish Social Board and the Foreigner Commision. This will be
an extremely time-consuming task, but it is necessary in order to reach a total
view. It is still to be determined to what extent a concentration can be made
to those persons who were subject to governmental interest already at that time,
or who have subsequently been interrogated by Swedish Counter-Intelligence. Also
Swedish citizens who were active in the nazi power apparatus, or who took part
in the war, will be included in the investigation.(6)
Another question is how these people arrived in
Sweden. The investigation will discuss the contemporary right-wing extremist
networks of refugee assistance.
For the time being we have only fragmentary knowledge of these, produced by research
on other topics.(7) Sources from the
Swedish Counter-Intelligence will probably shed a light on this phenomenon. The
escape
route over the Baltic Sea, which
was organised by the Swedish Intelligence, was investigated already in the mid-1940s
by a governmental enquiry, and foremost British research has later expanded this
knowledge.(8) It is long overdue that
the Swedish Armed Forces let further material on this topic free for research.
There
is a large volume of Anglo-American research
on this field, to which this part of the investigation will relate.
Thirdly, the investigation will make an assessment
of how much Swedish authorities actually knew about the background of these persons.
How did they handle the
knowledge they actually had? An answer to these questions will make thorough
and time-consuming research in several archives necessary. Increasing interest
for these questions that grew out of the Eichman trial was from the late 1970s
spreading from USA to other countries. There is a voluminous literature that
shows how the different states (USA, Australia, Canada, Great Britain, France,
and others), reacted to the requests from Simon Wiesenthal and others for investigations,
extraditions and trials.(9) There
is thus good reason for a comparative perspective. There is also reason to compare
the
Swedish treatment with the German debate
about Vergangenheitsbewältigung/Vergangenheitspolitik. There is also good
reason to follow Swedish press commentaries.(10)
notes
1 Richard
Breitman, Staatsgeheimnisse, Die Verbrechen der Nazis – von den Alliierten
toleriert, München 1999.
2 Albrecht
Götz, Bilanz der Verfolgung von NS-Straftaten, Köln 1986, 12; Rena
Giefer & Thomas Giefer, Die Rattenlinie, Fluchtwege der Nazis. Eine Dokumentation,
Frankfurt am Main 1992, 17.
3 Götz,
Bilanz, 22-29. On the number of convicted in the Soviet Union and in Soviet
occupied zones, see Manfred Zeidler, Stalinjustiz contra NS-Verbrechen, Die
Kriegsverbrecherprozesse gegen deutsche Kriegsgefangene in der UdSSR in den
Jahren 1943 – 1952, Kenntnisstand und Forschungsprobleme, Dresden 1996.
In the British zone there were also Canadian courts.
4 Götz,
Bilanz, 30-31.
5 Heléne
Lööw, ’Swedish policy towards suspected war criminals,
1945-87’, i Scandinavian Journal of History, Vol 14:2 (1989), 152.
6 As
journalist Bosse Schön concludes in his book Där järnkorsen
växer, Ett historiskt reprotage, Stockholm 2001, 172, 193, Swedish police
showed no interest in investigating also confessions of war crimes as late as
in the early 1960s. The German historian Hans Werner Neulen came to the same
conclusion 16 years ago, in An deutscher Seite, Internationale Freiwillige von
Wehrmacht und Waffen-SS, München 1985, 167.
7 Holger
M. Meding ,Flucht vor Nürnberg? Deutsche und österreichische
Einwanderung in Argentinien 1945-1955, Köln 1992; Harly Foged, Henrik
Krüger, Flugtrute Nord, Nnazisternes hemmelige flugtnet gennem Danmark,
Lynge 1985.
8 Lööw, ’Swedish
Policy’, 147; Tom Bower, The Red Web, London
1989.
9 Cf.
James E. McKenzie, War Criminals in Canada, Calgary 1995.
10 Norbert
Frei, Vergangenheitspolitik, Die Anfänge der Bundesrepublik und die
NS-Vergangenheit, München 1996, 234-235; Götz, Bilanz, 89.
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