Ester Pollack
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ABSTRACT
How could the Holocaust happen – and why did the surrounding world not react? During the first decades after World War II, in Sweden as in many other countries, a common answer was “we did not know.” The argument is still used. However, today we know that testimonies about the mass murder in concentration camps were spread through both diplomatic channels and international news reports. To what extent did this information also reach the Swedish citizens, living in a neutral nation? In this article I present two studies. One study analyses Swedish news about Jews from January 1933 to the end of May 1945. The results show an interest in “Jewish questions” throughout the 1930s, culminating in 1938 (Kristallnacht), but with a decreased attention thereafter and with very limited reporting in 1940 and 1941. A second study analyses articles about the extermination camps in Germany and Poland in 1938–1945 and shows that bits and pieces of news information can be found, but the publications are at the same time limited in facts and restricted in coverage. Information control by Swedish authorities and self-censorship contributed to the silencing of the German war crimes and the normalisation of “not knowing.”
Introduction
In July 1944, the Red Army – and allied Polish forces under Soviet command – liberated the extermination camp Majdanek in Lublin, Poland. One of the camps used by Nazi Germany to kill people on an industrial scale, it was captured before the SS and the German forces could destroy the gas chambers and other pieces of evidence of war crimes. Approximately 200,000 people lost their lives in Majdanek, among them 60,000 Jews (Benz 1999, 140). On 27 January 1945, the Red Army further liberated Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest extermination site. By the time the Soviet troops reached Auschwitz, the German Nazis had done what they could to cover their tracks (Pitzer 2017, 214). The gas chambers had been dismantled and destroyed with explosives. Just over 7,500 survivors remained in the camp; 66,000 had been forced to leave on death marches to other, soon to be overcrowded camps in central Germany. It is estimated that in the period from January 1942 to the end of 1944, around one million people died in Auschwitz; approximately 90% of them were Jews, but the camp was also responsible for the extermination of Roma minorities and prisoners of war from both the Soviet Union and other countries (Benz 1999, 139; Pitzer 2017, 209). During the ensuing months, the Allied forces from the US and the UK liberated concentration camps in the western part of Germany, among them Bergen-Belsen, where the lack of food and poor sanitation conditions led to mass deaths shortly before and after the liberation.
With the liberation of the concentration and the extermination camps, written documentation and pictures of horror reached and shocked the world. Debates about guilt, morality and responsibility have since formed different countries’ self-understanding in various ways. Over time, Auschwitz has become one of the most prominent symbols of the Nazi genocide of the Jews and the “Gypsies” (Roma and Sinti), as well as the persecution and the murder of homosexuals, prisoners of war and others viewed as inferior or undesirable. In 2005, the United Nations designated 27 January, the date of the liberation of Auschwitz, as a day of remembrance for the Holocaust victims. In Sweden, the date has been designated as a national day of remembrance since 1999.
This does not mean that this Remembrance Day is observed in every country or that it is the only day of remembrance of the Holocaust. Nor does it mean that people in different countries remember the Holocaust in the same way. Remembrance involves looking back at the history of one’s own nation, which is affected by the historical and the political changes that have occurred during the intervening period, while also relating to the present and the future. International Holocaust research has used the concepts “perpetrators, victims and bystanders” when discussing the neutral countries’ relationship to the Holocaust and has characterised it as a bystanders’ position (Åmark [2011] 2016, 482; see also Marrus 1985; Hilberg 1992; Cesarini and Levine 2002). The collective memories of different countries are naturally affected not only by the role that a given country played at the time but also by the various ways of understanding, interpreting, reinterpreting and attempting to come to terms with this history or of using it as an effective means of achieving various political goals that have characterised different countries over subsequent decades.
Since the end of World War II, it has been observed that the majority of European countries have struggled over which narratives about their own histories should be acknowledged as authentic. This is also true for the Nordic countries.
How could this happen? Why did the surrounding world not react? These have been two of the recurrent questions concerning the Holocaust. During the first decades after World War II, a common answer was “we did not know.” In Scandinavia, this is still an ongoing debate. For example, in 2014, when Swedish Television interviewed the well-known Swedish author and journalist Jan Guillou about his new novel, the fourth of a series about a family and the European history during the twentieth century, his standpoints led to an animated public debate. The book title is Not wanting to see [Att inte vilja se], and the author claimed that Swedish upper- and middle-class citizens generally did not know about the extermination camps until they were publicly revealed in 1945 (Guillou 2014). After critique, he nuanced himself and claimed that Swedish intelligence and the government most certainly knew about the development of the persecutions against the Jews, and that the communist press reported after 1941. Yet, Guillou claimed, the dominating mainstream press only published small news items hidden in the last pages of their papers.
However, we know that testimonies about the brutal persecution of Jews, Roma and other people – leading to industrial extermination – were spread both through diplomatic channels and newspaper reports, not least in the US and the UK. Nonetheless, to what extent did this information reach ordinary Swedish citizens? Sweden, a so-called neutral nation, took a bystander’s position during the World War II. State regulation of the media was introduced to avoid Nazi Germany’s disapproval. Self-censorship concerning war news and reports about Nazi Germany was widespread. Some newspapers were denied distribution, and their information was therefore effectively censored. What kind of information about the escalating victimisation of the Jews, the theme of this article, did the Swedish press in this situation provide their readers? If the silencing of the persecution and the extermination of the Jews did take place, what discourses and wider social practices enabled this?
In the analysis of silencing as a strategy for the normalisation of passivity and non-engagement, a key term is symbolic annihilation. The sociologist Gaye Tuchman (1978) has used it to characterise the underrepresentation and trivialisation of women in the news media, making male dominance seem the normal and self-evident media depiction. Gavriely-Nuri (2013) has later used the concept in relation to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to characterise a strategy normalising war through a discourse that omits elements such as death, damages and environmental destruction (for other strategies see also Krzyżanowski 2020 – in this Special Issue).
Previous research has presented and discussed different hypotheses about Swedish news reporting and the Holocaust. Koblik (1988) maintains the idea that the media were principally indifferent to and silenced about the fate of the Jews. Levine (1987) argues that the information was comprehensive but fragmented and without analysis and therefore inconsistent. Svanberg and Tydén (1997) notice a rich documentation about the persecution of Jews in the pre-war time but less interest after the outbreak of the war. According to their study, the destiny of Norwegian and Danish Jews nonetheless had a dramatic impact on the Swedish press and resulted in increased publications. They also observe a greater outspokenness about the persecution from 1943 – when Germany’s fortune in the war turned. Therefore, they propose reformulating the question of how the Holocaust could happen without the outside world knowing it to the question about how the genocide could continue even though the outside world had adequate knowledge of the event. However, their study suffers from a methodological problem as they analysed the most manifest and initiated articles in different newspapers; thereby the researchers constructed a corpus that showed a picture about what the most well-informed could provide.
The media historian Göran Leth (2007) has characterised this development as Swedish media’s betrayal in the shadow of the Holocaust; information and opinion building were influenced by the consideration for the perpetrators, not the victims. The media did not offer the public the possibility to judge the violence and the murderous intent of the Nazi regime, making it easier for anti-Semitism to unfold (Leth 2007, 191). Perhaps it also created a normalisation pattern whereby the apparent “not knowing” – a fallacy that indeed persisted over time – also created a justification for neither opposing the Nazi regime’s atrocities openly nor taking any counter actions and measures.
None of the above-cited studies represents a systematic media analysis of the whole wartime period (1939–1945) reporting; they build mostly on case studies of selected periods. However, in a broad descriptive study about how World War II was depicted by the daily press, the diplomat Axel Moberg (2015) has shown that some information was available regarding the extermination of the Jews from 1942 onwards.
The purpose of my study is to concentrate on Swedish news reporting about the Jews and the Holocaust, analysed in the historical context of Swedish politics at the time, and with the aim of providing a better-informed answer.
It is necessary to comment on the concept of the Holocaust as a generic terminology summarising the atrocities against Jews, Roma and others during the World War II period. In Sweden, as in other Western countries, the concept was not used during the war years or the first decades thereafter. However, it became widely known and popularised through the American TV series The Holocaust, produced by NBC in 1978. In Sweden, the series was shown in the spring of 1979, with the title Förintelsen. Subsequently, the Holocaust concept has been adopted and used by both politicians and historians, sometimes first and foremost characterising the systematic mass murder of the Jews and other defined groups, such as Roma, Sinti and people with handicaps (Friedlander 1995; Bruchfeld and Levine 1998), at other times characterising the broader and systematic mass killing of civilians organised by the Nazi state (Bergen 2009). In the following sections, I primarily use the term in relation to the extermination of the Jews.
The two overall research questions are as follows: How did the Swedish press report about the development concerning Nazi Germany’s policy against the Jews? Was the mass murder of Jews and others effectively and purposefully silenced by the wide sections of the Swedish press, thus normalising the Swedish bystander position of not opposing or taking actions against the Nazi crimes?
Two connected research questions are as follows: What kind of information reached the Swedish citizens? Was it possible to know about the ongoing persecution of the Jews between 1941 and 1945?
To this end, two studies have been conducted. The first follows four daily newspapers with different attitudes to Nazi Germany and Sweden’s relationship to Nazi Germany from 1933 to the end of 1945 and analyses what they wrote about the Jews. The second study analyses the reporting about concentration camps over the period from 1938 to 1945 in the leading liberal paper, Dagens Nyheter. I provide a brief overview of my findings.
This article is organised as follows. In the section “Sweden’s relationship to Nazi Germany,” I discuss the political context that influenced the media coverage of the persecution of the Jews before and during the war years. In the next section, “Press data and methods,” I explain the selection of the newspapers and the methods. In “Jews in the news,” different stages of the press reports in the 1933–1945 period are presented. In “Holocaust in the Swedish press,” I conclude the discussion on what Swedes could know about the extermination of the Jews and other people before the war in Europe ended. In the final section, “Adaptation to the fortune of the war, fragmentation – and silence,” I return to the research questions and discuss them in the light of my findings.
Sweden’s relationship to Nazi Germany
To give meaning to the results and understand the discussion, some background information on Sweden’s political position and press policy during World War II is necessary.
During the 1920s and the first years of the 1930s, Sweden had good economic and cultural relations with Germany. 1 These relations became more strained after Hitler and the Nazi Party came to power but basically continued as previously, not least on the economic front. Sweden upheld its position as a neutral country during World War II (while its neighbouring countries, Denmark and Norway, were occupied by Germany), but the Swedish-German trade was important for both countries, and they had mutual economic dependency. Sweden imported coke and coal from Germany and paid these imports with exports of primarily iron ore and ball bearings. Germany also used Swedish railroads as transit routes to Norway and affected the Swedish business community through claims for “Aryanisation,” calling for the Jews’ expulsion from the businesses. Many Jews became severely affected by such persecution even though some Swedish companies showed opposition (Blomberg 2003, 205–211; Åmark 2016, 192). However, during the war, the two countries economic cooperation was gradually reduced, but until the turn of the year 1945, Sweden still had limited trade with Nazi Germany.
During the 1930s, the Swedish Social Democratic Party dominated the government, but from 1936, they ruled in a coalition with the Agrarians (today named the Centre Party). The Social Democrats’ ambition was to build a welfare state with broad popular support (folkhem, meaning people’s home). When World War II broke out in 1939, a new and broader coalition government was formed, with participation from two other parties, the Conservatives and the Liberals. This coalition governed Sweden during the entire war period, and the responsibilities for different policy areas were distributed among the coalition parties. The most important project for the Social Democrat Prime Minister, Per Albin Hansson, was to maintain peace. Sometimes, this contrasted the principle of neutrality, which triggered major and minor crises. The most debated is the so-called midsummer crisis in 1941, when Germany was allowed to bring a battle-equipped division of military personnel from Oslo to Haparanda, near the Finnish-Swedish border in Northern Sweden, for further transportation eastward. 2 Besides this, historical research has documented that a German attack on Sweden during these years was unlikely and that the appeasement policy put Sweden’s neutrality and independence at risk. However, in the summer of 1943, the transit agreement with Germany was terminated.
The government was often divided in questions concerning the adaptation to Nazi Germany, one of the reasons being the necessity to handle German-friendly sentiments in the bourgeoisie, the police and the military forces. The war risk and perceptions of Germany as an upcoming great power, in whose empire Sweden needed to settle, came to characterise the Swedish attitude to Nazi Germany.
Did the Nazi ideology with its racist and anti-Semitic ideas matter in Sweden’s relation with Nazi Germany? This question has been considered first with newer research about Sweden’s role in relation to Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. Racist and anti-Semitic perceptions existed long before the Nazi movement made its entrance. This was a historical tradition, which Swedish Nazi circles, inspired by Hitler’s Germany, tried to use during the 1930s and the first part of the 1940s. However, the Nazi movement never received any political mandate; its proponents were defeated in the elections (Åmark [2011] 2016, 311). Anti-Semitic perceptions nevertheless existed in a variety of sectors and environments. 3
How widespread were these ideas, and what significance did they have? This question has been answered very differently. Among the reasons are that various definitions of anti-Semitism, either broader or narrower, have been used and that much search remains to give us better knowledge and overview. Some researchers argue that everyday anti-Semitic perceptions were widespread throughout society (e.g. Berggren 1999; Andersson 2000; Byström 2008; Kvist Geverts 2008); others contend that anti-Semitism had an uneven spread (Svanberg and Tydén 1997). In a summary of the research situation, Åmark ([2011] 2016, 396) formulates a hypothesis of polarisation of attitudes towards anti-Semitism. The driving force was the German development towards a coarser and more violent anti-Semitism, which activated the small Swedish Nazi parties. However, this also led to deprecation from Swedes influenced by more “everyday” anti-Semitic perceptions.
From the summer of 1940, Sweden was one of three neutral, democratic European countries neither participating in the ongoing war nor being occupied by Nazi Germany (the others being Ireland and Switzerland) and left with a relatively free press. However, Sweden’s neutrality came at a price and required extensive negotiations in its foreign and trade policies. Swedish exports of iron ore and ball bearings, as well as the use of the Swedish communications network for the transit of war materials and soldiers on leave, were long regarded by historians as the price Sweden had to pay to stay out of the war.
The potential importance of news reporting at the time should not be underestimated. The possibility for media organisations and journalists in neutral countries to reveal the nature of the Nazi occupations and the brutalisation of the war did exist. This was exactly what the German regime knew. The German authorities therefore read Swedish newspapers very closely, which they had done since Hitler became Reichskanzler, and they regularly sent complaints to the Swedish government.
Before World War II, these complaints were mostly directed towards the social democratic and communist press and also against the liberal business daily, Göteborgs Handels- och Sjöfartstidning, which had an outspoken anti-Nazi attitude. In the summer of 1940, after the occupation of Sweden’s neighbouring countries Denmark and Norway, the Swedish Foreign Ministry received one German complaint a week (Åmark 2016, 227). In subsequent years, most complaints were related to news from occupied countries and stories about Nazi occupation politics. This represented a political and diplomatic pressure that Nazi Germany maintained all through the war. How did the coalition government respond to the German pressure? How free was the Swedish press under these circumstances?
During the war, the Swedish government initiated two new institutions with responsibilities for information control and press politics. One was The National Bureau of Information, established in 1940 and chaired by the vice-chancellor of Stockholm University College. The bureau produced “Grey Notes” (to be kept secret) on what was considered either appropriate or inappropriate for publication, including instructions about the necessity of not publishing negative information about the powers at war. The other wartime institution was the Press Committee, established in 1941 and chaired by Sten Dehlgren, the chief editor of Dagens Nyheter. As a collaboration forum between the state and the press, the Press Committee organised meetings between high-ranking representatives of the press and the Foreign Affairs Minister. It also published press guidelines that advocated neutrality in relation to warring nations. The system aimed to secure close cooperation between the government and the press.
The guiding principle for the papers was to be careful; published articles should strictly be based “on grounds of fact.” The attitude was that publications of cruelty and brutality linked to the war had to be avoided. In practice, this cooperation system meant that self-censorship became an important method to secure press coverage loyal to the needs of the coalition government.
Even a law of state censorship before publication was prepared and enforced by the Swedish parliament in 1940 in case Sweden was drawn into the war, but this limitation of the Constitution’s principle of free speech and press freedom was not put into practice (Funcke 2006). However, the threat of censorship was launched and influenced the political climate. There were also several other methods of repression. Post censorship was carried out within the framework of the public security service (Sandlund 2001, 269). One legal loophole was the possibility to confiscate news organisations’ assets, a type of repression that was frequently used, especially against the leftist press. In total, 200 out of 303 confiscation acts were directed towards communist and social democratic papers, 30 against Nazi papers (Funcke 2006, 88; Åmark 2016, 236). Accusations/motivations for such confiscations were references to foreign propaganda and predictions about cruelties by the powers at war, such as “the tyranny of Hitler,” or characterisations, such as “barbaric,” “sadistic regime” and so on. Another method to limit press freedom was communication and transportation prohibition (by mail, train or bus). However, this was only carried out against papers being prosecuted in other ways, mostly hitting the communist press.
The main aim of the Foreign Affairs Minister and the Minister of Justice was to improve the relations towards Nazi Germany under the mask of a press policy; the politics were mainly directed against the newspapers that represented opposition towards the Swedish government’s politics of neutrality (Åmark [2011] 2016).
The so-called small-state realist paradigm on the necessary consequences of neutrality remained dominant until the mid-1990s. However, the Swedish self-understanding excluded the idea of any form of complicity or guilt in relation to the Holocaust. This perspective underwent a shift during the 1990s. A debate developed about both the concessions made by Sweden to Nazi Germany and the country’s restrictive refugee policy before and during the war. Among others, the journalist Maria-Pia Boëthius (1991) raised questions about the Swedish self-image in her book Honour and Conscience. Sweden and the Second World War (Heder och samvete. Sverige och andra världskriget). A paradigm of moral responsibility emerged to challenge previous perspectives. Since then, the Swedish debate about the country’s position during the war and its possible complicity in the Holocaust has been conducted within the framework of these two opposing viewpoints – the small-state paradigm and the moral responsibility perspective. The historian Klas Åmark’s book To Live Next Door to Evil (Att bo granne med ondskan) ([2011] 2016) presents perhaps the best Swedish account of the relations between Sweden and Nazi Germany, along with an overview and an insightful analysis of the debate regarding Sweden’s approach to this relationship.
Press data and methods
As mentioned in the introduction, the empirical research is divided into two studies. The first covers the period from 1933 – the year Hitler’s Nazi Party came to power in Germany – to the end of 1945, the year World War II ended. The aim has been to find the texts that deal with the fate of European Jews, regardless of the perspective and the context. 4
Four Swedish newspapers have been selected for this analysis. It is a strategic selection, not a representative selection where all types of Swedish papers are represented. The aim has been to be able to conduct a comparative analysis of papers known to have different attitudes concerning Swedish policy in relation to Nazi Germany. The selection has been inspired by Leth’s (2005) analysis of ten Swedish newspapers’ reporting on the violent abuses against German Jews in November 1938, which has come to be called Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glasses). In the newspapers’ coverage, he discovers patterns that make it possible to divide the press into three categories: Protest, Indifference and Adaptation. The Protest group includes newspapers that openly distanced themselves from the heavily brutalised Nazi politics typical of the Kristallnacht’s abuse. The Indifference group consists of newspapers that over time expressed a kind of normalisation of Germany’s anti-Semitism. Here, Leth includes Dagens Nyheter, a newspaper also chosen for my study. However, I have relabelled this group Caution, a name more in accordance with what my analysis shows for the period as a whole. The newspaper is first and foremost characterised by its careful closeness to government politics. The Adaptation group consists of newspapers whose editorial pages expressed adaptation to – or direct support for – Nazi Germany and its policy.
This categorisation has guided the selection of newspapers: The Protest group is represented by the Göteborgs Handels- och Sjöfartstidning, a regional trade and shipping newspaper with a liberal profile, published in Gothenburg and owned by a corporation of trade papers. 5 The paper’s chief editor, Torgny Segerstedt, was a well-known, outspoken critic of Nazi Germany. Dagens Nyheter, a liberal newspaper that in the 1940s was the largest in Sweden with a circulation of 210.000 copies, represents the Caution group. The paper was (and still is) owned by the Bonnier family, a Swedish family of Jewish descent who since the nineteenth century has been active in the book and publishing industry. The Adaptation group is represented by Stockholms-Tidningen, 6 a regional and national newspaper, and Aftonbladet, 7 which in this period was a pro-German and Nazi-influenced newspaper. The German-friendly businessman Torsten Kreuger owned both newspapers. 8 Before and during the war, the editorial pages of Stockholms-Tidningen were nationalistic and strongly opposed to the Social Democrat Swedish Prime Minister, Per Albin Hansson. The editor in chief and some of its commentators had links to the Nazi movement but not as openly as Aftonbladet. Both newspapers cooperated with the German legation in Stockholm during the war. However, Aftonbladet was more outspoken about its pro-Nazi policy and its editorial organisation had to go through a de-Nazifying process after the war (Sandlund 2001, 354–360).
Dagens Nyheter, Aftonbladet and of course Stockholms-Tidningen were all published in Stockholm, but also reached a public beyond the capital of Sweden. Göteborgs Handels- och Sjöfartstidning was published in Sweden’s second big city Gothenburg, and had readers in the region of western Sweden.
Without systematically reviewing all of the Swedish daily newspapers during the 1930s and the 1940s, I think it is fair to state that a minority of them belonged to the Protest category, and most of these papers also had a fairly small total circulation. Göteborgs Handels- och Sjöfartstidning, which grew in circulation during the war years, was the most renowned paper in this group. The largest group of newspapers can probably be included in the Caution category, a group most typical of the bystander position and a driving force in accepting and thereby normalising a situation with limited press freedom. The German-friendly newspapers with anti-Semitic sympathies constituted a small but not insignificant group. It may be added that the categorisation does not follow a newspaper’s party affiliation in any given way (see Leth 2005).
In the first study covering the 1933–1945 period, the first page of each of the four selected newspapers’ issue every three days and the entire newspapers’ issues every six days were read. Relevant pages were copied from the archives of the National Library of Sweden. The selection (of in total 1383 articles) can be considered sufficiently comprehensive to provide a largely representative picture of how the persecution of the Jews was depicted in the four newspapers. All articles that contained the word jude* (Jew) in all its compositions and the word anti-Semitism were selected for the analysis. Articles about literature, theatre and sports could therefore also become part of the sample. This was motivated by the ability to analyse the discourse about Jews and Jewishness in texts from the whole spectra of areas covered by the press at the time. Texts that dealt with flyktningar (refugees) were also examined since the newspapers could write about German, as well as Norwegian and Danish refugees, without stating that they were Jewish refugees. A few such texts have been included in the sample when the context confirmed or indicated that they were about Jews.
The second study concerned Dagens Nyheter’s news and opinion coverage of concentration camps in Germany, German-allied countries and German-occupied countries in the period from 1938 to the end of May 1945. This study was based on a search in the digital archives of Dagens Nyheter. The main search word was koncentrationsläger*, supplied by a list (12) of specific concentration camp names in Germany, Central and Eastern Europe and Scandinavia that possibly could have been used by Swedish newspapers. Two other search words, likfabrik* (corpse factory) and gaskammare* (gas chamber), were also used. 9 Every article that was found through this search was read to judge its relevance. Only reports of concentration camps connected with Nazi Germany were coded for this study.
Jews in the news
Figure 1 shows the results of the number of texts about Jews and Jewish questions, including news, features and opinion material, as well as the newspapers’ priorities concerning front-page news about Jews over the period 1933-1945. These news texts dealt with a variety of themes, such as foreign policy issues (Jewish immigration and emigration), developments in Palestine (the problems of the British mandate, Jews and Arabs in conflict), Jewish culture (theatre, literature and music), Norwegian and Danish Jewish refugees, Swedish heroes rescuing Jews, anti-Semitic legislation and concentration camps. 10
The proportion that specifically dealt with anti-Semitic persecution, concentration camps and the mass extermination and its consequences constituted around one-third of all texts. Three of the newspapers, Dagens Nyheter, Göteborgs Handels- och Sjöfartstidning and Stockholms-Tidningen, had coverage on around the same level, while Aftonbladet – the Hitler-sympathetic newspaper, had significantly less frequent articles. The newspapers’ priorities concerning front-page news about Jews basically followed the same pattern. The two newspapers belonging to the Adaptation group obviously paid the least attention to news about Jews.
The four newspapers represented different attitudes towards the fate of the Jews, attitudes that also varied over time. However, there was also a common pattern. During the 1930s, all of the papers reported on the various persecutions, legislative initiatives and the terror that Nazi Germany was directing at the country’s Jewish population. It reached a new height in 1938, the year of Kristallnacht in Germany. Nonetheless, during these years with news about persecutions, there was little critique of and opposition to Sweden’s restrictive refugee policy 11 , especially concerning Jewish refugees. According to a secret circular from the Foreigner’s Bureau sent to passport officials on 27 October 1938, a person with an Austrian or a German passport with a red J-stamp on page 1 should be regarded as an immigrant and refused entry if the person had no resident permit or border recommendation. 12 A depressing part of this story is the fact that the J-stamp in the passports held by Jews was introduced by Germany after proposals from the Swedish and the Swiss governments. Both countries wanted to restrict refugee immigration and suggested that Jews from Germany should receive separate passports (Kvist Geverts 2008).
If we look at the distribution of the texts in different years, another result becomes visible. The coverage was relatively high in 1933, the year the Hitler regime came to power, but subsequently declined, and then 1938, the year of the Crystal Night, represented a new peak of interest. 13
Attention diminished significantly during the years of the outbreak of the war, reaching its absolute bottom in 1940. In 1941, when the persecution of the Jews started developing into mass extermination and the outcome of the war was highly uncertain, the issue was not prioritised. The silence of the press at this time is quite remarkable. Here, we can clearly see the traces of Swedish information control and self-censorship.
Holocaust in the Swedish press
When the Norwegian Jews were arrested and deported to concentration camps in the autumn of 1942, and the Danish Jews fled across the Øresund to Sweden in the following year, the reporting changed its character once again. It is easy to observe a strong engagement in the newspaper reporting regarding what was happening to Sweden’s Nordic neighbours. Nonetheless, this should not be confused with a generally increased and focused attention on the German policy of extermination.
However, in 1942, some of the Swedish newspaper readers became aware of reports about the persecutions and the massacres of the Jews also on a more general level. Some information about the German concentration camps and the massacres was printed but mostly as short news items. Widespread and collective publications in the Swedish newspapers, with stories on the first page and headlines that caught attention, did not occur. In a brief bulletin published on 4 December 1942, the Göteborgs Handels- och Sjöfartstidning informed its readers that during the celebrations of Hanukkah at the Stockholm synagogue, Rabbi Ehrenpreis stated that the extermination campaign against the Jews in Europe had already cost the lives of two million victims. Another, very short item the same day mentioned that 21 women organisations opposed the terrible treatment of Norwegian Jews. A third short report from the newspaper’s London correspondent announced that the Nazi regime’s intention to exterminate all Jews was confirmed and verified. On 12 December 1942, two brief bulletins from the national news agency Tidningarnas telegrambyrå (TT) were published in both Aftonbladet and Stockholms-Tidningen. According to the Polish government-in-exile in London, one-third of the three million Jews in Poland had “died” during the preceding years. These reports were not treated as major news stories but brief registrations of events.
Contrary to these short news items, on 13 October 1942 Göteborgs Handels- och Sjöfartstidning published a long article by the Swedish historian Hugo Valentin about what he named “the war of extermination against the Jews” (Valentin 1942a). This was followed up on New Year’s Eve in a commentary with a new analysis, titled “Världshistoriens största judepogrom” (“The Biggest Pogrom of Jews in History”). Its starting point was a reference to a 17 December meeting in the House of Commons in the British parliament where Anthony Eden recited a declaration signed by the governments of the UK, the US and several other countries, stating that Germany had started to carry out its plan to exterminate the Jewish people in Europe, including through mass executions. It was a very well-formulated analysis of how the ideology of Anti-Semitism was used by Hitler and the Nazis to gain power and expand their territory. By awakening the slumbering hatred of Jews in different countries, Germany aimed and hoped to win influential groups in every country for Hitlerism. “Once the will to hate is provoked, the most grotesque tales and conclusions will be accepted, only hatred is bred” (Valentin 1942b, 3).
However, the insights in this article represented an exception and a contrast to how the same information was treated in other and leading parts of the Swedish press. One of the early, important international sources documenting the German annihilation of the Jews and other victims in the concentration camps was the report, The German New Order in Poland, published in England in 1942 by the Polish government-in-exile’s information department (Polish Ministry of Information 1942b). In the US, the book was published the same year with the title The Black Book of Poland (Polish Ministry of Information 1942a). In Sweden, the report was mentioned in a few newspapers, one of them being the small, anti-Nazi weekly Trots Allt! [Despite all!]. The paper also quickly published a short extract of the text, but the Swedish authorities immediately confiscated the publication. The editor of the weekly, Ture Nerman, responded by translating and publishing the whole report in November 1942, with the title Polens martyrium [The Martyrdom of Poland]. It was confiscated by Swedish authorities without trial, and the same procedure was repeated when Trots Allt! published new and revised editions of the report in February 1943 and September 1943. In an advertisement in Dagens Nyheter on 25 September 1943, p. 3, some days before the last edition would be released, the publisher wrote:
The publication of this book is not a violation of Swedish law. Knowing the truth and concealing it is, on the other hand, criminal. “The Martyrdom of Poland” is an appeal to the conscience of the civilized world. And Sweden still claims to be part of the civilized world.
Table 1 shows the frequency of the articles in Dagens Nyheter, the Swedish newspaper with the highest circulation and readership, mentioning Germany-related concentration camps in the period from 1938 to the end of May 1945. The pattern was the same as the one we have observed in the general coverage of the Jews. After the Kristallnacht in 1938, the number of mentions about Jewish persecution decreased and remained relatively low until it started to increase in 1942–1943.
Table 1. Mentions in Dagens Nyheter of concentration camps (situated in Germany and in countries occupied by or allied with Germany), 1938–31 May 1945.
As the Holocaust escalated, the Swedish press fell silent: media and the normalisation of passivity and non-engagement in WWII Sweden
Table 1. Mentions in Dagens Nyheter of concentration camps (situated in Germany and in countries occupied by or allied with Germany), 1938–31 May 1945.
| Year |
Camps in Germany and other countries outside Scandinavia |
Camps in Norway |
Camps in Denmark |
Total |
| 1938 |
76 |
– |
– |
76 |
| 1939 |
46 |
– |
– |
46 |
| 1940 |
19 |
1 |
1 |
21 |
| 1941 |
35 |
21 |
– |
56 |
| 1942 |
19 |
50 |
– |
69 |
| 1943 |
41 |
58 |
9 |
108 |
| 1944 |
75 |
46 |
37 |
158 |
| 1945 |
96 |
45 |
34 |
175 |
| All years |
407 |
221 |
81 |
709 |
Until 1945, the majority of these reports were about concentration camps located in Norway and Denmark, representing the same news priorities as discussed above, partly relating to their closeness, geographically and culturally. It was easier to obtain reliable news reports from nearby sources. Large groups of refugees from Norway and Denmark gave easy access to new information. The emotional impact of the Nazi persecutions of Sweden’s neighbours on the Swedish population was also strong, leading to increased reader interest. This also meant that the horrors of the large extermination camps in Central and Eastern Europe became news headlines to a very limited degree.
However, from 1944, the figures about the mass killings began to be commented on. On 1 April and 6 August 1944, Dagens Nyheter published sharp editorials about Germany’s extermination of the Jews. The newspaper also printed book reviews with documentation of mass murders in concentration camps and used the expression likfabriker (corpse factories). A news report on 12 December 1944 stated that 4000 people had been killed in a gas chamber in Alsace. On 28 January, 1945, p. 10, Dagens Nyheter printed a news item stating that Russian forces had taken control of an infamous concentration camp near Oswiecim (Auschwitz).
News reports about the concentration camps were frequent at this stage of the war, but headlines and information about the systematic massacres in the camps, even at this stage, near the end of the war, were limited in Dagens Nyheter. However, in repeated advertisements for new films, the readers received information about “a sensational Russian documentary” that was being shown at a Stockholm cinema in April 1945. The title was The March against Berlin, and the film revealed “the corpse factories in Maidanek,” one of the German extermination camps. A review of the film in Dagens Nyheter on 11 April, p. 12, read:
… This is a reportage from the so-called corpse factories in Majdanek, where according to reports, 1.380.000 human beings have been put to death. Among them thousands of children between 3–10 years old. An endless amount of piles with shoes and toys talk silently to us, more eloquent than ever the mountains of bones found around the site of the camp.
In late April and May 1945, such cinema advertisements about the horrors of the camps were frequently published in Dagens Nyheter and remind us of that other channels of information and documentation about the consequences of the Nazi policy against the Jews now became accessible for a wider public.
Adaptation to the fortune of the war, fragmented information – and silence
How did the Swedish press report about Nazi Germany’s policy against the Jews? Was the mass murder of Jews and others effectively and purposefully silenced by the wide sections of the Swedish press, thus normalising the Swedish bystander position of not opposing or taking actions against the Nazi crimes?
Concerning the general tendencies in the reporting, the results of the two presented studies showed that the coverage varied in different years and periods, with the reports about the Crystal Night representing a peak of the news interest in the 1930s. However, after the outbreak of World War II – when the German strategy for the extermination of the Jews was planned and gradually executed – the Swedish press fell silent for nearly three years. The few voices that tried to follow another line were supressed by different types of government sanctions. The omission of news that could anger the German Nazi authorities became the new normal, symbolically annihilating most of the horrifying reports about the massacre of the Jews from the news.
However, the results show that news priorities about geographically and culturally closeness mattered; as events crept in close to Sweden, the press interest increased significantly. Some news items about the mass murder and the extermination of the Jews were printed as early as autumn 1942, but the information was at the same time sparse and limited. This result can thus be said to substantiate the thesis that the press adapted to the turmoil of the war and that the newspapers had priority of the news that rewarded events in Sweden’s immediate vicinity. In the last stage of the war and in the months after it ended, articles were successively published on the opening of the extermination camps, on the refugees and on Sweden’s participation in various aid operations, including those involving the so-called White Buses. 14
What kind of information reached the Swedish citizens? Was it possible to know about the ongoing persecution of the Jews between 1941 and 1945? Information about the Nazi persecution of the Jews could undeniably be found in the news, but the reporting was fragmented and fluctuated over time. Depending on what newspaper the people read, their possibility to be well informed would differ. My results confirm a fragmentation and scarcity of analyses in the news reporting. At the same time, an attentive and engaged reader, willing to search for news from different sources, had the possibility to be well informed. This also meant that the political elite certainly had access to information about the development of the Jewish genocide, but the government’s general press policy was that this should not be actively disseminated and broadcasted to a mass audience.
Koblik’s (1988) thesis about Sweden’s indifference to the fate of the Jews and the news media’s silence was applicable to certain years. The pattern of my findings clearly showed a decrease in news reporting during the years 1940–1942, when the Holocaust escalated – and the Swedish press fell silent. These were also the years when the outcome of the war was very uncertain, Sweden’s neighbouring countries were occupied by Nazi Germany, and the question of neutrality and adaptation to Germany’s demands about a friendly press was the Swedish government’s main concern. Clearly, the Swedish government’s press policy, with its prohibition on “atrocity propaganda,” had consequences. Those parts of the Swedish press that reported Nazi atrocities and the systematic persecution of the Jews suffered reprisals. The news reporting that might have provided the public with better knowledge of what was happening in the Third Reich was suppressed. Despite this, the political elite – and those who sought information from various sources – had more insights into what was going on.
In a commentary in Dagens Nyheter 4 April 1945, “The Corpse Factory as a Symbol” the historian Hugo Valentin wrote:
recomended by: Leon Rozenbaum
The fact that the Swedish population did not understand the significance of the fight against the swastika, was only natural as long as the Bureau of Information did not allow a free debate. The public was misled by the forced omission to make mention of German cruelties. Thereby sections of our nation obtained a truly unrealistic picture of both the means, aims and consequences of Nazism.
We should be careful not to confuse the fact that something has been mentioned in a brief news item or a commentary with it having received sufficient attention to become part of the public debate and a country’s collective consciousness. In the political landscape of neutral wartime Sweden, the space for truthful reporting was limited. A normalisation of “not knowing” and a bystander’s position were constructed, both through government control and self-censorship.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes on contributor
Ester Pollack , PhD, is a Professor of Journalism Studies, Stockholm University. Her research concerns historical and critical studies of journalism’s different roles in society, and its importance to democracy. She has analysed the interaction between Swedish crime policy and criminal journalism, the reporting on the Holocaust in Sweden, Swedish news reporting about the Soviet Union in the 1930s, the development of journalism on political scandals in the Nordic countries and the importance of source verification and fact checking in times of disinformation and propaganda.
Notes
1 The historical information in this section is essentially based on a synthesis of recent research about Sweden’s relation to Nazi Germany, conducted by the historian Klas Åmark, summing up a comprehensive research programme about “Sweden’s relationship with Nazism, Nazi Germany and the Holocaust” (Åmark [2011] 2016).
2 Germany was mobilising for an attack against the Soviet Union. The Swedish military leadership, the Prime Minister and the Minister of Foreign Affairs knew about the plan because the Swedish intelligence service had cracked the code for the telegram traffic that went through Sweden. However, the majority of the government members, including the Defence Minister, were not informed (Åmark [2011] 2016, 116–117).
3 Kvist Geverts has used the metaphor of anti-Semitism as a background bustle to explain the paradoxical situation in Sweden where “bureaucrats and politicians could express moderate anti-Semitic perceptions and, at the same time, explicitly and clearly distance themselves from antisemitism … ” (2008, 291).
4 This study was conducted within the research programme Sweden’s relations with Nazism, Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, financed by the Swedish Research Council and led by Professor Klas Åmark.
5 Göteborgs Handels och Sjöfartstidning went into bankruptcy in 1973. Different attempts to restart the paper have been made, but none has been successful.
6 Stockholms-Tidningen was the leading morning paper in Sweden in the first decades of the 20th century, until Dagens Nyheter took over this position. From 1937, it was owned by Torsten Kreuger, but it was sold to the National Confederation of Trade Unions (LO) in 1956. In 1966, due to severe economic problems, the newspaper was closed.
7 Aftonbladet was founded by Lars Johan Hierta in 1830. Initially it was a liberal paper, later shifting to other ideological positions. In 1956, similar to Stockholms-Tidningen, it was sold to the LO. In the last part of the 20th century, it was developed successfully into a modern, popular tabloid. After the millennium this was followed up online, and Aftonbladet is today Sweden’s leading media house in terms of readership. The major and controlling owner is the Norwegian listed media company Schibsted, but the LO is still a minority owner, and the editorial comment pages are edited with a social democratic profile.
8 Torstein Kreuger was the brother of Ivar Kreuger, a Swedish industrialist, investor and swindler whose international financial empire collapsed in the aftermath of the Great Depression.
9 The first time the word likfabrik was used was on 18 April 1944, in a review of a book by the pseudonym Stefan Tadeusz Norwid. 1944. Landet utan Quisling (The country without Quisling) (Norwid 1944).
10 Here, the space is not enough for a close reading and a text analysis of my material; this will be the theme of a forthcoming publication.
11 See, for example, Byström 2006, 2008; Kvist Geverts 2008.
12 “Hemligt circulär till samtliga passkontroller” [“Secret circular to all passport controls”], 27 October 1938; referred to in Byström and Kvist Geverts 2007, 156–157.
13 As Leth (2005) shows in his analysis about the Crystal Night in Swedish dailies, they did not represent a unanimous protest against the Nazi persecutions. Only a few newspapers belonging to the Protest group gave voice to the Jews as sources and actors and openly criticised Germany. Overall, Leth concludes that the reporting over time contributed to indifference about the fate of the Jews.
14 This was a rescue action during the last month of the war, organised by the Swedish Red Cross under the responsibility of the Swedish government. Around 20,000 people from concentration camps were brought to Sweden, with the main aim to repatriate imprisoned Scandinavians. Jews were also among them, but their number is uncertain. This initiative has become part of a heroic storytelling about Sweden’s response to wartime cruelties but has also drawn critiques for wrongfully giving the impression of a rescue aimed at saving surviving Jews from the concentration camps (Lomfors 2005).
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Gen. Lucjan Żeligowski ze swoim sztabem podczas mszy przed katedrą w Wilnie po zajęciu miasta w październiku 1920 r. (Fot. Polona)
Polski nóż w litewskie plecy. (100 lat temu) Lucjan Żeligowski zajął Wilno
