Sweden’s Refusal to Prosecute Nazi War Criminals:1986-2002

Efraim Zuroff

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Toward the end of World War II, an unspecified number of Latvian and Estonian Nazi war criminals escaped to Sweden among a wave of Baltic refugees fleeing the advancing Soviet Army. Although the Swedish government established a special commission to investigate their wartime activities, no legal action was ever taken against any of these escaped Holocaust perpetrators.

In 1986, the Simon Wiesenthal Center exposed the presence in Sweden of several Baltic Nazi war criminals and asked the Swedish government to investigate the entry of Nazi collaborators into the country and to take legal action against those who could be brought to trial. The Swedish authorities refused to investigate, let alone prosecute these cases, citing the existing statute of limitations which prohibited the prosecution of any crimes more than 25 years after they were committed.

This has remained the position of the Swedish government even after it was revealed in 2000 that those who had participated in Nazi atrocities were alive and living in Sweden. All the efforts to induce a change in Swedish policy on this issue have hereto failed. Sweden is currently weighing the abolition of the statute of limitations on genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes but will not do so retroactively, so there is no chance that any Nazi war criminal will ever be prosecuted in Sweden.

Background

In the fall of 1986, the Simon Wiesenthal Center began to intensify its efforts to help facilitate the prosecution of Nazi war criminals in various countries all over the world, focusing primarily on western democracies which had afforded a refuge to escaped Holocaust perpetrators in the immediate aftermath of World War II. The Center’s efforts were based on a discovery made by its Jerusalem office, which revealed that the files of the International Tracing Service (founded by the Red Cross and located in Arolson, West Germany), which were available on microfilm in the Yad Vashem Archives, contained extremely valuable information on the postwar emigration of numerous suspected Nazi war criminals. By cross-referencing master lists of Holocaust perpetrators with the files of the ITS, the Center’s researchers were able in a relatively short time to identify the postwar emigration destinations of numerous Eastern European collaborators who were alleged to have actively participated in the implementation of the Final Solution.

Since many of these suspected criminals had emigrated to countries which were democracies, but which had no legal mechanism to deal with crimes which had been committed in a different land at a time when the perpetrator was neither a resident nor a citizen of his current country of residence, the Center hoped that the revelation of the presence of numerous suspected Nazis would help influence these governments to investigate the Nazis’ entry and take legal action against them. In this regard, the Center’s hopes were based, to a certain extent, on the experience of the United States, where revelations regarding the presence of numerous Nazi war criminals and collaborators, who had entered the country as refugees during the years 1947-1952, had prompted the establishment in 1979 – in the framework of the Department of Justice – of the Office of Special Investigations (OSI), a special agency whose primary purpose was to take legal action against the Nazi war criminals residing in the United States. OSI’s relative success in prosecuting such cases (which were dealt with as civil rather than criminal cases for a variety of legal reasons)1 were the basis and the model for the Center’s efforts which, it was hoped, would induce additional countries to take similar or equivalent legal measures.

It is also important to note that the successful efforts of the American government to prosecute the Nazi war criminals residing in the United States had an added impact because they focused attention on the highly significant role played by local collaborators in the implementation of the Final Solution. This was the result of the fact that with a few exceptions, all the war criminals prosecuted by the Americans were East European collaborators, rather than Germans or Austrians. The trials of these perpetrators in the United States focused public attention on the active involvement of local collaborators in the mass murder of European Jewry, primarily in the areas in which the Einsatzgruppen had operated, and raised critical questions regarding the current whereabouts of war criminals who had escaped to countries other than the United States.

In this context, it should be noted that in two countries – Canada and Australia – the presence of numerous Nazi war criminals, who had entered as refugees, had already been revealed before the Center began its campaign, but those governments had still not decided what, if any, legal action to take against them. In that regard, the submission of lists of suspected Nazi war criminals who had immigrated to those countries was designed to increase the pressure upon these governments to take action against Nazi perpetrators. The Center’s working assumption in this regard was that the suspects it had discovered were the proverbial “tip of the iceberg” and that only a full-scale, adequately-funded governmental inquiry could reveal the scope of the postwar entry of Nazi war criminals under the guise of refugees in each of the countries in question. In all, a total of ten lists were submitted during the period from October 1, 1986 to March 1, 1987 to eight countries: Australia (3 lists – 65 suspects); United Kingdom (1 list – 17 suspects); Canada (1 list – 26 suspects); Venezuela (1 list – 3 suspects); Brazil (1 list – 1 suspect); Sweden (1 list – 12 suspects); West Germany (1 list – 44 suspects); USA (1 list – 74 suspects).2

The Swedish List

During the fall of 1986, the Center obtained information on twenty-one Latvian and Estonian suspected Nazi war criminals who had escaped to Sweden after World War II and were thought to still be residing in that country. The individuals in question ranged from national leaders who actively collaborated with the Nazis on a variety of key issues including security affairs and/or the murder of the Jews, to local officials who assisted the Nazi regime and participated in measures against the Jewish population in a specific geographic area, to journalists who worked for collaborationist newspapers. Among the most prominent Latvian collaborators were: Aleksanders Plesners who headed the Latvian SS-Legion; Karlis Lobe who organized the Latvian police battalions in Riga and later served as chief of police in Ventspils; Arvids Ose who was actively involved in the persecution of Jews in Riga and Alfreds Vadzemnieks who headed the Latvian Security Service (SD) in the Ventspils district and was alleged to have participated in the murder of civilians.3 Among the Estonians the most important suspects were Oskar Angelus, who headed the Estonian Department of Internal Affairs and organized the Estonian Political Police which carried out the murder of Estonian Jewry, Hugo Okasmaa and Leonid Laid who both served as officers in the Political Police in the Tallinn-Harju Prefecture and Vladimir Tiit and Arkadi Visnapuu who served as officers of the Estonian Security Police.4

Unlike the other lists presented to Western governments in the fall of 1986, the Swedish list was based primarily on allegations which appeared in Soviet publications published during the 1960s. And although there was a certain risk in presenting charges based on Soviet sources, the Center decided to submit the material for two major reasons. The first was that quite a few of the allegations which had appeared in similar Soviet publications had been confirmed independently, including some in Western courts.5 The second was that the Center believed that a Swedish governmental investigation would most probably find numerous additional suspected Nazi war criminals living in the country and would hopefully prompt legal action by the government against these criminals, a course of action which the authorities would never have initiated on their own without externally-produced evidence of the existence in the country of at least several Nazi war criminals. Although the Center was fairly certain that there were indeed numerous, additional, unknown suspects living in Sweden, it lacked the resources to carry out the kind of comprehensive investigation which can only be performed by a government, and therefore decided to submit the material despite the fact that it might be perceived as ostensibly less convincing than documents culled from Western sources.

On November 18, 1986, Rabbis Marvin Hier and Abraham Cooper, the Dean and Associate Dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, met in Washington, D.C., at the Swedish embassy with Swedish diplomat Ulf Hjertonsson and submitted a list of twelve6 suspected Latvian and Estonian Nazi war criminals whom the Center had reason to believe were residing in Sweden.7 In an accompanying letter to Swedish Prime Minister Ingvar Carlsson, the rabbis asked the Swedish government to “fully investigate these individuals and the overall question of how many Nazi war criminals may have made their way to Sweden after World War II.” After adding some details regarding the nature of the crimes committed by the suspects, the rabbis expressed their optimism regarding the response they expected from the Swedish authorities: “While we are very much aware of Sweden’s unique position in the world as a center of neutrality and asylum, we are certain that your democracy will want to act to help bring to justice those guilty of participating in the most heinous crime, the Holocaust.”8

Read more: Sweden’s Refusal to Prosecute Nazi War Criminals:1986-2002

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