Writing history politically.A safe haven for war criminals?

Matthew Kott

Illustration Ragni Svensson

Published in the printed edition of Baltic Worlds pages 43-45, Vol 4:2010
Published on balticworlds.com on januari 11, 2011

The tension among politics, justice, and history lies at the heart of the recent book Purgatorium by the Swedish historian Mats Deland. Even though Sweden was formally neutral throughout World War II, it was still intimately drawn into many aspects of the conflict. A neutral state, it was also the destination of choice for many refugees both during and after the war. Among those who sought refuge in Sweden were not only the victims of various persecutions, but, indeed, also persons who had been complicit in persecuting others. Deland’s interest is in exposing how the Swedish state handled this situation.

Within the framework of a government funded “Svenaz” research program initiated by the Social Democratic Prime Minister Göran Persson, a number of projects aimed to shed new light on the relations between Sweden and Nazi Germany, and, more broadly, Sweden and Nazism. One of the research projects in the program was Deland’s investigation of Sweden as the destination for alleged Nazi war criminals in the final phases of the war and its immediate aftermath.

Due to his “Svenaz” affiliation, Deland was able to access certain classified files and documents closed to other researchers, although this did not prevent him from feeling thwarted at times by the overly bureaucratic procedures that hindered his progress. Despite this, after some years Deland managed to amass an unparalleled body of source material on war criminals in Sweden after World War II. The results were far too much to be contained in a single volume. Aside from Purgatorium, which runs to over 560 pages, Deland has also published a separate report1, magazine articles2, and appendices on his Web site3 based on this research.

In Purgatorium, Deland focuses primarily on one group of suspected Nazi war criminals who came to Sweden, the Latvians. Other groups — Germans, Estonians — are mentioned as well, but mainly to contextualize the general historical trends described. Although not the largest refugee group in postwar Sweden, nor the group with the most (in absolute terms) suspected war criminals among them, Deland lets the case of the Latvians exemplify the moral, legal, and political factors that shaped Sweden’s problematic history of dealing with war crimes since World War II.

The occupied Baltic states were the locus of some of the earliest mass atrocities of the so-called Einsatzgruppen phase of Nazi genocide. During 1941 and 1942, hundreds of thousands of Jews, as well as Romanis, Communists, Soviet POWs, and the mentally ill were executed en masse in the Baltic region by the SS men of Einsatzgruppe A and their helpers: German soldiers, German policemen, and local auxiliaries.

These tragic circumstances thus contributed to a sizeable group of perpetrators, both German and local, in the Baltic states. Sweden’s geographic proximity made it an ideal escape route for those who sought to avoid the retribution that could be expected with the collapse of German power and the return of the Soviets to the region.

The book opens with the story of a German policeman who served with an SS unit that swept through small-town Lithuania in 1941, leaving behind a trail of mass graves. This German, who fled to Sweden after the war, was later extradited to face charges relating to his complicity in wartime Nazi crimes. After serving a short sentence in a West German prison, he returned to his family in Sweden, where he remained to the end of his days. As it turns out, he was the only foreigner ever who was extradited from Sweden to a non-Nordic country.

Throughout the Cold War, Sweden never assisted other countries in prosecuting alleged war criminals who had sought refuge there, but nor did it actively pursue prosecuting these persons itself. Deland offers several explanatory factors for this, some legal, some pragmatic, some political. Most significant, however, would seem to have been the political ones.

To set the scene, Deland presents a great deal of detail regarding the situation in German-occupied Latvia during World War II, including the types of atrocities committed there, and by whom. The reader is left with few illusions about the implications that complicity in these crimes would entail.

Read more: Writing history…