| lovely. So much for their vaunted neutrality and moral superiority |
"We are finding new areas of collaboration which we didn't know about," said Stockholm University historian Klas Amark, who coordinated the research commissioned by Prime Minister Goran Persson in 2000 in connection with a Holocaust conference.
The series of studies released yesterday into Sweden's Nazi links shows it did not just avoid invasion by selling iron ore to Adolf Hitler and letting his troops through to invade Norway. Swedish pastors stopped marriages between "Aryan" Germans and Swedish Jews for violating the Nuremberg laws promoting Aryanism. This was done on the advice of the foreign ministry.
"From 1937, Swedes wanting to marry Germans of so-called Aryan blood had to give assurance that none of their grandparents belonged to the Jewish race," reads a study on Sweden's church by Anders Jarlert of Lund University.
Newspapers gagged criticism of Hitler, of the occupation of Norway or the murder of millions of Jews in concentration camps, while cultural links between the Nazis and Sweden flourished.
"The government and authorities did what they thought was necessary to keep peace but I think they did more than was necessary," Amark told Reuters in an interview. There was not much rationale for a German attack as Germany got what it wanted from Sweden," he said. It was easier to buy iron ore from Sweden than invade and risk it sabotaging iron mines.
He blamed Sweden's attitude to Hitler on the ruling class's links with Germany and on anti-Semitism that meant Sweden had - and still has today - its own small National Socialist party.