The Swedish Connection
The story before the film
You may have seen the film, The Swedish Connection, first released in January and now available on Netflix. It is worth watching if you haven’t done so already.
The Swedish Connection tells the story of Gösta Engzell, a lawyer who, in 1938, was appointed to head up the Legal Affairs department of Sweden’s Foreign Office. One of the lesser known heroes of the Shoah whose name was unknown to most of us, Engzell is estimated to have saved the lives 30,000 - 40,000 Jews. The film tells his story but it is a film and not a documentary so it cannot drill too deeply into all the historical detail. Without giving away the plot of the film, I thought it might be interesting to add some additional context to the story, because his actions were wholly out of character. Even he would have been surprised a couple of years earlier, had he known what he was about to do.
Those who write about the Shoah discuss three groups of people: the victims, the perpetrators and a third group, the largest of all, who they call the bystanders. The bystanders include ordinary people who knew something terrible was happening but were unable or unwilling to do anything, together with a small number of braver souls who did what they could to help the victims or lessen the suffering, and, at the far extreme, the heroes, people like Raoul Wallenberg, Oskar Schindler and Gösta Engzell, who risked their own lives in order to save others. The Swedish government, legal establishment and citizens all fell into the category of bystanders, mostly numbered amongst those who turned a blind eye to Germany’s annihilation of Europe’s Jews.
During World War II Sweden was a neutral country. That is to say, it did not fight on either side. But it took care of its own interests and, if that involved compromising its principles to ensure its neutrality, it was prepared to do so. Sweden, at least in the late 20th century, if less so now, had a reputation as a progressive, tolerant, egalitarian society. Sweden of the 1930s was very different.
Sweden is a thinly populated country, at the beginning of the 1930s it had little more than 6 million people, of whom only 6,000 or so were Jews. During the 1930s the country suffered from a ‘casual’ antisemitism: unlike some other European countries there were no antisemitic or racist political parties, but antisemitic remarks were lobbed around freely, even in parliamentary debates, and it was hard for Jews to break into the upper echelons of Swedish society, to obtain senior positions in business, government or the military. In 1922, the Swedish government financed the State Institute for Racial Biology, Europe’s first institution dedicated to the study and improvement of races with allegedly ‘superior’ qualities.
This explains why, when Jews started to flee from the Nazi regime in the 1930s, Sweden did not extend a welcoming hand, notwithstanding its geographical proximity to Germany. Whereas the USA admitted around 95,000 Jewish refugees during the 1930s, and the UK about 75,000, by 1939 Sweden had allowed in just 2,000. And if Gösta Engzell had had his way, the number would have been even smaller. Not that Engzell was personally hostile to Jews during the 1930s, there is noting in the records or in his correspondence that indicated he disliked them. He was just a bureaucrat who abided by the rules of the society he served. In a speech in July 1938, he said that the problem was not so much Jews fleeing the Nazis as “European Jewish emigration as a whole”. Adopting the racist image of ‘invading hordes’ he implied that Jews throughout Europe were emigrating and would soon be knocking on Sweden’s door. .
The Germans began to stamp the letter J in Jewish passports in 1938, after they annexed Austria. It is well known that they did this in response to pressure from the government of Switzerland, who wanted to discourage Jewish refugees from turning up at their border. Less well known is that the Swedish government also demanded similar measures, and that the diplomatic pressure came from Gosta Engzell’s office. His chief aide told the Germans that Sweden needed to control Jewish immigration. Engzell himself wrote to the Swedish ambassador in Berlin, telling him that he envisaged a system in which normal, ‘desirable’ travellers would be able to pass through border control easily, while ‘non-desirables’ would have to produce a visa or risk being turned away.’ Since he had already told the Swedish embassy in Berlin not to issue visas to Jews, Engzell effectively ensured that no German Jews could enter Sweden.
Engzell and his department continued their policy of blocking Jews from entering their country, even after they had become aware that the Nazis had begun their extermination campaign. Under the Geneva convention, Sweden, as a neutral country, had the status of a ‘protecting power’; their role was to act as an intermediary between Germany and the citizens of those countries, such as Holland, which had been invaded. He received reports of the deaths of Dutch Jews in the Mauthausen concentration camp and he regularly read accounts sent by Swedish diplomats of deportations in Poland and France.
The events that brought about such a dramatic change in Engzell’s attitude, turning him from an obstructive bureaucrat into a passionate man obsessed with saving as many Jews as he could, are detailed, with a little fictional licence, in The Swedish Connection. if you haven’t seen the film I won’t spoil it for you by writing about it here.
The film ends without going into the details of how Engzell’s actions influenced other Swedes to devote themselves to the saving of Jewish lives. He was inspirational. The list of Swedish diplomats who followed him in rescuing Jews is long and impressive. Chief among them is the tragic businessman, Raoul Wallenberg, sent to Budapest by the Swedish Foreign Ministry on a mission to save as many Jews as he could. By issuing them with protective diplomatic papers, Wallenberg saved the lives of thousands of people. He was however unable to save himself. He was arrested by the Russians in 1945 and was never heard of again.
In the book Bystanders to the Holocaust[1] the historian, Paul A. Levine, compared the attitudes of the Unted States, the United Kingdom and Sweden towards the rescue of Jewish lives during the Shoah. He argued that, although the leaders of the three countries ‘were never seriously involved in formulating their nations’ responses to the to the Nazis’ assault on the Jews’, the situation changed towards the end of 1942. It was then that rescue policies began to be formulated. However, while the leaders of the US and the UK made public gestures condemning the extermination and promising to punish the evil doers, in practice little changed. The Swedes, however, did change.
The military and diplomatic pressures facing the British and Americans were of course very different to those facing the Swedes. Levine’s argument that their failure to act was determined by their ‘attitude towards the people under attack by the Nazis’ is contradicted by the fact that until 1942 the Swedes shared the same attitude. His more incisive point is that “Gösta Engzell and other Swedish diplomats chose to help Jews when they could, because they understood that the nature of the crisis made the maintenance of longstanding prejudices and policies morally untenable . . . .Their attitudes and actions demonstrate with clarity that moral indifference was not the only option” available to the bystander during the Shoah.
[1] Bystanders to the Holocaust: A Re-evaluation. Ed. David Cesarani & Paul A. Levine, Frank Cass, London, 2002.