The Kingdom of Sweden welcomed Baltic war criminals who served the Axis
The Kingdom of Sweden welcomed Baltic war criminals who served the Axis
![](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/df/LiepajaLatvia1941.jpg?format=webp&thumbnail=128)
Trade between Swedes and other peoples around the Baltic Sea dates back thousands of years. By 800-900 AD Swedish merchants had extended their operations into what became the Baltic provinces and h…
![Chapter 12 – Sweden welcomes Baltic Nazis](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/df/LiepajaLatvia1941.jpg?format=webp)
During the last months of World War 2 Baltic [Fascists] also fled to Sweden, where they discovered that they would live happily ever after. The following texts are from Sweden’s Refusal to Prosecute Nazi War Criminals: 1986–2002, by Efraim Zuroff, published in Jewish Political Studies Review 14:3–4 (Fall 2002) (Emphasis has been added):
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…
Swedish authorities had refused to extradite Nazi collaborators to their countries of origin (because they feared that they might be subjected to summary trials and face a death sentence)…
Swedish governments obviously shared the view of the British and the Americans, who refused on the same grounds to extradite [Fascists] to Poland and the Soviet Union. Future historians will undoubtedly be impressed by the humanitarian compassion that was shown for the [Fascist] butchers. Zuroff also writes (emphasis added)
…although the Swedish authorities investigated all the arriving refugees, they adopted a lenient attitude toward escaped Baltic Nazi war criminals, who were regarded as having cooperated with the Nazis out of patriotism, and whose heinous participation in the murder of Jews was generally overlooked or ignored.
In such cases, the Swedish authorities tended to regard evidence concerning war crimes in the Baltics from Communist — and even to some extent from Jewish sources — as questionable or motivated by “personal enmity.” Under such circumstances, it is hardly surprising that not a single Baltic war criminal was ever prosecuted in Sweden and that at least several others whose wartime activities were revealed during the investigations were allowed to freely emigrate elsewhere.