Reaching a State of Hope: Refugees, Immigrants and the Swedish Welfare State, 1930–2000

By Nordic Academic Press

Shedding new light on the issues concerning refugees and immigration in 20th-century Sweden, this analysis examines the implications of its immigration policies. On what grounds were refugees admitted? Where did they come from? How did the Swedish state aid its new citizens? What differences were there between refugees and the imported labor that was essential to Swedish industry? A group of established Swedish and international historians answer these questions against the background of the eras passed: the Second World War, the Cold War, and the labor movement that shaped the national characteristic of Sweden so deeply. Reaching a State of Hope contributes to the wider field of research on political and administrative practices around refugees historically and places the Swedish refugee and immigration experience in a European perspective.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nordic Academic Press
• Release date: Jan 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9789187351587

Book preview

Introduction I

Mikael Byström & Pär Frohnert

It was not until the 1970s that Swedish historians showed much interest in refugee policy. Hans Lindberg’s dissertation Svensk flyktingpolitik under internationellt tryck, 1936–1941 of 1973 was for many years the only work on the subject in Swedish. However, there were several important contributions published in German which highlighted different aspects of Swedish refugee policy and reception, among them Helmut Müssener’s Exil in Schweden: Politische und kulturelle Emigration nach Schweden (1974), and later Hans Uwe Petersen’s Hitlerflüchtlinge im Norden: Asyl und politisches Exil 1933–1945 (1991), and Einhart Lorenz’s Ein sehr trübes Kapitel? Hitlerflüchtlinge im nordeuropäischen Exil 1933 bis 1950 (1998). Steven Koblik’s The stones cry out: Sweden’s response to the persecution of the Jews 1933–1945 (1988) was not only the first academic publication to follow in Lindberg’s footsteps, but also placed Swedish refugee policy firmly in a new context: the Holocaust. That the author was American was significant. Some years later the journalist Maria-Pia Boëthius challenged many of the accepted historical perspectives and conclusions concerning Sweden, the war, and neutrality by concentrating on the morality of Sweden’s behaviour above all else, not least in the questions of refugee policy and the Holocaust: a corrective that did much to shift Swedish research perspectives and to formulate new questions. Thus during the 1990s a number of important publications were added to the literature on Swedish refugee policy— Anders Berge’s Flyktingpolitik i stormakts skugga (1992), Paul Levine’s From indifference to activism: Swedish diplomacy and the Holocaust, 1938–1944 (1996) and Lars Olsson’s On the threshold of the People’s Home of Sweden (1997)—but it was not until the 2000s that the research field can be said to have been firmly established, to a large extent by authors who have contributed to this anthology.

The literature

Swedish research on refugee policy in the 1930s and 1940s can be said to have two different empirical foci. One perspective considers how legislation and machinery of government influenced the possibilities for refugees, especially Jewish refugees, to find safety in Sweden. Who was accepted, how did the process work, and what were the discourses of refugee control? The other perspective considers what happened to those refugees let into Sweden. How were they treated, what conditions did they meet, and what kind of opinions existed about the refugees? This research has usually been devoted to describing how individual groups of refugees were viewed and treated. Usually the approach has been ‘Swedish’, but some works look at things from the refugees’ perspective. In addition to these refugee studies, there is also research about Swedish antisemitism during the period in question.

The general picture given by the research on refugee policy developments is that Sweden went from a very restrictive refugee policy in the 1930s to a generous refugee policy. When exactly this change took place is much debated, and presumably the answer depends largely on the specific topic, but it usually comes down to 1942–3. The reasons given also vary, although the fact that Sweden’s foreign policy underwent a change in 1942–3 has often been emphasized. In the standard account, Sweden was able to act more freely after this point, and it has been suggested that refugee policy followed a similar pattern—specifically that Sweden’s greater scope for action enabled it to adopt a more generous refugee policy. Another common explanation stresses a change of attitudes: opinions about refugees and their needs altered, which also meant their practical reception and treatment changed, and for the better. Other explanations of the changeover, which do not exclude the previous reasons of course, include pragmatism (Sweden wanted to generate international goodwill by its generous reception of refugees), the war as such, and pressure from the Western Allies.

The research still has difficult, concrete problems to deal with. One thorny question, relevant for the essays in this anthology, is the exact number of refugees that Sweden accepted during the war. That this seemingly simple question poses such a problem is due to the fact that the official statistics comprise the number of aliens who were in the country at a certain moment, not all arrivals. Neither were registers kept of the total number of refugees or other foreign citizens who entered the country, nor on how many left the country. Many refugees, especially from Norway, returned home—and then perhaps fled to Sweden on several subsequent occasions. Then there is the fact that the authorities were seldom careful to distinguish between categories of refugees, evacuees, or ‘other aliens’. Thus the information on how many refugees in total fled to Sweden is lacking. That is why there is so much fragmentary information about the reception of the refugees, a problem Klas Åmark discusses in the present volume. Yet, while it is unclear if we will ever know the exact number of refugees, the trend is very clear: in 1939 there were about 5,000 refugees in Sweden, while at the end of the war there were 200,000 refugees and ‘other foreigners’, the majority of whom were refugees. The exact figures are not essential for our purposes here.

The legal and political context

The Aliens Act of 1937 remained in force throughout the war. While it can be characterized as somewhat more generous than the preceding act of 1927, it was still restrictive and signalled loud and clear that Sweden was not an immigration country. The law still contained the labour market argument, but the explicit reference to race had been removed. However, the ideal of the ‘upholding of the Swedish race’ was still explicit at the time, for example in the proposal from the Population commission in 1938. The major change in the new Aliens Act, however, was that it now stated that ‘a foreigner fled from another country for political reasons’ had the right to have his case heard, and could not be denied entry at the border. With this formulation, the concept of ‘political refugee’ was widened to afford protection to those fleeing political oppression and persecution, mainly from Nazi Germany.

It is clear that the refugee question was something of a conundrum for all the political parties, none of which, apart from the Communists, had anything approaching a clear party line. It is possible to distinguish a ‘refugee friendly’ grouping mostly consisting of Social Democrats, Communists, and Liberals, and a group of ‘refugee opponents’ from the Conservative Party, the Farmers’ League, and again the Social Democratic Party, some of them in leading positions. The situation was quite polarized, and the policy embodied in the 1937 Act must thus be seen as a compromise where they had agreed on the lowest common denominator. It must be underlined that it was Social Democratic governments alone or in coalition that drew up the restrictive refugee policy. One result of the compromise made in the shadow of xenophobia was that Jewish refugees not were accounted political refugees and many were denied entry permits, at least well into the 1940s. Today we know that some of them were able to get to another country, but also that others perished in the extermination camps. Thus one question that has occupied research is the part played by antisemitism in Sweden’s refugee policy and its role in the Holocaust, which is something that Karin Kvist Geverts focuses in her essay.

At the outbreak of the war, the Swedish coalition government of the Social Democrats and the Farmers’ League declared Sweden’s neutrality. This had broad political support, as was underlined in December 1939, after the Russians’ attack on Finland when a coalition war cabinet was established, consisting of all political parties that were represented in Parliament except the Moscow-loyal Communist Party (Sveriges kommunistiska parti). This war cabinet was not dissolved until after the war, on 31 July 1945.

Swedish neutrality was to be put to the test, and it is clear that the government made several deviations from strict neutrality. During the first half of the war, German demands for troop transfers through Sweden, including the transport to Finland of a whole division equipped for action during the attack on the Soviet Union, courier planes in Swedish air space, and so on, were complied with. During the second half of the war, Sweden was heavily criticized by the Allies for those deviations from strict neutrality and for its trade policy towards Nazi Germany. A central purpose of the trade policy was to secure Sweden’s supply of coal. It did not help Sweden’s case that from the end of 1943 it made clear departures from the neutrality in favour of the enemies of Nazi Germany—for example, by allowing Norwegian and Danish refugees to train as paramilitary police on Swedish soil. By war’s end, the Swedish interpretation of neutrality had a bad reputation among the Western Allies.

Responsibility for refugee policy shuttled between several ministers and ministries. Its legal formulation obviously rested with the Ministry of Justice, during much of the war led by K. G. Westman, member of the Farmers’ League, xenophobic, and sceptical towards democracy. The embassies abroad and Swedish passport control came under the Ministry for Foreign Affairs (Utrikesdepartementet, UD), and they together were responsible for the so-called external barrier for the control of aliens—in other words, they determined who would be allowed to enter the country by deciding who would be issued with passports and visas. From November 1939, the Ministry for Foreign Affairs was led by Christian Günther, a career diplomat, not a politician. The responsibility for domestic control rested with the Board of Social Affairs’ Aliens Department (Socialstyrelsens utlänningsbyrå), established in 1938, under the Ministry of Health and Social Affairs (Socialdepartementet), and its Social Democratic minister Gustav Möller. The Aliens Department handled the practical work of the refugees’ three-month residence permits and work permits. In 1939, after the outbreak of war, all foreigners except for Nordic citizens were required to have visas. That meant that the control of entry was moved to the Ministry for Foreign Affairs, while both refusal of entry and refoulement were the business of the Board of Social Affairs.

On 1 July 1944, the National Alien Commission (Utlänningskommissionen) was instituted in order to bring together all aliens’ issues under one roof. But in spite of the ambition to concentrate all refugee issues in one authority, the same confused group of responsible authorities continued even after this point, something which we will come back to in Part ii. Here it is sufficient to note the divided and partly unclear distribution of responsibility for refugee issues and the ad hoc character of the solutions. Indeed, there is good reason to ask if there was ever a single, uniform, and coherent refugee policy in the first place.

Refugees, evacuees, and repatriates

During the 1930s, it was mainly refugees from Nazi Germany (including Austria from 1934) who tried to get to Sweden. Most of them were Jews, but there were also political opponents to the Nazi regime, social democrats, and some communists. At the outbreak of war, there were approximately 5,000 refugees in Sweden, of whom 3,000 were Jews. The attack on Norway and Denmark by Germany on 9 April 1940 saw the beginning of a continuous stream of refugees from Norway, though on a limited scale in the beginning. Initially the Swedish authorities were restrictive, but soon almost everyone who sought refuge was allowed to enter Sweden. Only occasional refusals of entry were known, mostly criminals and obvious security risks. Many refugees from the Continent who had landed up in Denmark or Norway tried to escape to Sweden when the Germans invaded. When German pressure increased during 1942, more and more Norwegians—among them approximately 1,000 Norwegian Jews—headed for Sweden, which kept its doors wide open. For the rest of the war between 5,000–10,000 Norwegian refugees fled to Sweden in a six-month period, and by April 1945 there were approximately 30,000 Norwegian refugees in Sweden.

In the summer of 1943, it was estimated that there were only a few hundred Danish refugees in Sweden, but then in the late summer the German occupation was tightened up and the Danish Jews were threatened by the Holocaust. From October and some months on some 10,000 Danes—among them approximately 8,000 Danish Jews—escaped across the Sound and sought shelter in Sweden. At the end of the war there were some 15,000 Danish refugees in Sweden.

The next large group were to be the last of the ‘proper’ refugees. These were refugees from Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania who were usually lumped together under the category of ‘Balts’. From the autumn of 1944 to the end of the war some 30,000 Baltic refugees fled precipitously to Sweden, presenting the Swedish system of refugee reception and relief with a real challenge.

Another important group was the Estonian Swedes, numbering some 7,000 individuals. They were the Swedish-speaking Estonian minority who on the initiative of the Swedish state were transported to Sweden in two mass evacuations (1940 and 1944). They were not seen as refugees, but instead as returning ‘kinsmen’. From Finland, there were only a few thousand refugees. Far more important were the evacuees. In the summer of 1944, the Swedish and Finnish governments signed an agreement that implied that Finnish civilians in the north of the country would be given refuge as long as the war lasted. Ultimately, a total of about 40,000 Finnish evacuees came over the border—in many cases with their cattle. In addition, Sweden throughout the war took in the so-called Finnish war children, who were protected from the fighting by being placed with Swedish families. In all some 70,000 children came to Sweden, the majority of whom returned to Finland after the war.

There were several thousand Soviet Russian refugees (mainly military personnel) who had fled to Sweden or ended up there in the course of the war or the immediate aftermath. Most of these refugees were put in internment camps, but quite a few succeeded in escaping the camps because they did not want to return to the Soviet Union. The Soviet government demanded that all Soviet citizens should be repatriated, and the Swedish government, apparently eager not to disrupt the new post-war power relations, largely complied. (The same was true of its response to similar demands from all the other legations.) Russian personnel were allowed entry to the refugee camps and were given the addresses of individual Russian refugees. However, the authorities protected refugees who had succeeded in escaping from the refugee camps, and gave them political asylum. From the autumn of 1944 to the summer of 1945, groups of internees were returned to the Soviet Union under more or less coercive forms, for while the majority might have wanted to return, not all did. There was a public outcry in Sweden at the repatriations, and the Swedish government did its best to keep them secret.

Another distinct group of refugees whose fate attracted a great deal of attention were the German troops who in the very last weeks of the war had managed to escape the military collapse in the Baltic area by crossing to safety in Sweden. Among the 2,500 or so men, there were approximately 150 Balts who had fought in the German forces. The whole group was interred and later extradited to the Soviet Union under dramatic forms (the so-called expulsion of the Balts), for many committed suicide or injured themselves in the hope of escaping extradition; events that prompted a lengthy debate in the Swedish press.

The last group who should be singled out for special mention here were the former concentration camp prisoners who were transported to Sweden in the spring 1945. There were two different rescue missions. The so-called White Buses of April and May 1945 were a programme run by the Swedish Red Cross led by count Folke Bernadotte (a relative to the Swedish royal family). Originally an initiative that came from the Danes and Norwegians, the purpose was to transport their citizens from the concentration camps during the last weeks of the war to Sweden, where they would recover before returning home when peace came. In fact, although the Red Cross initially extracted Nordic citizens, when the chance came to rescue other nationalities, they took it. The other rescue was run by the international aid organization UNRRA (the United Nations’ Relief and Rehabilitation Administration), in which Sweden was slated to receive approximately 10,000 former concentration camps internees in order to give them rest and care for a shorter period. Those helped by the UNRRA programme, which took place in June 1945, were mainly women, especially Polish Jews. In all, some 30,000 former camp inmates were transported to Sweden, the majority with the White Buses. The non-Nordic former internees were referred to as repatriates by the Swedish authorities, signalling that they were expected to return ‘home’ when the war was over. The majority did return to their home countries, but quite a few remained in Sweden, given the social problems, antisemitism, and political unrest that marked the immediate post-war period in East Europe.

The essays

The two essays discuss the development of Sweden’s refugee policy and its consequences in the period 1933–45. They have slightly different foci and treat different aspects of the problem complex outlined above. Klas Åmark’s essay gives an overview of Swedish refugee policy and reception: groups, official bodies, the quota system, the refugee relief committees, and the growing role of the state. His main point is that the state went through a learning process, abandoning its original, strongly restrictive refugee policy with very limited state commitments for large-scale refugee reception and, in the last years of the war, extensive aid programmes. Karin Kvist Gevert’s focus is on attitudes towards Jewish refugees and their treatment. She discusses the different forms of discrimination, from denying Jews entry to Sweden to the Swedish authorities’ singling them out as a separate category according to their religious beliefs but also under the Nazi German Nuremberg laws. Both Åmark and Kvist Geverts discuss the question of when the changeover in Swedish refugee policy occurred, and how it should be explained. Kvist Geverts sees a slow procedure of change from November 1942, when public opinion in Sweden reacted to the deportation of Norwegian Jews to Auschwitz, to the autumn of 1943, when the government first officially declared itself prepared to receive the Danish Jews, who were then smuggled over to Sweden (with the knowledge of the local German occupation regime). Sweden’s new policy can be explained in part by its growing awareness of the full horror of the Holocaust as fellow Scandinavians began to be affected, and Kvist Geverts argues that the moderate antisemitic attitudes among the authorities in question were durable. She argues that antisemitism was so common in Sweden in the 1930s and early 1940s that she can speak of ‘an antisemitic background noise’. However, by then it was already regarded as unacceptable to indulge in propagandistic violence supporting antisemitic attitudes, or to announce oneself to be an anti-Semite.

Åmark’s interpretation of the changeover differs somewhat. Like Kvist Geverts, he holds that it was crucial that Sweden’s Scandinavian brethren were hit by the Nazi round-ups in 1942–3. He stresses that it was largely in answer to the brutal German occupations that Sweden then took in Scandinavians (who were expected to return home when the war ended). After Stalingrad in the winter of 1943, the outcome of the war became more and more obvious. Åmark locates the crucial change of the refugee policy to the autumn of 1944, when Sweden suddenly found itself with tens of thousands of Baltic refugees who were expected to remain in Sweden. Concerning the extent of antisemitism, he concurs with some of Kvist Gevert’s picture, but instead of ‘background noise’, he argues that Swedish research on antisemitism still is insufficient to give a clear picture. By his account, the changeover in Sweden’s refugee policy cannot be explained by decisive changes in attitudes among the decision-makers during the war, yet, in spite of this, Sweden went from acting as a limited and limiting bystander to a rescuer, as seen in its help for the Danish Jews, Wallenberg’s actions in Budapest in 1944, and the rescue of concentration camps survivors from Germany to Scandinavia in the spring of 1945.

References

Åmark, Klas, Att bo granne med ondskan. Sveriges förhållande till nazismen, Nazityskland och förintelsen, Stockholm 2011.

Andersson, Lars M. & Kvist Geverts, Karin (eds.), En problematisk relation? Flyktingpolitik och judiska flyktingar i Sverige 1920–1960, Uppsala 2008.

Andræ, Carl Göran, Sverige och den stora flykten från Estland 1943–1944, Uppsala 2004.

Bachner, Henrik, ‘Judefrågan’. Debatt om antisemitism i 1930-talets Sverige, Stockholm 2009.

Berge, Anders, Flyktingpolitik i stormakts skugga. Sverige och de sovjetryska flyktingarna under andra världskriget, Uppsala 1992.

Blomberg, Göran, Mota Moses i grind. Ariseringsiver och antisemitism i Sverige 1933–1943, Stockholm 2003.

Boëthius, Maria-Pia, Heder och samvete. Sverige och andra världskriget, Stockholm 1991.

Bogatic, Wirginia, Exilens dilemma: att stanna eller att återvända. Beslut i Sverige av polska kvinnor som överlevde KZ-lägret Ravensbrück och räddades till Sverige 1945–1947, Växjö/Kalmar 2010.

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— ‘De behöva en fast hand över sig. Missionsförbundet, Israelmissionen och de judiska flyktingarna 1939–1945’, in Andersson & Kvist Geverts 2008.

Hallberg, Lars, Källor till invandringens historia i statliga myndigheters arkiv 1840–1990, Stockholm 2001.

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Kvist Geverts, Karin, Ett främmande element i nationen. Svensk flyktingpolitik och de judiska flyktingarna 1938–1944, Uppsala 2008.

Levine, Paul A., From indifference to activism. Swedish diplomacy and the Holocaust 1938–1944, Uppsala 1996.

Lindberg, Hans, Svensk flyktingpolitik under internationellt tryck 1936–1941, Stockholm 1973.

Lomfors, Ingrid, Blind fläck. Minnen och glömska kring svenska Röda korsets hjälpinsats i Nazityskland 1945, Stockholm 2005.

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— ‘Exil und Exilforschung in Skandinavien’, in Lorenz et al. 1998.

— ‘Fremdenpolitik und Asylpraxis’, in Lorenz et al. 1998.

— ‘Schweden’, in Krohn, Claus-Dieter & Kohlhaas, Elisabeth (eds.), Handbuch der deutschsprachigen Emigration 1933–1945, Darmstadt 1998.

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— ‘Exil in Schweden’, in Petersen 1991.

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CHAPTER 1

Sweden and the refugees, 1933–45

Klas Åmark

Swedish refugee policy and refugee reception changed dramatically between 1933 and 1945. In the course of the 1930s, refugee policy became more and more restrictive. In early 1939, a heated debate took place about a proposal that Sweden should accept ten German Jewish doctors. Yet in the first half of 1945, there were more than 210,000 refugees and evacuees staying in Sweden, without any major debate about the size of the Swedish refugee reception. The expansion came late. It was not until 1942 and 1943 that the number of refugees in Sweden grew rapidly. The largest groups of refugees arrived between the summer of 1944 and the summer of 1945. What had happened, in what respects did the Swedish refugee policy change, and why?

The question of numbers

There are no reliable statistics on how many refugees came to Sweden during the period 1933 to 1945. Swedish authorities regularly counted the number of foreigners with the right to stay in the country, but in the 1930s they did not differentiate between refugees and other foreigners. The situation altered in the last year of the war, probably due to a change in the administrative structure of the authorities, with the establishment of a new National Alien Commission in July 1944. Another problem for the historian is that a number of refugees were only in Sweden for a limited time and then moved on, but the authorities only counted the number of foreigners and refugees who were in the country at a certain date: we still do not know how many refugees only passed through Sweden.

The best available statistics on refugees and foreigners in Sweden were worked out by an official commission of inquiry, in an unpublished study of Swedes living in foreign countries and refugees in Sweden in 1948. Its estimates are presented in Table 1 (p. 51). The largest group of refugees in Sweden were the Norwegians, who started to arrive after the German occupation of Norway in April 1940. In the autumn of 1943, as the occupation became more oppressive, more Norwegians fled to Sweden. Similarly, in the first year of the German occupation of Denmark refugees were relatively few. Approximately 8,000 persons arrived from Denmark in the autumn of 1943, of whom 7,000 were Danish Jews. Baltic refugees came in large numbers in the autumn of 1944, after the Soviet occupation of the Baltic countries. Sweden also took in a great number of Finnish children during the Winter War and the Continuation War with the Soviet Union; in all, 72,000. They are usually not classified as refugees, sometimes even not as foreigners, in Sweden, since they were not adults. After the peace between Finland and Soviet Union in September 1944, the Finns were forced to throw out the German troops who had been stationed in Northern Finland since 1941. The Germans responded with a scorched earth policy, and to escape the fighting tens of thousands of Finns were evacuated to Sweden together with their cattle. These Finns, at least 45,000 in number, were also usually not called refugees, but evacuees, and they are not included in the number of refugees in Table 1. From the late autumn of 1944, at least 210,000 refugees and evacuees were in Sweden for shorter or longer periods of time.¹

For this essay, neither the difficulty of finding exact figures, nor the problems with the categorization of different groups of refugees, are of real importance. My focus is instead the change in scale in the refugee reception in Sweden. During the 1930s, a couple of thousand refugees came to Sweden, most of them from Germany and usually German-speaking (German being the second language of choice in Sweden at the time). They were typically either Jews or social democrats. In the last year of the war, tens of thousands of refugees arrived from a great number of nations. There were Norwegian resistance fighters, quislings who saw the end of the war drawing closer, Allied bomber pilots, Soviets and Yugoslavians fleeing from slave labour under Organisation Todt in Norway, Baltic and Soviet soldiers who had been fighting in the German army, Spaniards, Swiss and Argentinean citizens who had been prisoners in the German concentrations camps, and even two Chinese women, also camp prisoners. It was not only the sheer numbers of refugees that created problems to be solved by Swedish authorities, also all the different cultures, languages, and religions that had to be handled in some way.²

Responsibility

Who was responsible for the decisions about which people should be allowed to come to Sweden in what numbers, and who was financially responsible for their support once there? Ultimately, of course, the state was directly responsible for the decision to accept a person as a legal refugee. Swedish refugee policies in the 1930s had their roots in the First World War and its aftermath, when a rather narrow definition of the concept of ‘political refugee’ had been established. The right of asylum was interpreted not as a right for the individual refugee, but as a right for the state to give asylum to political refugees, as a protection against criticism from the state from which the refugees came.

In Sweden, a system of refugee quotas was established during the 1930s. The quotas, decided on after negotiations between the government and various refugee committees, regulated the number of refugees who were allowed to stay in Sweden at the same time. Sweden’s concerns about controlling the number of refugees were considered much more important than the individual refugee’s need for protection. At the time, Swedish politicians and authorities were worried about the risk that large, uncontrolled groups of refugees would invade Sweden. As early as the first half of the 1930s many feared, for example, that Poland would start to persecute its 3.5 million Jews in the same way as Nazi Germany did, and thereby create an untenable situation for the receiving countries.³ Sweden’s quotas defined different categories of refugees, such as children, young people who had been offered education, refugees in transit, etc., but nothing was normally said about the nationalities of the refugees. Usually, the refugees in question came from Nazi Germany. For example, the Chaluz quota had 300 places for young Jews who intended to take agricultural courses in Sweden in order to continue to Palestine.⁴ After the Munich Agreement in September 1938, a new quota was established for refugees from the Sudeten region in Czechoslovakia.

Until 1939, the Swedish state—like all other states in Europe at the time—took no financial responsibility for refugees who were permitted to enter Sweden. Instead, civil society had to guarantee economic support for the refugees. Several refugee committees were established during the 1930s, but their financial capacity was rather limited. Some refugees had economic resources of their own, or were supported by their families still living in Germany.⁵ Other refugees were able to support themselves by gainful employment. In 1939, Parliament granted 500,000 kronor for the support of refugees, a sum mainly distributed through the refugee committees. The refugee committees themselves raised about twice as much money during that year. In the financial year of 1941–2, state support was increased to 800,000 kronor.⁶

During the war, when the number of refugees who came to Sweden exploded, the refugee reception costs to the state also grew rapidly (a detailed analysis of the overall refugee costs has yet to be done, but the broad picture is clear). Some countries, such as Norway and Denmark, were expected to pay the costs of their own refugees, but the Swedish government seems to have lent the money to the Scandinavian legations in Sweden and the Norwegian government in exile in London. The Danish legation was given credits of 110 million kronor, of which 50 million were written off after the war.⁷ In the financial year of 1944–5, the Swedish state paid 80 million kronor for refugee reception, compared to roughly 500,000 kronor in 1939.⁸ The grant had increased a hundredfold in relative terms, as the number of refugees and evacuees in Sweden grew from about 4,000 in 1939 to around 200,000 in the spring of 1945—a fiftyfold increase. Evidently, the state took much greater economic responsibility for the refugees in 1945 than it had done in 1939.⁹

The Swedish state thus rapidly expanded its role and financial support for the refugees. It was the Ministry of Health and Social Affairs under its powerful minister, Gustav Möller, which was primarily responsible for this part of the expansion. Möller had not only high ambitions for social policy in general; he also had such a strong position in the government that he could force through the decisions that were important to him. Möller’s role seems to have become even more important during the war, with its many Nordic refugees, than during the 1930s, when most refugees came from Germany. According to his state secretary, Tage Erlander,¹⁰

Gustav Möller was emotionally fiercely engaged for the refugees. In general, he accepted the refugee policy, which was formed in the Ministry of Justice and especially in the Ministry for Foreign Affairs. He wanted Sweden to go as far as possible to save individuals. I myself can verify the intensity with which Möller argued that refugees from Denmark and Norway, Finland and the Baltic countries should be taken care of and protected.¹¹

But the state did not act on its own accord. The emergency administration specially built up during the war typically saw close collaboration between the state on the one hand and special interest organizations and voluntary organizations on the other.¹² In Sweden’s refugee policy, we also see a close collaboration between the Swedish state and representatives of other countries, especially the Nordic countries. Actually, the Norwegian legation and its refugee office in Sweden became a kind of state within a state, building a Norwegian refugee community in Sweden and retaining a far-reaching control over Norwegian refugees, and during the last years of the war even building up an army of its own, the so-called police troops (Reservepolitiet), trained and armed by the Swedish