Swedish Diplomats and Holocaust Knowledge

Abstract

Abstract How did Swedish diplomats report the persecution and killing of European Jewry by Nazi Germany in the 1930s and during the Second World War? What did the Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs do with reports on the Holocaust during the war, and to what extent did such reports affect policy? This article shows that Swedish diplomats provided their superiors with reliable, if at times unverifiable, information about the different phases of the Holocaust from 1933 until the end of 1942, and argues that awareness of the transition from persecution to mass murder did not alter Swedish refugee policies. The author thus details the process whereby knowledge of the annihilation of the European Jews seeped out from eastern Europe by examining Swedish diplomatic reports on the Holocaust. Furthermore, he sheds new light on the history of Swedish refugee policies and Swedish German relations during the Nazi period.