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available statistics on refugees and foreigners in Sweden were worked out by an official commission of inquiry, in an unpublished study of Swedes living in foreign countries and refugees in Sweden in 1948.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.

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.

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...