The numerically small Roma communities in Sweden generally survived World War II. But even in Sweden, which was one of few countries in Europe that remained democratic, sovereign, and neutral, the government announced in September 1942 that it intended to solve the ‘Gypsy problem.’ The official rhetoric was aggressive, since both the government and many influential academic experts were convinced that there were what they called ‘scientific’ grounds for an immediate solution to the invented problem. However, in 1945 this plan became a non-issue for the government and in the same year the first Roma survivors of the genocide came to Sweden as refugees.
Roma and Resande before World War II
Roma appear for the first time in Swedish records in 1512, when a caravan of Roma called Thaatra arrived in Stockholm. This group, known as Resande [Travellers] has lived in Sweden since then and is now recognised by the state as part of the Romani national minority. Before World War II many Resande families travelled between Sweden, Denmark and Norway. In the second half of the 19th century, several families of Kalderaša migrated to Sweden from the Russian Empire and Romania. Today this group, known as Swedish Roma [svenska romers], is also recognised by the state as a part of the Romani national minority.
During the post-war period, and especially after 1991, thousands of Roma migrated to Sweden from Finland, Poland, former Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Romania and other countries. Therefore, many Roma in today’s Sweden are representatives of second and third generations of genocide survivors.
Like other European countries Sweden has an ignominious history of discrimination and regulations targeting the Roma communities. Until the end of the 20th century the authorities and majority society used the discriminatory terms zigenare and tattare for Romani groups. In interwar Sweden, the Roma featured in the census as representatives of ‘an alien tribe’ [främmande stam].1Folkräkningen den 31 december 1930, 25. The 1930 census recorded 471 Roma individuals in Sweden, but the census takers stressed that that figure did not include the most of Resande (about 5,000 individuals at that time). If the Svenska Romers were easy to identify through their customs, names, language, and itinerant trades, many Resande were settled and bilingual and had typical Scandinavian names and therefore became invisible for census takers. The total population of Sweden at that time was about 6,100,000 individuals. This means that the Roma minority was numerically insignificant; however, this did not save it from systematic state-run discrimination based on an invented pseudo-scientific ‘racial problem’ [rasproblem].
Science and Criminologists
Pseudo-scientific racism received enthusiastic support in interwar universities and governmental agencies. In 1922, the State Institute for Racial Biology [Statens institut för rasbiologi], led by Professor Herman Lundborg (1868–1943), was established at Uppsala University. In the same year, a Parliamentary Committee initiated one of the first investigations of the Roma and Resande, completing its inquiry in 1923. The principal aim of the investigation was to map these two groups separately in order to establish the legal definitions of Roma and Resande. The investigation failed to develop such definitions. However, the committee proclaimed the Resande as ‘the racial problem’.2Undersökning rörande tattare och zigenare, 84–92, 317–376. In the 1920s Lundborg and his team visited many cities with the travelling exhibition entitled Swedish Folk Types. The exhibition catalogue, which included over 600 pictures, was presented as the first race-biological visual collection in the world. In it the Roma were presented as ‘a distinctive race’ consisting of two smaller groups. Lundborg described the Svenska Romers as an exotic oriental group. The Resande featured in his chapter on ‘Vagabonds, Tattare, Criminals and Similar’. Lundborg also edited an anthology entitled Race Questions in Modern Analysis, with Special Regard to the Swedish People in which Arthur Thesleff (1871–1920) wrote a chapter about Roma. He presented the Resande as a group of Romani origin who had been ‘denationalised and become a hybrid race with more or less Romani descent’; at the same time the Svenska Romers were described as ‘pure-blood original vagabonds who came to Sweden from the Basque Provinces’. However, applying racist principles, Thesleff condemned both groups as ‘a biological threat to the Swedish nation through sexual relations between them and ordinary Swedes’.3Thesleff, “Zigenare,” 73–82.
In 1935, the police of Malmö—the third largest city in Sweden—made a register of the local Roma population.4Ericsson, Exkludering, 148–160. In the same year, at the conference of the International Criminal Police Organisation (Interpol) in neighbouring Copenhagen, participating states discussed the initiative proposed by the SS-dominated German police for the creation of a pan-European register of Roma.5Ludi, “Swiss Policy,” 119–132. Apart from the Nazis, the main advocate of an international registration project at this conference was Harry Söderman (1902–1956)—a well-known criminologist and the founder and first director of Sweden’s National Forensic Centre. Söderman has had a very positive image in Swedish historiography as a pioneer of modern criminology, as an anti-Nazi and as creator of the Norwegian police troops formed in exile in Sweden for the liberation of Norway. However, as recent research shows, in 1935 he gave full support to the German proposal and called on the Interpol states to collect fingerprints and photographs as well as genealogical data on the Roma.6Selling, “The Obscured Story,” 329–353. Nevertheless, by comparison with the indigenous Sámi [also spelled Sami or Saami] people, Roma were marginal to the pseudo-scientific activity of Swedish racial biologists before 1939. This situation changed during World War II.
Registration and Racial Investigations
On 25 September 1942 the coalition government led by the Social Democrats declared that the country’s ‘problem’ with the Roma had to be resolved immediately, since: ‘The populations known as zigenare and tattare constitute a problem that the nation has had to fight for almost four centuries. Their lack of ability to adapt to the Swedish rule of law, as seen in their vagabondage and parasitic nature, is obvious.’7“Tattarproblemet,” 165.
Soon the anti-Roma declaration resulted in the personal registration of all Roma and Resande made by the police with the help of so-called sagesmän—non-Romani informants chosen by the National Board of Health and Welfare. The registration distinguished between Roma and Resande. Svenska Romers were registered during a one-day series of police raids on 31 May 1943, which resulted in the identification of 453 individuals across the country. Most of them were Kalderaša who lived in caravans, staying for one or two weeks in each place to carry out their occupations as (for example) petty traders, blacksmiths or travelling entertainers (e.g. at Gröna Lund [Tivoli]).8“Zigenarnas antal,” 116–127. The tiny Roma community reacted to the registration with great consternation; some among them believed that it had been proposed by the Nazi embassy in Stockholm.9Kotljarchuk, “World War II ,” 465–66.
The registration of Resande was a kind of witch hunt, in that local experts decided who among their neighbours was a Resande, often based on the subject’s physical appearance or semi-itinerant lifestyle. The registration card for an adult comprised nineteen questions covering places of birth and residence, knowledge of Romanes and occupation; it also included a question regarding the individual’s ‘abnormal physical appearance and alien racial features’ [avvikande utseende och rasdrag].10Uppgifter till inventering; Kompletterande uppgifter. Altogether 7,668 individuals of Resande origin were recorded in Sweden by 1944.11“Tattarnas antal,” 377–99.
Proposals ‘to solve the problem’
At the same time, in response to the governmental call, many academic experts came with different anti-Roma proposals. Allan Etzler (1902–1980), a historian at Stockholm University College (nowadays Stockholm University), was the leading expert in Romani studies since the end of the 1930s in Sweden. In 1944 he defended the first modern Swedish doctoral dissertation on the history and language of the Resande. The main thesis of Etzler was that the Resande are of Romani origin, because of the historical evidence and their dialect, which is similar to the dialect of the Svenska Romers. Alongside his academic affiliation, he was the director of Sweden’s Central Prison in Långholmen. Acting as a public scholar and civil servant, Etzler promoted his ideas about prison education in many interviews and articles in leading newspapers. He proposed the internment of all adult Roma (both the Resande and Svenska Romers) in labour colonies. The children had to be separated from their parents and placed in special orphanages in order to plant them in his view in ‘a healthy environment’.12Kotljarchuk, “State, Experts and Roma”.
The main lobbyist of the race-biological approach was Nils von Hofsten (1881–1967), a professor at the State Institute for Racial Biology and member of the National Medical Board. In a memorandum addressed in 1943 to the Riksdag (the Swedish Parliament) he proposed the immediate forced mass sterilisation of Resande.13Hofsten, “Utlåtande,” 19–22. Etzler, who supported the theory of the ‘mixed origin’ of the Resande, was strongly opposed to the idea of systematic sterilisation, basing his arguments on the danger that non-Roma might be mistakenly sterilised and his conviction of the effectiveness of prison education. His expertise carried significant weight in government, since Etzler was a leading figure in law enforcement agencies and considered to be the main expert on Roma.
Police opinions were also divided. Some policemen supported penal measures and argued in the mass media for the establishment of special labour camps for the Roma. Others publicly supported the race-biological solution based on systematic forced sterilisation (arguing from ‘scientific grounds’). At the same time, many policemen, including local police chiefs, opposed the anti-Roma plans proposed by central government.14Kotljarchuk, “Etnisk kategorisering”. As a result, the Resande and Roma were never explicitly targeted as a group by any of the sterilisation laws in Sweden.
As Mattias Tydén (born 1963) pointed out, academic debates concerning the sterilisation of the Resande at the time revolved around the racial origins of the group. Did they comprise a separate race? Or was it a mixed group of Swedes and Roma that had developed over a long period as a result of different factors?15Tydén, Från politik till praktik, 63–4. In 1944 Prof. Gunnar Dahlberg (1893–1956), as director of the State Institute for Racial Biology, took the chief responsibility for the race-biological investigation of the Resande commissioned by the government. Prof. Hofsten was not included in the research team and Dahlberg chose to carry out the investigation with the assistance of Karl Olof Danielsson (also known as Carl-Olof Danielsson) (unknown–unknown), a junior scientist at the Royal Medical University. Both researchers were human geneticists, not race biologists. Under Dahlberg’s leadership the State Institute for Racial Biology distanced itself from Nazi racial science.16Ericsson, “Anti-Fascist Race Biology”. In the report to government, which was also translated and published in English, Dahlberg stated that the ‘Roma issue’ had no basis in race—a conclusion that greatly complicated the race-biological measures. Moreover, he added that according to their anthropometric characteristics and physical appearance many Resande are more like south Germans. He concluded that the main problems were rooted in poverty and opened an arena for the discussion of welfare measures.17Dahlberg, “Anthropometry,” 69–79. Thus, the grand plans to ‘solve the problem’ became a non-issue. The relationship between the state and the scientific establishment allowed the government not to set up any formal procedure to review the results of the academic investigation. In Sweden almost all universities and research centres were state-affiliated agencies. It meant that the report by Prof. Dahlberg was considered by the central authorities to be the last word in the official investigation. After 1945 a paradigm shift in Swedish policies towards the Roma minority took place. It has been described by Ida Ohlsson Al Fakir (born 1978) as a change from how to solve ‘our problem with the Roma‘ to how to solve ‘their problems’.18Ohlsson, Nya rum för socialt medborgarskap.
Rescue and Relief: White Buses and Roma Survivors
In 1914, the Riksdag introduced a law forbidding foreign Roma to enter Sweden. This law remained in force until 1954. What role did the anti-Roma legislation play in practice? In 1934, a group of 62 Norwegian citizens of Roma origin, on returning home from Belgium, arrived by ferry at Trelleborg, a seaport in the southern part of Sweden. They had valid Norwegian passports, and yet the Swedish authorities refused them entry into the country, referring to the 1914 law, while the Norwegian government refused to permit them to return to Norway and cancelled their passports. As a result, this group of Roma was turned back from Sweden. In 1944, these Roma were deported from German-occupied Belgium to Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camp. Only four of them survived.19Rosvoll, Å bli dem kvit, 86–123.
The legal prohibition on foreign Roma entering Sweden also meant that few Roma came to Sweden from Europe as refugees in course of the ‘White Buses’ and ‘White Ships’ operations organised by the Swedish Red Cross under the leadership of Folke Bernadotte (1895–1948) in the final stage of the war. This large-scale humanitarian operation, which aimed at freeing Scandinavians and those with a ‘connection’ to Scandinavia from German concentration camps, was fully successful. In March and April 1945 about 300 Swedish volunteers, mostly military personnel, rescued 15,345 prisoners from Nazi concentration camps. 7,795 of them were Norwegian and Danish nationals and 7,550 individuals were of other nationalities, among them thousands of Jews. How many Roma came to Sweden during the White Buses and White Ships operation is unknown. However, there were more than the two individuals—Polish Romnja Sofia Taikon born Brzezinska (1931–2005) and Hanna Dimitri born Brzezinska (1931–1992)—named in previous research.20Selling, Romani Liberation, 131.
Among other survivors who came to Malmö in 1945 we can mention Sintize Hulda Trollmann (1921–2002) and her daughter Rosemarie Trollmann (1940–2024) (former inmates of Auschwitz-Birkenau), Hildegard Braun21Also known as Hilde Braun, Hildegard Bagge, Hildegard Falck. (1921–1976), former inmate of Wöbbelin, a satellite camp of the Neuengamme concentration camp, Austrian Romni Therezie Sarka (1929–1994), who survived Auschwitz-Birkenau, and the French Marie-Madeleine Vinstretin (1900–unknown) with her daughter Gervaise Schmitt-Vinstretin (born 1931), both survivors of Auschwitz-Birkenau and Ravensbrück concentration camps.
All these Roma and Sinti girls and women were granted asylum in Sweden despite the legal ban of 1914. This fact may also be explained by the solidarity with all victims of Nazism within Swedish society and the Swedish state that existed at the end of war. As Mikael Byström (born 1963) and Pär Frohnert (born 1956) have pointed out, the very restrictive policy towards refugees from German-occupied countries began to change as early as the end of 1942, when Sweden invited all Jewish refugees from occupied Norway.22Byström and Frohnert, “Introduction II,” 69–79. Sweden was also a destination point for the Roma and Resande refugees who escaped from there. Some of them were stopped by the Swedish border police on the grounds of their ethnicity and the discriminatory law of 1914, but some succeeded in entering Sweden.23Hanson, Vid gränsen, 248–249.
At the end of the war Sweden introduced a number of large-scale humanitarian rescue operations relating to Jews from Denmark and Hungary, the inmates of the Nazi death camps and children from Finland. Some small facts indicate that the turn from a restrictive refugee policy became possible because of knowledge about the Nazis’ racially motivated systematic destruction of Jewish and Roma communities in Europe. In 1944, the Swedish Immigration Office prepared a draft law forbidding racial hatred. The proposal included legal protection in Sweden for both groups: Jews and Roma.24Kvist Geverts, “A Study of Antisemitic,” 209–10.
The actual number of Roma survivors who came to Sweden at the end of war was most probably higher than existing records have so far suggested, and may have included some refugees whose ethnic identity was not documented. It also includes the genocide survivors who came to Sweden after the repeal of the legal ban on Roma entry in 1954. For example, in 1981, a group of Polish Roma came to Sweden as refugees after the pogrom in Oświęcim, the town that had been renamed Auschwitz under German occupation.25Kapralski, “The Evolution of Anti-Gypsyism,” 101–117. The psychologist and civil rights activist Ingrid Schiöler (born 1943) estimated that there were about 300 Roma survivors of the genocide alive in Sweden in the end of the 20th century.26Thor and Wagrell, Vittnesmål från Förintelsen, 51.
Aftermath
During the post-war period the Swedish government slowly changed its anti-Roma policies. This became possible not least as a result of the decline of racial biology in Sweden. The first national round table for the critical discussion of racial biology met in 1953. The academic meeting, titled ‘Race Conflicts and Race Stereotypes’, gathered at Gothenburg University. Uppsala historian Hugo Valentin (1888–1963), the well-known specialist in Swedish-Jewish history and one of the first authors of publications about the Nazi genocide, took part in the conference. The participants agreed that Roma were treated wrongly by scientists as ‘a threat to society’ and that any economic or social problems Roma had to face had no racial background.27Bordssamtal i rasfrågan, 26.
In March 2014 the Swedish Government established the ‘Commission against Antiziganism’ [Kommissionen mot Antiziganism], the first such official body in Europe. The Commission was established in conjunction with the submission of the White Paper on Abuses and Rights Violations against Roma in the 20th century.28Den mörka och okända historien. The Commission had an operational remit to directly counter antigypsyism, and a remit to produce proposals for measures against antigypsyism. It consisted of eight members (both officials and heads of Roma associations), one special advisor and chair and a reference group that includes the representatives of the national Roma minority of Sweden, journalists and scholars. The Commission’s role also involved participating in the public debate and contributing to various forms of educational and informational activities. In June 2016 the Commission delivered its final report to the Swedish Government. The Commission has also produced a version of the White Paper for schools.29Antiziganismen i Sverige.
Memory of the Genocide
As in many other countries, memory work and studies of the genocide of the Roma in Sweden were inspired by Holocaust research and Jewish commemoration efforts. In 1964, after a long-term struggle, Sofia Taikon received the compensation known as Entschädigung für NS-Unrecht from the Federal Republic of Germany for imprisonment in Nazi camps. Her story became a media event in Sweden with extensive press coverage, and this produced the first public knowledge about the Nazi persecution of the Roma.30Kotljarchuk, “Nazisternas folkmord på romer”. Katarina Taikon (1932–1995), a prominent Swedish-Roma civil right activist and writer was the first author to introduce Swedish readers to the history of the genocide of the Roma in her famous non-fiction book We Are the Roma.31Taikon, Zigenare är vi. She also collected the testimonies of genocide survivors who came to Sweden. In 1976, Katarina Taikon published the novel Katitzi Z-1234, one of the first children’s books in world literature about the Nazi genocide of the Roma.32Taikon, Katitzi Z-1234. In the book, a 12-year-old Swedish Roma girl called Katitzi wonders why Zoni (an adult woman living in the same caravan), is sitting and crying. Zoni tells a tragic story about how she was treated by the Nazis before her escape to Sweden, and how she survived in Auschwitz. She shows Katitzi the number Z-1234 tattooed on her left forearm and explains that all Roma were forcibly marked with such a tattoo by the Nazis on arrival in Auschwitz. Katitzi is so upset that she decides to do a Z-tattoo on her arm too.
In 1990 the first non-fiction book on the genocide of the Roma was published in Sweden. However, it was a translation from Norwegian.33Johansen, Zigenarnas holocaust.
Civil Rights Movement
Unlike Finland, Sweden did not participate in the First World Romani Congress in Orpington near London, United Kingdom, in 1971. In 1973, the Nordic Roma Council [Nordiska Zigenarrådet] was founded, to serve as an umbrella organisation for associations representing Roma and Resande groups in Scandinavia. Since that time the delegations from Sweden participate regularly in international Roma congresses and take part in the global memory work in commemoration of the Nazi genocide. Since the 2010s the Nazi genocide has become a standing topic for Swedish Roma journals, for example the journal É Romani Glinda and Dikko—a journal published by the Resande association.
Since the 1970s, Roma activists and some scholars have sought a specific term for the Nazi genocide: Swedish Romani and Resande associations decided to use the term ‘Roma Holocaust’ (den romska Förintelsen). Today, most Roma activists in Sweden—as in Germany or the Czech Republic—use the word ‘Holocaust’ as a term for the Nazi genocide of the Roma. They are convinced that other terms work as a tool for exclusion of the Roma victims from the memory of the unique Nazi crime of murdering men, women and children on racial grounds.
In 2013, the leading Roma activists in Sweden published an open letter to the government in which they protested against the official silence regarding the Nazi genocide of the Roma during the national commemoration of the victims of the Holocaust on 27 January.34Kotljarchuk, “The Holocaust of the European Roma”. In Sweden, the Roma associations now commemorate the victims of the Nazi genocides on two occasions: Holocaust Memorial Day in January and the European Roma Holocaust Memorial Day in August.
In 2021 the government of Sweden decided to establish a National Holocaust Museum in Stockholm. Today the Swedish Holocaust Museum is a major official actor in the memory politics and commemoration of the Nazi genocides of Jews and Roma with focus on the survivors who came to Sweden. The museum collects artefacts, documents and other material that illuminates the Jewish and Roma genocides in a historical context, including the testimonies of survivors with links to Sweden. It organises exhibitions, public seminars and study visits and produces films. Another principal agent of memory is the Living History Forum in Stockholm, which is a government agency tasked with serving as a national documentation, museum and educational centre to inform the Swedish schools and general public about the Holocaust and communism’s crimes against humanity. The Living History Forum has published many popular and didactic works about the Nazi genocide of the Roma including testimonies and stories of survivors who came to Sweden.35See as an example: Lundgren et al., Sofia Z-4515. Recently, the history of the Nazi genocide of the Roma has become a subject for journalistic projects36Hirsch and Nylander, Det tysta arvet. and literary fiction.37Axelsson, Jag heter inte Miriam.
Outlook
There is a significant body of research on the history of different Roma communities in Sweden as well as on how different forms of antigypsyism affected their lives, but how the survivors of the genocide of the Roma and their experiences are seen in a Swedish context is still understudied. Sweden belongs to the countries in which the studies of this genocide are in the first stages, especially compared to the well-developed research about the Jewish Holocaust. This is a typical situation for many Western countries.38Joskowicz, Rain of Ash, preface.
Oral testimonies are the main sources for the study of the genocide of the Roma as there is a dearth of official records. However, the Nazi genocide of the Roma was left undocumented in Sweden until the beginning of the 21st century, despite the presence of many survivors. Volha Bartash (born 1985) has described the post-war documentation of this genocide as a process of exclusion from the major narrative of the Nazi crimes. Without having academic recognition and public space, most testimonies of Roma in Sweden have existed only orally in private circles. Many post-war interviews and archival records on the Nazi genocide of the Roma that do exist were long forgotten or ignored in Sweden. This happened for many reasons. First, Sweden was not in the focus of international Holocaust and genocide research. Second, in Sweden itself there was relatively little knowledge about the existence of such material and relatively little interest in studying it within the academic community.
This overlooked the fact that the material available in Sweden is very rich. For example, in an interview with Swedish journalists from 1946 the survivor Hans Capellen (1903–1973), who was imprisoned in several concentration camps, described different groups of victims he met. When speaking about the Roma inmates at the concentration camp of Natzweiler-Struthof, he spoke of the deadly medical experiments carried out by a certain ‘Dr Hirta’.39Kotljarchuk, “Nazisternas folkmord”. Today, we know that this person was SS-Sturmbannführer Dr August Hirt (1898–1945), an anatomist who was head of the Department of Anatomy at the Reich University in Strasbourg.
The Polish Research Institute archive at Lund University Library holds a great collection of oral history interviews and other documents on the Nazi genocide of Polish Roma, collected in 1945 and 1946. The Research Institute was founded in 1945 to conduct in-depth interviews with the former prisoners and collect material that the survivors had brought with them from the camps to Sweden. The initiator of the documentation project was Dr Zygmunt Łakociński (1905–1987), university lecturer in Polish at Lund University. Most of this material recently became available online. These are just few examples of the great potential of early Swedish testimonies.
In the 2020s the study of the genocide of the Roma did become a subject for Swedish academic research. A large-scale research project on Sweden and the early testimonies to the Roma and Jewish genocides started in 2024 at Uppsala University.40Witnessing for the future. Holocaust, Sweden and Forgotten Early Testimonies funded by the Swedish Research Council under grant 2023-05936 (PI: Andrej Kotljarchuk).
The discussion of Roma and Resande identities and rights cannot be isolated from the memory of the Nazi genocide, and this makes the struggle over the past a reflexive landmark that organises the collective work of Sweden’s Roma and makes a cornerstone of their cultural and political mobilisation. For centuries the Roma communities of Sweden have been excluded from the nation-building process. The memory of the Nazi genocide and the actions of its survivors have the potential to change this situation, boosting the inclusion of the Roma minority into the majority society and its past into the grand narratives of Sweden’s history.
