Judefrågan. Allmänt. Hjälp åt flyktingar.

The collection was created by the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs and consists of documents (originals, and contemporary copies and transcripts) connected to the situation for the Jews in Europe during the Nazi era and the immediate post-war years. It includes reports from Swedish diplomats in countries about the policies on Jewish refugees of different countries, and also reports from countries under Nazi rule about the situation for the Jewish population, as well as newspaper clippings on the same subjects.

Some of the Swedish diplomatic correspondence includes antisemitic statements and language.

The collection also includes statistics from the National Board of Health and Welfare on the number of Jewish refugees with Swedish residence and working permits in 1933. The collection includes correspondence and reports concerning the Swedish representation in the Government’s Body of the League of Nations’ High Commission for Refugees Coming from Germany (Jews and Others). The correspondence between the Swedish representative, Karl Ivan Westman, and the Swedish Minister for Foreign Affairs, Rickard Sandler, reveals that Westman received the instruction to make no binding commitments on Sweden’s part on behalf of Jewish refugees. However, the collection also contains correspondence, between Swedish diplomats and German officials, and between Swedish diplomats and the Ministry for Foreign Affairs, that shed light on the responses to the Holocaust by Swedish diplomats and their and Swedish Jews’ efforts to help Jews in Norway and other countries under German control and try find out the destinations of deportations. There is also a report concerning the evacuation of Swedish Jews from countries under German control following the German declaration of 22 January 1943 according to which Jewish citizens of foreign countries would be subjugated to the same treatment as the local Jewish populations. ¶ There is also correspondence between Ministry officials such as Gösta Engzell in Stockholm and Arvid Richert at the Swedish legation in Berlin with instructions regarding refugee aid and attempts to rescue Jews in Europe, and correspondence relating to efforts of family members in Sweden who tried to obtain permission to send food packages to their relatives in German concentration camps. Swedish diplomat Göran von Otter’s report of 1945 (Göran von Otter to Karl Lagerfelt, 23 July 1945) concerning his meeting with SS officer Kurt Gerstein on a night train between Berlin and Warsaw in 1942 when Gerstein informed von Otter about the use of gas in the mass murdering of Jews in extermination camps is in dossier HP: 1051. In another dossier (HP: 1049) Gösta Engzell relates a meeting of 7 September 1942, with Latvia Jewish refugee Gilel Storch, who later became a Swedish representative of the WJC. Storch told Engzell about the shooting and gassing of Jews in Riga.

The part of the collection entitled Hjälp åt flyktingar has partly been transferred to volume P 40 G in the archive.

The collection is structured thematically, and chronologically within the two themes (General and Relief work).