Stockholm: First Stop in Sweden

Flo Requests Compassionate Leave to Visit Relatives

My Mother and Audie Murphy Ch. 110

Sweden maintained official neutrality in the war but made pragmatic concessions to Nazi Germany — exporting crucial materials and allowing troop transits to occupied Norway and Finland — while also expanding its military, sheltering thousands of Jewish and political refugees, training Norwegian resistance fighters, and sharing intelligence with the Allies. As the war turned, Sweden steadily curtailed cooperation and nearly ended trade with Germany by late 1944. Historians debate this legacy: some see pragmatic neutrality that preserved independence and enabled humanitarian acts; others criticize compromises that prioritized economic interests over moral responsibility.

Flo and I traveled to Sweden and Norway in 1979, and we visited all the Swedish relatives still living that Flo saw in 1946. We saw Flo’s mother Gerda’s birthplace, and the towns Flo had visited. From talking to Norwegians I got the feeling then that they had not yet forgiven the Swedes for cooperating with the Nazis during their five-year occupation of Norway. In 1979 there were still those, like my mother, who remembered the war. Perhaps the younger generations no longer hold a grudge.

Request for compassionate leave

“This is the best place I’ve been in all of Europe”

Flo’s Photos of Stockholm February 1946

Changing guards at the palace in a snowstorm

Guards at the palace at Midsommer 1979

Postcards of Stockholm

I’ll have the Smor, Brod & Varmrätt

Ch. 111: https://medium.com/@tradeswomn/visiting-swedish-relatives-5fa468c8f365