Former Swedish neo-Nazis become Holocaust commemorators

‘I can no longer deny it happened, or salute what happened,’ says a former neo-Nazi teenager after a visit to Auschwitz as part of a Swedish initiative to confront troubled youths with their distorted anti-Semitic views.

They used to paint swastika graffiti, get into street fights with immigrants, and distribute anti-Semitic propaganda. But after studying the cases of a few of the 6 million Jews killed by the Nazis during World War II, some former Swedish neo-Nazi teenagers came to the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial to underline their new attitudes.

The kids, some of whom were active members of neo-Nazi groups, came to the memorial on Monday to present the findings of their research into the stories of 16 Holocaust victims from their hometown of Karlstad, and to add pages of testimony for the previously unknown dead. The project, named Combatting Social Unrest, is the initiative of Swedish Holocaust educator Christer Mattsson. The concept is to take troubled youths off the street, confront their prejudices and ignorance and slowly convert them into Holocaust educators themselves.

”The first time I took a neo-Nazi to Auschwitz, I didn’t know what to expect,” he said. ”But after seeing it, after seeing where Jews used to live, he said: ”I can no longer deny it happened, or salute what happened.”

The journey has been an arduous one. Of the 100 teenagers in his program, Mattsson said about five to eight are ”hard-core neo-Nazis” - some completely reformed, others not. Those, some sporting Nazi tattoos, did not make the trip to Israel, either for fear of offending survivors or to remain anonymous for their own safety. The only former active member who arrived, 17-year-old Joar, refused to be photographed and would be identified only by his first name for fear of retribution from his former friends.

The shy, blond Joar hid behind a baseball cap and a large pair of sunglasses. He would only say that he used to have ”different opinions.” ”I didn’t know so much. I’ve learned a lot about the Holocaust,” he said, through a translator. ”I have a different perspective on life now.”

‘In our own backyard’

Sweden remained neutral during World War II. It had a very small Jewish population and closed its gates to refugees. That policy began to change as the horrors of the Holocaust became apparent and Sweden began to lean toward the allies. In 1944, Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg began handing out papers to save thousands of Hungarian Jews from the Nazi death camps. After the war, some 27,000 survivors arrived in Sweden.

In Karlstad, 16 Jewish women died shortly afterward, most from illness, and were buried in a Jewish cemetery. Mattsson took his students there to ask them if they still believed the Holocaust to be a myth. They, in turn, decided to investigate the women’s stories. The result is a 100-page book that details their stories.

On Monday, they presented their findings to Israel’s official Holocaust museum and memorial. Yad Vashem spokeswoman Estee Yaari said it probably marked the first time it had ever dealt directly with neo-Nazis.

The teenagers toured the museum and met with Mirjam Akavia, a Holocaust survivor who fled to Sweden after the war. She vividly described her childhood and how she was yanked out of school and sent to the camps, where only she and sister emerged while the rest of her family perished.

”When I was 12, it was the end of my beautiful childhood. It was the end of everything,” she said.

The Swedish teenagers were not much older when they encountered their own local brand of anti-Semitism.

”The headmaster of my former school, who is here today, was beaten up by people I knew three years ago,” said 17-year-old Jennifer Lindstrom, who said she joined Mattsson’s group so she could have the tools to battle her classmates’ rhetoric and actions.

”Maybe because I have been studying about the Holocaust and Nazism, maybe because I have been to Auschwitz and the empty shtetels (Jewish villages) in Poland or maybe because I got sick and fed up with racism and neo-Nazis - I could not remain silent.”

Lindstrom’s principal was assaulted because he tried to keep the neo-Nazi students out of his school. The two other teenagers in the group were Johanna Karlsson and Deken Izat, a Kurdish immigrant to Sweden who used to belong to a rival gang that battled with Joar’s.

Lindstrom said that finding out what happened in her own backyard proved to be the best way for her and her new friends to counter racism.

”It is slightly unreal to be here today and handing over material that we have worked with for so long, knowing that it will be here at Yad Vashem for always,” Lindstrom said.

YnetNews

Eleven-nation panel of nazi archive meets

The governing commission of a long-closed Nazi archive convened Monday to decide when and how to make its vast treasure of wartime documents accessible for the first time to historians.

The two-day annual meeting of the 11-nation commission, held at a 15th-century cloister in central Amsterdam, will cap a yearlong process to pry open the files of the International Tracing Service.

With the horror of the Holocaust still fresh, the files were sealed under a 1955 treaty for fear that unrestricted access to personal histories would violate the memory of the dead and the reputations of the survivors. They also were subject to German privacy laws. The files, maintained in Bad Arolsen, Germany, were used by the Red Cross mainly to trace missing people and later to validate restitution claims.

After years of pressure from survivor organizations, the commission voted last year to distribute digitally scanned copies of the documents to member states for research purposes.

The decision was cheered by survivors and relatives as potentially breaking the bottleneck in responding to their queries for information about Nazi persecutions. But it required ratification by all 11 nations - a process taking longer than anticipated. Seven countries have endorsed the treaty amendments - the United States, Israel, Poland, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands and Britain. Ratification is still pending by Luxembourg, Greece, Italy and France.

The commission was considering a proposal to begin transferring scanned documents to research institutions under embargo until the ratification is complete, said a statement by the archive's management. Even then, access to the records will be limited under the terms of last year's agreement, which stipulated a single copy would be made available to each member state for use "on the premises of an appropriate archival repository."

Each government was expected to take into account "the sensitivity of certain information" the files may contain, the agreement said.

Several survivor organizations in the United States reportedly were objecting to the restricted access, saying the files should be available on the Internet and open to everyone. Only the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem have requested copies.

Reto Meister, the archive's director, said all documents relating to concentration camp internment and deportations have been scanned and indexed - about two-thirds of the estimated 30 million to 50 million pages. The archive also has a collection of postwar files on millions of displaced persons.

The documents "offer a unique window into that black chapter of recent history," he said in a statement. "Behind each record is a personal story that puts a face on the suffering caused by Nazi persecution."

Associated Press