The Engelbrecht Division’s transit through Sweden

On 25 June 1941, after three days of deliberations that later came to be known in Sweden as the Midsummer Crisis (Swedish: midsommarkrisen), the government in Stockholm agreed to let the fully armed German 163rd Infantry Division travel by rail across its territory from occupied Norway to Finland. After its commander, Generalleutnant Erwin Engelbrecht, it was called the Engelbrecht Division. That same evening the divisional staff, with the general at its head, arrived at the border station of Charlottenberg, and by 12 July the whole formation – some 14,700 men with their artillery and supply trains – had been carried through Sweden. The Swedish government stipulated that this was a one-off consent. It nevertheless remained the most serious concession Sweden made to Germany in the entire war, and it is still one of the most debated episodes in the country’s history.

Neutrality with concessions

Sweden declared its neutrality in September 1939, and in December a government of national unity was formed in Stockholm under the Social Democrat Per Albin Hansson, in which all parties except the Communists were represented. The foreign ministry went to Christian Günther, a career diplomat with no party backing. Even during the Winter War Sweden had not been fully impartial: it did not declare neutrality in the Finnish–Soviet conflict but described itself as a “non-belligerent”, sent arms to the Finns and allowed volunteers to go, in keeping with the Scandinavian states’ stance on the Winter War. It did, however, refuse to let an Allied corps cross its territory, and earlier, in May 1939, together with Norway and Finland, it had rejected a German offer of a non-aggression pact.

The country’s position changed radically on 9 April 1940, when Germany invaded Denmark and Norway. Sweden found itself encircled by Germany, cut off from trade with the West and dependent on Berlin’s goodwill. During the fighting for Narvik it refused passage to German weapons and soldiers, although it allowed a few trains carrying supposed medical aid which – as it later turned out – carried mainly soldiers. After the capitulation of Norway it gave way. In June 1940 it permitted German soldiers to be carried from Trondheim to Narvik on Swedish rails, and on 8 July it signed an agreement with Germany on the so-called leave traffic (Swedish: permittenttrafiken). Formally this concerned unarmed soldiers travelling on leave from Norway to Germany and back; in practice the Swedish railways also carried replacements and military equipment. According to Swedish calculations, by August 1943, when the traffic was stopped, some 2.1 million German soldiers and about 100,000 wagons of weapons and supplies had travelled on them. The government took the decision unanimously, without consulting the Riksdag, and the public was informed only when news of the trains began to leak into the press.

By the spring of 1941 it was known in Stockholm that Germany was preparing for war with the Soviet Union and that Finland would stand at its side. The Commander-in-Chief, General Olof Thörnell, warned the government that a rigid adherence to neutrality might provoke Germany, and Günther gave German diplomats to understand that in the event of war with the USSR Berlin could count on a more “understanding” attitude from Sweden. As early as Directive No. 21 of December 1940, Adolf Hitler had noted that Sweden could be expected to make its railways and roads available for the concentration of the northern group of forces at the latest when the operation began. According to Swedish researchers, at the beginning of June 1941 German planners included in their preparations for the attack on the USSR the transfer of one division from Norway to Finland through Sweden, assuming that Stockholm would agree.

German demands

On Sunday 22 June 1941, a few hours after the German invasion began, the Swedish authorities learned of the war in the East. At about eight in the morning the Reich Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, received the Swedish envoy in Berlin, and half an hour later the German envoy, Prince Victor zu Wied, and Karl Schnurre, an emissary of the Auswärtiges Amt who had been negotiating transit matters with the Swedes since 1940, called on Günther in Stockholm. They presented a list of eight wishes of the Reich. The most important concerned the transport of one division with full arms and equipment by Swedish railways from southern Norway to Finland. The others concerned, among other things, overflights of Sweden by German aircraft, the movement of German warships and merchant ships in Swedish territorial waters, and the use of Swedish communications. Schnurre made it clear that a refusal would be regarded in Berlin not merely as an unfriendly act but as something far more serious. In the evening the Finnish envoy, Jarl Wasastjerna, passed on a similar list of wishes from the government in Helsinki and gave assurances that Finland, too, was asking for the division to be let through.

The division in question was well known in Scandinavia. It had been formed in Brandenburg in the autumn of 1939, and in April 1940 its units landed in Norway. Engelbrecht himself had sailed with his staff aboard the cruiser Blücher, which was sunk in the Drøbak Narrows, and had to save himself by swimming. Since the end of the campaign the division had been on occupation duty in southern Norway. Now it was to join the Finnish army as a reserve on the Karelian axis. The sea route across the Baltic was long and dangerous, and there was no rail link through northern Norway, so passage through Sweden was the shortest and surest solution.

Three days of deliberation

The demands reached the Swedes at the worst possible moment: the Midsummer holiday was beginning, celebrated in 1941 on 23 and 24 June, and many ministers had left the capital. Günther was in favour of consent from the outset. Before noon on 22 June he spoke with King Gustaf V, and immediately afterwards Hansson called on the monarch. At a preliminary meeting of the members of the government who were still in Stockholm, the prime minister reported this conversation in a way that decided the subsequent course of events: according to him, the 83-year-old king had declared that he would not be party to a refusal to Finland and Germany, which the prime minister presented as a hint of abdication. Günther promised Schnurre an answer by Thursday 26 June. The German considered this too far off, so the minister undertook to speed matters up.

On 23 June the government met in full but failed to reach agreement. In the afternoon the Foreign Affairs Council (utrikesnämnden), made up of representatives of all the groups in the Riksdag and chaired by the monarch, convened. Günther again argued for consent; Hansson stated that the government was not unanimous and was waiting for the position of the parliamentary groups. A majority of the council, eleven to four, came out in favour of accepting the demands. Finally the king announced that he shared the foreign minister’s view, and the Crown Prince, Gustaf Adolf, sided with his father.

The matter was decided on 24 June in the parliamentary groups. The non-socialist parties – the Conservatives, the Farmers’ League (Bondeförbundet) and the Liberals – were in favour of consent. The real dispute took place in the Swedish Social Democratic Workers’ Party, which had a majority in both chambers of the Riksdag. The chief opponent of letting the division through was the finance minister, Ernst Wigforss, who argued that it meant taking sides in the war. In a first vote the Social Democratic group decided, by 159 votes to 2, to recommend that the other parties reject the German request. Hansson, however, called a second vote: what to do if the non-socialists did not give way. This time 72 deputies held that in that case consent would have to be given, while 59 wanted to refuse whatever happened. A refusal threatened the break-up of the government of national unity, a constitutional crisis over the king and – so it was feared – a conflict with Germany, while the military and some politicians stressed that a refusal would be badly received in Finland. In the evening the government decided to accept the demand.

On the morning of 25 June the cabinet agreed on a statement, which was presented to secret sessions of both chambers of the Riksdag. The chambers backed the government. At 3.30 p.m., at a meeting of the Council of State attended by the king, the decision was given legal form: Sweden consented to the transit of the division, and consideration of the other German wishes was postponed. In the afternoon the king received Prince zu Wied, and Günther received Schnurre. Both stressed that the consent applied to a single case and could not be treated as a precedent or as a political declaration. That same day Soviet aircraft bombed Finnish towns, and the government in Helsinki concluded that the country was at war with the USSR. This circumstance allowed Swedish politicians to present the passage of the division as help for an attacked neighbour rather than for Germany.

Trains to the north

The transport was organised at lightning speed, because talks between railwaymen and German transport officers had been going on since 23 June. Swedish State Railways brought some 200 wagons to the border, and the trains entered Sweden via Charlottenberg and Kornsjø. From there the route ran through Laxå, Hallsberg, Krylbo, Ånge, Vännäs and Boden to Haparanda on the border river Torne, from where the soldiers crossed into Finnish Tornio. Engelbrecht’s staff arrived at Charlottenberg on 25 June a few minutes before 11 p.m. According to Swedish studies, about 105 trains were needed, and the last units left Sweden on 12 July.

Unlike the leave traffic, the passage was closely guarded by the Swedish army. According to some Swedish authors, as many as 15,000 soldiers were deployed for the purpose, guarding stations, bridges and tracks. This time there was no fiction of “men on leave”: a complete tactical formation with weapons, ammunition and guns was travelling through a neutral country. The government announced its decision in a communiqué stressing its exceptional character and its connection with Finland’s situation.

On arrival in Finland the division was placed under Finnish command and in July went into action in Karelia by Lake Ladoga, then took part in the advance towards the Svir river. In the winter of 1941/1942 it was moved to Lapland, to the sector facing Kandalaksha, where as part of the German forces in Finland it fought in positional warfare until 1944.

Did the king threaten to abdicate?

Controversies grew up around the crisis from the start, and the most important concerns the role of Gustaf V. Since 1914 the monarch had not openly interfered in government policy, but in June 1941 he made no secret of favouring consent. German diplomatic documents that fell into Allied hands after the war include a telegram that Prince zu Wied sent to Berlin on 25 June marked “most urgent and strictly secret”. In it the envoy reported that the king had personally informed him of the consent to the transit, had spoken of it with joy, had admitted that he had been through several anxious days and had committed himself heavily to the matter, and had added in confidence that he had felt it necessary to go so far as to mention abdication.

When the affair came to light in 1946–1947, it was read in Sweden as proof of the king’s personal responsibility for the policy of yielding to the Reich. In January 1947 Gustaf V himself assured Hansson’s successor as prime minister, Tage Erlander, that he had not sought the government’s resignation and had not threatened to abdicate. Erlander’s diaries, for their part, show that only then did he learn how large a role Hansson himself had played in the whole affair. Some historians believe that the prime minister, who was himself inclined to make the concession, deliberately presented the monarch’s vague words as a threat of abdication in order to break the resistance within his own party. The Swedish historian Carl-Gustaf Scott went further in a much-discussed article of 2002: he argued that there had been no real crisis at all, because Hansson had correctly foreseen the positions of all sides and steered the matter so that the Social Democrats could protest without stopping the trains. In his view the dramatic story of a crisis and royal blackmail was cemented after the war to protect the political legacy of Hansson and his party. The question of whether Gustaf V was really prepared to abdicate remains unresolved.

Its place in the war

Letting the Engelbrecht Division through was Sweden’s most far-reaching concession to the Reich and also the last one on such a scale. When in July the Germans submitted further requests to move troops, this time from Trelleborg to Tornio, the government in Stockholm refused, and in the autumn of 1941 it also rejected other demands that would have violated its neutrality. The traffic of “men on leave” continued, however, as did exports of Swedish iron ore to Germany. Only when, after the defeats at El Alamein and Stalingrad, it became clear that Germany would not win the war, and pressure from Britain and the United States intensified, did Sweden terminate the transit agreement. The movement of German soldiers across its territory ceased in August 1943.

For Finland the passage of the division confirmed that in the war it called the Continuation War it could count at least on the benevolent attitude of its western neighbour. For Britain and the Soviet Union it was proof that Swedish neutrality was bending under German pressure, and Winston Churchill reproached the Swedes for closing their eyes, for the sake of their own advantage, to the great moral issues of the war. The Swedes themselves defended their record with the argument that the concessions of 1940–1941 had saved the country from the fate of Denmark and Norway.

The argument over what that price was worth continues in Sweden to this day. The transit of an armed division of one of the belligerents was, as Carl-Gustaf Scott wrote, an open breach of the international law on the duties of neutral states laid down in the Hague Conventions, and it remains a “black stain” on Swedish history. Defenders of the decision point out that Finland was by then already at war with the USSR, and that during the Winter War Sweden had likewise behaved not as a neutral but as a “non-belligerent” state. In Swedish memory the Midsummer Crisis became a symbol of the country’s whole wartime policy: pragmatic, successful in keeping the country out of the war, but bought at the price of concessions to Hitler of which many Swedes were ashamed after 1945.