Sweden ends the German transit traffic

On 5 August 1943 the Swedish government announced that it had given Germany notice terminating the agreement on rail transit between occupied Norway and the Reich. This brought to an end the so-called leave traffic (Swedish permittenttrafiken), which for three years had been neutral Sweden’s most visible concession to Germany. The Swedes simply called these trains “the German trains” (tysktågen). According to Swedish calculations, some 2.1 million German soldiers had travelled on them since the summer of 1940 (the figure counts journeys, not individuals – many soldiers travelled several times), along with some 100,000 wagons of weapons, ammunition and supplies. The decision was taken when the tide of war was clearly turning, and it was the first step in Sweden’s gradual shift towards the Allies.

How the transit came about

Sweden declared its neutrality in September 1939, but on 9 April 1940 it found itself in a new situation: Germany occupied Denmark and attacked Norway. During the two months of the Norwegian campaign the government in Stockholm refused to allow troops and weapons through its territory for General Eduard Dietl’s besieged force at Narvik, though it did let through medical transports and food. The Norwegian King, who had rejected the German demands, was still fighting in the north of the country at the time.

After Norway’s capitulation in June 1940 the situation changed. Sweden was surrounded by the Reich and its conquests, France was collapsing and Britain was fighting alone for its survival. On 17 June the Swedish legation in Berlin was given to understand that a refusal might entail “measures of coercion”, presumably military ones. The coalition government of Per Albin Hansson, which included Social Democrats, Conservatives, Agrarians and Liberals, gave way unanimously and without asking the Riksdag for its consent. Hansson admitted in his diary and at cabinet meetings that Sweden was departing from strict neutrality. The non-party foreign minister, the diplomat Christian Günther, defended the decision on the grounds that, since the fighting in Norway had ended, the passage of soldiers over Swedish railways was no longer aid to a belligerent.

The first transports began running at the end of June 1940, and on 8 July an agreement was signed on the passage of soldiers travelling on leave from Norway to Germany and back. Formally it concerned unarmed men on leave, and the principle was to be that the numbers travelling in each direction balanced out, so that the German garrison in Norway would not grow thanks to the Swedish railways. The Swedish public learnt of the agreement only when the trains were already running and rumours had leaked into the press.

Three years of “German trains”

In practice the agreement was soon extended. The main route ran from the ferry port of Trelleborg across Sweden to the border station of Kornsjø and on to Oslo, while some trains went to Narvik. From the autumn of 1940 more and more trains crossed by the shorter and safer ferry route from Helsingør in Denmark to Helsingborg. Alongside the leave trains ran the so-called “horseshoe” trains (hästskotåg): from Trondheim via Östersund to Narvik – that is, from Norway to Norway across Swedish territory. These movements had nothing to do with leave; they were simply troop transfers. Swedish railways also carried wagons of weapons, ammunition, fuel and equipment, described as Wehrmacht property (Wehrmachtsgut); at its peak the German transit took up about a tenth of the capacity of the Swedish network.

The most far-reaching concession was the consent given on 25 June 1941 to the passage of the Engelbrecht Division – the fully armed 163rd Infantry Division, moved from Norway to Finland at the start of the war against the USSR. The government stipulated that this was a one-off concession and rejected further demands of the kind. The leave traffic, however, continued, and under its cover further shipments of equipment were carried.

The Swedes tried to maintain at least the appearance of control. The trains were escorted by railwaymen in railway police uniform and by Swedish soldiers, customs officers checked the luggage vans, and the numbers travelling north and south were compared week by week. There were incidents: drunken officers, German deserters jumping from the trains (Sweden treated them as political refugees), and finally disasters such as the explosion of an ammunition train at Krylbo station in July 1941. For Norwegians, and for many Swedes too, the “German trains” became a symbol of submissiveness.

The turning of the tide

From the autumn of 1942 criticism of the transit grew in Sweden. The German defeats at El Alamein and at Stalingrad, which ended with the surrender of the Sixth Army in February 1943, showed that the Reich was no longer invincible. The Swedish armed forces, expanded since 1940, were far stronger than at the start of the war. At the same time Allied pressure was growing. Britain and the United States controlled the so-called safe-conduct traffic – the voyages of ships which, with the consent of both sides, passed through the German blockade of the Skagerrak to Gothenburg with oil, grain and raw materials. In 1942–1943 the Allies increasingly linked trade questions, including fuel deliveries and a reduction of Swedish exports of ball bearings to the Reich, to an end to the German transit.

For a long time Prime Minister Hansson was unwilling to terminate the agreement, whether under Allied pressure or of his own accord. The advocates of a change of course nevertheless prevailed, among them Günther himself, who in 1940–1941 had been regarded as the champion of concessions to Germany but in 1943 became one of the chief architects of the shift. The Swedish authorities began to introduce technical restrictions on the traffic and refused additional trains and shipments of heavy equipment. In the summer of 1943, after the Allied landing in Sicily, the failure of the German offensive at Kursk and the fall of Mussolini, the decision ripened. The government took care to make it look like an independent Swedish step rather than a concession to the Allies – although in fact it was linked to trade negotiations with London and Washington.

Termination of the agreement

The Swedish Foreign Ministry informed the German legation in writing that the agreement was being terminated, and on 5 August 1943 the government made this public. The traffic was wound down gradually: troop transports to Norway were halted the same day, the carriage of war material ended on 15 August, and the last transports of German military personnel ran on 20 August. From then on only hospital trains carrying wounded, German mail vans and goods other than military equipment could still pass through Sweden; individual soldiers and Wehrmacht employees could travel on ordinary trains to a limited extent, but the special military transports came to an end.

Sweden therefore stopped letting German troops and war material through not on 5 August itself but over the following two weeks: the decision was announced on 5 August, and the last military transports ran on 20 August. The hospital and mail transit continued for a long time afterwards.

The Germans accepted the decision without retaliation. Plans for an attack on Sweden had indeed been considered in Berlin earlier, but the Wehrmacht no longer had the strength for it, and the Reich needed Swedish iron ore and ball bearings. The leave traffic was moved to the sea: ships ran between Oslo and the Danish ports of Copenhagen, Aarhus and Aalborg. The route was longer and more exposed to attack by British aircraft and submarines, and according to Norwegian railwaymen the halt to transit through Sweden clogged the whole leave system of the Norwegian garrison for a time.

Its place in the war

The end of the transit marked a clear turning point in Sweden’s wartime policy. Until 1943 Sweden had manoeuvred under pressure from Germany, which dominated all its surroundings; from the second half of 1943 it refused Berlin ever more boldly and drew closer to the Allies. In the autumn of 1943 it signed a new trade agreement with Britain and the USA and cut its exports of ball bearings to the Reich, and on its territory thousands of Norwegian and Danish refugees were trained, under cover of being police units, to return to their countries as soldiers in the future. Sweden also took in refugees from neighbouring countries – in the autumn of 1943 some 7,000 Danish Jews saved from deportation found shelter there.

The legacy of the “German trains” remains one of the most contentious subjects in Swedish history. Critics, including present-day historians, see them as a flagrant breach of the principles of neutrality laid down in the Hague Conventions and as direct support for the occupation of Norway. Defenders of the Hansson government argued that the concessions of 1940–1941 had kept the country out of the war and that their withdrawal at the right moment was a considered policy. The fact remains that Sweden ended the transit only when doing so was no longer dangerous for it – and that for three years the Swedish railways were part of the German war machine in northern Europe.