To be fair, they didn’t have a bone in the war. And during the pre-war years of Hitler’s power (1933 to 1939), some 3,000 Jews migrated to Sweden to escape Nazi persecution. Because Sweden was neutral during World War Two, it helped facilitate the rescue of relatively many Jews from Norway and Denmark: in 1942, 900 Norwegian Jews were given asylum from Nazi persecution in their home country, and, most importantly of all, almost the entire Danish Jewish community, some 8,000 people, was transported to Sweden in October 1943 (see Rescue of the Danish Jews). Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg also saved thousands of Hungarian Jews in Budapest by providing them with “protective passports”.
#6. Good historical overview comment on how the Swedes helped save the lives of many European Jews fleeing the Nazis.
Re Sweden dealing with both sides, they had no choice re Germany, who threated to invade and take them over if they didn’t trade with Germany and let German troops go thru their country. Sweden had no army to speak of and it would have been a slaughter as the Poles suffered resisting the German might.
Switzerland did something similar in that it dealt with all countries in its officially recognized capacity as a NEUTRAL non-combatant and Humanitarian country (Sweden also had that type of status).
Much of European WW2 espionage was based in Switzerland as well as the trade business in watches-clock mechanisms, etc. which were used for time-delayed fuses in ammunition and bombs.
The caught-in-the-middle positions of both Sweden and Switzerland will be debated by historians for many more decades but when viewed from an outside perspective, officially they had no choice except to play the game.
One thing Germany did NOT want to do was to invade Switzerland where every male had a rifle/ammo, the whole country was honeycombed with caves, and roads would have been easily blown up.
Several members of my synagogue were given asylum in Switzerland. A few were turned back at the border but survived with the help of friendly Austrians. Others were held in “camps” in Vichy France or escaped the Nazis in Germany only to be turned back at the Russian borders by the Soviets (they went into the forests to hide and/or fight as partisans. Others were killed in the camps).
War is very complicated but so is the history of what really went on. After 50 years I’m still writing about what went on in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos as new documents and memoirs emerge, and as new “views” of events were posulated.
Even being there, as I was as a journalist, only gives one a segment of time/events perspectives though a few new books by Vietnam Veterans for Factual History (VVFH.org - the Yellow Yearbooks, 1963-75), provide many often unknown or unread on-the-site memoirs from those who served in every capacity from ground pounders/soldiers to naval personnel, Air Force vets, POWs, US civilian aid and foreign service officers, provincial advisors, presidential advisors, and from researchers who are dedicated to finding out/writing about the truth of the war (and it isn’t Ken Burns’ slanted, anti-American PBS crap).