Starania szwedzkiej dyplomacji o uwolnienie „warszawskich Szwedów” (1942–1944)
Efforts of Swedish Diplomacy to Secure the Release of the “Warsaw Swedes” (1942–1944)

Summary/Abstract: In July 1942, the Gestapo arrested several Swedish industrialists in Warsaw on charges of espionage and collaboration with the Polish resistance. A year later, four of them were sentenced to death in Berlin, but after King Gustav V of Sweden appealed for clemency, Adolf Hitler commuted the sentences to imprisonment. Following secret high-level negotiations between Swedish and German authorities, the Swedes were released – most likely in exchange for the export of Swedish ball bearings to the German army. The Poles involved in the case, however, were brutally interrogated and in most cases sentenced to imprisonment, deported to concentration camps, or executed. The article discusses previously unknown materials from the archives of the German Foreign Ministry (Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amtes) in Berlin, which shed light on the behind-the-scenes dynamics of the affair – the rivalry between Joachim von Ribbentrop’s Foreign Ministry and Heinrich Himmler’s Gestapo and SS, as well as the secret political maneuvers carried out away from public and media scrutiny in both Sweden and Germany.

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