”J” som i justering: En omvärdering av Sveriges påstådda medverkan till J-passens tillkomst 1938

Abstract

”J” as in Judication: A re-evaluation of Sweden’s part in the introduction of Germany’s J passports in 1938

Ever since Hans Lindberg’s 1973 book about Sweden’s refugee policy in the late 1930s, the consensus among Swedish historians has been that the Swedish Foreign Ministry (UD) lobbied Germany to introduce the regulation (Verordnung über Reisepässe von Juden or VüRvJ) that put a large red J in Jewish passports from October 1938. UD’s purported demand has been portrayed as essentially the result of antisemitism towards Jewish refugees. In this article I take a long-overdue critical look at the accepted view. I test the hypothesis that UD caused VüRvJ – adding previously unused sources from Swedish, German, and Swiss archives – and show that there simply is no evidence to support it. The consensus, I argue, is based on sloppy handling of sources, anachronistic reasoning (based on hindsight knowledge of the Holocaust), flawed methodology (not distinguishing between correlation and causality, let alone how to prove or falsify the latter), chronological mistakes, inadequate source criticism, and even mistranslations of German documents (as in the case of the recent claims that Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler was personally engaged in the UD negotiations). The German sources and international scholarship alike point to Switzerland as the only party with which VüRvJ was negotiated.

I also adduce a range of facts that have hitherto been unknown or overlooked. The marking of Jewish passports was suggested by the head of the Gestapo and SD, Reinhard Heydrich, as early as September 1935 if not before. Moreover, by the summer of 1938 a ”J” was already printed on Jewish national identity cards (Kennkarten), proving that such a marking was Nazi policy before UD first contacted the Germans about the passport issue. A very different picture emerges when UD’s actions are interpreted in their historical context. UD was trying to balance several difficult problems at once and were in a catch-22 because of the Nazi policy towards the Jews. UD did not want to aid the Nazis’ forced deportation of German citizens and hoped that the Refugee Committee set up in London after the Évian Conference in mid-1938 would solve the refugee crisis in the long term. But by denying entry to many Jews seeking refuge in Sweden from the Third Reich, the Swedish authorities inadvertently and unintentionally put Jewish lives at risk.