Abstract: The interest in the Holocaust – Nazi Germany's concentrated attempt to exterminate European Jewry – has become increasingly noticeable in the Scandinavian countries during the last decades, with a growing number not only of dissertations, monographs and other publications, but also public debates and controversies relating to this event. This new upsurge of interest in the Holocaust reflects the dynamics and the contested nature of collective memories of wartime Scandinavia more broadly. This article highlights, broadly speaking, the development of Holocaust historiography in Scandinavia; the changing perspectives, interpretations, debates and focus from the immediate post-war years to the present day. It argues that, despite the fact that the Holocaust was truly a European-wide phenomenon transcending national borders, Holocaust studies have mainly been produced as nation-centred histories. Only with the end of the Cold War and with a paradigmatic shift from ‘the event’ to ‘the memory’ has a new form of Holocaust remembrance begun, ‘the cosmopolitanization of Holocaust remembrance’, which transcends borders and makes memory cultures coincide. In Scandinavian historical cultures and historiography, then, the 1990s marks the starting point of a process by which Holocaust remembrance has become officially embedded into European memory.
Abstract: Since the end of the Cold War, most European nations – including those in Eastern Europe – have reassessed their role in the Holocaust. Although the Finnish scholarly community, as well as the wider public, is now beginning to participate in this process, Finland has been one of the last countries in Europe to recognize that it cannot assume a total immunity or innocence in this Europe-wide event. This article examines the ways in which the Holocaust has entered Finnish historiography over the last decades. Holmila and Silvennoinen's argument is two-fold. First, they hold that there are many contextual matters, such as the absence of visible anti-Semitism, which have for a long time worked as a sufficient barrier to keep Finland disconnected from the Holocaust. Second, they argue that there are important theoretical and methodological underpinnings, especially the so-called ‘separate war thesis’, which has been utilized as a convenient, if no longer tenable, explanation that Finland was very different from all other Axis nations. They also seek to point out the directions in which the Finnish scholarly community is now going in its search for a more nuanced approach to the Holocaust.
Abstract: Seven-hundred-and-seventy-two Jews were deported from Norway during World War II, and Norway was de facto the only Scandinavian country incorporated in the Nazi Final Solution. Holocaust discourse in Norway has concentrated on only a few, but vital, topics: the awareness of the Final Solution among Norwegian perpetrators, the ‘image’ of the perpetrator, the role of the Norwegian police, and, finally, to what extent the Jews were offered help by the organized resistance.
The views on these topics have changed considerably in the years since 1945, both in public discourse and in academic research. In the public discourse, the topics have regularly re-emerged, from the early 1960s until today. Academic works, however, appeared late; not until the 1980s. From the mid-1990s, the interest in Holocaust-related topics has become far more present, resulting in more academic, as well as public, interest.
Abstract: This article deals with a subject that has been sensitive in the Jewish community in Sweden since the time of the Holocaust, namely the widespread image of the Stockholm Jewish Community as being negative towards letting Jewish refugees find a safe haven in Sweden during the Nazi persecution and mass murder. This image has previously been explained by the alleged ineffectivity of the Stockholm Jewish Community to aid the refugees and Swedish Jewry's failure to integrate them into the community. The present article, however, shows that this image was also a result of political differences between Jewish organizations, groups, and individuals, internationally as well as in Sweden. It was also due to an exaggerated belief in, and misconception of, the influence of the Swedish Jews on the Swedish administration of refugee aid, and resulted in personal feuds in which this negative image was accentuated. Furthermore, the image of the reluctant Swedish Jews has been reproduced and used by Swedish officials to avoid taking responsibility for the country's previous restrictive policy towards Jewish refugees. These accusations have cross-fertilized with the allegations from the inter-Jewish debate, further cementing the negative image of the Stockholm Jewish Community's responses to the Holocaust and the preceding persecutions.
