Nazism in Sweden

Nazism in Sweden has been more or less fragmented and unable to form a mass movement since its beginning in the early 1920s.^[1] Several hundred parties, groups, and associations existed from the movement's founding through the present.^[2] At most, purely Nazi parties in Sweden have collected around 27,000 votes in democratic parliamentary elections. The high point came in the municipal elections of 1934 when the Nazi parties were victorious in over one hundred electoral contests.^[3] As early as January 22, 1932, the Swedish Nazis had their first public meeting with Birger Furugård addressing an audience of 6000 at the Haymarket in Stockholm.^[4]

Like their German counterparts, the Swedish Nazis were strongly anti-semitic and as early as May, 1945 became early adopters of Holocaust denial.^[5] The Swedish Nazi groups persisted after the war until they were officially dissolved in 1950. During this post-war period, they were more or less completely inactive politically. In 1956, a new Swedish Nazi party, the Nordic Reich Party (NRP), was formed by Göran Assar Oredsson and Vera Oredsson (previously married to Nazi leader Sven-Olov Lindholm). This party brought together the heritage of the older Nazi generations in the 1980s when Swedish neo-Nazism began growing stronger, and they managed to gather some small groups of the new generation of Nazi skinheads. A Swedish white supremacist movement arose during this period, especially among some former criminal motorcycle gang members and younger white power skinhead youths.

Particularly in the 1990s, there was a plethora of neo-Nazi organizations, most infamous being the militant network Vitt Ariskt Motstånd ("VAM") which translates to White Aryan Resistance but was not associated with the US organization bearing the same name. VAM promoted the idea about a race war and gathered young skinheads and neo-Nazi activists in several cities, and their members committed several serious crimes, including arsons, armed bank robberies, weapons and arms thefts against desolate Swedish army and police headquarters, and series of brutal assaults and beatings. Other groups such as the Riksfronten and the party National Socialist Front (NSF) was also founded.

Similar to the movement during WWII, there was tendencies toward fragmentation, disagreements and infighting, which accelerated after the Malexander murders, a 1999 bank robbery and murder of two policemen by a group of militant neo-nazi criminals whose aim was to form a revolutionary underground Nazi organization. It also evolved as a variety of explicitly racist organizations which drew from other sources. The Swedish Resistance Movement was also formed by former VAM leaders. Short-term attempts to create an umbrella organization were discontinued after some time. In the 2000s, the National Socialist Front remained the largest Swedish Nazi organization, gaining around 1400 votes in the parliamentary elections of 2006. It was officially shut down in November 2008, and replaced by (or renamed to) the Party of the Swedes. The largest demonstrations was the annual "Salem march" (Salemmarschen) every December from 2001 to 2011. The first demonstrations attracted 2000 participants, but this number dwindled for each year. The magazine Expo, co-founded by Stieg Larsson, campaigns against "modern" Swedish Nazism and right-wing extremism.