After Nazism: Strange but true

 

"Renegater: Nils Flyg och Sven Olov Lindholm i gränslandet mellan kommunism och nazism" is a Swedish book published in 2019. The author is the historian Johan Stenfeldt. The book deals with two extremely controversial characters from Swedish 20th century political history. Nils Flyg (1891-1943) was a Communist leader who became a Nazi, while Sven Olov Lindholm (1903-1998) was a maverick Nazi who became a Green left pacifist, and ended up voting for one of the Communist parties! I´ve written about Flyg before, and will therefore concentrate on Lindholm (who was the stranger of the two). 

Sven Olov Lindholm was a career military who became a fascist in 1927. The factional struggles between various Swedish fascist groups (and their frequent and confusing name changes) need not concern us here. Suffice to say is that Lindholm´s faction ("lindholmare") had a "socialist" and "working class" coloration largely absent from the other groups. Originally, Lindholm was more inspired by early Italian fascism than Nazism, which presumably explains the absence of overt anti-Semitism from his messaging. However, after a visit to Germany, Lindholm became infatuated with National Socialism, including its strongly anti-Jewish character. In particular, Lindholm admired Nazi leaders who emphasized the "socialist" aspects of the NSDAP´s program: Gregor Strasser, Gottfried Feder, and Joseph Goebbels (although the latter had actually broken with Strasser). The Lindholmite project was clearly to win the Swedish working class to Nazism, a project that completely failed. Lindholm´s group remained a small sect at the outskirts of Swedish politics. Despite this, they seem to have been frequently mentioned and attacked in the media. Lindholm even tried to sue a major daily newspaper who had pinpointed him as a potential collaborator in the case of a Nazi German attack on Sweden!

Lindholm´s political ideology was contradictory in many ways. While claiming to support the Swedish working class against capitalist exploitation, Lindholm also opposed class struggle, instead favoring national unity. Capitalism and Communism were both controlled by Jews. Even the pro-worker stance is problematic at second glance. Lindholm romanticized pre-industrial society and the peasantry, since they were closer to nature. The military was also glorified. Factory life was described as hellish and degrading. I get the impression that the really existing workers, so to speak, should be emancipated by somehow becoming something else. Anti-imperialism was another important element in Lindholm´s program. All nations had the right to national self-determination. Britain hypocritically claimed to fight for freedom and democracy, all the while the British Empire refused to heed Indian demands for independence. World War II was a defensive anti-imperialist war on the German side, according to Lindholm. 

Overall, Lindholm´s attitude to Nazi Germany was somewhat peculiar. He strongly supported the NSDAP´s domestic policies in the belief that "Hitler had given the masses true socialism". It´s almost as if Lindholm believed that Hitler was a Strasserite! And while the Swedish Nazi leader was saddened by the execution of Gregor Strasser during the Night of the Long Knives in 1934, he somehow convinced himself that the suppression of the SA had neverthless been necessary. That some people "to the right" of Hitler had also been purged was taken as evidence that the Führer´s socialist course would continue. 

At the same time, Lindholm realized that a too close identification with post-1933 Germany would be detrimental to political success on the Swedish home front. He refused to take Nazi German money (while Flyg - who never explicitly called himself a National Socialist - did solicite the German embassy for financial support), claimed that the swastika was Nordic, and subsequently replaced it as party symbol with the Swedish Vasakärven (a stylized bundle of wheat associated with the Vasa kings - but note that this heraldic emblem can also be seen as a form of the fasces). Lindholm also changed the name of his small political party, from "National Socialist Workers Party" (NSAP)  to "Swedish Socialist Unity" (SSS). Its ideology was apparently called "Swedish socialism". However, since the Lindholmites supported Nazi Germany in World War II, their identification with Hitler´s regime remained strong anyway. So did their anti-Semitism. It wasn´t until after the war that Lindholm began to re-orient himself. For instance, he eventually reached the conclusion that National Socialism had went astray in 1934 with the purge of the Strasserites, and that the Lindholm group should have broken all relations with Hitler´s regime then. 

The SSS dissolved in 1950. Then, something strange happened. Nobody really knows when Lindholm began to question fascism as such, but his new and unexpected political course seems to have been firmly fixed around 1970. (Lindholm´s young German wife Vera was a die hard Hitlerite Nazi, and had divorced him by this time, instead marrying Göran Assar Oredsson, the leader of the kook Nazi micro-party NRP.) Lindholm became a "soft" leftist, perhaps the only former Nazi leader ever to become such. He was an active member of the anti-Vietnam War movement (the DFFG), the anti-nuclear power movement (Folkkampanjen) and the peace movement (Svenska Freds). He voted for the Communist Left Party (VPK), which is represented in the Swedish Parliament (today just called the Left Party). 

Ironically, Lindholm became less "socialist" and "working class" when he became a leftist than he had been as a Nazi. His anti-capitalism sounded more anti-consumerism and Green than traditionally socialist. Lindholm called for a world government to eradicate poverty, want and hunger. He also wanted Sweden to abolish its military entirely. Nuclear disarmament was another important point. Stenfeldt never says it, but Lindholm almost sounds left-liberal! His anti-Semitism was long gone, and he apparently never joined any anti-Israeli protest marches. A less sympathetic trait was that the old Nazi Führer denied ever having been an anti-Semite in the first place...

I´m not sure what to think of Sven Olov Lindholms curious journey from literal Nazi to peacenik,and Stenfeldt never really explains why he did it, but I suppose Lindholm must have had a very independent spirit, since he never fully subordinated himself to the Third Reich, not even during his most pro-Hitlerite period. Nor was he good at taking orders from other Swedish Nazi leaders. Perhaps he was also something of an idealist (as in "good guy who believes in high ideals"), and it´s probably inevitably that such people eventually break with a movement like Nazism, leaving it to the cynics, psychos and kooks to which it properly belongs.