ABSTRACT

This article explores the ‘bystander’in Holocaust history by comparing the response to the genocide of the Jews from three countries ordinarily grouped together in that category of Holocaust historiography: the United States, Great Britain and Sweden. The first two were of course warring belligerents while Sweden was de jure, if not de facto, neutral during the Second World War. The article compares not the top leadership of the three nations, but rather subCabinet level officials serving in the respective foreign ministries. This emphasis is justified, as is the comparative point of departure, because existing scholarship demonstrates that in these countries much of the response to Germany's persecution and extermination of European Jewry was formulated at that level, and then implemented.

Emphasis is placed on detailing Sweden's response because its case is far less well known than that of the other two. Among the questions explored is how, when and why a policy response so similar in those countries through many of the Nazi years then diverged. Both the practical and moral importance of conscious choices made by the officials involved, from what is generally thought to be the ‘bystander’position, is also explored.