Vid gränsen. Mottagningen av flyktingar från Norge 1940-1945

Abstract

Norway was occupied by Germany on the 9th April 1940. As a consequence, thousands of Norwegians fled to Sweden, and there are good grounds for asserting that Sweden experienced its first fairly extensive refugee crisis. The country was simultaneously badly equipped to cope with the large numbers of distressed people crossing the frontier. Neither legislation nor the refugee reception organisation was designed for such a scenario, so a more or less chaotic situation resulted. Most problems that arose had therefore to be solved directly when they occurred. Towards the end of the war, refugee reception had on the other hand developed into an effective organisation with frontier guards, healthcare, interpreters etc. Refugee politics had also changed radically, from very restrictive to more open. Earlier research on how Swedish refugee politics changed during the war has only to a limited extent paid attention to the Norwegian refugee problem. The focus has likewise mostly been on how the central authorities handled the waves of refugees during the war. This dissertation focuses instead on a local perspective on refugee politics and the theory advanced here is that experiences of refugee reception gained at the Norwegian frontier during the first years of the war were decisive for the development of refugee politics during the final years of the war. The main objective of this dissertation is therefore to explain how these experiences influenced the shaping of refugee politics. This in its turn presupposes a local perspective on how reception took place along the Norwegian frontier. The dissertation’s main question is thus how refugee politics developed at the intersection between local and central authorities. Among other sources, this study builds on previously uninvestigated information from almost 33,000 interrogation protocols about backgrounds and motives for flight. Above all, it was the efforts for the refugees at the Norwegian frontier that transformed Sweden’s refugee politics from within, enabling the country to cope with the great waves of refugees into the country at the end of the war.