Word: albin
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Stolid Premier Per Albin Hansson looked anxiously over clean, quiet Stockholm, at Sweden's six-thousand-mile-long frontier, and beyond. Across the war-torn Baltic, Red Armies had lifted the siege of Leningrad (see p. 33) and threatened to push on into starving, freezing Finland. To the south, British and U.S. bombs fell regularly on German cities. Westward, across the Skagerrak, German sappers and soldiers from Trondheim to Narvik threw up fortifications against the Allied attack they feared...
Many threatening things Per Albin saw as he prepared his speech to the Riksdag. For more than three years he had kept his country neutral while war raged on every side. Sweden's trade had been perforce with Germany and satellite Finland: her iron flowed steadily and uninterruptedly into German munitions plants. And neutrality had paid. Compared with the rest of Europe, Sweden had done well. Living standards fell only 15% by 1941, then leveled off. Military expenditures increased, but not to the point of taking the bread from Swedish mouths. While Norwegians across the mountains starved and bled...
Sweden's bald, bushy-browed, Social Democratic Prime Minister Per Albin Hansson should have been bowling or playing bridge with Octogenarian King Gustav in the Royal Palace as was his wont. The recent elections had produced no surprises. The Government Coalition had lost moderately to the left, but had still received 94% of all the votes cast...
...North. Three years ago at a dinner in Lund, Sweden's Prime Minister Per Albin Hansson made this statement: "No earthly power can prevent Sweden's fighting on the side of a Denmark in distress." Long before Denmark came to distress last week it was plain that Sweden would not fight side by side with anybody against Germany, unless Germany forced her to do so. Sweden's cultural and economic ties with Germany are too strong for political differences to break, and she is bound even closer to Germany by her mortal dread of Russia...
Meanwhile Per Albin Hansson's letters kept pouring in. They put to confusion those who believed Swedish opinion was overwhelmingly for intervention. Most of them praised the Premier's neutrality. But those which did not were in such unpretty language that police immediately stationed two detectives and police dogs at his Appelviken ("The Apple Blossom") villa and, wherever he went at the wheel of his little Chrysler, shadowed him in a big, radio-equipped police...