Word: hansson
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Premier Per Albin Hansson, a cautious Socialist who plays bridge with the King and bowls with cottagers, found it militarily safe and politically popular to take back a concession which Hitler had wrung from Sweden soon after the fall of Norway: the privilege of shipping troops and war supplies through Sweden to Norway and Finland. The concession had to be made because Hitler could have conquered Sweden. It was withdrawn because Hitler no longer could conquer Sweden-and possibly because Per Albin's government believes that soon the Allies will be strong enough to take back Norway. This would...
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...
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...
Sweden's conservative press reasoned fairly that the Communists won only 42 out of 1,520 council seats (a gain of 16). The real victors of the elections had been the Farmers, who gained 36 seats and now held 212. Prime Minister Hansson's safe Social Democrats still held 831 seats-an absolute majority. Even the anything-but-pro-Bolshevik Helsinki radio called Communist gains in Sweden "moderate and in no way surprising...
Although this sounded like defiance of Germany, Premier Hansson was playing a cagey game with a bad hand. His hand was strengthened before the week was out by the British capture of Narvik. If Britain establishes a strong force there, Germany will have to think twice before invading Sweden. It is only 84 miles from Narvik to the Swedish iron mines at Kiruna, 125 miles to the mines at Gällivare, and Britons could probably reach the mines before the Germans. But Premier Hansson had still other problems. For what he mortally fears is that Sweden may become...