fascism 8 (2019) 9-35 brill.com/fasc The Fascist Who Fought for World Peace: Conversions and Core Concepts in the Ideology of the Swedish Nazi Leader Sven Olov Lindholm Johan Stenfeldt Dept of History, Lund University, Sweden
[email protected] Abstract This article deals with the political conversion and ideological thought of the Swedish National Socialist Sven Olov Lindholm (1903–1998). Lindholm began his career as a fas- cist in the twenties, and became a member of Sweden’s main National Socialist party led by Birger Furugård, in the early thirties. Ideological divisions and a failed attempt to oust Furugård saw Lindholm found his own party in January 1933, the nsap (later renamed the sss). Previous research has often described this party as a left-wing Nazi alternative, but its ideological basis has never been thoroughly dissected. The present article uses a variety of archival collections, speeches, pamphlets, and newspaper ar- ticles to suggest a cluster of six interdependent core concepts in Sven Olov Lindholm’s ideological thought: anti-Semitism, anti-capitalism, anti-imperialism, anti-material- ism, the idealization of the worker, and the definition of Nazi Germany as a worker’s state. Lindholm underwent a second political awakening in the sixties, redefining him- self as a communist, and thus the article also examines the ideological remains there- after. It is found that anti-materialism, linked to a broad antipathy to modernity, was central throughout his career. Keywords Sweden – fascism – National Socialism – socialism – Sven Olov Lindholm – ideological conversion © Johan Stenfeldt, 2019 | doi:10.1163/22116257-00801002 This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the prevailing cc-by-nc license at the time of publication.