The Man Who Played with Fire: Stieg Larsson's Lost Files and the Hunt for an Assassin

by Jan Stocklassa

To an outsider, the right flank in Swedish politics could look like it had grown up out of nowhere or merely been buoyed by opinions that had, over time, shifted from the middle. In reality, there was a relatively small but close-knit group of people who were often part of multiple organizations, and there was an unbroken line back to the growing Nazi movements from the interwar period. In the decades following World War II, these movements had not been very active, but they definitely had not disappeared. German Gestapo officers had sought out places of refuge; South America was popular, but also East Germany because the country was still the enemy of the United States and the UK, and because anti-Semitism lived on behind the iron curtain. A handful of die-hard Nazis came to Sweden, where there were multiple layers of hidden adherents and sympathizers. Stieg’s own mappings from the last year showed what others had warned of: there were direct and indirect ties between Swedish right-wing extremists, Swedish parliamentarians, and people in the top levels of the Swedish economy.