Queen Silvia's father no 'serious' nazi

The Swedish queen started her own investigation following last year's accusations that her father's activities as a member of the Nazi Party were not as benevolent as earlier believed. 

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  Walther Sommerlath (1901-1990) – father of the Swedish queen. An earlier investigation portrayed him as more than just an inactive member of the Nazi Party, however an investigation initiated by the queen shows him as someone who helped a Jewish businessman emigrate to Brazil in order to escape the Nazis.

• Sommerlath helped Jewish businessman: Queen Silvia has done a private investigation of her father Walther Sommerlath’s activities during WW2 following accusations that his activities as a member of the Nazi Party were stronger than the family had believed.

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  Queen Silvia of Sweden, here in a photograph from the year 2000 with the late, former U.S. Ambassador to Sweden Franklin S. Forsberg (1905-2002)

• Silvia’s investigation shows that in 1939, her father Walther took over a factory in Germany, owned by a Jewish man. So far nothing’s new. What’s new is that Walther Sommerlath in exchange gave the man his coffee farm and three estates in São Paulo in Brazil. This made it possible for the Jewish man to leave Nazi Germany.

• “I have looked through Brazilian and German archives,” the Swedish Queen told the daily Göteborgs-Posten. “And I found that my father and Efim Wechsler made an agreement about the factory in Berlin and the coffee farm in Brazil.” According to Silvia, this was all news for her and her brothers. “Our father never spoke about this time in his life, and we children never asked him either,” she says.

• After 6 months in Brazil, Wechsler gave the coffee farm to a brother-in-law of Alice Sommerlath, Silvia’s mother and Walter’s wife. The Queen was helped by a cousin in Brazil who is a lawyer and a former national archivist in Sweden.