SWEDEN: The Informers

The Union of Customs Officials in the free port of Göteborg knew that S. Svanberg was a Nazi agitator who talked too much. They blackballed him when he applied for membership, wondered why Swedish authorities let him keep his job. But the neutral Swedes want no trouble, and so they quietly, methodically investigated what Svanberg talked about and to whom. Last week, three months after the virtual annihilation of an eleven-ship Norwegian-British convoy, they indicted Svanberg and two unidentified Swedes as ringleaders in one of World War II’s biggest spy rings.

The convoy, most spectacular spy-ring prize, was made up of Norwegian ships which had lain quietly in Göteborg harbor for two years. They stayed there pending a final decision by Swedish courts, turning down Nazi claims of “authorizations” from Norwegian owners, in favor of claims that the Norwegian government had chartered the ships to the British. Ship-hungry Britain then ordered the ships to run the Nazi blockade of the Skagerrak. In the midst of a blinding snowstorm on the evening of March 31, the ships slipped out of harbor to a rendezvous with British destroyers. Waiting for them, plainly tipped off by Göteborg spies, were German warships and swarms of Heinkel bombers. More than half the convoy was sent to the bottom; a few ships crawled back to Göteborg; only one or two got through to the North Sea.

Angry Norwegian protests that the convoy, aside from being ill-advised by the British, had been trapped through Nazi spy work led investigators to Svanberg. But a terse official announcement that a Nazi spy ring was believed broken up did not tell the whole story. Short-wave equipment capable of sending information on ship movements “halfway around the world” was confiscated and dozens of arrests made. British and Norwegians said a “bitter blow” had been struck at the U-boat campaign in the North Atlantic.