”The Swedish Museum About ’About the Holocaust’” – that is what this state agency in Stockholm should actually be called. Because here, it is not about the physical, industrial extermination camps, the logistics, or the mass murder on the European continent. Instead, they have chosen to pile filter upon filter, specializing in exhibitions about films about the Holocaust, or about what Swedish newspapers wrote about the Holocaust during the war years. By consistently showcasing safe side-tracks, they conceal the documentary evidence—such as the cold numbers found in the Höfle Telegram.
This stems fundamentally from an outdated agency structure where the museum’s leadership has completely lost touch with today's harsh reality. In recent years, Swedish society has undergone massive changes. Antisemitism has taken on new, aggressive forms on our streets and in our schoolyards. The need for a hard, fact-based counterweight to historical distortion has never been greater.
To operate a museum—whether privately or publicly—in today's social climate based on an outdated and navel-gazing Swedish perspective is entirely tone-deaf. Today's society does not need more academic analyses about how Swedish newspapers formulated their words in 1943. We need a museum that displays the naked, physical machinery of the Holocaust in all its brutal clarity, serving as a warning of what happens when democracy is dismantled.
Exactly 85 years ago, on September 29-30, 1941, 33,771 Jews were systematically murdered at Babi Yar. This horrific massacre marked the onset of Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement. On that very day, the Jewish population of Kyiv was driven into a nearby ravine that had been encircled with barbed wire and heavily guarded by Waffen-SS soldiers and local Ukrainian police. Forced to strip naked and surrender every belonging, they were marched in small groups toward the edge. As they reached the precipice, a German mobile killing unit (Einsatzgruppen) shot them to death, sending their bodies tumbling into the depths. According to the unit's official report, 33,771 Jews—mostly women, children, and the elderly—were executed during the first 48 hours alone. The report cynically concluded that the action was carried out ”without any incidents” thanks to ”exceptionally clever organization.”
Has this monumental tragedy of the ”Holocaust by bullets” been commemorated by the Swedish Museum About the Holocaust in Stockholm? No.
Instead, on this precise and somber anniversary, the state agency is hosting a theatrical presentation: ”Experience excerpts from Peter Weiss's play The Investigation [Rannsakningen] in a performance where scenic production, music, and lectures meet. Featuring actors from the Royal Dramatic Theatre ensemble.”
There is a profound, almost tragicomic irony in this programming choice. While the museum invites the public to a play titled The Investigation (which in Swedish literally translates to The Scrutiny or The Reckoning), this state-funded institution utterly refuses to engage in the one reckoning that actually matters: a scrutiny of its own operations, its narrow mandate, and its blatant lack of relevance in today’s societal climate.
Instead, we see a Stockholm-based agency led by an archaeologist and staffed by around thirty employees, where resources are funneled into local field archaeology: excavations of wartime Swedish emergency hospitals or former refugee camps. This is where we reach the realm of mass-media theater. This type of archaeology is highly marketable to a broader audience—but historically, it is deeply debatable.
Just look at what happened in Warsaw in the summer of 2025. Researchers carried out archaeological excavations at the property on 33 Chłodna Street, where Janusz Korczak’s orphanage, Dom Sierot, was located for a period. It generated massive headlines in the media. Inkwells, milk bottles, medical ampoules, and even a metal bed were unearthed—and everything was instantly and sensationally attributed to Korczak’s children.
Yet, when you dig beneath the mass-media surface, all the ”buts” appear. First of all, the excavation took place in the basement of the house next door (there were two properties under the same street number). Secondly, the orphanage was only there for an extremely limited time—eleven months. After the street was excluded from the ghetto area, ordinary Polish families lived in the building for years. Slapping Korczak’s name onto every excavated item is not science; it is emotional popular archaeology for the galleries.
The value of painstakingly digging up a spoon from the 1940s from Swedish soil—at a site that served as a refugee camp primarily for Norwegians—is just as debatable. The truth is, a 1940s spoon can be found much more easily and cheaply at a local Stadsmissionen or Myrorna thrift shop. We do not need to dig in the dirt to prove the existence of camps that are already documented with millimeter precision in our Swedish archives.
A rusty spoon in Swedish soil or a misattributed inkwell in Warsaw does nothing to explain the mechanisms, the logistical apparatus, or the ideology of the Holocaust.
When a state agency becomes more interested in producing comfortable, crowd-pleasing field archaeology* than confronting the roots of global antisemitism, it ceases to show the Holocaust. Instead, the state has built an institution in Stockholm that hides behind academic side-tracks—completely unequipped for the times and the urgent needs we face today.
* These material findings serve today merely as a supplement to written archives. No one is questioning that internment camps and boarding schools existed for children who survived the Holocaust.
