Search

This article provides the first in-depth scholarly analysis of the collection of notes dated February and April 1945 colloquially known as ?Hitler?s political testament?. This article uses sources from private and public archives in several countries to assess this issue of authenticity and concludes that these notes are most likely forgeries. The purported history of these documents cannot be trusted, the dating of several of the notes has clearly been manipulated, and the published text contain statements that cannot be authentic. The original notes were allegedly destroyed, which means that the published versions cannot be checked for accuracy. Until these notes have been conclusively proven to be genuine ? something that is very hard to do without access to the original documents ? historians should refrain from using them.

The post-Cold War era has led to a proliferation of scholarship on U.S. policy toward four neutral European countries—Austria, Finland, Switzerland, and Sweden—during the Cold War. This article provides a survey of the latest literature on U.S. policy toward these four countries as well as general comments about the U.S. government's approach to European neutrality from 1945 to 1991.

To be published in 2016.

This article presents the first comparative study of US policy towards two European neutrals, Sweden and Switzerland, in the late 1940s and early 1950s. During this period, Sweden and Switzerland were integrated into the Western security regime through a series of diplomatic, economic and technological steps until certain parts of the Swedish and Swiss armed forces were hard to separate from their NATO counterparts. This pioneering multi-archival study shows not only that US policy towards the neutrals was coordinated in order to make them conform to US security demands (a fact previously unnoticed by historians), but it also points towards another surprising and previously unknown conclusion - which the article calls the armed neutrality paradox'. The article argues that the transfers of military technology to Sweden and Switzerland, which were needed to make their neutrality credible, effectively undermined the very credibility that they were supposed to ensure. This technology became a conduit of foreign influence reaching straight into the nerve centre of the armed neutrals, and the more ubiquitous and advanced the technology got, the less control over its use the governments seemed to have. US policy, together with the efforts of the neutral governments to increase security, spawned this paradox.

This article investigates the attitude to communism, National Socialism, Fascism, and authoritarian conservatism in the Swedish Catholic Church’s journal Credo from 1922 to 1945. The comparative approach has made it possible to see how the journal distinguished between the various forms of authoritarian ideologies in Europe during this period. The article shows that the Catholic Church in Sweden took a very negative view of communism (the Soviet Union and the Spanish Republic) and strongly condemned it throughout the period, while it took a largely very positive stance towards Fascism (Italy) and Authoritarian Conservativism (Spain and Portugal). In the case of National Socialism (Nazi Germany) the attitude was more diverse. Credo was largely negative towards National Socialism but only because it was thought to threaten Catholics and Catholicism in Germany. However, Credo never criticized discrimination and genocidal violence against the Jews.