Content area
Full Text
The Art of Cloaking Ownership: The Case of Sweden. By Gerard Aalders and Cees Wiebe Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1996. vii + 210 pp. Notes, sources and index. $27.95. ISBN 90-5356-179-x.
Reviewed by Mark Harrison
This book is the outcome of the authors' exhaustive investigation of the wartime activity and interests of the Wallenburg brothers, Jacob and Marcus, prominent in Swedish financial circles of the time. Its main focus is on the Stockholm Enskilda Bank (SEB). Aalders and Wiebes argue that SEB played a significant role as an intermediary for private German companies such as Bosch, IG Farben, and Krupp, helping them to conceal and thereby retain ownership of foreign subsidiaries which otherwise would have been liable to confiscation by the Allied powers, and helping the wartime German government both to retain ownership of its foreign assets and to realize the proceeds from sale of assets looted from Germany's occupied territories, Jewish families, and so on. In addition, the Wallenburg-controlled ballbearing manufacturer Svenska Kullager Fabriken (SKF) not only played its part in concealing German ownership of foreign subsidiaries across the world, but also supplied the German war economy with large quantities of ball-bearings in the decisive stages of the war.
This is the core of the argument. The authors go on to argue that the Wallenburgs began to retreat from this strategy towards one of accommodation with the Allies as German defeat became increasingly likely. After the...